ST. ANSGAR | Fewer than 300 sailors and Marines survived the Japanese attack on the USS Houston when it was sunk in the Java Sea during World War II and the harrowing years as prisoners of war that followed.
The late Merle Hobbs, formerly of St. Ansgar, did both. He was pulled from the ocean in the hours after the ship's sinking and survived 3 ½ years in captivity in Burma.
He joined the Navy soon after graduating from St. Ansgar High School in 1941, said his widow, Marilyn Hobbs.
His parents, Lee and Agnes Hobbs, were notified that he was missing in a U.S. Navy telegram dated March 14, 1942.
It wasn't until Hobbs was released and transferred to a military hospital in New York with tuberculosis that family members began to learn details of his time in captivity, Marilyn said.
Prisoners were marched through the jungle to work on the Burma-Siam railway, she said. The Bridge over the River Kwai was a part of this railroad but the movie did not do justice to the reality.
"The British and Dutch had both tried to build this railroad and had given up," Marilyn said.
Prisoners built bamboo huts with open sides when they extended the track a specified distance.
Few had shoes. If they did, they did not last in the jungle climate, she said.
The burlap sack her husband used for a blanket had to be burned because of bedbugs.
At one point, the prisoners used elephants to help build the railroad but they had no mechanical equipment, Marilyn said.
They relied on pulleys and ropes to help them haul heavy loads of rock which they crushed with sledge hammers. They hauled crushed rock in baskets on yokes over their shoulders.
Weights were used to tamp pilings into the swampy ground.
At one point, Marilyn said her husband, who had played football in high school, lost about 87 pounds.
Yet, he was better off than some. During part of the time in captivity, he had access to food he could steal.
Only after being freed on Sept. 3, 1945, did Hobbs learned that his brother Hilmer "Shorty" had been married in 1943 and killed in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.
Marilyn said she and Hilmer were married for about year but he was gone nearly all of that time.
"It was very sad but it really came home to you when the other fellows came home," she said.
After Hobbs' parents visited him in the hospital in Sampson, N.Y., his dad urged Marilyn to visit. They wrote letters for a time and then she took the train out to see him for a couple of weeks.
"We decided to get married," Marilyn said.
So she closed up her apartment in Iowa and returned to New York.
They were married at the hospital chapel by the local chaplain and a visiting chaplain from Iowa on Feb. 14, 1946.
"You had a ward of 40 fellows, probably all just back from overseas. They pulled pranks on each other and I suppose they got in a few arguments. That was pretty close living but they pulled for each other when necessary," Marilyn said.
Hobbs was not granted leave to take a honeymoon because he was possibly still positive for tuberculosis so Marilyn said she smuggled him out of the hospital in the trunk of her car with assistance from a guard.
"We just went to my room which was a room in an elderly lady's apartment in Geneva, N.Y., for one night," she said.
After Hobbs was released at Sampson and discharged from the Navy, he returned to Iowa to continue recovering with rest and nutritious food at Oakdale near Iowa City.
Afterwards, Merle trained to be a jeweler in Kansas City, Mo.
He and Marilyn, now 88, operated a jewelry store in Marengo for 27 years and raised four sons before returning to St. Ansgar in retirement.
They celebrated 51 years of marriage before his death in 1997.
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/st-ansgar-man-survived-uss-houston-sinking-burma-captivity/
No comments:
Post a Comment