Left Behind: When America Surrendered WW2

21-year-old Frances Long was just passing through Manila when WW2 broke out – stranding her there. She’d arrived just days previous with her fiancée, US Marine Alan Manning. On Sunday, December 7, they said goodbye to each other as he headed for his new military station. It would be the last time they ever saw each other. Because the next day, the world changed. The Japanese attacks deserted Franc...

John Burk languished for 3 months in 1943 in Manila’s medieval-era dungeon. Then the sentence came: Execution. The date was set. The prison guards forced him to dig his own grave. When suddenly… Burk’s past came back to save him, and possibly the lives of three fellow sailors. At the same time, one of those sailors, William Patton, was involved in a cross-ocean love triangle – that he knew nothing...

As the US military hurriedly withdrew from Manila on Christmas 1941, 4 US sailors were ordered to remain behind on a sabotage mission. Their mission accomplished; it was too late to join the American troops on Bataan. And Japanese forces had already occupied Manila. So sailors Arthur Lazcano and Gordon Fontaine pretended to be civilians and were imprisoned at a civilian internment camp. But, after...

75% of servicemen in Company C, 803rd Engineers, Army Corps of Engineers, died in captivity during WW2. Company C had 166 servicemen on its roster when WW2 began.  Only 38 returned home. The rest died in battle, on the Bataan Death March, or in POW camps.  This episode follows 4 men from Company C . . . From the company's beginning in Hawaii. Through their work hard, play harder days in Manila. In...

More than 50,000 native Filipino servicemen were captured when the US surrendered The Philippines in 1942. Filipino servicemen outnumbered Americans at least 6 to 1 during WW2 in The Philippines. Yet we hear so little about them. And more than half never made it home.  Among those 50K Filipino POWs was 21-year-old Private Dominador Figuracion. He rode in one of the US Army’s last horse-mounted cav...

Marines Brooks Miller and Louis Sontag escaped Japanese forces 3 times during WW2. The first was when they helped rescue sailors and civilians trapped on a burning navy yard pier after a devastating Japanese air raid. Months later the two Marines defended Manila’s island-fortress against invading Japanese ground forces. Then they became POWs. Back home, the women in their lives waited patiently fo...

It was the morning of December 10, 1941. Captain Colin Kelly and Lt. Don Robins piloted their B-17 “Flying Fortress” Bomber on to the bombed-out runway at Clark Field in The Philippines. They refueled, loaded bombs, and took off again -- headed toward a Japanese aircraft carrier . . . and the stuff of legends. That day Capt. Colin Kelly would become the first widely celebrated hero of World War 2....

While everyone else ran for cover, Chaplain Ralph Brown drove straight into the bombs, machine gunning, and destruction of Japan’s first air attack on The Philippines. Brown collected wounded men in his old Pontiac and drove them to the nearby hospital. And then he headed back into the bombing and staffing at least 5 more times, getting wounded men to safety. For those actions, he became the first...

Being released from a POW camp was just the beginning of Lester Tenney's quest... In 1940, Lester Tenney joined a tank unit in the US Army Reserves, hoping to serve 1 year and then move on with his life.  But the world had different plans. Captured by Japanese forces on Bataan Peninsula in The Philippines in the early days of World War 2, Tenney endured the Bataan Death March and spent 3 years and...

Major Frank Pyzick, US Marine Corps, rode thru a navy yard announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the start of World War 2 to the Marines in The Philippines. 5 months later he was captured by Japanese forces and spent the next 40 months at POW camps in The Philippines, Japan, and Korea. And in the middle of it all, he destroyed a US Navy base and survived 2 shipwrecks. For images, maps, and a...

20,000 American and 70,000 Filipino service men and women were captured when the United States surrendered The Philippines to Japan in April 1942. Probably half of them never made it home.   Coming January 30, 2023 -- Left Behind tells the stories of the servicemen and women, civilians, families, and others left behind when the United States surrendered The Philippines mere months into World War 2...