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Home Front: Soldier survives Bataan march, not U.S. sub

The Enquirer

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which claimed between 50-85 million lives. Battle Creek made its impact on the war, sending soldiers and sailors and nurses to far-flung places across the globe and putting them in situations they never could have imagined. Home Front will recount what local people did during the war, in the exact words of newspaper stories from the Battle Creek Enquirer and News. Given the period in history, some of those words may be considered offensive or inappropriate by today’s standards. Jody Owens of Heritage Battle Creek compiled the clippings.

From Jan. 4, 1943....

Sergt. Paul Dennis Shea, son of Mrs. Isabel Dunn of 475 Main, has survived one of the war’s most tragic episodes. It was revealed over the week end when the war department informed his mother that he is held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war.

Sergeant Shea, a signal operator with a pursuit squadron, was in service at Nichols Field, Manila, for a year before the Japanese attack and fought through the island campaign until the American surrender at Corregidor. He has previously been reported “missing in action.”

Letters written in pre-war days and one long letter dispatched from the island months after the Japs had laid siege to Bataan told of Shea’s harrowing experience.

One of the letters, bearing stains of water, was taken from the Philippines by an American submarine that managed to reach a harbor in the night time. It was later placed aboard an American liner at sea. The liner was subsequently torpedoed and sink.

Sergeant Shea’s letter was found in a mail sack recovered from the Pacific several days after the liner’s sinking.

The letter had been started in January after Jap bombers had destroyed most of the American planes at Nichols Field....The sergeant and his comrades then started a perilous trip through dense, snake-infested jungles trying to reach Bataan.

He told of the horrors of his fight to survive. “We are in a jungle tonight, near where Frank Buck caught one of the largest pythons,” the letter said. “There are threats of malaria. Most of us are suffering from skin diseases.”

Sergeant Shea wrote of hardships suffered, lips parched and swollen because of thirst, near starvation, the terror that came from snakes, insects and beasts. The small band was subsisting in fox holes, working its way to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s besieged forces.

Mrs. Dunn heard nothing more directly from her son until two days before Christmas when she received the Christmas card he had sent to her in December 1941. It had taken 13 months to deliver it.

Mrs. Dunn said that although she had received three letters reporting her son missing, that she had never given up hope that he, somehow, had survived. He is her only child.

Nov. 22, 1945...

Staff Sergt. Paul Dennis Shea, 23, who was a prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines, is now presumed to be dead, the war department having been informed by the Japanese through the Red Cross that he was one of 1,775 American soldiers aboard a ship going to Japan which was sunk last October 24 by an American submarine.

The sinking was one of three similar ones reported by the navy department, and in which another Battle Creek soldier was lost. Pfc. Floyd M. Welcher, son of Mr. and Mrs. Vern Welcher of Bellevue, was lost in the first of the sinkings, in September.