And we return to Our American Stories. Up next, a story from Ronna Simmons. Ronna is an historian and the author of The Other Veterans of World War II, Stories from Behind the Frontlines.
It's a book that dives into the lives of men and women who weren't necessarily firing guns and storming enemy positions, but certainly helped bring us to victory in the war. Up next, a story about one of those individuals. Here's Ronna with the story of Frank Kohn.
Take it away, Ronna. He was born in Maryland to a very well-to-do family. His father was a physician. He had graduated from John Hopkins University and had a medical degree.
And Frank Kohn had a preliction to education as well. He became a leader in his class. He became an Eagle Scout. He was class treasurer. He graduated from high school, and then he went to Johns Hopkins University, just like his father. Graduated then there with a Bachelor of Science degree, and also was recognized as being a member with Omicron Delta Kappa Fraternity, which is a national leadership honor society.
Now, that might be enough for you or me or many other people, but not for Frank. And he decided that he would go on with his education. He would continue them. And he earned a Bachelor of Arts at Johns Hopkins in 1933, and then a medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1938. And that's where he met his wife. They married, but he got married twice. Once at the university in Annapolis by a Baptist minister. And then because, of course, families want to have the weddings at their home, they married again at her home in Joplin, Missouri by a Methodist minister. So maybe he was playing the odds.
He could not only have several degrees, he might have two different religious avenues that he could pursue if he chose. So quite unusual thing to do, but I guess when you think back at the times that the family wanted to be there and it wasn't always as easy as we think to travel from place to place to attend a wedding. So they made sure they had all their bases covered. The Frank and Marion started their life. They moved to Houston where he was beginning his medical practice. Had a great future ahead of him as he imagined. Was not very long after he started, after he began his practice, that he got a letter in the mail by the U.S. government calling him and requesting, quote unquote, as he left in his notes, requesting he serve in the Army Medical Corps. Now, others I've talked to said they got the same rather benign letter in the mail that requested them to report to their draft office or requested their presence at the recruiting center. So these letters were very politely termed and he, even though it requested, he certainly knew that it wasn't an invitation that he could turn down. So he did. He reported to the Army's office and as he said, he, quote unquote, volunteered as he reported for duty, whether or not he didn't. And we can imagine in his case, he hadn't volunteered and he didn't necessarily want to serve because he was just looking forward to his medical practice.
But by no means did he say, I'm not going or I don't want to go. It just blindsided him that just as his life was starting, because this was 1939 and the war really was quite far away at that point in time. But he knew that he was going to have to take part and he knew that his athletic ability, having played football and basketball and polo in college, that the Army had taken note of that from his draft registration and placed him with the 12th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. He would be, as it would turn out, one of the last men to serve with horse mounted troops.
And I think that's so incredible and hard for us to realize. There were 550 positions, different job positions in the Army. And I looked at some of the names of those positions, of course there were truck drivers and infantrymen, but there were also horse and saddle makers.
And that struck me when I read that list. I thought, what, this is World War II, there were tanks, there were aircraft, there were battleships, there were carriers. What are we doing with horse mounted troops? And in fact, yes, we still had horse mounted troops. The draft boards, the recruitment centers had quotas to fill and they might have to find five men, two men, one man who could ride a horse so that they could fill out a platoon or a regiment with the cavalry. And horse mounted battle surgeon, horse mounted medical officer in this 12th Cavalry Regiment.
And Frank would be going off to spend his time in the Philippines. But he did have a very, very different transit than most of our troops that went off to war. We have seen thousands of pictures of men who crowded the decks of the carriers or battleships, troop carriers going to Europe. And these men were four and five and six to a berth. They might have been aboard the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary. And at first that sounded unbelievable to them until they got in and saw that all the finer parts of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth had been gutted to allow for maximum capacity of young men. But Frank was assigned to the SS Washington, which was a former Austrian luxury liner.
And it had not been stripped. In their case, again, this is earlier on in the war, so they had some luxuries that other soldiers that would follow did not. But they sailed aboard this luxury liner, fully furnished, complete with stewards for their cabins. And one of his fellow Medical Corps officers said in his letters home that were preserved and sent to Frank's children, it was some trip.
And it didn't stop there. When Frank arrived in the Philippines, he was stationed at Fort Stotsenburg. And it was a very different camp or barracks than, again, the soldiers might experience who went in other directions. They had white coat dinners. Frank wrote home about wearing his white coat and gold epaulettes to dinner, champagne being served. And you can imagine the chandeliers or the lights glistening and them socializing with the other officers as they live. And he writes home about his fellow officer that he shared quarters with and how they went and commissioned furniture to be built for them. They found artifacts or objects that were native to the Philippines that they decorated the walls of their residences with.
