Father Emil Kapaun
April 20, 1916 - May 23, 1951
Patron of Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School - Wichita, KS
The Fr. Kapaun Guild will begin hosting monthly
Masses to pray for the beatification and canonization of Fr. Kapaun
at the Spiritual Life Center. All KMC students, parents and staff are
encouraged to attend these monthly Masses. The first Mass will be
Wednesday, November 2 at 7:00 pm.
Help the Quest to see that Fr. Kapaun is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor--click HERE.
For press releases and other information about the cause of Fr. Kapaun's
canonization, click HERE.
Chaplain Emil Kapaun, Servant of God
Prayer
Lord Jesus, in the midst of the folly of war, your servant, Chaplain Emil
Kapaun, spent himself in total service to you on the battlefields and in the
prison camps of Korea, until his death at the hands of his captors. We now
ask you, Lord Jesus, if it be your will, to make known to all the world the
holiness of Chaplain Kapaun and the glory of his complete sacrifice for you
by signs of miracles and peace. In your name, Lord, we ask, for you are the
source of peace, the strength of our service to others, and our final hope.
Amen.
Chaplain Kapaun, pray for us.
Fr. Kapaun an Example of Love in a Prison of Hate
Army chaplain Emil J. Kapaun, armed during the Korean War only with the love
of God, was described by those who served with him as the best and bravest
foot soldier they ever knew.
Fr. Kapaun, a Wichita diocesan priest from Pilsen, died in a prison at 35
and was buried somewhere along the Yalu River in North Korea. "If I don't
come back, tell my Bishop that I died a happy death," Fr. Kapaun told fellow
prisoners as he was carried away to die.
He was honored Saturday, June 2, 2001 at Kapaun Mount Carmel High School,
and Sunday, June 3, at Pilsen.
Fr. Kapaun was captured because he refused an order to try to escape through
the surrounding enemy after the 8th Cavalry was overwhelmed on Nov. 2, 1950.
Fr. Kapaun was seized by the enemy as he administered the last rites to a
dying soldier.
He was taken to a POW camp run by the Chinese.
"It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly,
starve," said fellow prisoner 1st Lt. Mike Dowe, who added that Fr. Kapaun
risked his life by sneaking into fields around the prison compound to look
for hidden potatoes and sacks of corn.
"The riskiest thefts were carried out by daylight under the noses of the
Chinese," Lt. Dowe said. "The POWs cooked their own food, which was drawn
from an open shed some two miles down the valley.
"When the men were called out to make the ration run, Father would slip in
at the end of the line. Before the ration detail reached the supply shed,
he'd slide off into the bushes. Creeping and crawling, he'd come up behind
the shed, and while the rest of us started a row with the guard and the
Chinese doling out the rations, he'd sneak in, snatch up a sack of cracked
corn and scurry off into the bushes with it."
Fr. Kapaun would always put the corn into the communal pot, an example that
other men, who would steal food for themselves, were shamed into following.
As the unsanitary conditions and unhealthy diet took their toll on the men,
the priest from Kansas was there to help.
"Even when they died, he did not abandon them," Lt. Dowe said. "The POWs
buried their own dead ... Men dodged this detail whenever they could. But
Father always volunteered. And at the grave, as the earth covered the naked
body -- the clothing of the dead was saved to warm the living -- he would
utter for them the last great plea: 'Eternal rest grant unto him, 0 Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon him.'"
Fr. Kapaun would often escape to the houses where the enlisted men were
held. He would hold a quick service, starting with a prayer for the men who
had died in Korea and for their families.
"Then he would say a prayer of thanks to God for the favors He had granted
us, whether we knew about them or not," Lt. Dowe said.,
"Then he'd speak, very briefly, a short, simple sermon, urging them to hold
on and not lose hope of freedom. And above all, he urged them not to fall
for the lying doctrines the Reds were trying to pound into our heads.
Somehow his presence could turn a stinking, louse-ridden mud hut -- for a
little while -- into a cathedral, Lt. Dowe said.
Fr. Kapaun did much more for the men. He gathered and washed the foul
undergarments of the dead and distributed them to men who could barely move
because of dysentery.
"He washed and tended these men as if they were little babies," Lt. Dowe
said. "He traded his watch for a blanket and cut it up to make warm socks
for helpless men whose feet were freezing. The most dreaded chore of all was
cleaning the latrines, and men argued bitterly over whose time it was to
carry out this loathsome task. And while they argued, he'd slip out quietly
and do the job."
