July 9, 2024 • 26 mins
A routine visit to raise a flag at a pet cemetery takes Charley down a path of discovering the story of veteran Willard L. Haskell's harrowing tale that is worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Today, I want to cover a story that I think
you will find hard to believe once I conclude with it.
It's almost as if this story was written by Hollywood.
I couldn't believe it when I heard it, and so
I want to pass it on to you now and
let you take in a story that, to me is
(00:24):
one of the most remarkable I've heard. So it has
to do with a prisoner of war. This will go
over a sixty five mile march, and it will also
include a pet cemetery. Three things you may not see
a connection to right off the bat, but after the
conclusion of this you'll never forget. In May of twenty eighteen,
(00:47):
I received a phone call about donating a flag to
an empty flagpole at a pet cemetery here in Tucson.
Now I didn't even know pet cemetery really exist, did
I knew nothing about him. I've never been to one.
If we ever lost a pet growing up, and either
was disposed of and you know a place not in
(01:09):
a pet cemetery, I don't want to go how we
flushed it, maybe a fish down the toilet or something,
but you know, we just wasn't something that we took formal.
So you know, the closest I've ever been to a
pet cemetery was either reading Stephen King's book or watching
the movie. That's all I knew. The pet cemetery, I
found out is close to where I live, and so
(01:30):
the owner who had contacted me asked me to come
by and take a look at what she has and
if I could help her out putting up a new
flag at her flagpole, which is in the center of
her pet cemetery. And so when I got there, as
i'm you know, you park right off the side and
you can see very clearly this large it's probably a
(01:52):
forty foot flagpole right in the center of the property.
Can't miss it. As I work my car and I'm
walking up toward the flagpole, I'm seeing all these headstones,
and I guess even headstones isn't the proper fraid I
get grave markers. I don't know what you call a
(02:14):
pet headstone. Great, I'm gonna say grave markers. So I
see all these grave markers, and they're etched with pictures
of a cat, or they're etched with the face of
a dog. And then I walked a little bit further
and I look over and now I'm seeing, you know,
the chiseled imprint of a guinea pig or a pet rat.
(02:38):
And then one that I never will forget is as
I'm walking up, I see the etching of these two fish,
and they had inscripted on it, blessed these fish. So
there's a world out there. I tell people all the time,
I know nothing about. This was all new to me,
(02:59):
that you buried fish in a cemetery, you know, okay, whatever,
it's a flag. I'm here for the flag, not anything else.
So I go up spot it, and I happen to
bring with me a pretty good sized flag. So I
brought with me a four foot by six foot flag
four feet long or four feet tall if you will,
six feet long, had new clips. Put the flag up again,
(03:22):
no fanfare, no one around at cemetery. It's what I do.
And this was like I think, I said, yeah, May,
right at the beginning of May. This took place. So
when I was leaving, after I raised the flag, I
make sure it's all good and everything looks squared away,
I look down and at the base of the flag pole,
I see two headstones of two veterans, you know, And
(03:48):
I've been to plenty of cemeteries, and I don't know
about others, but it's when you see a military or
a veterans headstone, it's very distinctive. You know, we've all
seen the curve riture of the white granted at Arlington right,
pretty clear about those headstones other ones. You know, the
government's pretty strict if the font that you use, the
(04:11):
certain granted that you're going to use. If you're a Christian,
they're going to put a particular cross. If you're Jewish,
they're going to put a very particular Star of Davy.
You know. I mean, you could just tell a veterans headstone.
So I looked down at the base of the flagpole
and here are two different veterans headstones at the base.
(04:31):
And like I said, you know, there's no one around,
so I couldn't ask anybody. I just thought it was
kind of odd that, you know, why are two people
buried in a pet cemetery, but now we have two
veterans at the base of this flagpole. I just left wondering.
About two weeks later, and we're still in May of
(04:53):
twenty eighteen, I get another call from the owner of
the pet cemetery this time and she calls me. She
sounds a little distraught. She said, Charlie, somebody stole the
flag off the flagpole at the cemetery. I was like,
what are you talking about, Like, you know, maybe I
screwed up, maybe I didn't tie you in the clips ride,
(05:15):
or I made some mistake. She's like, no, I'm telling you.
In thirty years of running this cemetery, owning it, I'm
never had an American flag stolen. I said, well, let
me come down, let me check out what you have,
let me see what the status of this is. And
(05:35):
so I drive back down to the pet Cemetery. And
even now, looking back on it, I can't remember how
I felt when I rolled up and I saw this
empty flagpole that just a few weeks earlier had a big,
brand new you know, and in nylon flag flying off
of it. And as I walked closer, what I had
(05:57):
seen is that And I need to go back briefly.
