He surprised me with that; it wasn’t like him. “Why would they do that?” I asked him.
“To keep a good impression of the Orient,” he said. A few months later, he told me that a Captain Hatfield, who worked for another American shipping line, managed to sail out of Manila and escape after the invasion; “he told me to fetch a bag and come along,” Mr. Buckles recalled. But, he added, “I had already told MacArthur’s headquarters that I was going to stay there . . . They told me that I would be more valuable to stay there in case we decided to take the people out and to take the cargos out.”
The American force in the Philippines was far too small to keep the Japanese at bay. There wasn’t much they could do, though they certainly did try. One afternoon, Frank Buckles recalled, he was walking in Manila when he spotted “a Japanese plane flying over, very high.” Suddenly, he said, an Army truck pulled up, “and a sergeant and his squad of eight men hop out and start firing, shooting at the planes. So I tell the sergeant, ‘Sergeant, what’s the extreme range of your rifle?’ He knew right off. I said, ‘Well, now, how high do you think that plane is?’ It was about twice it. And he said, ‘Mister, I’ve just got to do something.’”
Everyone now knew what was coming. MacArthur left Manila, moved his headquarters to the fortress of Corregidor, on an island in Manila Bay, and then to Australia. The Japanese marched into Manila—left defenseless, as an “open city”—at the beginning of January, 1942. The city was full of foreigners who had fled there seeking sanctuary; in addition to the aforementioned British, French, Dutch, and Americans, there were, Frank Buckles explained, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, too. “Many of these people,” he recalled, “had no residence in Manila at all. They had just been staying at the hotels.” Now, he said, the Japanese “gave word that everybody was to present themselves . . . at the Santo Tomas University [in Manila], and to bring provisions for three days.” He didn’t, deciding instead to wait until they came and got him.
It didn’t take very long. They found him at his apartment: a Japanese soldier—“big, bad”—and “two Japanese civilians, nice little people.” After they took him to Santo Tomas, the Japanese civilians returned to his apartment, “took a mat I had, about this size, and put all my canned goods and stuff in it, bound it up and took it out there for me.” It was one of the few lucky breaks he would catch over the course of the next few years.
I asked Mr. Buckles why the Japanese had told people to bring along only enough provisions for three days; what did they expect to happen after that? “They thought you would go back to your home,” he replied. In Manila. “Japanese were not accustomed to taking prisoners. They didn’t know how to handle them. They didn’t want prisoners. Even their own people. If their own people were taken prisoner, they never wanted to see them again. He’s marked off . . . It was a disgrace to be taken a prisoner. They said they would die for the emperor, and so forth.” Consequently, he said, “they hadn’t made any provision for it.” Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to the Japanese that taking prisoners also meant feeding prisoners. “At first there wasn’t anything,” Frank Buckles explained, during our second visit. “Then a man who had a warehouse full of coffee and so forth managed—you get permission to do a lot of things—to go outside and bring in coffee. And he brought in enough coffee for the whole [camp] . . . In the beginning we were only a thousand people there; eventually, there were three thousand. And then we negotiated with the Japanese. The Japanese began to give a certain amount of foodstuffs.”
In some ways, the walls at Santo Tomas were porous; the Japanese recognized that the more food prisoners could have brought in to them from the outside, the less food their captors would have to provide. But you had to have connections. Fortunately, Frank Buckles did; he’d actually had the presence of mind to make the arrangements as the Japanese were escorting him out of his apartment. “I told my Filipino houseboy—I gave him money, I told him, ‘You just stay here.’ He lived someplace nearby; I said, ‘You just move in, you and your wife move into this apartment and stay here’ . . . The people who lived in Manila all had servants . . . loyal servants. And they came right down bringing food. So finally the Japanese allowed an arrangement where they could come down and put it in an apartment inside the wall in Santo Tomas. Then my houseboy would right away bring . . . little containers; there would be one, two, three, four, five of them, and then a handle at the top. And he would bring about, more food than I could eat. And I had two or three friends there. One of them . . . was from the Shell Oil Company. And he didn’t, he couldn’t immediately find any contact; and he was a big man, too. So I kept him alive for the first few months.” Despite such arrangements, though, food was never plentiful; “even the first few months, we were suffering from hunger,” he explained.