Because of their diet, the POWs became sick and weak with many beginning to
show signs of starvation. One day, though, their diet was different.
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Father Emil J. Kapaun |
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Fr. Kapaun celebrates a battlefield Mass. (For Holy Cards with this
picture and the Chaplain Emil Kapaun, Servant of God prayer, please
contact crusaders@kapaun.org.) |
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A crucifix hand carved in Fr. Kapaun's POW camp by a fellow prisoner
is displayed at Kapaun Mount Carmel Catholic High School, along with
numerous other items of memorabilia. Anyone interested in
seeing these items are welcome to come to the school during normal
school hours. |
Books for further reading about Father Kapaun
The Story of Chaplain Kapaun, Patriot Priest of the Korean Conflict by
Father Arthur Tonne. Published 1954 by Didde Printing Company in Emporia,
Kansas. (Currently out of print, but sometimes available at used book
stores. Also available at the Chancery office.)
A Shepherd in Combat Boots, Chaplain Emil Kapaun of the 1st Calvary Division
by William L. Maher, 1997, by Burd Street Press of Shippensburg, Pa.
Books that contain excerpts about Chaplain Kapaun:
Believed to be Alive by Captain John W. Thornton, 1981, by Paul S. Eriksson,
Middlebury, Vt.; Memoir of a Cold War Soldier by Richard E. Mack, 2001, by
Kent State University Press.
Father Kapaun's prayers answered with a meal
Editor's note: This is the second half of the article about Father Emil J.
Kapaun, a native son of Pilsen, Kan., who died 50 years ago in a North
Korean prisoner of war camp. Fr. Kapaun was honored on Saturday, June 2, at
his namesake Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School, Wichita, KS. A statue
of the hero chaplain was unveiled during a ceremony Sunday, June 3, in
Pilsen. (Shown at top of page)
"The night before St. Patrick's Day, Father called us together and prayed to
Saint Patrick, asking him to help us in our misery," Lt. Dowe wrote. "The
next day, the Chinese brought us a case of liver-the first meat we had
had-and issued us golian instead of millet. The liver was spoiled and golian
is sorghum seed ... but to us they were like manna. Later he prayed for
tobacco, and that night a guard walked by and tossed a little bag of dry,
straw-like tobacco into our room."
As the prisoners continued to weaken, the communists intensified their
propaganda. The prisoners would sit for hours in lectures while Comrade Sun,
a fanatic who intensely hated Americans, assailed capitalism. After the
lecture the men would have to comment on "the great truths revealed by
Comrade Sun."
Some men were thrown into a freezing hole for their comments about the
lectures, Lt. Dowe said. Others veiled their ridicule: "According to the
great doctrines taught us by the noble Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Amos and
Andy..." the men would say.
"Father was not openly arrogant, nor did he use subterfuge," the lieutenant
said. "Without losing his temper 'or raising his voice, he'd answer the
lecturer point by point, with a calm logic that set Comrade Sun screaming
and leaping on the platform like an angry ape."
Fr. Kapaun was never punished, although he was threatened and warned.
In another incident, two officers who knew him well were tortured into
accusing Fr. Kapaun of slandering the Chinese and of displaying a hostile
attitude toward his captors, he said: "You never should have suffered a
moment, trying to protect me."
Lt. Dowe said after the torture, the men expected a trial in which Fr.
Kapaun would never return. "Instead, they (the Chinese) merely called him in
and bullied him and threatened him. We realized then what we had known all
along. They were afraid of him. They recognized in him a strength they could
not break, a spirit they could not quell."
On Easter Sunday, 1951, Fr. Kapaun challenged his captors again, openly
flouting their law against religious services.
"He could not celebrate the Easter Mass, for all his Mass equipment had been
lost at the time of his capture ... He told the story of Christ's suffering
and death, and then, holding in his hand a Rosary made of bent barbed wire
cut from the prison fence, he recited the glorious mysteries."
The next Sunday, Fr. Kapaun collapsed while holding another service.
Although he was weak, he battled dysentery, pneumonia and an infection in
one of his legs and eyes.
During the last day Fr. Kapaun spent with his fellow prisoners, Lt. Walter
Mayo Jr., said the chaplain was in great pain. "His face was contorted with
pain every few minutes and we were all pretty much scared."
With tears rolling down his face he began telling the men the story of the
Seven Macchabes in the Old Testament.
