“Unless one was there and experienced the HELL (and that is a mild expression), it is not possible to properly share the terrible times everyone endured . . . far too many brilliant men lost their lives.”

J. A. Oden, Jr.

William “Bill” Overmier

Photo by Dr. Don C. Salisbury

Mr. Overmier was captured on Corregidor. He slave-laborered as a “ship fitter” at the shipyards in Yokahama, Japan. When American bombers sunk a recently completed “small carrier” he had worked on from start to finish, his reaction was, “Yee-hah!”

On the Bataan Memorial he said, “At least members of our family can visit the park in later years and read a little bit about the history of what happened and some of the names of the men who were lost. It means everything.”

Mr. Overmier has often spoken of the need for inclusion of the Bataan experience in school text books.

See: 3 Jacks & A Joker

“Many of us in those camps were Hispanics who knew each other... There wasn’t a night that we didn’t get together to pray for our survival in the camps and the salvation of our souls.”

— Vicente Ojinaga

Clifford Omtvedt (left of flag)

When word of Japan’s verbal surrender reached POWs at Mukaishima prisoner-of-war camp, Honshu Island, Japan, prisoners marked out P.W. in large letters in their camp so it could be seen from the air.  American bombers began dropping food shortly after.

The senior officer of the camp, American Col. Ralph T. Artman, commissioned a flag to be constructed from the red, white and blue parachute silk used to drop food to POWs and even “commandeered” three local Japanese tailor shops shops so the pieces could be sewn together.

Charged with raising the flag on August 18, 1945 at 11:00am before the assembled ninety-nine survivors of one hundred prisoners who had been shipped north one year earlier on the Hell Ship Noto Maru, were three men: Clifford Omtvedt and Rhodun Bussell of the 200th Coast Artillery, and Charles Branum, 71st Infantry, Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The flag was the first “Stars and Stripes” to fly over the Japanese — just days ahead of the first American troop landings on Japanese soil.

Omtvedt, who carried the flag, out of the camp after liberation one month later, gifted the flag to the US Government in 1952.  In 1963 it was presented to the US Army Quartermaster Museum at Fort Lee, Virginia where it remains today as part of their permanent collection.