Lester James Raymond

photo courtesy of Lester Raymond	photo by Thais Boise
Lester Raymond (top row, 2nd from right) is pictured here with other American POWs at his POW camp. This photo was taken shortly after his capture.	Although Raymond is 78, the government believes he is 81. Raymond joined the service at age 14.

Humor, compassion
help POW pull through

by Curtis Wackerle
Veterans History Project

Lester James Raymond had the chance to break his chains every day. His Japanese captors actually trusted him to drive a supply truck from prison camp to prison camp, bringing food and weapons to his oppressors. Nothing would have stopped him from not returning from one of his runs. Nothing except his own conscience.

If Raymond were to have left, he would have condemned nine of his fellow prisoners to death. During World War II, the Japanese put their POWs into groups of 10, Raymond said. If one of the 10 attempted an escape, the other nine would be executed by firing squad. The killing was done in front of all the other prisoners. Raymond had seen it happen.

Death and violence were a part of daily life at Raymond’s prison camp outside of Tokyo. In this dreary setting, Raymond wondered if he would be the next to go.

photo by Thais Boise

Lester Raymond fills out paperwork for the Veterans History Project.

“I never did think I’d get home again in the prison camp,” Raymond admits. But still, he refused to give up hope.

“I knew they wouldn’t get rid of me,” Raymond said, “So I survived.”

Raymond is now 80 and lives on Dog Lake, north of Plains, Mont., but his spirit and sense of humor are that of a younger man. He is Native American, enrolled on the Flathead Reservation.

Raymond was just 14 years old and living in western Montana when he joined the Army Air Corps more than a year before Pearl Harbor. His father lied for him, telling the government that Raymond was 17. Nonchalantly, Raymond said he wanted to join the service so young because “it was something to do.” Leaving Montana and the Great Depression behind, Raymond set off to become an instruments specialist who worked on B-17 bombers.

“I was damn good at my job,” Raymond said. “When I went to school to study something, I studied. I wanted to find out a lot of things. At 14, what the heck, you might as well get everything you can.”

Raymond was stationed on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines when he was taken prisoner by advancing Japanese forces less than a month after Pearl Harbor. He remained a POW until the Japanese surrendered, four years later.

photo by Thais Boise

Raymond was taken prisoner by the Japanese at age 15. He spent his next four birthdays in a POW camp outside Tokyo.

During those long and difficult years in captivity, Raymond remained unselfish and dedicated to his buddies. Of the 10 Americans Raymond considered his close friends in the camp, only five survived the ordeal. The psychological pressure to surrender all hope was constant.

To combat that psychological pressure, Raymond, only a teenager, was a man for his friends.

“Most of the time, I tried to help the others because there was a lot of them that wanted to give up,” Raymond said.

Raymond used his sense of humor and tried to keep the mood light whenever possible.

“When there wasn’t any Japs around, we’d have a good time,” Raymond said.

After years of surviving on nothing but one daily serving of rice, Raymond and his buddies used a stray cat to inject a little fun and mischief into their dreary routines.
The POWs captured the cat as it was wandering across the prison yard.

“We cooked it right there in the kitchen. The Japs didn’t know anything about it,” Raymond said with a chuckle. Together, the POWs boiled the cat and feasted on animal meat for the first time in years.

“Cat tastes like rabbit,” Raymond said.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled by atomic bombs, the Japanese forced their POWs to do clean-up work around those sites. Raymond was one of the first Americans to see the destruction first hand.

“That was a mess up there,” Raymond said. “Everything was burned. Nothing was standing.”

To this day, Raymond said any watch he wears malfunctions. Digital scales don’t work either. Raymond suspects that the incredible amounts of radiation he was exposed to in 1945 are to blame.

When the war finally ended, Raymond had no idea what injustice would be waiting for him back in the states.

After experiencing more pain and strife than any 19-year-old should, Raymond left the prison camp weighing only 90 pounds. He weighed 190 when he entered the camp.

His first taste of injustice came when Raymond’s ship full of POWs arrived in Washington state. The POWs had to wait until night time to come on shore.

“Some weighed 87, 90 pounds,” Raymond said. “We were too skinny. They didn’t want anybody to see us.”

Raymond spent three months recovering in the hospital from four years of physical abuse. Raymond’s teeth had been knocked out by the butt of a Japanese rifle and he had sustained shrapnel wounds during the battle before his capture.

When Raymond applied for disability pay, he expected to get 90 percent like most of his comrades. Instead, in a painful scene still burnt into his memory, Raymond was told he would only receive 10 percent benefits.

“The general said ‘Go back to the reservation and let the Indians take care of you,’” Raymond said.

So for 50 years, Raymond received a meager $13 per month from the government. In 1997, he began to receive full benefits.

Raymond’s service also warranted him a Purple Heart, given to all soldiers wounded in combat, and a Bronze Star, for service above and beyond the call of duty. But those did not come until a November 2003 ceremony. Apparently, a fire destroyed paper records and caused the 60-year delay, government officials say.

Although he never joined any veterans organizations, Raymond did keep up with his war buddies and attended reunions whenever he had the chance.

He recalls one reunion when he toured a B-17 bomber, the plane he was trained to work on.

“The 17 used to seem so big,” Raymond said. “That son of a bitch looked like a small little thing.”

Now most of his war buddies have passed away.

“They just passed away,” Raymond lamented, “so now I don’t have anybody to call.”

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