"There was an emperor who had an old woman brought up before him. He told
her to renounce her Faith or he would torture and kill her. She replied that
he could do anything he wanted, but she would not renounce it.
"The emperor then had her seven sons brought in and said he would kill them
if she did not do as he said. She still refused and he then put them to
death one by one. The old woman was crying and the emperor asked her if she
was crying because she was sad. She replied that her tears were tears of joy
because she knew her sons were in heaven."
"Father then looked at us and said he was crying for the same reason. He
said that he was glad he was suffering because Our Lord had suffered also
and that he felt closer to Him.
"By that time we were all crying," Lt. Mayo said. "Everyone in that room,
who had seen scores of people die in the past few months and who thought
they were pretty hard."
Soon after, the Chinese came to carry Fr. Kapaun to the hospital. "The
Chinese saw a good chance to get this man they feared, now that he was
helpless. They hated him because he had such an influence over all the
prisoners.
"Three or four days later," Lt. Mayo said. "Father died among the men he
served, up on a hill overlooking the Yalu River in that communist hospital
of death."
(Information for this article, written by Christopher M. Riggs, was taken
from Msgr. Arthur Tonne's 'The Story of Chaplain Kapaun' and the Jan. 16,
1954, edition of the Saturday Evening Post.)
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Father Kapaun, second from right, assists a soldier in the field. |
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Father Kapaun's namesake is located at 8506 East Central, Wichita,
KS 67206 |
(Posted on CWV Web site 18 August 2001)
Reprinted from Catholic Advance, Diocesan Newspaper of the Diocese of
Wichita
Two Tours in Hell
By: Maj Allan C. Bevilacqua, USMC (Ret)
At 1330 on 6 May 1942, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainright, USA,
commanding the last remaining American and Filipino forces in the
Philippines, surrendered the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay to
the overwhelming numbers of LtGen Masaharu Homma’s 14th Imperial
Japanese Army. Wainright’s men had given their commander everything they
had. Pounded relentlessly by massed Japanese artillery and totally unopposed
air forces, reduced to a ration of 30 ounces of food per day and less than
one canteen cup of water, they had fought heroically against all hope.
Finally, there was no hope left.
In his last radio message to his Commander in Chief, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Wainright said: “There is a limit to human endurance, and that
point has long been passed.” At the command post of the Fourth Marine
Regiment, the island’s primary infantry force, Colonel Samuel L. Howard, the
regimental commander, ordered that the national and regimental colors be
burned rather than surrendered. Then he and his pitifully under-strength
regiment joined the 11,000 prisoners of war marched into Japanese captivity.
In the sadly depleted ranks of Company D, 1st Battalion, 4th
Marines, Sergeant Felix J. McCool, with the wounds he had received several
weeks before still not completely healed, may have wondered what was coming
next. If he did, it is unlikely he could have imagined that this was but the
first of two tours in hell.
Hell wasn’t long in arriving. Exhausted, malnourished, dehydrated and
weakened by sickness and half-healed wounds, the defenders of Corregidor,
now prisoners of the Japanese, were slapped, cuffed, kicked and punched into
loose ranks by their captors. Japanese guards were quick to prod laggards
along with bayonet and rifle butt. Personal possessions, watches, rings,
photographs, letters and the like were stripped from their owners. Anyone
who resisted found himself on the receiving end of a world-class beating.
Held briefly on Corregidor, the mass of prisoners was ferried to Manila and
paraded through the streets while Japanese cameramen recorded what was
intended to be their humiliation. The tactic didn’t work. The citizens of
Manila who were supposed to jeer at the prisoners driven along at bayonet
point, instead cheered and applauded, some risking beatings or worse to
bring water to the exhausted men.
The following day, after an overnight stay in Manila’s Bilibid Prison, a bad
enough place in its own right, they began the nightmare journey to their
destination, Cabanatuan Prison Camp. Packed in boxcars, 100 men per car in
searing summer heat with no room to sit, they were given no water, and there
were no rest stops. Men suffering from Diarrhea and dysentery voided
themselves where they stood. Others, nauseated by the stench, added the
acrid odor of vomit to the reeking atmosphere.
“If a man passed out,” McCool would remember in later years, “he couldn’t
fall down. He was held upright by other men crammed in about him. Several
men in our car died and remained on their feet until we carried them out
when the train finally stopped.”
