Sgt. Larkin Jay Burt (1915-1997)
Sergeant Larkin Jay Burt was born on the family farm in
Improve, Mississippi on 15 October 1911. He was a particularly
wayward boy, once hopping a freight train and riding all the way
to New Orleans. He then helped unload a shipload of bananas in
order to make enough money to make it back home. He once hopped
a freight train and traveled to Texas and back. At age
twenty-two, he saw a Marine Corps recruiting poster that
advertised that joining the Marines would be a good way to see
the Orient, and in particular China. On 6 December, 1934 he
enlisted in the Marine Corps in New Orleans, Louisiana after
leaving junior college.
After basic training at Paris Island he was deployed to
various places, but spent the most time in China. He was the
last Marine to leave Shanghai, purposely lagging behind at the
foot of the gangplank to claim this honor.
He was captured at Fort Mills on Corregidor on 6 May 1942,
beginning an imprisonment that would last for the next forty
months. He says that he was asleep when the bombing began on
Corregidor, and that the bombing was “incredibly heavy.”
Artillery barrages would last for twenty-four hours straight. He
remembered that when the shelling would cease for a time, men
would climb out and talk to one another, but no one could hear
anything. Many of the Marines had tunnels dug into the hillsides
to afford some protection, but many, like Burt were “in the
open.” He said that if the Japanese hadn’t captured them, they
soon would have starved to death anyway.
To the best of his recollection, from 6 May to 26 May 1942 he
stayed on Corregidor under guard. From 26 to 28 May 1942 he was
moved to Bilibid Prison, in Manila. From 29 May to sometime in
October of that year, he was imprisoned at Cabanatuan #3, and
then moved to Cabanatuan #1. From then he served the remainder
of his imprisonment in different places in Japan. One of the
last camps he was in was Camp Tokyo #5-B, in Niigata, Japan.
During has captivity, he contracted scurvy, beriberi and
dengue fever. He remembered; “we lost twenty men a day for a
long time, then we started getting Red Cross supplies and got
straightened out. We mostly ate rice, sweet potato vines and
seaweed. We were filthy; we had fleas and lice in our clothes
and everywhere else.”
On 16 April, 1944 he managed to get a prisoner card home,
which simply read: “Dear Mother, I am well. Had some snow
yesterday. Received seven letters. Tell everyone hello. Can not
answer all letters. Hope all of you are well. Love to all,
Larkin.”
One Japanese guard had a name they couldn’t pronounce so they
called him “the Goon.” Several prisoners had built a rapport
with him and would ask him for war news. One day he said “pretty
soon there are going to be a lot of Americans here, and I’m
going to the mountains.” The Japanese distributed paint to the
prisoners and instructed them to paint the letters “PW” on top
of the camp buildings. On 25 August, 1945, American planes came
out of the east and flew right over the camp. “They began to
circle and swooped down over the camp and dropped a pack of
cigarettes with a note that said they’d be back with food.”
Before his death in 1997, he remembered, “When I was a POW, I
would dream about being home, and everything in the dream was
good, but when I got home, I’d dream about being in Japan, and
everything was bad.”
He was released on 5 September, 1945 at Yokahoma, Japan. Upon
his release he was diagnosed with malaria, pleurisy and
pneumonia and nearly blind with retinitis. He had broken his
back and dislocated his wrist when he fell off of a railroad
trestle while working in coal yards in Japan. During his
imprisonment, Larkin Burt went from 220 pounds down to 132
pounds. He finally returned to the United States early in
October, 1945.
Larkin Jay Burt died on 8 April 1997, his body cremated and
the ashes buried at the foot of his mother’s grave
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