When I recognized the two veterans headstones the first time
I was there, I went to my car and I
got two American stick American flags. I carry those in
my car also, So out of gratitude and thanks, I
went back to the flagpole and at the headstones, the
(06:19):
grave markers of these two veterans, I put in little
stick flags. So when I left, I've got two stick
flags in the ground honoring these veterans, and I got
a flag up over the cemetery. Okay, So now I'm
back at the cemetery, I'm walking up, I see the
flags missing, and what what? Whoever had done this? They
(06:40):
had taken the stick flags that I had put at
the headstones and put those in the clips instead and
like raise them up. Like even now I'm confused. It's
just weird, Like I don't understand. So now you're stealing
a huge American flag and now you're taking the flags
off of two veterans headstones and raising them up. It
(07:03):
was just a mess, Like it was just and this
is not the first time that I've put up a
flag that's been stolen. I remember distinctively, I was being
interviewed on a local news station and the reporter was
asking me about stolen flags. And at the time, I
was trying to get a bill passed to make it
a crime to steal, particularly an American flag, and she
(07:27):
was going on and on about this, and you know,
overhearing the conversation. The actual weather man for the news
station overhears our conversation, and as we're done and I'm leaving,
he tells the reporter. The weatherman tells a report in
front of me. He says, you know, I had a
flag stolen when I was doing the weather in Kansas.
(07:48):
And the reporter kind of took a step back. She's like, really,
what did you do? He's like, what can I do?
Police can't do anything, right, so to call in and
report it it was pointless, but he said, yeah, in Kansas,
off my porch when I was there, I've had a
flag stolen, so it You know, oftentimes people just think
it doesn't really happen. Nobody's I'm telling you there are
(08:11):
people out there that are taking down American flags, and
for what reason, I don't know, right, because they don't
leave a note, they don't they don't identify who they are,
so I don't know why they're taking the flag down,
but just know that there are American flags being stolen.
And my thought has always been that you take you
(08:32):
steal one of the American flags that I have put up,
I'm putting up a bigger flag next time, right, And
if you take down ten of my flags, I'm gonna
put up eleven, right. And I think that's part of
the American story, that's part of American history, is that
we don't get intimidated. We come back stronger than we
(08:53):
did before. We don't give up. We're not going to
let one one particular act settle this story. Now we're
going to come back. We're going to come back stronger,
and we're going to show you that we're not going
to be intimidated. And that's the attitude that I have.
If someone takes an American flag, bring it on, I'll
get a bigger flag. You want to take that one down.
As soon as I find out within two days I'm back,
(09:14):
I'll put up another one. You know. I don't take
lightly to that. So I told the owner of the
pet cemetery at that time that I would contact the
local news station actually that I had done an interview
with about stolen flags, and she said that she would
call one of the veterans' family members who was at
(09:34):
the base of the flag.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
There.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
There was family that was in town, and she would
call them and see if they'd be willing to come
out and talk to the news station about you know
the importance of the flag and what happened here. So
I said, okay, I said let's do it. And it
was shortly after that conversation is that I started to
(09:56):
learn about an American hero and about a story like
I mentioned earlier. It's like it's written by Hollywood. This
is Willard L. Haskell's grave site at the flagpole. Willard L.
Haskell was the second born to a family in nineteen
twenty in Stratford, Connecticut. He was the son of Willard
(10:19):
and Ruth Haskell, and he had a brother Fred. While
at Barrington High, Willard was on a swim team and
he was also on the basketball team. But with that,
he also had a love of radios, amateur radios like
ham radios, you know, and that's those are radios that
(10:42):
everyday folks use. There's no commercials, it's not regulated in
any way. It's used for private recreation and so it's
you know, not like a radio where you would be
have an FCC a government entity looking over it. Right.
So I just wanted to explain a ham or amateur radio.
He loved it as a kid growing up. So in
(11:03):
nineteen thirty eight, at eighteen, Haskell graduates from high school
and he enlists in the army. Being that he had
previous experience with the use of radios growing up, the
army now gave him formal training on how to become
what they called an aerial radio man. So he gets
(11:27):
his training in the army and he is sent to
Nichols Field Military Base, which is a base that was
just south of Manila in the Philippines. And so while
there at Nichols Field, the military base in the Philippines,
his first year road Haskell is you know, meeting his
(11:48):
new friends that he's been sent overseas, with his camaraderie,
the friendships and you know those around him that he
worked with. But after twenty months that all change because
in April of nineteen forty, Willard Haskell has now become
a prisoner of war. Imperial Japanese forces had taken over
(12:16):
Nichols Field where he was at, and he now becomes
a pow of the Japanese Army. If you have read
history or you can imagine how a prisoner of the
Japanese Army was treated, it's pretty disgraceful. It's actually quite sad.
