A North Korean worker named Yi found a gold ring in the dirt by one of his colleagues. Yi Jianlian looked at it for a long time, then turned around, because the worker put the ring in his pocket, which violated the on-site regulations. The worker whispered that he was going to pawn it at the end of the day.
But Yi Jianlian is also the driver of a US naval officer. In the afternoon, he found himself driving a car for Major General George Precy, the commander of the United States in Han Haijun. Yi Jianlian was shocked by the similarity between the ring found at the scene and the Annapolis ring on plessy's finger. Yi Jianlian mentioned his discovery to Admiral this morning, and plessy asked where the ring was.
Suddenly, vehicles sped along the crowded streets of Incheon, and they visited a pawnshop one after another until they found the guilty laborers. The ring is melting. The admiral demanded it back. It has partially melted, but once it cools down, he can wipe off the dirt, and Press realizes that this is really an Annapolis ring. Grade 1932. Plessy is also at the United States Naval Academy. When he tilted the blue gem ring at the light, his heart began to pound. It is engraved with a name he knows: dial. Shortly before World War II, on a warship
Minter, Dialing (photo courtesy of Dialing Family) Nathaniel Minter Dialing was once one of plessy's best friends in Annapolis. They are teammates of the lacrosse team, and Press and his wife were members of the wedding when they married his old lover Lisa Porter in 1934. Plessy has only one idea: return the ring to Lisa.
Memories and sadness flooded the 5 1 year-old general. Minter Dale is the son of South Carolina Senator Nathaniel Dale. He is the most typical boy in America. He is affable, well-educated and strong. He married a beautiful young woman, who gave up her ambition to establish and raise a family. He's going to some places. In the summer of 194 1, he went to the Pacific Ocean.
The last time the reporter heard of his friend was during World War II. Both of them wanted boats from the Philippines, but Precy knew that Dale had been captured and held in a Japanese camp in the northern part of Luzon Island. A few years ago, Precy even visited this website. Found a note, confirmed to be Dell's. "God, I'm so hungry … so tired," his friend scribbled. But it will be nearly twenty years since Dell's ring was discovered, and it is more than a thousand miles from Incheon. Dale was imprisoned and killed near Orangapo, Philippines. What's his ring doing in Korea? Read more about Minter Dial's tragic story after skydiving …
1941July, Minter Dial won the order of the US Marine Corps, which is a fleet tugboat, mainly used for laying mines and torpedo nets. At first, he used his time at sea to develop his typing skills on the portable Underwood and kept writing letters to his wife. However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in June 5438+February last year, Napa's 0.50.30 caliber Lewis machine gun appeared heavy air defense mission. That winter, the Japanese attacked the Philippines, leaving the US and Philippine troops at a loss, and captured more than 75,000 soldiers in Bataan Peninsula with decreasing supplies and inferior weapons. By April of 1942, Bataan's self-proclaimed fighting * * * starved to death. In the captain's room of the United States Marine Corps,
Captain Minter wrote a letter in the autumn of 194 1. (p) Hotel courtesy dial-up family) Napa continued to pull on duty and ran the boat around Manila Bay with fuel under heavy artillery fire until the fuel was exhausted. The ship was forced to dock at Corregildo Island. Just when Bataan Island fell into Japanese hands, Dell and his crew reported that they were on a mission in Corregildo. Because the Americans were trapped on the island of Corregido, the speed of Japanese shelling made the island one of the most densely bombed places in the history of war. "Don't worry," Dell wrote to his wife a few days before the surrender of the US and Philippine troops on May 6, 1942. "Remember, I worship you, and I will always worship you." This is the last letter he wrote in Freedom magazine.
A week later, Lisa Dale received a telegram from the Admiralty saying that her husband was missing, possibly a prisoner of war. Captain bob taylor, one of her husband's close friends, elaborated the details of the Philippine surrender in a letter to her and asked her to "remember that prisoners of war have some advantages. He stopped fighting. He eats more than those poor demons on the island of Corregido. " It was several months before Lisa heard any other news about her husband. "Just before the surrender,
Dial was hospitalized with pneumonia; It was several weeks before he recovered and could be sent to a Japanese prison camp. As fate would have it, he escaped the 60-mile deadly prisoner transfer known as the Bataan Death Parade, and thousands of other American prisoners died of disease and malnutrition. A few weeks later, he was sitting in the back seat of a truck and got dysentery.
