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Robert Rosendahl Interview
S: I'm Mike Smith for KSMU News. A very special reunion will take place in Branson this week. Like many who in time of war are brought together to sacrifice and face adversity theirs is a story of courage in the performance of their duty. They are the American soldiers who after survivng the Battan Death March in April and May of 1942 were held in forced labor camps or transported to other camps in lands conquered by the Japanese. Among them a group of about 1500 American soldiers who were taken by ship to Mukden, Manchuria where many miles separated several POW camps each with its own mission was to further the Japanese war effort. One was a tanning factory, another its alleged was a biological warfare and medical experimentation complex known only as Unit 731 where hundreds of Americans are said to have died while being used as human guinea pigs. Another complex the Japanese turned into a Mitsubishi aircraft engine factory and that is where Robert Rosendahl was forced to work as a prisoner of war.
R: They had a large industrial complex set up there in China, which had originally been built by Pratt and Whitney. It was a Pratt and Whitney engine plant that was built there in the early 1930s before the Japanese took over in Manchuria. Robert Rosendahl is 81 years old now, he lives in Springfield. Nearly 60 years ago on November 11, 1942 he arrived at Hotin Camp number one in Mukden, Manchuria. He would remain there until September, 1945. Rosendahl along with other POWs are holding a reunion in Branson this week. About 60 of the 200 still alive are expected to attend. Rosendahl describes what it was like for him in Mukden,
R: We were cold and hungry in the wintertime, hot and hungry in the summertime. S: The complex where Rosendahl was held included about a dozen large buildings where once the daily routine was established two or three Japanese guards would watch over 50 or so POWs in a work detail. A good ratio for sabotage according to Rosendahl, R: They didn't what they had, they realized after awhile when they got to going putting the machines up and getting them going, that they were missing certain items but they didn't know where they'd gone. They didn't realize we stripped them. They thought maybe the machinery was stripped before it came in there because it was in big crates when they got there. We'd break into these boxes and steal the gears out of the damn machines and throw them in the concrete. Drill bits, anything we could get we would throw in the concrete. There's a fortune in drill bits in the concrete still in Manchuria at this time and they don't know it.
S: If taken prisoner it is considered ones duty to throw a monkey wrench into the works. It's also considered ones duty to try and escape. Rosendahl says that it didn't go well for those who tried. R: We had three fella's escape from our camp. They got about 80 miles away from the camp before the Japanese cavalry run them down. They threw a rope on them and just kept dragging them. When they got back to camp they were just a bag of rags. Anyway, they killed them, drug them to death. S: While Rosendahl says some of the guards were doing their duty honorably, there were atrocities in the camp. While not on the scale of what is said to have happened 40 miles away at Unit 731, medical experiments were carried out on Rosendahl and others at Hotin camp number one. R: Medical people came into our camp and they gave us shots. We don't have any idea what we got. You know, if a guy was sick and needed a hospital they had a little hospital there. If they carried him off someplace we didn't know where he went. We had guys that left our camp that went off for operations, experimental operations. One guy, his name was Joe Rubeck. They went in and operated on him and cut all the nerves on his backbone. Did all kinds of damn strange things to him.
S: After enduring the experiences of wartime captivity for nearly three years freedom finally came to Rosendahl and his fellow prisoners on August 15, 1945. Less than a week after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, Rosendahl and the others noticed that no Japanese had came into the camp that day. The camp was deserted except for the prisoners, then out of the sky came six parachutes. As it turned out it was six members of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which after the war was to become the Central Intelligence Agency. When the Japanese did show up it was to officially hand the camp over to the OSS agents. Rosendahl says two days after that a Russian military unit arrived to liberate the camp.
R: A Russian major jumped up on a concrete step that was blown out during an air raid and made a little speech, and said that from this moment on we were freed. And he told us what a big job the Russian army had done, that they'd moved thousands of miles in ten days or something against the Japanese Army. And they brought a bunch of acrobats in and some stage shows and entertained us. S: It was September 17, 1945 when Robert Rosendahl left Hotin camp number one. His was one of the last groups of American soldiers to leave, but Rosendahl soon found out that getting out of China and then back to the United States was not an easy task. In fact, it was terrifyingly difficult. R: We were 800 miles inland from the sea and the railroad bridges were all knocked out. The road system in that county in those days was just terrible, so we had to wait until they got a couple of those bridges rebuilt before we could get out of there on the railroad. We had to go to a place called Darian Manchuria, which is on the Yellow Sea. We got aboard a ship there called an APA; it had a big hospital on it and a bunch of landed craft. Anyway, we went out to sea and there was a hurricane coming in, so instead of going to Okinawa like we were supposed to we stayed out at sea and rode the hurricane out. And the day after the hurricane went through we ran into a floating mine and sunk the ship. Everybody got off, we got off on landing barges and they took us into Okinawa. We spent a couple of days there in Okinawa and then they flew us out on a bunch of old B-24s to Clark Field in the Philippines. One of the airplanes that was picking up all of these prisoners and flying them from Okinawa to the Philippines, one of them flew into a mountain, killed everybody on the airplane.
S: Rosendahl finally made it back home to Thief River Falls, Minnesota in time for Christmas 1945. He was discharged from the Army in 1946, but re-enlisted that same year after finding it too difficult to secure a spot in a college classroom. Too many other ex-soldiers were trying to do the same thing. He was discharged again in 1949, but in June of 1950 re-enlisted again when the Korean War broke out. Rosendahl served as a combat infantry man in Korea until July of 1951. Rosendahl left the army for good in 1953; he worked as a masonry contractor until landing a job with the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Springfield, Missouri. Did any of your experiences as a prisoner of war shape how you performed the duties of your job as a correctional officer?
R: I suppose you'd have to ask one of my supervisors. I did the best job that I could for them and the only thing was I don't think anybody got beat up while I was in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Come to think of it, I got beat up. I got involved in a riot they had out here at the US Medical Center in 1959. I was held hostage by the convicts out there overnight and the next day, something like that. 23 hours maybe, I don't remember, that was long time ago. S: Springfieldian Robert Rosendahl who 60 years after being captured by the Japanese in World War II, is celebrating life and freedom with his fellow prisoners of war this week in Branson. Of the 1500 or so American soldiers who were taken to the POW camps at Mukden, Manchuria around 200 are alive today and about 60 of them will attend the reunion at the Woods Resort. Re
porting for KSMU News, I'm Mike Smith.