Very, very difficult to believe. But we would learn, of course, that things changed very rapidly. We were in the Philippines in part knowing that it would be a strategic path between the Far East, Japan and its aggression, even though it hadn't come to Pearl Harbor at this point, but to stop the Japanese to control the avenues of the ocean. And so we had an outpost in the Philippines, but not necessarily known to the troops at the time. There was a realization that while we hoped that we would be able to retain the Philippines in the course of the war, if push came to shove during the full-blown conflict, we would not sacrifice the European war for the Pacific war. We thought that all of our men or most of our men would be fighting in Europe. We would need to deploy there first and only secondarily to the Pacific. So if they had to, and if the Philippines were threatened by the Japanese forces, the United States had a plan that we would not defend the Philippines. We would actually leave.
We would by no means fight to the death. And you've been listening to Ronna Simmons tell the story of Frank Kohn and millions of Americans served in places other than the battlefield, from Rosie the Riveters to our medics and doctors and everything in between. And my goodness, Kohn had graduated with a BS, BA and MD degree from Johns Hopkins, was about to start his life as a doctor in Houston, a growing city at the time.
And everything was put on halt because of a request from the United States government in 1939. When we come back, more of Frank Kohn's story here on Our American Story. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of Frank Kohn is told by Ronna Simmons. When we last left off, Frank, a highly educated doctor, had been sent to the Philippines to serve as a horse mounted battle surgeon.
Frank's early experience in the Philippines was peaceful with white coat dinners, champagne and great food. But things were about to change and change fast as the Japanese invaded the islands. The U.S. had a plan to combat this, to leave.
Let's continue with a story. I don't believe that Frank or any of the men at that time, even the officers, were privy. This was a fairly tightly controlled plan until it became obvious what they had to do. Even when Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines, that might have given them a clue that if they thought it was unsafe for Douglas MacArthur to be there, perhaps they were going to see the battle firsthand, which of course is what they did.
And when the Japanese did invade the Philippines and began to fight and very quickly moved down the country, they knew they were having to pull further and further back and came under attack. But in his letters home, amazingly, he reassured his wife, perhaps not to worry her, that all was well, even Christmas dinner, they had cigars and a nice meal. And he said he was looking forward to coming home to Christmas dinners, back with the family soon. There was nothing to worry about. In fact, in one early part of a letter, he says everything has been fine and this has been a lovely war.
And that is an incredible statement. I think it was maybe a lovely war when you're having champagne dinners, but that quickly turned and things that followed were obviously not quite so lovely. They would continue to retreat further and further down the peninsula until they had to abandon the mainland and hold a last stand with the American Horse Cavalry. We talked earlier about Frank being a horse mounted medical officer and being assigned to the 26th, which was this combination of Philippine Scouts and American Horse Cavalry. And that not only his assignment to the horse mounted cavalry was the last time that we sent troops into battle on horseback, this unit actually had the last known or last recognized horse mounted battle at Lingayen Gulf. And he was, we believe, part of it because he was assigned to the 26th.
And whether or not he was actually in the battle that ensued, he was out there among the men, most likely tending to them and their wounds. But the 26th was able to delay the Japanese advance. And that was that was what their mission was at this point in the war, trying to keep them from reaching Manila as quickly as they might and allowing more of our troops to abandon our positions on the mainland and flee to the islands and then be escorted off the Philippines. And they were successful, but the Japanese soon took control of peninsula but not before the 26th, which has been written to say that they wrote the glorious final chapter to the proud history of both the Philippine Scouts and the American Horse Cavalry.
It was the last traditional horse cavalry regiment to go into battle in the US. So at this point in the war with really being in combat, Frank, who had been trained at numerous things found himself actually doing far more than he probably ever realized he would. He not only got off his horse and acted as a forward observer, he drove a tractor, he was a telephone line man trying to string communications back to their headquarters. He acted as a messenger, a mechanic and airplane lookout. He had been strafed by Japanese planes shelled by the enemy. When he was going out to check on his men in the field, a bomb exploded nearby and threw him against a tree.
snipers were shooting at them. So he saw it all. He was in combat. He was not a combat trained soldier. He was a medical officer.
And so I'm quite sure he just looked for something that needed to be done and he did it and allow the direct shooting and sniping to the others in his outfit. He had long since taken off his white shirt, taken off his white coat with gold epaulets. In fact, he described himself later as being filthy, smelly, sleepy, wearing a steel hat, coveralls, GI shoes, a gas mask on his back and a pistol on his hip. So he was clearly out in the bush, out in the jungles, walking across, following troops, helping out where he could without a good meal.
