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DPAA In The News

News 2 | Jan. 29, 2021

Hundreds died on World War II ‘hell ships’. Now there’s an effort to identify the dead. (via the Washington Post)

By Mike Ruane, Washington Post

On May 14, 1941, Manila’s Pier 7 was teeming with military family members saying goodbye to husbands and fathers and waiting to board the ocean liner that would take them away from the war looming in the Pacific.

Three-year-old Nancy White and her pregnant mother, Chrystal, 31, were saying farewell to her father, Maj. Clarence H. White, 39, an Army doctor. The chaos on the pier would be the little girl’s first childhood memory, and the last time she saw her father.

Now, a Defense Department agency is about to seek permission for the exhumation from a cemetery in Hawaii of hundreds of unidentified remains of World War II POWs killed on Japanese prison vessels known as “hell ships.”

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