HEROES: Full Circle

As he walked out, gaunt and shaken, to surrender Corregidor, Lieut. General Jonathan M. Wainwright did not feel like a hero. As a prisoner of Japan he did not feel like one, either. “Skinny” Wainwright, who could remember the bugle-bright traditions of the U.S. cavalry, learned a dingier drill—to remove his shoes when entering buildings, to bow to his captors. He was allowed no news. Lonely and aging, he could only wonder about how the war was going, and what the nation and the Army thought about him—if they ever did think about him.

Last week, five days after his 62nd birthday, after three years and three months of isolated captivity, he found out. Rescued from his prison camp at Sian, 100 miles northeast of Mukden (TIME, Aug. 27), he flew into Chungking and a warm and wonderful welcome.

There were messages of congratulation from home, an autographed wirephoto from his wife, his back pay, summer khaki uniforms to replace his worn clothing, good food, and the stirring atmosphere of a U.S. Army post. And, better than all these, he found that his country remembered him with sympathy and pride.

When correspondents came in to congratulate and interview him, his voice shook: “I have had little contact with the outside world, but I … believe the War Department and the American people lave accepted my dire disaster with a forbearance and generosity greater than any in the experience of any other defeated commander. . . .”

After the Grey Years. And this was just the beginning. After the grey years of captivity, Chungking seemed full of wonders. Like other rescued prisoners, the General was too tense at first to relax. He and the group who arrived with him ate hungrily but shyly, clumsy with knives & forks after years of using only mess-kit spoons. They looked at magazines, full of unfamiliar expressions like G.I. and A.P.O., listened to references to battles, planes and Army outfits about which they knew nothing.

The day after his arrival, General Wainwright was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross, entertained by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. From his old commander, General Douglas MacArthur, came a heartwarming invitation to attend the surrender of the Japanese Empire.

Still marveling, he flew to Manila and marveled again: as the plane approached the city, the pilot circled over the hundreds of ships in the harbor, the vast supply dumps, the great runways at Nichols Field. When the plane landed, a crowd which had waited for hours burst past MPs to surround its famous passenger.

The thin, tired man who had seen the Stars & Stripes pulled down in the Pacific went on to see it raised over the home islands of Japan. At Yokohama’s New Grand Hotel he was embraced by his old commander, sat down to dinner served by bowing Japanese. There was a pistol at his hip. To U.S. correspondents on Japanese soil Skinny Wainwright said: “It’s good to be back a free man and an American soldier wearing a gun again.”

He watched the formal surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, received the first of the five pens with which General MacArthur signed the document. Then, for the supreme moment of his wonder-packed week, he returned to Baguio, to accept the surrender of all Japs in the Philippines from the now fangless “Tiger of Malaya,” Lieut. General Tomoyuki Yamashita.