Prisoners of War

Prior to World War II, few Americans had been held as prisoners of war on foreign soil, but the surrender of U.S. forces in the Phillippines in the spring of 1942 swelled the number of POWs into the thousands, and support groups soon formed in the U.S. to exchange information about loved ones held captive. At the war’s end, the Bataan Relief Organization absorbed similar barbed-wire clubs and in 1949 became the American Ex-Prisoners of War. A Wisconsin department was established in 1977, and Stanley G. Sommers of Marshfield, a sailor captured at Corregidor, became national commander in 1980. Sommers helped compile data on the effects of incarceration on former POWs, and some of that information informed the congressional debate over the Former Prisoners of War Benefit Act of 1981. In both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, 142,227 Americans were captured and held as prisoners of war, including 1,929 Wisconsinites, and 15,190 U.S. service personnel died in captivity, almost three-quarters of them in Japanese hands during World War II.

Richfield, Wisconsin · United States