(12:36):
But what had happened is the Japanese army had instilled
in their soldiers to believe that surrender was dishonorable. You
do not give up, you don't surrender, it's dishonorable, and
that anyone surrendering was beneath contempt. The prisoners of war therefore,
were thought to be unworthy of any respect, and so
(12:58):
as a result of that treatment or that thought process,
the treatment of the prisoners was harsh, and they suffered
terribly at the hands of their captors. Most of the
POWs were transported to other parts of Japan's wartime empire,
where they served as slave labor. These prisoners, these POWs
(13:18):
performed backbreaking, laborious hard work with just improvised tools, just
simple tools, you know. They would take down trees and
they cleared the land. Oftentimes they were barefooted, not allowed
any shoes for fear of an escape. The Japanese guards
wouldn't allow them to wear clothes. They would wear loincloths
(13:40):
and that was it. One former PW remarked that you
worked or you were beaten, and if you objected, you
were beaten to death. Food was that the bare minimum,
and disease and injuries were untreated. They didn't care right,
they were just below, you know, dignity to the Japanese.
(14:02):
So Willard Haskell is now held a prisoner for two
and a half years in a Japanese pow camp, put
under some of the most brutal conditions known to man.
His life is about to actually get worse, and it's
going to get much much worse, because in April of
nineteen forty two, it was decided upon that he and
(14:22):
seventy five thousand other prisoners, ten thousand of them being Americans,
sixty five thousand being Filipino prisoners of war to be
placed on fargo ships and they were to be sent
to Japan, where they would be held in prison camps
in Japan, no longer being held in the Philippines. But
in order to get these men, these prisoners of war,
(14:46):
they were given the order that they would have to
march to where these ships were at the harbor that
they would have to march to to get on these
ships that would take them to Japan was sixty five
miles away. This march, really the forcible transfer of these men,
was later given the name the Baton Death March, and
(15:10):
this march has gone down in history as one of
the most inhumane treatments in mankind. If you were doing
a quick search on a computer, your phone, whatever it
may be, and you you know, look up Baton Death March,
you will read that it was the it was the
forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of seventy five
(15:33):
thousand prisoners of war. But what it really was was
a march of death for many of these men. And
I want to explain the Baton is the Baton Peninsula,
and I'm spelling Baton. It's b as in boy A
t aa n and that's Baton, and it's located in
(15:53):
the northwest part of the Philippine Philippines. And it's here
at the Baton Peninsula where the these men started their march,
thus where the name comes from. The seventy five thousand
men were forced to march sixty five miles over eight
days and sweltering heat and humidity. They were given no
(16:16):
food or water, and some had their hands tied behind
their back. They were placed into groups of one hundred,
and each group had four Japanese guards per group. The
first part of this death march had the men march
close to sixty miles in a week. After those sixty miles.
(16:41):
They were crammed into box cars railway cars because they
still had to go further to get to the harbor
where these ships were. So now the men are put
into railroad cars where one pod you later stated that
the rail cars were so crowded that you could not move.
(17:05):
You had to stand the entire time, and if you
needed to go to the bathroom, you went where you
were standing. They were held like sticks in a bundle,
crammed into these box cars. So they reached their destination
now by rail and the prisoners removed off the train,
(17:29):
and this time they were told they had seven more
miles to go before they were done. They had march
seven miles to another prison camp where those who would
survive this march would stay until they were to be
put on ships to be sent back to Japan. And
(17:50):
during the Baton Death March, which lasted between five to
ten days depending on where a prisoner joined in, the
prisoners were beaten, they were shot, they were bayoneted, and
in some cases they were beheaded. A large number of
those prisoners made it to the camp later died from
(18:11):
starvation and disease. It's estimated that of the seventy five
thousand men that started the march, only fifty four thousand
made it. Twenty thousand men died during that week of marching.
So here we have road Houschool joined the army in
nineteen thirty eight at eighteen. In nineteen forty he's taken
(18:34):
to be a prisoner of war. Then in nineteen forty
two he marches in the sixty five mile Baton Death March.
And he has survived both the prison camp experience in
the Baton Death March. Now he's another prisoner of camp
and he waits to be loaded onto a cargo ship
to be sent to Japan to do slave labor in Japan.
(18:57):
These cargo ships that transported thes to Japan came to
be called hell ships by the Allied prisoners of war.
They were basically merchant vessels that were unmarked and there
was no way to identify it as a Japanese warship did.