That wasn’t the only problem at Santo Tomas, even in the early days. “We were in this building, well, I guess about seven hundred in that building,” Frank Buckles told me during our first visit. “The ruling was, you had to be in at seven o’clock, seven o’clock out in the morning. Well, men were getting stiff, and complaining about everything . . . and they wanted some exercise. I said, ‘I’ll give you some exercise.’ So I took about forty men, lined them up, and started giving them stick drill. The Japanese commandant came along with his crew. And everybody thought I was going to get into trouble. The Japanese said: ‘Put up a notice on the bulletin board—everybody should take exercise.’” The incident earned Frank Buckles some measure of renown among the prisoners; one day, he told me, he was approached by another American, a man whose family had owned a large sugar plantation on the Philippine island of Luzon before the invasion. “Name of Walter Weinzheimer,” he recalled. “Was in there with his family, and the little daughter, nine years old, had the polio. And [they’d] had an Austrian doctor, a woman, who was taking care of her.” Austria, of course, had been annexed by Germany in 1938; as a German citizen, the doctor would not have been interned by the Japanese. But at a certain point, he explained, “she could no longer come in [to Santo Tomas]. So she asked if somebody could take care of the daughter. And the father came to me and asked if I could . . . So every morning, I gave her exercise, and I walked her around the place.” They’d stayed in touch ever since; he showed me a letter he’d just recently received from her.
Others started coming to him for help, too. But though he appreciated the responsibility that came with his position in the community, internment grated on him; so when, after a year or so at Santo Tomas, the Japanese announced that they would be moving eight hundred men to a new camp at another university in Los Baños, about fifty miles away, Frank Buckles stepped forward. “It had been part of the Philippine Agricultural College,” he explained. “I volunteered to go because I knew the mountains around there and thought that I would be able to get out. Well, I thought it was a possibility.” He was quiet for a moment. “But I didn’t make it.”
“You tried to escape?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “We have very good reasons why you don’t.”
“What are they?”
“They’d take the next twenty people around you. Execute them.” Their allies, the Nazis, were known for doing the same thing.
Life had never been comfortable at a Japanese internment camp. Food was always scarce; the soldiers, officers, and commandants always indifferent, and often cruel. As the war started turning against the Japanese, though, things got much worse for their prisoners. Rations were cut, and cut again, and again, to the point where they were almost nonexistent. Brutality surged, became the norm. Prisoners died of disease or starvation; others were taken away by soldiers and never seen again.
Frank Buckles was not spared. Though he continued to lead his daily calisthenics class, his body was breaking down. Before the war, he’d been a healthy 150 pounds; now—well, he didn’t know, exactly. “They had scales there,” he said, but after a while he stayed away. “When I got down to a hundred pounds,” he explained, “I quit weighing.” H
e developed beriberi, a disease of the nervous system caused by malnutrition, which would affect his sense of balance for the rest of his life; whenever we walked somewhere together—across his lawn, into a restaurant—I had to gently press one hand into the small of his back. It got to the point, he said, where “you can’t get any worse, or you die.” He added: “Lots of them did.”
News had a way of filtering into the camp, through civilians outside the walls and secret radios inside them, and when Allied forces started liberating parts of the country toward the end of 1944, prisoners’ hopes and spirits rose. “We were accustomed to seeing planes fly over, cargo planes,” Frank Buckles recalled. “And we knew Americans were there somewhere, because . . . here a Filipino would appear with a package of American cigarettes.” But the Philippines is a large place, spread out over many islands, and the Japanese were tough defenders, known for fighting to the death; the process of liberation took time. By early February, 1945, the prisoners of Los Baños were hearing rumors that the Japanese were killing prisoners wholesale before the Americans could free them. It’s difficult to imagine the sense of anxiety the prisoners must have experienced, wondering which set of rifles would get to them first; it must have been hard for many of them even to get out of bed. Except they had to, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., every day.
“The morning of the twenty-third of February, 1945,” Mr. Buckles recalled, during our second visit, “most of us were out. You’d go out early, maybe have a folding chair or something to sit on . . . [We] saw a plane fly over, and the paratroopers started dropping out . . . Most people in there had never even heard of a paratrooper. And the guerillas had been hiding up in the trees in the background along the mountain. They came out with their wire cutters and opened up the wires, the fences. And the paratroopers”—that is, men of the 1st Battalion, 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division, United States Army—“started coming through. About 180, about the same number of Japanese in the camp. And fortunately for the paratroopers, it was just calisthenics time. The Japanese all do calisthenics, and not all would be out doing that, but many of them were. So paratroopers came through and killed the Japanese—except those who escaped. And plenty of them got out, too; they are not all as brave as they try to tell you.” The prisoners, he said, were elated, bordering on hysterical. “After you have been in prison camp three years, you’re a little bit stir-crazy,” Frank Buckles explained. “Some of them were trying to take all their possessions with them.”
And by them, he meant: us. “When the paratroopers started going through the barracks,” he recalled that same day, “my bunk was up high. I reached up on the wall and grabbed my rucksack, and put a mat on the floor. And I reached into the rucksack and I took out my shirt, that I’d had made, and shorts. And there was still starch on them, where my boy had starched them when I was back in Manila a couple of years before . . . I had a pair of knit socks, and I was one of the few men who had a pair of shoes. I dressed up, put on my shoes, put my rucksack on, and just as I walked out the door, the roof was on fire. Just as I walked out the door, the roof fell in.” He wanted to honor the occasion accordingly; you can’t teach that kind of dignity. Or style.
