Homecoming -- April 8, 1945

2025 is a year of eightieth anniversaries for those who lived World War II.  February 3 of this year marked eighty years since “Liberation Day,” when American troops freed the nearly four thousand Allied civilians of Santo Tomas Internment Camp from Japanese imprisonment.  The emaciated men, women, and children had endured 37 months of captivity, overcrowding,  disease, cruelty, and ultimately starvation. By  January they were dying at the rate of one a day.

The toll of starvation had been compounded by the toll of fear:  would American troops arrive in time to save them?  And even when they did, would the Japanese kill them before they could return home?  On the heels of liberation, the Japanese shelling of the camp left nineteen internees (children among them) dead after surviving three years of privation and captivity. 

Those memories of horror, hunger, fear and uncertainty gave the 80th anniversary celebrated by many Santo Tomas survivors this month – Homecoming Day -- greater richness and depth.  When the navy transport ship USS Admiral Washington Lee Capps sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on April 8, 1945, hundreds of former prisoners rejoiced to finally be home.   

Not much has been written about the repatriation of Santo Tomas internees, but homecoming journeys often offered hope, healing and promise.  Such was the case for three teen girlfriends who had been through the ordeal of captivity together:  along with their families, Leonore Iserson (aka Lee), Marylouella Cleland (aka Lulu), and Ellen Thomas (aka Nellie) were blessed to return on the same ship: the Admiral Capps. 

Their journey began on March 10 when the public address system in Santo Tomas announced: “The following internees will be ready to leave for Nielsen Airfield, the island of Leyte, and the United States of America within ninety minutes.” Sixteen-year-old Lee whooped her joy when she heard the “Iserson” name read aloud and raced to her mother, who was standing in line for chow. Ninety-two-pound Agnes Iserson’s response: “we are not going anywhere before lunch.” And they didn’t.

But later that afternoon the Isersons, Clelands, and Thomases boarded bulky C-47s in what for many was their first plane ride ever.  They headed for the U.S. naval base at Leyte, where ships home and -- more important to the girls -- tens of thousands of GIs awaited them.  That’s right -- tens of thousands. 

When Lee, Lulu, and Nellie descended the steps from the plane, they did so to applause, cheers, whistles, and whoops. Lee wrote:  “Those boys had forgotten what a God’s-honest-American girl looked like.” And they were very happy to be reminded.  Some of the GIs hopped in Jeeps and followed the girls to the Convalescent hospital, promising great adventures on their exit.  After two days of hospital quarantine, friendships and romances blossomed.

Lulu’s romance with Private First Class Al Burgess lifted her starved teen spirit, and he was eager to show her around the island – here’s where MacArthur had landed and wouldn’t she like to go to the movies in the nearby dark Quonset hut -- where they were not left alone by her best friends who felt called upon to protect her. 

For their part Lee and Nellie were invited to dance at the Officer’s Club to sip cokes and hear latest records from the States.  Lieutenant Jimmy Anderson (“a tall, dark, and handsome son of Texas” according to Lee) was Leyte’s youngest officer (24) and Lee’s date.  He told the girls about a new singing sensation in the States:  a skinny kid named Frank Sinatra.  He regaled them with stories of the “Columbus Day Riot” of bobby-soxers at Sinatra’s concert in New York City the previous October.  The girls puzzled over why – with all the strong, beefy American men in evidence here on the island – teen girls at home would swoon over a string bean kid.

After their ten days on Leyte, the girls, their families, and hundreds of other Santo Tomas internees boarded a spanking new floating city.  The USS Admiral Capps was embarking on its second voyage across the Pacific. The ship had been designed to transport up to 5000 soldiers across the seas but now sped approximately 3100 soldiers and 800 newly liberated prisoners of war to freedom. 

The girls couldn’t get enough of the Capps’ splendor.  Massive, clean, modern. Six hundred nine feet long, five decks deep, boasting a five-ward hospital for wounded soldiers heading home, along with an infirmary, laundry, bakery, butcher shop, library, rec room, barber shop, chapel, post office, and berthing areas.  But it was the Dining Room, the Officer’s Mess, that truly dazzled. 

​On the first night the teens and their families were welcomed to a carpeted salon filled with tables topped by white cloths and silver bowls filled with apples--not mangoes, but apples. None of the former internees had seen an apple in years.  A Navy steward in starched white coat escorted each of the arriving families to tables, where a card announced the fare: roast beef, carrots, peas, mashed potatoes, red cabbage, white bread and ice cream for dessert. “It was Heaven,” Nellie recalled.

The industrious GIs did not limit their internee welcome efforts to food.  When Navy crewmen learned they were going to have almost a hundred children on board the Capps for a month, its carpenters flew into action.  They’d spent the week before the ship’s departure from Leyte building sandboxes, play tables, and even cobbling together swings, which they attached to a superstructure on the deck. During their time at sea, the little kids were mightily entertained on this playground.

Well, some were.  The high-spirited pre-teen boys aboard were another story. They considered themselves too old for sandboxes, and became masters of pranks.  They spent time greasing handrails, marking up bulkheads with crayons and chalk, and generally playing jokes on the crew, whom they regarded as big-brother co-conspirators.  Weary mothers just let it happen, so crew members came up with schemes to tame them.