It looked just like a cargo ship right. The Japanese
(19:18):
Navy overloaded these ships with POWs and basically there were
nothing more than floating dungeons. History will tell us that
these hell ships denied in mates air, It denied space
for them. It denied light, bathroom facilities, and adequate food
and water, especially water. It's water that claimed many of
(19:40):
the lives. Many of these ships were targeted and sunk
by Allied planes and submarines, and that was for the
simple reason that these merchant vessels, these hell ships were unmarked.
The allieds had no idea that there were a thousand
men crammed into the hull of these ships. They simply
saw these whip says cargo ships heading to Japan, and
(20:03):
they needed to be stopped. The ship which Haskell was
loaded onto and stuffed into the bottom of had seven
hundred and fifty POWs loaded on that ship below deck.
Three days after being at sea and heading to Japan,
the ship that Willard Haskell was on was struck by
(20:23):
an American torpedo. As the POW's below deck, they were
bloodied and terrorized and they're clamoring up the hatches to
get out of the hole they ran. The Japanese guard
shot them dead, Yet the men kept coming forced out
(20:44):
of the holes and into the fires and rising water. Eventually,
the chaos, the staffing and the fires became too much
for the Japanese jailers. Then eventually abandoned ship. Willard Haskell
was though. Willard Haskell was able to make it off
the ship, and he began to swim, and he swam
(21:08):
towards a piece of land that he could barely see.
It wasn't a toll, right, It's an island smaller than
an island. It was an a toll that he swam to.
Of the seven hundred and fifty prisoners that were on
that ship with Haskell, only sixteen of them survived the ordeal.
Haskell's swimming days from high school, no doubt, helped him
(21:29):
make it to that atoll. So now Willard Haskell, after
swimming and reaching this a toll, he doesn't stop. He
doesn't give up there word Haskell begins to get bits
and pieces of a radio he finds scattered about, and
he assembles a small amateur ham radio much like the
(21:50):
ones he had growing up. Right, he's been around amateur
radios his entire life. Now he's stranded on an island
and he's able to find pieces and put together a
simple amateur ham radio. He then starts to send out
Morse code over to this radio that he's put together.
(22:12):
He gets a response, and that response is from the
United States Navy. The Navy responds back with a series
of questions, questions only Haskell is able to answer. After
the Navy confirmed who he was and where he was located,
and this is around September of nineteen forty two, the
(22:32):
Navy sends a ship and is able to rescue the
sixteen stranded prisoners off this attoll. Less than eight weeks later,
two days before Thanksgiving, Willard Haskell arrived home, where he
was greet at the airport by his brother Fred, his
mother Ruth, who had tears streaming down her cheeks, and
(22:54):
his father, Willard Senior, to celebrate what must have been
the best Thanksgiving for the Haskell family ever up until
this point in their lives. Haskell soon was honorably discharged
from the Army and he came to do civilian contract
work for the Apartment of Defense, and he was eventually
(23:15):
transferred to Tucson because the large presence of at the
time Hughes Aircraft Company, which is now known as Raytheon
When i met Willard Haskell's daughter Janet in May in
May of twenty eighteen at the pet Cemetery, as I'm
preparing to put up this new bigger, right flag, I
(23:39):
asked her. I said, Janet, why, why is such a
man who had given so much for his country, who
had been through so much? You know, a man who
joins the military at eighteen, right out of high school.
He becomes a prisoner of war, He's put through a
sixty five mile death march. Then he's crammed into a
(24:00):
ship to be sent to Japan. He is able to
swim to an atoll, send out morse code, gets rescued
and makes it home. Why as a man like that
buried in a Pet cemetery of all places in tucsome
Her response to me was, Charlie, what isn't written in
(24:22):
any history books and was not known to many outside
of the family, was the love my father had for
his dogs. Lady, Tippy and Charlie were the loves of
his life, with Lady being his favorite. Janet added, then,
(24:44):
my dad had three loves in his life. He loved
his country, he loved his family, and he loved his dogs.
And he wanted to be buried here at the Pet
Cemetery so he could be buried next to them. The
(25:04):
American flag, which I provided back in twenty eighteen to
the cemetery still flies to this day over the property
here in Tucson. Word Haskell's headstone is there looking up
at that large flag, and that flag is looking down
upon him. Every time I go to visit, I make
sure there's a new small stick flag place at his
(25:28):
headstone as well as the other veterans headstone, to show
my gratitude for all that he suffered through and survived
to help protect our country.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Flags
for the Flagless. This episode was produced by Charlie Foley,
Doug Levy, and Jason Wikol. To listen to Charlie's newest episodes,
please download and subscribe through your favorite podcast service, and
if you like the show enough, leave a review.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Your thoughts would greatly be appreciated.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Flags for the Flagless United Stories of America is proudly
produced and distributed by the eight Side Network
Today, I want to cover a story that I think
you will find hard to believe once I conclude with it.