“Did you know that the roof was on fire when you were getting dressed?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, with a wry grin, “I sort of suspected it.”
Add poise to that list.
He returned home, visited his eighty-eight-year-old father in Oklahoma (his mother had died of cancer in 1936) and a lot of other people here and there who’d believed for years that he was dead, took that job in San Francisco, and married a woman he’d met there before the war. In 1953, he moved to West Virginia; the following year, he bought Gap View Farm. A year after that, at the age of fifty-four, he became a father. Gap View was always a working farm; when I first met Frank Buckles, he still drove the tractor, still hired and supervised the hands, still kept the farm’s books and paid all its bills himself. He never really retired.
But, though farming was much harder than he had imagined it would be when he bought the place, he never withdrew from the outside world, not a bit; never even limited his scope at all. He still read the newspaper, remained active in his community, traveled. And though his gaze now extended backwards, too, he never lost his fascination with the new. At one point, toward the end of our first visit, I said to him: “You have lived to see so many changes. What kind of things have you seen that you never could have imagined?”
He didn’t hesitate: “That little instrument you have there in your pocket,” he said. My cell phone. I had forgotten to turn it off, and it had rung while we were talking.
“I was calling on an elderly gentleman in the county,” he told me. “And while I was there, his grandson was in Singapore onboard of an oil tanker, the chief engineer, [and] he gets on a telephone and calls his grandfather.” He laughed. “That’s the change,” he declared.
We talked, as I said earlier, for more than four hours that day, and only stopped because I got tired. I came back a few months later, and many times after that, until he became too frail to receive visitors, a turn of events that, despite his greatly advanced age, surprised me. When I’d gone to see him in 2008, he told me he wasn’t at all surprised that he’d lived to be 107, his age then. “I had been warned by my two aunts, both of whom made it past 100,” he explained, “to be prepared—that I was going to live past 100 years old.” His father’s mother, Harriet Ripsom, the great-granddaughter of Mathias Riebsomeer, killed at Oriskany in 1777, had lived to ninety-six; born the same year that the House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams president (thus infuriating Andrew Jackson, who’d won the popular vote), she lived long enough to hear the election of Warren G. Harding called on the radio. His father, James Clark Buckles, had lived to ninety-five; born three and a half years before the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, he had lived long enough to watch I Love Lucy on television. And he, Frank Buckles, born a few months before Theodore Roosevelt was verbally lynched for inviting a black man to visit the White House, lived long enough to vote for Barack Obama, and to see him sworn in as his country’s first African American president.
His wife, Audrey, had died in 1999, leaving her husband a widower at the age of ninety-eight. She was nineteen years his junior, and somewhat self-conscious about the age gap; while she was alive, he told me, he never really told their friends and neighbors about his experiences in the Great War, “partly [because] Audrey wouldn’t allow me to . . . she didn’t want to let anyone know that I was that old. Her father was overseas [during World War I].” So, he said, “I never talked about it.” Still, he maintained, his time in the Army “was [important] for me . . . it started my independence.” In lieu of friends and neighbors, he shared stories with his daughter, Susannah, and joined the Veterans of World War I of the USA, which had been founded in 1948, the year General Pershing died. He told me that in the 1970s, when he joined, the or-ganization had tens of thousands of members; decades later, when he was made national commander, there were but a handful. For the last five or six years of his administration, there was just one. “Someone has to do it,” he told me once, smiling. Still, he conceded, “it kind of startles you.”
About six weeks before our 2008 visit, the death of a 108-year-old Florida man named Harry Richard Landis, who had enlisted in the Army a few weeks before the armistice and never completed basic training, left Frank Buckles as the United States of America’s sole surviving veteran of World War I. I asked him if he’d ever thought, years earlier, that he might one day be the last of the last. “I had an idea that I would be among them,” he said. His status didn’t seem to please or sadden him; rather, he took the small modicum of fame it afforded him and used it to draw attention to the fact that there was no national World War I memorial in Washington, D.C. He testified before Congress, was received at the White House, rode in parades with celebrities. He continued to speak out for an appropriate memorial, was written up in newspapers and
magazines for doing so. Senators and congressmen issued statements to the effect that they would make it happen. It still hadn’t when he died, three years later. It still hasn’t.
He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the required special permission having been obtained before his death. Newspapers across the country ran obituaries; his name was always spelled correctly. The United States Senate passed a resolution in his memory: Senate Resolution 89, “Relating to the death of Frank W. Buckles, the longest surviving United States veteran of the First World War,” by name. It was sponsored by sixteen senators.
Whereas Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last known American World War I veteran, who passed away on February 27, 2011, at the age of 110, and represents his generation of veterans;
The Last of the Doughboys Page 57