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 515th Coast Artillery men: Clifford
Omtvedt and
Rhodun Bussell and
Charles Branum, 71st Infantry, from 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. |