It's almost as if this story was written by Hollywood.
I couldn't believe it when I heard it, and so
I want to pass it on to you now and
let you take in a story that, to me is
(00:24):
one of the most remarkable I've heard. So it has
to do with a prisoner of war. This will go
over a sixty five mile march, and it will also
include a pet cemetery. Three things you may not see
a connection to right off the bat, but after the
conclusion of this you'll never forget. In May of twenty eighteen,
(00:47):
I received a phone call about donating a flag to
an empty flagpole at a pet cemetery here in Tucson.
Now I didn't even know pet cemetery really exist, did
I knew nothing about him. I've never been to one.
If we ever lost a pet growing up, and either
was disposed of and you know a place not in
(01:09):
a pet cemetery, I don't want to go how we
flushed it, maybe a fish down the toilet or something,
but you know, we just wasn't something that we took formal.
So you know, the closest I've ever been to a
pet cemetery was either reading Stephen King's book or watching
the movie. That's all I knew. The pet cemetery, I
found out is close to where I live, and so
(01:30):
the owner who had contacted me asked me to come
by and take a look at what she has and
if I could help her out putting up a new
flag at her flagpole, which is in the center of
her pet cemetery. And so when I got there, as
i'm you know, you park right off the side and
you can see very clearly this large it's probably a
(01:52):
forty foot flagpole right in the center of the property.
Can't miss it. As I work my car and I'm
walking up toward the flagpole, I'm seeing all these headstones,
and I guess even headstones isn't the proper fraid I
get grave markers. I don't know what you call a
(02:14):
pet headstone. Great, I'm gonna say grave markers. So I
see all these grave markers, and they're etched with pictures
of a cat, or they're etched with the face of
a dog. And then I walked a little bit further
and I look over and now I'm seeing, you know,
the chiseled imprint of a guinea pig or a pet rat.
(02:38):
And then one that I never will forget is as
I'm walking up, I see the etching of these two fish,
and they had inscripted on it, blessed these fish. So
there's a world out there. I tell people all the time,
I know nothing about. This was all new to me,
(02:59):
that you buried fish in a cemetery, you know, okay, whatever,
it's a flag. I'm here for the flag, not anything else.
So I go up spot it, and I happen to
bring with me a pretty good sized flag. So I
brought with me a four foot by six foot flag
four feet long or four feet tall if you will,
six feet long, had new clips. Put the flag up again,
(03:22):
no fanfare, no one around at cemetery. It's what I do.
And this was like I think, I said, yeah, May,
right at the beginning of May. This took place. So
when I was leaving, after I raised the flag, I
make sure it's all good and everything looks squared away,
I look down and at the base of the flag pole,
I see two headstones of two veterans, you know, And
(03:48):
I've been to plenty of cemeteries, and I don't know
about others, but it's when you see a military or
a veterans headstone, it's very distinctive. You know, we've all
seen the curve riture of the white granted at Arlington right,
pretty clear about those headstones other ones. You know, the
government's pretty strict if the font that you use, the
(04:11):
certain granted that you're going to use. If you're a Christian,
they're going to put a particular cross. If you're Jewish,
they're going to put a very particular Star of Davy.
You know. I mean, you could just tell a veterans headstone.
So I looked down at the base of the flagpole
and here are two different veterans headstones at the base.
(04:31):
And like I said, you know, there's no one around,
so I couldn't ask anybody. I just thought it was
kind of odd that, you know, why are two people
buried in a pet cemetery, but now we have two
veterans at the base of this flagpole. I just left wondering.
About two weeks later, and we're still in May of
(04:53):
twenty eighteen, I get another call from the owner of
the pet cemetery this time and she calls me. She
sounds a little distraught. She said, Charlie, somebody stole the
flag off the flagpole at the cemetery. I was like,
what are you talking about, Like, you know, maybe I
screwed up, maybe I didn't tie you in the clips ride,
(05:15):
or I made some mistake. She's like, no, I'm telling you.
In thirty years of running this cemetery, owning it, I'm
never had an American flag stolen. I said, well, let
me come down, let me check out what you have,
let me see what the status of this is. And
(05:35):
so I drive back down to the pet Cemetery. And
even now, looking back on it, I can't remember how
I felt when I rolled up and I saw this
empty flagpole that just a few weeks earlier had a big,
brand new you know, and in nylon flag flying off
of it. And as I walked closer, what I had
(05:57):
seen is that And I need to go back briefly.