Cabanatuan was, if not hell itself, at least a suburb. Wooden shacks
provided shelter of a sort, but the only bed a prisoner got was a space on
the floor. Sanitation was nonexistent. An open trench provided the sole
approximation to a head. For every 1,500 men there was one water faucet that
was turned off every evening at 1900. Food consisted of rice with maggots in
the morning and rice with maggots and vegetable tops at night. Scurvy,
beriberi, pellagra, dysentery, dengue fever and malaria were rampant. There
was no medical care. Men died at the rate of 40 to 50 a day. Their bodies
were dumped into a pit and covered by a thin layer of dirt that all too soon
was crawling with maggots and flies.
A man could be beaten senseless for the slightest infraction of camp rules,
or just because a guard felt the urge to swing a club. That was how Felix
McCool suffered the loss of one of his front teeth. A guard decided he
wasn’t answering up smartly enough at morning bango (head count).
Escape was not an option. Felix McCool saw brute evidence of this when two
men who had escaped and been recaptured were beaten bloody and then
decapitated as the entire prisoner population was forced to look on. After
that the Japanese divided the prisoners into 10 man squads. If any member of
the squad escaped successfully, the remaining members of the squad would be
executed.
While Felix McCool may have been a prisoner, he did not by any means
consider himself defeated. He never thought of himself as anything other
than a Marine: a Marine who still had a role to play in the war. By every
means at his disposal he would do whatever he could to hurt the Japanese war
effort.
Put to work on the construction of a new Japanese airfield, he and several
fellow prisoners carefully concealed a large crater with bamboo poles and
palm fronds, and then covered the whole with dirt, making it
indistinguishable from the packed dirt of the runway. When the airfield
became operational, he had the satisfaction of watching a multiengine
Japanese transport airplane crash and burst into flames after hitting his
field expedient tiger trap. “They [the Japanese] hauled out eight bodies,”
he remembered.
When not busy as a saboteur, Felix McCool “moonlighted” as a smuggler,
bringing in medicine provided by Margaret Utinsky, a courageous American
woman. Using her experience as a nurse and forged documents identifying her
as a Lithuanian national, this brave woman risked her life setting up a
network of equally brave Philippine citizens to send medical supplies
secretly into Cabanatuan and the even worse Camp O’Donnell.
At Cabanatuan, Felix McCool served as an “inside man,” using his assignment
to the farm detail to receive small packages of medicines from Philippine
children and secretly delivering them to the prisoner medical staff. Knowing
he risked summary execution if he were discovered, he did it anyway. Felix
McCool was a man who did not give up. He was determined to resist,
determined to survive.
He saw what happened to men who lost that determination. “Guys who fold up
quietly, lose all hope of ever seeing home and the people they love, and die
very silently during the night. It wasn’t the illness or the malnutrition.
They would just stop fighting and lose the will to live. The next day you’re
stomping six inches of dirt down on them.” That was one of the memories
Felix McCool carried with him.
McCool never stopped fighting. Confinement under the most barbaric
conditions never broke his will. That was a good thing because what was to
come would be infinitely worse than the worst Cabanatuan had to offer. That
was what he experienced in July 1944 when he was among more than 1,500
prisoners herded aboard Nissyo Maru,
One of the more than 100 deservedly named “Hell Ships” used throughout
the war by the Japanese to transport prisoners to the Japanese home islands.
Nissyo Maru was bound for the port of Moji on the island of Kyushu.
Getting there would require every bit of a man’s physical and moral courage.
Crammed into a cargo hold with scarcely enough room to move, with the hatch
covers dogged down and no ventilation and fed once a day on moldy rice and
no water, the prisoners endured torment beyond description. Men driven to
madness by boiling heat and all-consuming thirst drank their own urine,
slashed their arms to drink their own blood. The dead, and there were many
of those, were dragged with great difficulty to one corner where the
sickening stench of putrefaction mingled with the suffocating odor of urine
and excrement. Fellow prisoner Donald Versaw, a 4th Marines
bandsman, remembered: “And the stench! God! The stench!”
Through it all Felix McCool endured, doing what he could to assist fellow
prisoners who needed a helping hand, channeling his hatred of his captors
into an iron determination to overcome each and every effort to reduce him
to a subhuman state. Somehow, someway, he would find a way to fight back and
by every means he could manage to carry on the war. He would never give up.
He would fight back.
The opportunity to do that presented itself at his ultimate destination in
Japan. That was at Fukuoka Camp #7B at Futase, and the Nittetsu-Futase Tanko
Kaisha coal mine. McCool was put to work mining coal used to make steel for
the Japanese war effort. He and other like-minded Marines wasted no time
doing everything they could to put a crimp in that several years later Felix
McCool talked about that with the
Saturday Evening Post writer Ed Herron.
