Back to Bataan
From his bedroom at night, little Rick would hear his father in the kitchen directly below, shouting in Japanese, barking sharp commands. He'd been out drinking again.
It was the early 1960s, and Joe Szczepanski was collecting a military pension and working at a shoe factory. After his shift, he'd stop at a bar just a block from the house.
He'd get home late, sit by himself and rant for an hour or more.
Rick, who was about 7, would have to get up for school the next morning, and the racket kept him awake. He knew it had something to do with POW camps during
World War II. His father had told him about beheadings.
''My dad was a little bit screwed up,'' Rick Szczepanski now says. ''He was suffering from post-traumatic stress, but nobody knew what that was at the time.
You never knew when he was going to fly off the handle. He didn't physically take it out on us; mentally, though, he did. It was hard for the whole family.''
A one-time amateur boxer from the coal country around Wilkes-Barre, Joe had stayed in the service after the war and would go on to another career, teaching Spanish
at Bethlehem Catholic High School. But he had a drinking problem and a hair-trigger temper that made life difficult for his wife and three sons.
As Rick got older, he found it easier to spend less time with his father than to put up with his combativeness. He knew some lurid details of his dad's existence as a
captive American soldier in the Far East. But he wouldn't gain a fuller understanding until after his father died in 2005.
Inspiration came from summarizing the 86-year-old's life for the obituary. The task launched a journey to his father's past that continues to this day. It is a quest that has
unmasked much of Joe Szczepanski's ordeal during the Bataan Death March and 31/2 years as a prisoner of the Japanese. And it has brought Rick Szczepanski of East Allen Township face to face with an Army veteran who was with Joe in two POW camps, including one in Japan where they slaved in a coal mine and saw the atomic bombing
of Nagasaki.
''Dad never really got over what took place in the prison camps, until in the mid-1980s he finally let go. It didn't bother him anymore,'' said Rick, who is 54 and owns
a mechanical contracting business. A sampling of the abuse his father suffered at Japanese hands appears in his 1947 testimony for the War Crimes Office investigating atrocities.
After his father died, Rick wrote to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis and was surprised to get a copy of the transcript. He hadn't known about the war crimes deposition. His father had never talked about it.
In his testimony, Joe Szczepanski told a counterintelligence agent about an incident that took place at Fukuoka Camp 17 on Japan's Kyushu island, where he was held
from mid-1943 until the war ended. A Japanese overseer in the mine ''reported me for not working hard enough. He and two guards beat me with their fists into unconsciousness, revived me with water and knocked me out a second time. They knocked out five teeth in the beating. They gave me the alternative of being shot or accepting the beating.''
A long walk in the sun
Joseph L. Szczepanski was born in 1918 to Ukrainian immigrants in Plymouth Township, Luzerne County. His parents, who would also have three daughters, were fairly well off. While his father worked in the coal mines, his mother made bootleg plum brandy. They built a nice home in Nanticoke, along with a rental house in the rear.
When Joe was 16, he lied about his age and joined the National Guard. The next year, he graduated from Nanticoke High School and worked in a silk mill. In 1938, now with the regular Army, he went to Hawaii and tangled with other soldiers in the boxing ring while serving in a chemical warfare battalion.
The decision that led him to Asia was his transfer to the Army Air Corps. He arrived at Luzon island, the Philippines, in mid-1940 and became a clerk at the Nichols Field air base outside Manila.
Two weeks after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops swarmed Luzon's northern coast. They gradually overpowered American and Filipino forces, trapping them on the mountainous Bataan peninsula. Joe was there, helping to supply the soldiers in the fight.
With hunger, disease and hopelessness weighing on the Allies, their commander surrendered on April 9, 1942. The next day, Sgt. Szczepanski was taken prisoner on Bataan's southern tip. He was among 75,000 Allied captives the Japanese would start moving north to the captured Camp O'Donnell -- 85 miles, all but two dozen of them on foot.
This was the Bataan Death March.
Along the way, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Filipinos died from dehydration, exhaustion and exposure to the fierce sun and heat, and from being run over, shot, bayoneted, beheaded, beaten and buried alive.