1943 In February, the Red Cross informed Lisa Dial that her husband was a prisoner of war in Cabanathun prison, where he would spend the next two and a half years. It's comforting to know that her husband is still alive. But she didn't know that the Tuan refugee camp in cabannes would be notorious for disease, malnutrition and torture.
Prisoners spare no effort to bring hope to the people in their hometown. After Dale escaped, Dale's friend Major Michael Dobag wrote to Lisa Dale, saying that her husband was "in good physical and mental condition" when he last saw him in June 1942+00. Every few months, the Imperial Japanese Army asked prisoners to fill out Red Cross cards, telling them that 50 words of information about the health status of their loved ones must be strictly examined. In such a letter to his wife, Dale said that he wanted to pay tribute to "John B. Bodie on Page 356-7 of Garden City Street in new york". She sent a letter to Mr. Bodie, but the post office wrote back. A few months later, another friend of Dell's in Annapolis, Lu Fen Cox, came back from work to decode the message. Cox recalled that during the Great Depression, they often read aloud for cheap entertainment. He found a book about john brown's body by Stephen Vincent Bennett, published in new york Garden City. On page 356, a young southern prisoner was imprisoned in a joint military camp. He said, "Besides, women and children, wipe your eyes/southern gentlemen never die." /He just lives by willpower,/Like a damn old hen that is too hard to kill. "
A few months passed and the war began to turn to fight against Japan. General douglas macarthur did come back more than two years after he fled the Philippines with the promise of "I will come back from Bataan". In1944,65438+February, Americans set up an airstrip on Mindoro Island in the Philippines. Luzon is in MacArthur's sight. That month, Mintedale's red cross card showed that his weight was 165 pounds, which was lower than the 200 pounds before he went to prison. Like most prisoners in Jiawan, he ate 10 ounce of rice every day and slowly starved to death. It may be easy for him to bribe a guard to eat more with his Annapolis ring, but it won't work. In fact, many POW officers hide their navy and marine corps rings (sometimes in body cavities) to avoid confiscation. When these people become too weak and fear that they will not survive another night, they will give valuables and messages to their wives to stronger prisoners.
1944 65438+February 12, Dell wrote a letter to his wife, which was the only letter he contacted with his wife after he was captured: "Hug the children and tell them that I love them. You should be brave, too! I will. We will get together again and live a happy life. Until then, hold your head up! You are my life! My love! All of me! Minter, it's yours forever.
Dial-up knew that he would leave cabannes for another camp, "probably in Japan". He and other 65,438+0,600 prisoners of war heard about the dangerous and tragic transfer on the Japanese ship. In his letter of 65438+February 65438+February, he included an explanation about the family financial arrangement-in essence, it was a living will.
The next morning, Dial and other prisoners lined up and stared at the 7300-ton Oryoku Maru, a passenger ship built around 1930, in the scorching heat wave. Japanese soldiers stood guard on the deck, and Japanese civilians (2000 men, women and children) were placed under the deck. The prisoners of war were squeezed into three separate cabins. Dell and more than 800 other people were crowded in the stern cargo hold, about 50×70 feet, and the ceiling was too low for most people to stand up straight. Due to the lack of ventilation and sanitary facilities, coupled with the rising temperature in the metal wall of the ship, the water distribution is very small, which leads to serious dehydration. The next morning, 50 people died, and their bodies were piled under the ship's drive shaft. Oryoku Maru has not left Manila Port.
65438+February 14 sets sail at dawn. The prisoners had no water that day, only a small amount of rice. In violation of international law, the Oryoku Maru was not marked as a prisoner of war ship, and American planes attacked it nine times that day. When the temperature rises above 120 degrees, the bullet will rebound in the engine room. Japanese military personnel have been evacuated from the ship, but the prisoners of war are still locked below. The next night, people were driven crazy. "The combination of despair, nervousness and thirst drove us to spend the most terrible night that human beings could endure," wrote john light, a survivor of a ship called "The Ship of Hell". Some people committed suicide. Others were murdered. Desperate people drink the blood of warm corpses or their own urine.
