WWII VETERAN RECEIVES BELATED MEDALS

CHAFFEE - Only when he finally was liberated from a prisoner-of-war camp in western Japan in August 1945, did Ralph Lape find out how close he and other American POWs came to becoming victims of the atomic bomb.

Lape, 70, of Chaffee returned recently from Salt Lake City after attending a reunion of his Army Air Force unit, the 5th Air Base Group, stationed at Fort Douglas, Utah.

During the reunion, Lape and two other Army Air Force veterans who were held captive with him in Japanese POW camps were awarded the Air Force Bronze Star and POW medal. Other members of Lape's unit had received their medals at earlier ceremonies.

Lape spent 3 years in prison camps near Tokyo and at Niigata, 500 miles northwest of Tokyo, on the west coast of the main island. It was at Niigata that Lape and the other American POWs had their close call with death during the closing weeks of the war.

"We knew something terrible had occurred on the other side of the island, but the Japanese never told us our air force had dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima," he said.

It wasn't until American forces liberated the POW camp that Lape and the others learned how close they had come to death.

An American officer visiting Lape's POW camp shortly after the Japanese surrender told the former POWs that Niigata was scheduled to be bombed next if Japan had not surrendered in mid-August.

"He told us we were all a very fortunate bunch of men. He said if Japan had not given up, Niigata was the next city to be bombed with an atomic bomb," Lape said. "After I got home, I did some checking, and I found out he was right. The orders to bomb Niigata had already been cut."

Lape's brush with death at Niigata was one of many that he and the other POWs endured after they were captured on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.

While in the POW camp near Tokyo, Lape watched as Gen. Curtis LeMay's B-29 bombers destroyed a large steel mill, where Lape and other POWS, along with elderly Japanese civilians, were forced to work.

Lape fibbed about his age to enlist in the Army Air Force in 1939. After completing basic training and advanced training as an aircraft mechanic, Lape was assigned to the 5th Air Base Group and sent to Fort Douglas.

In September 1941, the 5th ABG was ordered to Mindanao to help build Del Monte Air Base, named after the fruit company that offered the land for the air base. While he was on Mindanao, Lape was an aircraft mechanic and aircraft gunner, and was able to fly several combat missions in B-10 and B-17 bombers before he and his comrades were taken prisoner.

For Lape and the rest of the airmen in the 5th ABG, World War Two began on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, and Japanese forces invaded the Philippines. It ended five months later, on May 10, 1942, when the American and Philippino forces on Mindanao surrendered to Japanese invasion forces.

Many of the 5th ABG were taken to Manila and placed on board Japanese prison ships bound for Japan. Nearly 50 years later, Lape and the other American airmen POWs look back at their experience with mixed emotions pride in their service for their country and anger for what the enemy did to them as prisoners.

But Lape says he has come to forgive his former captors and the Japanese nation.

"While I was over there, I possibly could have shot every one of them," he said. "We left a trail of American bodies between the Philippines and Japan.

"I saw men shot to death by firing squad and beaten to death by fanatical Japanese soldiers. But I turned myself over to God and became a Christian man. I have had to forgive those people not the civilian people of Japan but the fanatical military officers and soldiers who committed the acts of atrocity."

Lape said that although the passage of time has brought forgiveness for those who committed the acts of cruelty against American POWs, it can never erase the memory of the hardships and humiliation he endured during his captivity.

Of the original 242 men in the 5th ABG, at least 105 did not return. Many were either killed in action or by Allied forces attacking unmarked Japanese ships transporting the prisoners to Japan. Others died in the squalid prison camps.

After he was liberated, Lape returned to Chaffee, where he retired after 36 years as a brakeman and conductor with the Frisco and Burlington Northern Railroad. Today he operates a TV repair shop at his home.