When I recognized the two veterans headstones the first time
I was there, I went to my car and I
got two American stick American flags. I carry those in
my car also, So out of gratitude and thanks, I
went back to the flagpole and at the headstones, the
(06:19):
grave markers of these two veterans, I put in little
stick flags. So when I left, I've got two stick
flags in the ground honoring these veterans, and I got
a flag up over the cemetery. Okay, So now I'm
back at the cemetery, I'm walking up, I see the
flags missing, and what what? Whoever had done this? They
(06:40):
had taken the stick flags that I had put at
the headstones and put those in the clips instead and
like raise them up. Like even now I'm confused. It's
just weird, Like I don't understand. So now you're stealing
a huge American flag and now you're taking the flags
off of two veterans headstones and raising them up. It
(07:03):
was just a mess, Like it was just and this
is not the first time that I've put up a
flag that's been stolen. I remember distinctively, I was being
interviewed on a local news station and the reporter was
asking me about stolen flags. And at the time, I
was trying to get a bill passed to make it
a crime to steal, particularly an American flag, and she
(07:27):
was going on and on about this, and you know,
overhearing the conversation. The actual weather man for the news
station overhears our conversation, and as we're done and I'm leaving,
he tells the reporter. The weatherman tells a report in
front of me. He says, you know, I had a
flag stolen when I was doing the weather in Kansas.
(07:48):
And the reporter kind of took a step back. She's like, really,
what did you do? He's like, what can I do?
Police can't do anything, right, so to call in and
report it it was pointless, but he said, yeah, in Kansas,
off my porch when I was there, I've had a
flag stolen, so it You know, oftentimes people just think
it doesn't really happen. Nobody's I'm telling you there are
(08:11):
people out there that are taking down American flags, and
for what reason, I don't know, right, because they don't
leave a note, they don't they don't identify who they are,
so I don't know why they're taking the flag down,
but just know that there are American flags being stolen.
And my thought has always been that you take you
(08:32):
steal one of the American flags that I have put up,
I'm putting up a bigger flag next time, right, And
if you take down ten of my flags, I'm gonna
put up eleven, right. And I think that's part of
the American story, that's part of American history, is that
we don't get intimidated. We come back stronger than we
(08:53):
did before. We don't give up. We're not going to
let one one particular act settle this story. Now we're
going to come back. We're going to come back stronger,
and we're going to show you that we're not going
to be intimidated. And that's the attitude that I have.
If someone takes an American flag, bring it on, I'll
get a bigger flag. You want to take that one down.
As soon as I find out within two days I'm back,
(09:14):
I'll put up another one. You know. I don't take
lightly to that. So I told the owner of the
pet cemetery at that time that I would contact the
local news station actually that I had done an interview
with about stolen flags, and she said that she would
call one of the veterans' family members who was at
(09:34):
the base of the flag.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
There.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
There was family that was in town, and she would
call them and see if they'd be willing to come
out and talk to the news station about you know
the importance of the flag and what happened here. So
I said, okay, I said let's do it. And it
was shortly after that conversation is that I started to
(09:56):
learn about an American hero and about a story like
I mentioned earlier. It's like it's written by Hollywood. This
is Willard L. Haskell's grave site at the flagpole. Willard L.
Haskell was the second born to a family in nineteen
twenty in Stratford, Connecticut. He was the son of Willard
(10:19):
and Ruth Haskell, and he had a brother Fred. While
at Barrington High, Willard was on a swim team and
he was also on the basketball team. But with that,
he also had a love of radios, amateur radios like
ham radios, you know, and that's those are radios that
(10:42):
everyday folks use. There's no commercials, it's not regulated in
any way. It's used for private recreation and so it's
you know, not like a radio where you would be
have an FCC a government entity looking over it. Right.
So I just wanted to explain a ham or amateur radio.
He loved it as a kid growing up. So in
(11:03):
nineteen thirty eight, at eighteen, Haskell graduates from high school
and he enlists in the army. Being that he had
previous experience with the use of radios growing up, the
army now gave him formal training on how to become
what they called an aerial radio man. So he gets
(11:27):
his training in the army and he is sent to
Nichols Field Military Base, which is a base that was
just south of Manila in the Philippines. And so while
there at Nichols Field, the military base in the Philippines,
his first year road Haskell is you know, meeting his
(11:48):
new friends that he's been sent overseas, with his camaraderie,
the friendships and you know those around him that he
worked with. But after twenty months that all change because
in April of nineteen forty, Willard Haskell has now become
a prisoner of war. Imperial Japanese forces had taken over
(12:16):
Nichols Field where he was at, and he now becomes
a pow of the Japanese Army. If you have read
history or you can imagine how a prisoner of the
Japanese Army was treated, it's pretty disgraceful. It's actually quite sad.
