A half-century later, LeRoy Schneider's POW experience haunts him

Editor's note: This story was originally published on April 1, 1999. Mr. Schneider died in 2007 and is buried in the Veterans Section of Evergreen Cemetery in Barrington, which is the subject of a Barrington@150 vignette that is running Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015.

LeRoy Schneider hasn't seen "Saving Private Ryan."

Or "The Thin Red Line."

He can't bring himself to watch.

"I can't handle the violence - it brings back too many bad memories," the 78-year-old World War II veteran explains, a grimace of far-off pain playing briefly across his still-chiseled face.

The former U.S. Marine's involvement in the war is an epic in its own right.

Schneider, of Barrington, was part of the fighting force that defended Wake Island in the Pacific in the early days of the war.

For 16 days in December of 1941, the outgunned Marines put up a fight before the outpost was overtaken.

For the next four years, Schneider and others were Japanese prisoners of war.

The tall American was hogtied naked on the beach with other servicemen, sure they all were about to be executed. Then he was transported to China and Japan on ships where sailors beat him. Finally, he was forced to perform labor that, by the end of the war, nearly killed him.

The ghosts and nightmares from the experience still haunt him more than 50 years later.

"They were the most brutal, sadistic, atrocious, barbaric people I ever met," Schneider says of the Japanese soldiers. Then, without a wink of hesitation, he adds, "Thank God for the (atomic) bomb."

Heroes for their valor then, the Wake Island defenders' story continues to be chronicled today.

One of the latest to do so, University of Central Arkansas history professor Gregory J.W. Urwin, put Schneider on the cover of his book: "The Siege of Wake Island - Facing Fearful Odds" (University of Nebraska Press, $59.95).

The account is not so much about Schneider as the grunts like him: 449 Marines, several hundred civilian construction workers and a handful of sailors and soldiers who repelled wave after wave of Imperial assault before being ordered to surrender in the face of superior odds.

'Remember Wake!'

For a nation newly at war, "Remember Wake!" became a patriotic rallying cry.

"These books are about Wake," Schneider said, pointing to two others on his coffee table. "But he (Urwin) talks about the people who were there. He takes care of the little guy."

It may be why a young Schneider, arm in arm with two fellow Marines on the island of Oahu, is pictured on the jacket cover.

Urwin tells the story of the small island's gutsy defense through the defenders' eyes, and in rather lengthy fashion: 570 pages.

Schneider is not so verbose. The pain of battle and 44 1/2 months at the hands of his Japanese captors make memories harder to retrieve.

Some he simply blocked out. He and his wife Cece were married 15 years before she learned any of the details of her husband's ordeal.

To this day, he can't watch a war movie.

Cece Schneider wrote a 1992 piece for the Marines' Leatherneck magazine describing the nightmares from which her husband still awakens, struggling against unseen enemies.

Following the war, stress became the enemy. Post-traumatic stress disorder would be a term coined later, but Cece Schneider found herself dealing with it years before the syndrome had that name.

She would run interference for her husband, trying to keep the pressures of the outside world to a minimum. Even their five kids learned to "protect Daddy."

Despite his reticence, the retired Ready-Mix Concrete Co. manager wants the world to know the brutality experienced at the hands of the enemy - even if it was more than a half century ago.

Under attack

Schneider's descent into hell came winging over Wake on Dec. 8, 1941.

The private first class was just 20 when 27 Japanese "Nell" bombers, camouflaged green and tan, swept out of a tall cloud bank and bore down on the tiny sun-scorched atoll below.

Word had already come of the attack on Pearl Harbor several hours before.

On remote Wake Island, though, there was not widespread concern of a similar fate.

The United States still was in the process of fortifying the 3-square-mile atoll 2,000 miles west of Hawaii.

Even when the bombs began to fall, there was disbelief an attack was underway.

"We were used to seeing B-17 (bombers) come in to land, refuel and take off for the Philippines," recalls Schneider. "So this Sunday morning we saw planes come over the horizon, and we figured they were B-17s. Some even said, 'Look, their wheels are falling off.' "

According to Urwin, the Japanese air group, in two swift passes, destroyed more than half the island's dozen Wildcat fighter planes, and killed or wounded 32.

Throughout the battle, Schneider sweated, fought and even slept at his anti-aircraft gun.

The Japanese threw wave after wave of ships, planes and men at Wake. Strategically dug in, the Americans pounded back with 5- and 3-inch guns.

