Texan Rufus Choate was 16 in 1938, envious of the local National Guard unit, part of the 36th Infantry Division, that went to training camp for two weeks every summer. It looked fun, so he enlisted. “We was lying [about our age], and they knew we was lying. Everybody turned their heads,” Rufus told me. The officers needed to meet enlistment quotas.
By Nov. 25, 1940, Choate’s unit was activated for one year of training. They trained in Texas and then Louisiana. Next, they were ordered to field artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. But orders changed. By November 1941, with Europe at war and tensions high in the Pacific, his unit was deployed to the Philippines, spending Nov. 29, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. Its convoy was near the equator when Pearl Harbor was attacked a little over a week later.
“Everything became very serious,” Choate told me. “It was an old WWI ship. It wouldn’t have taken much to sink it.”
Choate’s convoy never reached the Philippines. It diverted to Java, where it joined the 19th bomber group, helping to field, maintain, and even man machine guns in B-17s. By Feb. 3, the Japanese had invaded Java, and when the Dutch government surrendered a month later, resistance became futile. Rufus’s unit couldn’t hope to prevail with 100 men, outdated rifles, and no chance of reinforcements or resupply. It surrendered.
Thus began 3 1/2 years of life as a POW.
The Japanese were notorious for atrocities committed against prisoners during WWII. I asked Rufus what it was like.
“You couldn’t smoke. When you passed a guard, you had to salute or bow. That was the hardest thing we had to get used to.” The Japanese foreman “could slap you around. You didn’t want to give them any reason to pick on you. I got slapped around a few times. Everybody did.”
Eventually, Choate and his fellow prisoners were sent to a coal mine north of Nagasaki. By late summer, the Japanese were tense. The POWs were working with Japanese boys too young to be drafted for military service and asked them for information.
One Japanese boy working with Rufus said, “Nagasaki Owari mashita.” Finished. “One bomb.”
“I didn’t believe him.”
One day, Rufus’s shift was not sent down into the mine. That night, the seldom-seen camp commander assembled the prisoners and spoke perfect English from a barracks balcony. “Today, the Japanese imperial military surrendered to the Allied powers. There will be no demonstration.”
As you can imagine, the commander of a work camp who has just announced that his military has surrendered to his captives’ military loses some authority. The men did, in fact, demonstrate. “The guys whooped and hollered and cheered!”
They were told to remain in the camp for their own safety. The guards would stay outside. A few days later, the U.S. Army flew over and dropped food, medicine, clothing, and blankets to the men.
“Did you feel like you had revenge for your years of captivity and work when they surrendered?” I asked.
He didn’t. There was no sense of it in his voice as he described riding by train back south through what had been Nagasaki. The bustling city in the once-green valley was gone. Only one two-story concrete building remained. “There was nothing else,” Rufus recalled somberly. “It wasn’t real that one bomb could do that much damage.”
Choate was back home on leave in Texas, with his father and siblings, for what must have been a glorious celebration of Christmas 1945.
“I went in for a year’s training in November of 1940 and got home May of 1946.”
Rufus Choate will be 99 in March, and he remembers every date and event of his war experience with remarkable detail, sharing his story with honest humility because, I think, he wants people to remember the men with whom he served. It is our duty to make sure history never forgets the greatest generation.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
