Prisoner of war: Russell enjoys life on the farm after surviving enemy capture
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But from 1943 to 1945, his life was much different. During those years he was a Japanese prisoner of war – an experience that has left him physically disabled, but spiritually undaunted.
Robert Russell is a living example of the kind of soldiers we seek to honor and remember. As we celebrate Memorial Day tomorrow, it is time to pause and pay tribute to the soldiers not as fortunate as Russell – the ones who made the ultimate sacrifice and gave their life for this country.
Russell is pleased to see the resurgence of American patriotism. He experienced such patriotism as he left a POW camp in the mountains of western Japan at the end of World War II. As he walked out on crutches to meet his rescuers from the 1st Calvary, the crowds cheered him, and some of them were even Japanese he recalls.
“It’s the first time in my life I felt like a big shot,” he says.
Born in Nashville, Russell studied engineering at Vanderbilt University for two years as a young man before moving to New York to study commercial and industrial art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
It was while he was living in New York he joined the service, eventually becoming a pilot in the 380th Bomber Group, affectionately known as the “Flying Circus” and as the “King of the Heavies.”
The 380th went overseas in April of 1943 and became the second B-24 unit in the 5th Air Force at that time after the 90th Bomb Group.
Russell was in the 530th Squadron, whose mascot and insignia was, ironically, the cartoon character Bugs Bunny. The 530th, stationed in Darwin, Australia and put under the control of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), flew B-24 Liberators on long-range missions in the South Pacific during the latter part of the war. It was while he was returning from one of these extended missions that his squadron was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. The B-24 he was flying lost one engine and suffered damage to the electrical and oil systems while still over the Philippines.
He and his co-pilot managed to ditch the plane on a coral reef of a small island where they were captured by the Japanese Air Force.
“We had to stand on the rudders to keep the damaged wing from going down or else we would have spun in and that would have been it,” he recalls.
He remembers being treated well by the Japanese Air Force and Army, but he and his crew were eventually moved to Ambon, capitol of the Spice Islands and a stronghold of the Japanese Navy, and that’s where, in his words, “the pressure and the punishment began.”
Russell was kept in isolation, seldom allowed to see his crew or anyone else except the interrogators who harangued him for information about the strength, numbers and location of American forces in the area, and about his downed plane, one of the few B-24’s captured intact by the Japanese during the conflict in the South Pacific.
“They kept asking me about that airplane,” Russell says, “I gave them name, rank and serial number, which is what my superiors had told us was all we had to give them according to the Geneva Convention. I was holding the Japanese Navy up to the Geneva Convention which they hadn’t even signed,” he says, laughing. “They were furious.”
He and his crew were eventually moved to Japan proper where they were taken to the Ofuna torture camp in Tokyo and later moved to a camp in the mountains of western Japan.
Russell was starved and beaten in the various camps over the two years of his capture. The starvation led to his contracting Beri Beri, which in turn led to the crippling peripheral neuropathy he still suffers from today.
After two long years of this treatment, the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 effectively ended the war for the Japanese. Russell recalls his captors then began feeding him relatively well and giving him injections of vitamin B-1, probably in hope of reversing the effects of the Beri Beri.
After his release, Russell returned to New York and married Mildred Chvatel and began working as a commercial and industrial artist. The couple moved around, living for a time in Nashville and Florida, and then finally settling down on a farm near Viola in the early ’70s where Russell still lives today. His beloved wife passed away in 1999 and he is cared for now by his combination cook, nurse, and farm manager, Juanita Alegria.
The peripheral neuropathy caused by the Beri Beri and malnutrition he suffered while a POW have left his hands and feet wasted, but he still manages to get around with the help of a cane, though he can no longer paint or draw.
“The horses are my art now,” he says as he looks at the beautiful animals grazing in the pastures near his house.