MEMORIALIZING AMERICA'S WWII DEFENDERS

An overwhelming belief that the United States would win the war was the common denominator author Harry Spiller found among the ex-WWII POWS he interviewed for his book "From Wake Island to Berlin."

"There wasn't a single one that had any doubt that we were going to win the war," he said. "For them it was just a matter of time."

But as the interviews in "From Wake Island to Berlin" bear out, life in a prison camp -- especially a Japanese camp -- was no episode of "Hogan's Heroes."

Three-fourths of all American POWs were taken by the Nazis, but Japanese camps accounted for half those who died. The difference, Spiller says, was that the Germans -- with the exception of SS troops -- respected the Geneva Convention and the Japanese didn't.

"The Japanese didn't believe in surrender. They considered them (POWs) nonhuman."

Spiller has not bowed to political correctness in allowing these men to have their say about their war experiences. The enemy they fought and often were brutalized by remain "Japs" to many of them.

A number of the men Spiller interviewed live in the region, including Charles Branum of Cape Girardeau (see related stories), Ralph Lape of Chaffee and Harold Boardman of Sikeston.

Spiller signed copies of his books Saturday at Hastings Books, Music & Video. A former Williamson County sheriff who now teaches criminal justice at John A. Logan College, he has written three other war-related books with two more to be published this year.

Late in 1998, Southeast Missouri State University will publish "Vietnam Angel of Death," a first-person account of the Marion, Ill., resident's years as a Marine recruiter in Southeast Missouri.

Spiller's first book, 1992's "Death Angel -- Vietnam Memoir" was an expiation for the role he played recruiting young men to fight in a war he says nobody intended to win.

Spiller himself fought in Vietnam. "I was pretty gung-ho," he said. He returned to recruit more men to fight but says he finally sickened of showing up on the same recruit's doorstep a few months later to deliver a death notice.

"By 1970 it was obvious there wasn't anybody trying to win any wars," Spiller said. "I realized we'd been used."

The difference between the soldiers who came back from Vietnam and those he interviewed for the POW book was clear.

"A lot of these people did the same thing they did but were rejected," Spiller said.