76th Issue: Joe Lee Kiyoomia
Warning for torture, war, death, etc.
Today I am thinking about Joe Lee Kiyoomia. He was a Navajo soldier who fought during World War II. He was fighting in the Philippines when various losses of the United States caused Joe along with 60,000 Filipino prisoners and 15,000 American prisoners to be forced into the Bataan Death March. When he was first captured, the Japanese thought he was Japanese American, and therefore a traitor, but he convinced them after several months of questioning and torture that he was Navajo instead.
The Bataan Death March was the transfer of the prisoners of war by the Japanese through a sixty-five mile walk. Anyone who fell or stopped was shot. Thousands of Filipinos and hundreds of Americans died. Joe made it, but then when he got to the prison camp he was questioned and tortured because they thought he could help them decode the Navajo code that was being used by the Americans. Joe had no idea about the code and told the Japanese it sounded like gibberish. In retaliation, they stripped him naked and forced him to stand in deep snow. The soles of his feet tore as they were ripped from the ground when he was finally allowed to move again.
Joe not only survived this torture, the death march, the prison camps, but then he made it through the “hell ships” that took him to Nagasaki. The hell ships were the ships that the Japanese used to transport prisoners. There was basically no air, ventilation, food or water. Many POWs died. Sometimes the ships were attacked by Allied submarines and aircraft since they were Japanese ships.
Joe was in prison in Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb was dropped by the US Army Air Forces. He said that the concrete walls of his cell are what protected him. After the bombing, Joe was just left abandoned, but finally a Japanese officer freed him. Joe returned to the United States, healed from his wounds, and lived to be seventy-seven years old.
