If I have my family history right, Uncle Johnny, John Woodard, My Aunt Tressie’s second husband, was on Corregidor Island when it felled. He managed to survive the Bataan Death March only to spend the next 42 months as a Japanese POW (prisoner of war). The Japanese used him and many others, as slave labor during this time. For my money, Uncle Johnny should be inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame along with the brother-in-law he never met, Paul Henry Carr.
Herr Schulze, aka Cousin Perry, sent the following around as an email. I decided to add it as a post to this site. Best I can figure it is from a Face page, entitled History Nerds HQ.
He surrendered 80,000 men and spent three years believing America saw him as a failure. He was wrong. They gave him the Medal of Honor.
May 6, 1942. General Jonathan Wainwright stood on Corregidor Island, staring at what remained of his command.
For months, American and Filipino forces had held the Philippines against impossible odds. After General Douglas MacArthur evacuated to Australia in March, Wainwright inherited a nightmare: trapped soldiers, dwindling supplies, no reinforcements coming, and a Japanese force that vastly outnumbered his own.
On Bataan Peninsula, 70,000 Allied troops had already surrendered in April. Now, on the tiny fortress island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, Wainwright’s remaining forces—exhausted, starving, and out of ammunition—faced annihilation.
The Japanese commander made it clear: surrender everything, or watch everyone die.
Wainwright had a choice that wasn’t really a choice at all.
He sent two messages that day. The first went to the Japanese commander, offering surrender. The second went to President Franklin Roosevelt: a heartfelt note expressing his sorrow while emphasizing that his men had fought with extraordinary courage and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Army.
Then he picked up a microphone and, under Japanese supervision, broadcast the order that would haunt him for three years: all Allied forces in the Philippines were to surrender.
Over 80,000 American and Filipino soldiers became prisoners of war—the largest surrender in American military history.
And General Jonathan Wainwright became the highest-ranking American officer ever captured during World War II.
For the next three years, he believed he had failed his country.
The Japanese moved him through a series of POW camps—first in the Philippines, then Formosa (Taiwan), finally to Manchuria in Japanese-occupied northern China. The conditions were brutal: starvation rations, no medical care, psychological torture.
But the worst torment came from inside Wainwright’s own mind.
He replayed the decision endlessly. Should he have held out longer? Could his men have fought on as guerrillas? Had he surrendered too quickly? Would America see him as a coward who gave up when MacArthur would have fought to the last man?
The guilt consumed him. While his body withered from malnutrition, his spirit eroded under the weight of imagined disgrace.
He had no way of knowing what was happening back home. No letters. No news. No confirmation that anyone understood the impossible position he’d faced.
Just silence, and shame, and the certainty that his military career—his life’s work—had ended in dishonor.
Then came August 17, 1945.
Soviet Red Army forces liberated Wainwright’s POW camp in Manchuria. Days later, American OSS operatives arrived to evacuate him.
Wainwright—now skeletal, gray-haired at 62 but looking 80, walking with a cane—asked the first American he met: “How do people back home think of me?”
The answer shocked him: “Sir, you’re a national hero.”
He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it.
On August 20, General Douglas MacArthur greeted Wainwright in Manila. MacArthur later described the reunion:
“He walked with difficulty and with the help of a cane. His eyes were sunken and there were pits in his cheeks. His hair was snow white and his skin looked like old shoe leather. He made a brave effort to smile as I took him in my arms, but when he tried to talk his voice wouldn’t come.”
Wainwright had spent three years imagining himself in disgrace, believing he would never command again. MacArthur immediately offered him his old corps command.
Wainwright could only whisper “General…” before breaking down in tears.
MacArthur later noticed something heartbreaking: the cane Wainwright leaned on was one MacArthur had given him before the war. Wainwright had kept it through three years of captivity—his only connection to the life he thought he’d lost.
Five days later, September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the Japanese signed their formal surrender.
Among the assembled Allied commanders stood two special guests: British General Arthur Percival and American General Jonathan Wainwright—both prisoners since the war’s early days, both gaunt survivors of Japanese captivity.
Wainwright stood directly behind MacArthur as the documents were signed, witnessing the moment that officially ended the war that had cost him three years of his life.
Then Wainwright returned to the Philippines to accept the surrender of General Tomoyuki Yamashita—the same Japanese commander who had conquered the islands three years earlier.
America welcomed him home as a hero.
On September 5, 1945, Wainwright was promoted to four-star general.
On September 10, President Harry Truman pinned the Medal of Honor on Wainwright during a White House ceremony.
The citation read: “Distinguished himself by intrepid and determined leadership against greatly superior enemy forces. At the repeated risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in his position, he frequented the firing line of his troops where his presence provided the example and incentive that helped make the gallant efforts of these men possible. The final stand on beleaguered Corregidor, for which he was in an important measure personally responsible, commanded the admiration of the Nation’s allies. It reflected the high morale of American arms in the face of overwhelming odds. His courage and resolution were a vitally needed inspiration to the then sorely pressed freedom-loving peoples of the world.”
On September 13, New York City gave him a ticker-tape parade.
The man who had spent three years believing America saw him as a failure discovered he was wrong. Completely, beautifully wrong.
But there’s an untold chapter that makes this story even more powerful:
In 1942, when news of Corregidor’s fall reached Washington, General George Marshall immediately recommended Wainwright for the Medal of Honor.
General Douglas MacArthur vetoed it.
MacArthur—Wainwright’s commander, his colleague—believed Corregidor should never have been surrendered. He blocked the Medal of Honor while Wainwright suffered in Japanese prison camps, tormented by guilt.
Only after the war, when MacArthur saw Wainwright’s physical and psychological condition, did he withdraw his objection.
It’s a reminder that even heroes make mistakes. MacArthur later regretted his opposition, and Wainwright—remarkably—bore no grudge. When MacArthur sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, Wainwright was prepared to deliver his nominating speech.
After the war, Wainwright took command of the Fourth Army at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, in 1946.
He retired in 1947 after 41 years of military service. He served on corporate boards, became a Freemason, and lived quietly.
On September 2, 1953—exactly eight years to the day after the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri—General Jonathan Wainwright died of a stroke in San Antonio, Texas. He was 70 years old.
His funeral was held at Arlington National Cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater, where he was buried with full military honors.
Jonathan Wainwright’s story teaches us something profound about courage and perception.
He made the hardest decision a commander can make: choosing his men’s lives over his own reputation. He surrendered to save 80,000 soldiers from certain massacre, knowing it might mean being remembered as the general who gave up.
For three years, he carried that burden alone—believing America would never forgive him.
But America understood what he couldn’t see from inside that prison camp: that sometimes courage means knowing when to stop fighting. That leadership isn’t always about last stands and glorious defeats. That saving lives can be braver than sacrificing them.
His men called him “the Fighting General” because he spent his final days on Corregidor in the trenches with them, sharing their danger, showing them he wouldn’t ask them to endure anything he wouldn’t face himself.
He surrendered 80,000 men to save their lives.
He spent three years believing he’d failed.
And when he finally came home, he discovered America had been waiting to give him the nation’s highest honor.
… And as Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the rest of the story.
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