(12:36):
But what had happened is the Japanese army had instilled
in their soldiers to believe that surrender was dishonorable. You
do not give up, you don't surrender, it's dishonorable, and
that anyone surrendering was beneath contempt. The prisoners of war therefore,
were thought to be unworthy of any respect, and so
(12:58):
as a result of that treatment or that thought process,
the treatment of the prisoners was harsh, and they suffered
terribly at the hands of their captors. Most of the
POWs were transported to other parts of Japan's wartime empire,
where they served as slave labor. These prisoners, these POWs
(13:18):
performed backbreaking, laborious hard work with just improvised tools, just
simple tools, you know. They would take down trees and
they cleared the land. Oftentimes they were barefooted, not allowed
any shoes for fear of an escape. The Japanese guards
wouldn't allow them to wear clothes. They would wear loincloths
(13:40):
and that was it. One former PW remarked that you
worked or you were beaten, and if you objected, you
were beaten to death. Food was that the bare minimum,
and disease and injuries were untreated. They didn't care right,
they were just below, you know, dignity to the Japanese.
(14:02):
So Willard Haskell is now held a prisoner for two
and a half years in a Japanese pow camp, put
under some of the most brutal conditions known to man.
His life is about to actually get worse, and it's
going to get much much worse, because in April of
nineteen forty two, it was decided upon that he and
(14:22):
seventy five thousand other prisoners, ten thousand of them being Americans,
sixty five thousand being Filipino prisoners of war to be
placed on fargo ships and they were to be sent
to Japan, where they would be held in prison camps
in Japan, no longer being held in the Philippines. But
in order to get these men, these prisoners of war,
(14:46):
they were given the order that they would have to
march to where these ships were at the harbor that
they would have to march to to get on these
ships that would take them to Japan was sixty five
miles away. This march, really the forcible transfer of these men,
was later given the name the Baton Death March, and
(15:10):
this march has gone down in history as one of
the most inhumane treatments in mankind. If you were doing
a quick search on a computer, your phone, whatever it
may be, and you you know, look up Baton Death March,
you will read that it was the it was the
forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of seventy five
(15:33):
thousand prisoners of war. But what it really was was
a march of death for many of these men. And
I want to explain the Baton is the Baton Peninsula,
and I'm spelling Baton. It's b as in boy A
t aa n and that's Baton, and it's located in
(15:53):
the northwest part of the Philippine Philippines. And it's here
at the Baton Peninsula where the these men started their march,
thus where the name comes from. The seventy five thousand
men were forced to march sixty five miles over eight
days and sweltering heat and humidity. They were given no
(16:16):
food or water, and some had their hands tied behind
their back. They were placed into groups of one hundred,
and each group had four Japanese guards per group. The
first part of this death march had the men march
close to sixty miles in a week. After those sixty miles.
(16:41):
They were crammed into box cars railway cars because they
still had to go further to get to the harbor
where these ships were. So now the men are put
into railroad cars where one pod you later stated that
the rail cars were so crowded that you could not move.
(17:05):
You had to stand the entire time, and if you
needed to go to the bathroom, you went where you
were standing. They were held like sticks in a bundle,
crammed into these box cars. So they reached their destination
now by rail and the prisoners removed off the train,
(17:29):
and this time they were told they had seven more
miles to go before they were done. They had march
seven miles to another prison camp where those who would
survive this march would stay until they were to be
put on ships to be sent back to Japan. And
(17:50):
during the Baton Death March, which lasted between five to
ten days depending on where a prisoner joined in, the
prisoners were beaten, they were shot, they were bayoneted, and
in some cases they were beheaded. A large number of
those prisoners made it to the camp later died from
(18:11):
starvation and disease. It's estimated that of the seventy five
thousand men that started the march, only fifty four thousand
made it. Twenty thousand men died during that week of marching.
So here we have road Houschool joined the army in
nineteen thirty eight at eighteen. In nineteen forty he's taken
(18:34):
to be a prisoner of war. Then in nineteen forty
two he marches in the sixty five mile Baton Death March.
And he has survived both the prison camp experience in
the Baton Death March. Now he's another prisoner of camp
and he waits to be loaded onto a cargo ship
to be sent to Japan to do slave labor in Japan.
(18:57):
These cargo ships that transported thes to Japan came to
be called hell ships by the Allied prisoners of war.
They were basically merchant vessels that were unmarked and there
was no way to identify it as a Japanese warship did.