Schneider remembers a portly gunnery sergeant who opted to remain outside his sandbagged but crowded anti-aircraft gun emplacement.

An exploding shell killed the man. Buried on the beach, he was blown out of his grave the next day and had to be reburied.

By the time Navy Cmdr. Winfield Cunningham ordered a surrender - a decision that would haunt him the rest of his life - the Japanese had paid an embarrassingly high price for the coral outpost. Urwin estimates the enemy loss of life at between 900 and 1,000 men.

Twenty-one Japanese aircraft were downed, and 11 ships were sunk. By comparison, 124 Americans died in the siege.

Urwin calls it the battle that first raised American spirits in the dark weeks following Pearl Harbor.

The price for surviving, though, was about to be exacted.

Beatings at sea

Schneider recalls the Japanese were known to never take prisoners. As 1,600 Americans sat in rows on the Wake runway, Japanese preparations seem to confirm the belief. Machine guns had been set up facing the men.

"There were Japanese walking up and down with beheading swords," Schneider said. "We knew we were going to die. We just sat there. I remember it was a cold, rainy morning."

Urwin theorizes the sheer number of prisoners saved the Wake defenders from execution. It would be one thing to dispose of a handful of survivors. Killing 1,600 defenseless men would be quite another. The order had been given to take prisoners.

Schneider recalls being shuttled to the transport Nitta Maru, and having to climb a cargo net on heavy seas.

"We tried to find out from the Japanese where we were going, and they would tell us, 'Frisco,' " Schneider said. "That eased the pain until we got on the deck of the ship. Then it changed."

The prisoners had to run a gauntlet of Japanese sailors.

"All along that walk, they beat us," Schneider said.

Beatings occurred daily over the next two weeks on the way to Yokohama, he said.

"One guy had a hole this big in his back," Schneider said, making a grapefruit-sized circle with his fingers, "and they beat on him."

During that time, two Marines and three sailors were picked at random, taken above, and beheaded, their bodies pushed into the sea.

Schneider and the other POWs in the cargo hold wouldn't find out until much later.

"I don't know what would have happened if we had known at the time," he said.

'We were all dying'

For the next 19 months, Schneider labored at prison camps near Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China.

Meals consisted of a bowl of rice or gruel and maybe a piece of turnip.

The group of prisoners with Schneider was housed in a stable. He remembers how dirty the men became.

"On a sunny day," he said, "you would take off all your clothes and pop all the lice in the seams. It's amazing what the human body can take."

Urwin writes of the relatively humane treatment of POWs - by Japanese standards - at the Shanghai War Prisoners Camp.

Although the camp commander sometimes ordered group punishment, he allowed the prisoners to receive two-thirds of the food and aid delivered by the Red Cross.

For Schneider, that too would change.

In August of 1943, he and about 100 other Wake prisoners were shipped to Osaka, where the men were forced to load equipment aboard ships.

"If you didn't do it, you died. If you got sick, they put you on half rations," he said.

Osaka later came under bombing attack by the Americans, and the POWs would be taken from town to town to help clean up the destruction.

"I remember one time we were helping clean up and a horse had been killed and burned," Schneider said. "We were grabbing meat off the horse to stuff into our pockets to take back to camp."

His last stop would be Naoetsu in April of 1945. Working under filthy conditions at a carbide plant, Schneider had to mix solutions that would bring on nausea and make him wretch.

"That was the worst," he said. "We worked 19 hours a day, had very little rest and very little food. We were all sick, and we were all dying."

Gangrene had set in on one of his legs.

The POWs knew the Allies were bombing Japan, but Schneider said he had little sense of the war's course.

Those last six months were "sort of a big blank."

"I was quite numb by then," he said.

Liberation came on Sept. 5, 1945. Schneider had to be carried out on a stretcher.

He would later learn the Japanese had a "master plan" to kill all the POWs on Sept. 6.

Asked how he survived the ordeal, Schneider says "faith and hope."

"We came from good, strong families," he said.

On weekends in the prison camp, Maj. James P.S. Devereux would say the rosary.

To this day, Schneider carries a rosary with him, along with the memories of four dark years that started on a small coral atoll, and ended in Naoetsu, Japan.

"It's tough just talking about this," Schneider said. "It's good, though. The more I talk about it, the easier it gets. You never forget it, though."