All those champagne meals were now a thing of the past. And as he's following the troops, he finds himself at a church. He comes upon in the jungle and he knocks on the door and the priest invites him in, offered him a Coca Cola, unheard of luxury, I'm sure at that point, and a glass of 100 year old brandy. So Frank, I'm sure had no inhibitions about saying, oh no, no, no. He availed himself of the brandy, took a bath, was able to use soap again, another luxury and a bathrobe and later sat down to eat with the priest.
He describes again, he's always talking in letters home about his meals and he even described this when he says soup, boiled eggs in Spanish sauce, sliced ham, smoked sausage, fried meat of some sort, papayas, bananas, Spanish wine, and then coffee and more brandy. So it was an incredible evening in the midst of battle for him to stumble on this. And he was offered a bed, which I'm sure he hadn't seen in some time. No doubt he collapsed, went to sleep, I'm sure without fail in minutes, only to awake as he further describes in his letter, burning all over as though his robe was on fire. And he realized that there was a colony of stinging ants all across his body.
So that lovely event was interrupted by not the enemy, but a swarm of stinging ants. Once the Japanese had pushed through and we realized that everything was in fact going to be lost, we retreated further and further down the peninsula and the Japanese pursued. And eventually the commanders knew that we would have to surrender.
It would be better and the men might survive. So they did surrender. And what ensued known now today as the Bataan Death March. And he was one of the troops among the many that were forced on the Death March, which is essentially the Japanese captured our prisoners and needed to move them from where we were at the bottom of the peninsula further north into what they were going to use as a prisoner of war camp. So they lined them up and it was a 65 mile distance from the Bataan Peninsula to Camp O'Donnell, which was a former Philippine army installation.
That was where they were going to move them to at least to start. And so they began this devastating march without food, without water, many of them fresh from the last battle, wounded, starving. They were forced to march and if they fell behind, if they fell down, the Japanese would use their bayonets on them, perhaps beat them. Either they had to get up and struggle forward, which of course after a number of beatings would have been fruitless, but they tried. Men tried to carry other men and they were beat, just deplorable conditions. But they persevered and they made it eventually to Camp O'Donnell. So they were moved to Camp O'Donnell and then to a larger camp that people probably know better as Camp Cabanatuan. They existed there still in deplorable conditions, emaciated their uniforms, became tattered.
They had to scrounge for food, eat anything that even looked mildly edible and became much weakened after the days and weeks and months. Frank himself became sick, even though as a surgeon he was trying to help others maintain their health, encourage them to eat what they could, treated those as best he could of course with little or no medical supplies except what might be smuggled into them. And he was reported by his fellow soldiers as always looking after the others, as I said, helping, helping, helping. And you've been listening to Ronna Simmons tell the story of Frank Kohn and my goodness to go from champagne dinners to the Bataan Death March in only months.
A stunning turnaround for his life and the people he was in the Philippines with. When we come back, more of Frank Kohn's story here on Our American Story. And we return to Our American Stories and the final segment of our story on Frank Kohn is told by author and historian Ronna Simmons. When we last left off, the Japanese had invaded the Philippines and despite fierce resistance, America was forced to surrender 76,000 men, 10,000 Americans and 66,000 Filipino soldiers. These men were then forced to walk some 66 miles on what became known as the Bataan Death March. Frank Kohn was one of these men.
Let's continue with the story. On the march to Camp Cabanatuan, there were some aid stations. The Philippine people were very sympathetic to the American soldiers and to the Philippine scouts who were also captured with them. And on this forced march, they tried to help, but they were often beat back by the Japanese and prevented from helping, but they were able to smuggle a piece of fruit or some water from time to time to some of the soldiers.
And the Japanese did allow us to have aid stations, mostly, I'm sure, to help move more and more prisoners to their ultimate destination. If one of our men might be medically trained, they might patch a leg or sew up a wound or do whatever they could to bandage up these people on the march, perhaps thinking that the more survived, the more that would be able to work in this labor camp and serve the Japanese down the road. Frank was one of those, and he stayed behind, which obviously led to a longer march for himself, but he stayed in these aid stations and was tending to the wounded. At this point in time, he was not sick, but he was spotted by a number of the men who reported, again, back to Frank's family after the war that he was helping, helping, helping.
He did everything to help his fellow soldier or Philippines soldier that was part of their group. And that was something that, even after they got to the camp, was what men did. They really helped each other survive, and they might question what they were surviving for, not knowing if they would stay there or be transferred to something worse, if they could have even imagined something worse. But they each helped each other out. They encouraged each other to eat. They shared what little tidbits of food they might receive or might have been able to smuggle in and trade for something they might pass off to a local villager.