“Your mind becomes fixed on one point: No matter how little it is I can do
to cripple this work, that much may save the life of an American, keep him
from this hell that has a hold on me. So you lean hard on the air drill
until the bit snaps, then you call the Japanese honcho, shake your head
wearily and gesture to the drill. The Nips lose four hours of production
while you go back up to the surface to get a new drill bit. That night, over
a dinner of rice with weevils and a bit of mouse thrown in for flavor, you
compare notes. What did you do today to screw things up? What were you able
to do to make life miserable for the bastards?”
“Tricks?” You’ve got a hundred of them, and every one born of desperation
and hate. Throw a false bottom of timbers into a mine cart; fill it with a
shallow load of coal. The result? Lost coal and steel never made. Maybe an
American life never lost. Pull links out of a conveyor belt; throw rocks
into the gears as often as four times a night. Derail a loaded train of coal
cars, short a dangling wire. Act stupid when the honcho comes to see what’s
wrong. Keep fighting every way you can.”
Working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, 1,600 feet under the ground in
nothing but a loin cloth…it gets hot down that deep…..that was the way Felix
McCool continued to fight the war. Enduring the starvation diet, the
recreational slappings, cuffing, kickings and beatings by guards known as
“Mickey Mouse”, “Smiley” and “The Skunk”, the freezing nights above ground
without a blanket, Felix McCool continued to fight the war.
After 13 months of grueling labor in a coal mine, on a diet barely capable
of sustaining life, sweltering below ground and freezing above, Felix McCool
was liberated from captivity. He had intestinal parasites and a chronic
cough. He weighed 130 pounds. But when he walked out of Fukuoka #7B in
September 1945, he went with his head held high.
Time moved on, to 29 Nov. 1950, high in those frigid mountains of North
Korea. Did Felix McCool- Warrant Officer Felix McCool- reflect on the fact
that eight years before he had been on his way from Shanghai bound for the
Philippines and the beginning of a nightmare? Perhaps, but if he did, he
never mentioned it. It may have had something to do with the fact that on
that day Felix McCool began his second descent into hell.
The relief column commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Douglas B. Drysdale, Royal
Marines, attempting to fight its way through to the hard-pressed defenders
of Hagaru-ri, was ambushed by an over-whelming Chinese Communist force. The
head of the column was able to break through and reach Hagaru-ri. The rear
elements successfully fought their way clear of the trap and returned to
their base at Koto-ri.
For the center of the column, hemmed in on all sides with more than 50
percent casualties and all ammunition gone, it was a different story. The
senior officer, Major John N. McLaughlin, USMC, had no choice but to
surrender. The choice was made more compelling since the Chinese commander
made it clear that all the wounded would be killed on the spot otherwise.
Felix McCool was a prisoner again.
The Chinese were new to the Korean War in that first winter, and while they
had infiltrated nearly a half million men across the Yalu River from
Manchuria, they had made few, if any plans for the confinement and control
of prisoners.
The small remnant of Task Force Drysdale, little more than 100 Marines,
Royal Marines and soldiers, was put on the road for a forced march
northward, more than a few of them were barefoot because the Chinese guards
had stripped them of their cold-weather shoe pacs. The march to the
flea-bitten village of Kanggye, not far below the Yalu River, made almost
exclusively at night in subzero temperatures, took four days.
The prisoners received neither food
nor water during this time. Not all of them made it. Some, weakened by
wounds, malnutrition, hypothermia and pneumonia, fell along the way dead or
dying. Their bodies were thrown into a roadside ditch.
Kanggye turned out to be only a temporary stopping point, a miserably poor
collection of mud-walled, thatch-roofed hovels from which the equally poor
Korean farmers who inhabited them had been ejected. After a brutally cold
winter, spent on a diet of the inevitable rice…one skimpy mean each
day….when even the daytime temperatures seldom rose above zero, Felix McCool
and his fellow prisoners were herded still farther north to their ultimate
destination, Pyoktong Camp 5.
Located on a point of land jutting into the Yalu River, Pyoktong Camp 5 was
another collection of vermin-ridden mud
and thatch huts from which hapless Korean peasants had been evicted.
The real assault on men’s will began there. Physically degrading conditions,
as bad as they were, came in a distant second to the relentless attempt to
break men mentally and morally.