In the morning, another 50 prisoners died before an American torpedo plane directly hit the ship, and another 200 died immediately. Oryoku Maru caught fire and the surviving prisoners were ordered to abandon the ship and swim to the shore. Dale started swimming, but he and other prisoners of war were soon shot by Japanese guards and American pilots. He landed successfully, but not unhurt. Two 50-caliber bullets left cracks on his side and legs. On a tennis court in Orangapo, Japanese guards imprisoned these prisoners, and he soon disappeared without medical assistance. Captain Douglas Fisher, one of Dell's closest friends in Touan, cabannes, held him in his arms. In the hot sun of the Philippines, he gave his Annapolis ring to Fisher and asked him to give it to his wife. Captain Minter Dale took his last breath. He is 33 years old,
Captain N Minter Dale (photo courtesy of Dale's family) spent five days on the tennis court, with no shelter and only a small amount of rice. Fisher and other 65,438+0,300 surviving prisoners of war were boarded the "Enula" pill and crowded into the cabin used to transport artillery horses. In the ankle-deep dunghill, in order to drive away horse flies and quench their thirst, the most desperate prisoners began to bite their arms so that they could suck blood. The ship sailed for Taiwan Province Province under the constant gunfire of American troops, and the deceased was detained for several days. A direct hit killed 300 prisoners. Survivors were moved to Brazil Maru, and I finally arrived in Japan. After a total of 47 days, I arrived in South Korea.
After surviving the severe winter in South Korea from the sweltering heat under the deck of Hell, commander Douglas Fisher held on to Dell's ring and survived. He would tie it to the clothes provided by prisoners or hide it under double slats at night. 1945 In February, when he came to a camp in Incheon, his health was also declining. Of the 1620 prisoners of war taken from the Philippines on Japanese warships, only 400 survived the war. The ring is missing. He searched his bunk and the folds of his clothes, but he couldn't find them. "I suspect someone took it," he said later.
Fisher survived the ordeal, but he was deeply saddened by his failure to realize his friend's last wish. After the war, he went to Long Beach, California to meet Lisa Dale and tell her the news of her husband's capture and death. Then, in tears, he apologized for not having Deming's ring. Although Lisa thanked him for his efforts, Fisher was still too sad. He gave his watch to Minter's 8-year-old son Victor as a gesture of friendship. After 18 frozen and thawed winters in Korea, the ring was buried in the soil under Fisher's old bunk. 1962 in may, a month after this ring was found in a pawnshop in Incheon, General George Precy arranged to return it to Lisa Dell. Shortly after the war, Lisa remarried, trying to bring stability to her family. But she never fully recovered from Minter's death and suffered from depression for the rest of her life. She died of cancer on 1963 at the age of 49.
Victor Dale put the ring in a framed box next to the Navy Cross and Purple Heart awarded after his father died. He hung the box in the house where he and his wife lived in the suburbs of Paris, but one morning 1967, when they came down for breakfast, the box was gone. Thieves stole it from home while they were sleeping.
Mint Dale's ring is missing again.
Source: Minter Dial II, personal collection; Edward F.Haase, EF Haase Papers, Edward F.Haase, U.S. Navy, memoirs; Austin C. Shoffner, Death March from Bataan. Angus Robertson Limited, Sydney, Australia,1945; Stephen Vincent Bennett, john brown's body. Double day,1928; David halberstam, The coldest winter: America and the Korean War. Hyperion, 2007; Gavin Dawes, Japanese prisoner of war: Pacific World War II prisoner of war. Quayle Publishing House,1994; December Ship Betty B Jones: tells the story that Lieutenant Colonel Arden R Barna was arrested, imprisoned and killed by a Japanese hellship in World War II. McFarland Company,1992; John m Wright, Jr., filmed in Corregildo: Diary of American Prisoners of War in World War II. McFarland Press, 1988. More information about the commander. Minter dial ring: //facebook。 /ltcdmenterdial "