And so that was key to their survival, key to maintaining their sense of humanity and hope that they would one day be freed. Frank became very ill, wasn't quite sure what was wrong with him, but he was no longer able to carry on and was taken to a camp hospital, which was not a hospital in the truest sense. He continued to decline and was then transferred to the provincial hospital of Cabanatuan.
One of our soldiers, another medical officer, Col. Jack Schwartz, actually performed surgery in this hospital and found that he had an inoperable form of intestinal cancer. And they shuffled Frank off to a corner of the hospital where they basically expected him to die. But he hung on and finally, five days later, the Japanese returned him to the camp. I guess knowing he was going to die, he might as well free up a bed in the hospital. On the bumpy road, in a cart or worse, back to the camp, his surgical wound opened up and would just refuse to heal under the circumstances. And a month later, a fellow medical officer saw him for the last time and Frank knew he was dying. And he actually said in letters that his friends sent home that Frank said, this is it, and that he wouldn't see him again.
And in fact, that's what happened. He did succumb. Before he did, he gave all his personal effects and you can imagine, or you might not be able to imagine, how these men were able to hold onto anything of a personal nature in this camp. But he gave him his watch, a fountain pen, a pencil, and what he referred to as a few treasures. And one of those treasures was a pearl that he had managed to acquire in the earlier stages of the war when he was still back at Fort Stotsenburg. He had intended to have it set into a piece of jewelry for his wife and bring it home, but he gave it to his fellow soldier who kept it in a small leather bag around his own neck for the rest of the time he was in the camp, which is also very hard to believe that something like that would not have been detected, but he was able to protect it. And along with Frank's other effects, managed to return them to Frank's family after the war. As Frank succumbed to his conditions, his cancer, and his friends visited him for the last time, well read, well educated, he asked for his funeral or for his funeral service, such as it would be, that the 23rd Psalm be read over his body.
And his friends shaved him, bathed him, and wrapped his body in a sheet and then buried him in a common grave in the prison. When the Philippines fell, of course the U.S. government knew and there was a normal chaos of war, if you will. It would take some time to know who had survived, who had been evacuated, who was deployed to what station, were they wounded, were they still fighting, where they might be, what their situation was. Frank died in September and it wasn't until November that his family actually received official notice. Now at one point in time she was informed that he had been captured and that he had died and then she was informed that he had been captured but he was alive, which was a common thing, as you might expect, again a war where we had far more primitive communications. But later on they would learn about the prisoner war camps and that he had survived the push by the Japanese. But it wasn't until November of 45 that Frank's family received a note from General Douglas MacArthur.
Of course it was a standard type letter. But by the time that came, four days after the letter from Douglas MacArthur arrived, they got another letter from one of Frank's cohorts in the camp, Lemoyne Bleich. Lemoyne was one of the two people that helped bury Frank and he provided them details of Frank's death. He commented and told them stories about Frank through the letters and how he had insisted upon working to take care of everyone else to his own detriment, even those Frank thought were less fortunate than himself. So he was the one who also passed on the story about looking after each other and he said, you got to know each other very well. If you got sick, your buddy usually kicked you in the butt to get you on your feet to keep you going. If he got sick, you reversed it.
That's the reason you survived because one took care of the other. And so they were able to talk to these other survivors, the people who knew Frank, as well as many others who didn't. I think Frank has so much to tell us, mostly his courage. Here's a young man who had the world at his fingertips starting out. He could see a future where he had a medical practice in the United States.
He was going to have a comfortable life. But then to go from that level down to the worst experiences of the war, as a prisoner of war, as a prisoner of the Japanese, his courage to try to survive himself and in his self-sacrifice of doing what he could for others. And how in this microcosm of the war, we hear about the band of brothers and many of us can't understand how men coalesced, how they came together and helped each other survive. Frank was eventually buried in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, one of 29 such American battle monuments or memorials around the world. And in some respects, Frank was home, I say, because the grass covering the cemetery was propagated from two square yards of sod from Beltsville, Maryland, Frank's home state. A terrific job on the production by Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to Ronna Simmons.
Her book, The Other Veterans of World War II, Stories from Behind the Frontlines is available wherever you get your books. That's what men did, Ronna told us, helped each other survive even if they didn't know what they were surviving for. Frank fell ill and had an inoperable form of cancer. He knew he was dying, Ronna told us. And knowing that, he wanted to take care of everyone else, he said, even to his own detriment. He had the world at his fingertips, Ronna said, to go from there to the very worst as a POW of the Japanese. Well, that is Frank Cone's story. Again, he wasn't in action, but boy, did he see it. The story of Frank Cone and so many others who served our country behind the front lines here on Our American Stories. ******