​One ingenious solution was Sundaes for Spotters.  With the war still on, the waters traversed by the Capps had been actively mined by the Japanese.  Day and night a sailor perched high on the foretop lookout, scanning the sea with binoculars and when he spotted a mine, the ship zigzagged around it and blew it up.  But it occurred to one Sergeant that they could immobilize the older kids by employing them:  the crew offered an ice cream sundae to any child at any time who spotted a mine and alerted the lookout.  Even if the lookout had seen it first (always), this tactic kept dozens of boys, and a few girls glued to the rail, watching the sea for hours at a time—occasionally meriting a sundae at mid-morning or late afternoon.  To children who had lived starvation, the incentive was overwhelming.

For the teen girls aboard, daily life on the Capps was a romantic adventure.  Many of the ship’s crew and soldiers returning home were not that much older than the girls.  Healthy, hardy and handsome nineteen and twenty-year olds in uniform lifted their spirits and the admiration was mutual.  Lulu had said goodbye to Al, and now fell head over heels for Randal Dean Eckenrode (“Randy”), who planned to study medicine and serve the poor in South America – at least that’s what he told Lulu.  Nellie (just fifteen) dated Sergeant Allen Tubby of South Carolina.  Lee found a buddy-turned-beau in Staff Sergeant Emmett Wellington Osborne (“Ozzie”) – a staff sergeant from Minnesota, who had a girl back in Chicago.

If the girls were looking for distractions other than boys during the next five days, their stop at Pearl Harbor provided one.  By April 1945 Pearl was a bustling powerhouse of steel docks, battle ships, aircraft carriers, planes, warehouses and servicemen. The hull of the U.S.S. Arizona sunk on December 7, 1941 still poked its head from the sea, testifying to the early sucker punch. But around it ranged an awe-inspiring display of military might: hundreds of ships built in California, planes from Seattle, and Jeeps from Detroit.  All America seemed to be represented here, amassed for final battle against the Japanese.

The FBI even wondered if they perhaps they had some Japanese collaborators aboard the Capps.  Passengers of the Capps were not allowed to disembark.  This was a one day stop to refuel, and according to Captain Haugen, to be interrogated!  One of the oddest events of the repatriation voyage was the team of FBI investigators who boarded the ship at Pearl Harbor.  Their job: to ask have you in any way, at any time, aided and abetted the enemy?  They had a list of folks they wanted to talk to.  Lulu, Nellie and Lee were not among them but Lee’s indignant response was: “of all the nerve!” She was prepared to loathe them.

But as the teen girls watched the agents board the gangway of the Capps were won over by … their suits!  The young men with full heads of wavy hair wore white and silver-grey suits with wide lapels, broad shoulders and folded squares poking out of their breast pocket as they ascended the gangplank.  Coming from the land of barong-tagalogs and more recently threadbare tee-shirts, Lee and Lulu marveled “will you look at those suits?!” The GIs prodded them:  hey, you’re supposed to love a guy in a uniform! But speculation followed among the three teens about whether the shoulders of those jackets were padded, or were these men in well-tailored clothes simply classic American HE-men? They decided the latter.

The GIs did not take this rejection to heart.  Crossing the international date line was an excuse for a GI sponsored show, the comic “King Neptune and His Court” where they wowed an audience of rapt internee girls.  In this initiation ceremony, “Slimy Pollywogs,” those sailors who had not crossed the international dateline before, endured a trial at the hands of “Trusty Shellbacks” – loyal subjects of King Neptune.  Hilarity held sway.
         
Lee’s seventeenth birthday (April 3, 1945) brought a birthday surprise she would never forget.  Her “pal” Ozzie proposed to her. Lee thought he was “the swellest guy ever” and wrote that she could talk to him about anything and everything but she was thunderstruck by his proposal of marriage.  What about his girl in Chicago?  She admonished him: “of all the unfair things I’ve ever heard of that is the most unfair!” Lee told him he had to go home and see if true love still awaited him in Illinois.  And by golly, it did.  He wrote her a letter two weeks after disembarking that “All I can say, Lee, is that you were right, very right.”  She concluded in a later letter to Lulu: “He’s a grand guy but he’s lucky that girl of his had a guardian angel by the name of Lee.”

Five days later, on the morning of April 8, 1945, hundreds of internees lined the deck of the Capps as the fog lifted, revealing the swooping red lines and towering heights of the Golden Gate Bridge.  This mountain-high miracle of a bridge pulsed against the skyline, its great steel arms reaching out to them.  Applause and wild cheers exploded from the Capps' passengers as they headed for port. 

The journey's end was as good as any Hollywood script: not simply family members but a United States Army Band waited to welcome them.  As the crew of the Capps secured the vessel portside, an eager crowd of former prisoners waited to disembark.  Did they really have to wait for musicians to play God Bless America?  But suddenly, a fast-paced roll on a snare drum split the morning air and the blare of jazz trumpets caught everyone by surprise.  Sliding trombones swung into action.  The Army’s musical salute?  There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.  They were home.