It looked just like a cargo ship right. The Japanese
(19:18):
Navy overloaded these ships with POWs and basically there were
nothing more than floating dungeons. History will tell us that
these hell ships denied in mates air, It denied space
for them. It denied light, bathroom facilities, and adequate food
and water, especially water. It's water that claimed many of
(19:40):
the lives. Many of these ships were targeted and sunk
by Allied planes and submarines, and that was for the
simple reason that these merchant vessels, these hell ships were unmarked.
The allieds had no idea that there were a thousand
men crammed into the hull of these ships. They simply
saw these whip says cargo ships heading to Japan, and
(20:03):
they needed to be stopped. The ship which Haskell was
loaded onto and stuffed into the bottom of had seven
hundred and fifty POWs loaded on that ship below deck.
Three days after being at sea and heading to Japan,
the ship that Willard Haskell was on was struck by
(20:23):
an American torpedo. As the POW's below deck, they were
bloodied and terrorized and they're clamoring up the hatches to
get out of the hole they ran. The Japanese guard
shot them dead, Yet the men kept coming forced out
(20:44):
of the holes and into the fires and rising water. Eventually,
the chaos, the staffing and the fires became too much
for the Japanese jailers. Then eventually abandoned ship. Willard Haskell
was though. Willard Haskell was able to make it off
the ship, and he began to swim, and he swam
(21:08):
towards a piece of land that he could barely see.
It wasn't a toll, right, It's an island smaller than
an island. It was an a toll that he swam to.
Of the seven hundred and fifty prisoners that were on
that ship with Haskell, only sixteen of them survived the ordeal.
Haskell's swimming days from high school, no doubt, helped him
(21:29):
make it to that atoll. So now Willard Haskell, after
swimming and reaching this a toll, he doesn't stop. He
doesn't give up there word Haskell begins to get bits
and pieces of a radio he finds scattered about, and
he assembles a small amateur ham radio much like the
(21:50):
ones he had growing up. Right, he's been around amateur
radios his entire life. Now he's stranded on an island
and he's able to find pieces and put together a
simple amateur ham radio. He then starts to send out
Morse code over to this radio that he's put together.
(22:12):
He gets a response, and that response is from the
United States Navy. The Navy responds back with a series
of questions, questions only Haskell is able to answer. After
the Navy confirmed who he was and where he was located,
and this is around September of nineteen forty two, the
(22:32):
Navy sends a ship and is able to rescue the
sixteen stranded prisoners off this attoll. Less than eight weeks later,
two days before Thanksgiving, Willard Haskell arrived home, where he
was greet at the airport by his brother Fred, his
mother Ruth, who had tears streaming down her cheeks, and
(22:54):
his father, Willard Senior, to celebrate what must have been
the best Thanksgiving for the Haskell family ever up until
this point in their lives. Haskell soon was honorably discharged
from the Army and he came to do civilian contract
work for the Apartment of Defense, and he was eventually
(23:15):
transferred to Tucson because the large presence of at the
time Hughes Aircraft Company, which is now known as Raytheon
When i met Willard Haskell's daughter Janet in May in
May of twenty eighteen at the pet Cemetery, as I'm
preparing to put up this new bigger, right flag, I
(23:39):
asked her. I said, Janet, why, why is such a
man who had given so much for his country, who
had been through so much? You know, a man who
joins the military at eighteen, right out of high school.
He becomes a prisoner of war, He's put through a
sixty five mile death march. Then he's crammed into a
(24:00):
ship to be sent to Japan. He is able to
swim to an atoll, send out morse code, gets rescued
and makes it home. Why as a man like that
buried in a Pet cemetery of all places in tucsome
Her response to me was, Charlie, what isn't written in
(24:22):
any history books and was not known to many outside
of the family, was the love my father had for
his dogs. Lady, Tippy and Charlie were the loves of
his life, with Lady being his favorite. Janet added, then,
(24:44):
my dad had three loves in his life. He loved
his country, he loved his family, and he loved his dogs.
And he wanted to be buried here at the Pet
Cemetery so he could be buried next to them. The
(25:04):
American flag, which I provided back in twenty eighteen to
the cemetery still flies to this day over the property
here in Tucson. Word Haskell's headstone is there looking up
at that large flag, and that flag is looking down
upon him. Every time I go to visit, I make
sure there's a new small stick flag place at his
(25:28):
headstone as well as the other veterans headstone, to show
my gratitude for all that he suffered through and survived
to help protect our country.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Flags
for the Flagless. This episode was produced by Charlie Foley,
Doug Levy, and Jason Wikol. To listen to Charlie's newest episodes,
please download and subscribe through your favorite podcast service, and
if you like the show enough, leave a review.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Your thoughts would greatly be appreciated.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Flags for the Flagless United Stories of America is proudly
produced and distributed by the eight Side Network
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