Seeing propaganda value in their captives, the Chinese devoted each day to a
constant barrage of mandatory communist indoctrination, the objective of
which was not to create willing Marxists, but rather to convert prisoners
into useful tools through the signing of “peace petitions,” highly
publicized “voluntary denunciation” of “American war mongering” and
“confessions” to “war crimes.”
Prisoners were “encouraged” to become “progressives” rather than
“reactionaries.” They received no medical care beyond that which a small
prisoner medical staff was able to provide, and subsisted on a starvation
diet of rice. Other forms of “encouragement” included nonstop interrogation
sessions, during which a succession of interrogators fired questions at
their subjects for as long as two or three days while the prisoner was kept
awake by frequent dousing with ice cold water. And there was always “The
Hole.”
Felix McCool learned about The Hole firsthand when he refused to “confess”
to charges of “rape and pillage.” The Hole was just that, a pit that was 3
feet square by 3 ½ feet deep, barely large enough for him to sit naked in a
hunched-over position to keep from being speared by the sharpened steel
spikes in the lid that was closed over him. Crawling with lice, he sat for
three days in a semi-frozen bog of urine and fecal matter left by previous
occupants.
Released from The Hole, he was once again taken before interrogators who
repeated their demands that he “confess.” When he refused, he was put back
into The Hole. Fellow prisoners called their encouragement: “Keep your chin
up, Mac,” “Stay tough, Mac.” For two more days in The Hole, Felix McCool
concentrated on the horrors that he had survived aboard the Hell Ship
Nissyo Maru, determined to survive this horror as well, and stoked a
burning hatred of communism that never left him.
In the end, after promising him “lenient treatment” if he informed on his
fellow prisoners, which he flatly refused, the Chinese gave up. Upon his
return to the main camp, fellow prisoners aided him with every form of
assistance they could provide. Captain Clarence Anderson, an Army doctor,
gave him clean clothes and the little bit of soap he had. Lieutenant Richard
“Ding” Bell, USMC, along with three others, washed the stink and filth off
him. A downed Marine aviator, Captain Gerald Fink, sat up most of the night
with him while McCool talked and talked and talked, getting it all out of
his system.
There were men like that in Pyoktong Camp 5, men like another Marine pilot,
LtCol William G. Thrash, and the indomitable John McLaughlin, with whom this
writer had the privilege of serving in later years. Never to be forgotten
was a magnificent soldier-priest, Father Emil J. Kapaun, an Army chaplain,
who risked the most severe reprisals by conducting clandestine religious
services and secretly smuggling what little food and medicines he could into
the enlisted compound. The chaplain eventually died from the complications
of his untreated wounds. And there was Felix McCool, the man who never quit.
Together they stood fast, resisting every effort of their captors to break
them and turn them into propaganda tools against their own country. Together
they shivered through the subfreezing nights when ice formed on the interior
walls of the filthy hovels where they were imprisoned. Together they formed
a bond that couldn’t be broken.
In early September 1953, after almost three years of brutal captivity, Felix
McCool was repatriated during Operation Big Switch, the prisoner exchange
that followed the end of the Korean War. He continued on active duty,
serving at posts and stations around the Marine Corps. He received a prize
for a poetry book written about his ordeals as a two-time prisoner of war.
Marine veteran Jerry Connors remembers him as an instructor in Supply School
at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in 1957. In 1958, he was the guest of honor on Ralph
Edwards’ popular television show “This Is Your Life.”
But the brutal physical punishment of confinement in subhuman conditions in
two wars took an inexorable toll on his health. In 1960, he was transferred
to the Marine Corps’ Temporary Disability Retired List, a retirement that
was made permanent in 1964.
Felix McCool, who lived through the horrors of Cabanatuan, the
Nissyo Maru, Fukuoka #7B and Pyoktong Camp 5, died in Dade County,
Fla., two days after Christmas 1972. Perhaps it isn’t out of line to believe
he went to a better place than those he had endured during his two tours in
hell.
For more information about the life of Father Emil Kapaun, Servant of God,
go to the Fr. Kapaun Guild website by clicking HERE.
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Father Kapaun medals now available
Medals depicting the image of Father Emil Kapaun, Servant of God, have been
struck and are once again available from the Chancery Office of the Diocese
of Wichita. The medals measure three-fourths of an inch in diameter
and have eye hooks for a chain. They are available in gold, silver and
pewter.
Suggested donations per medal are as follows:
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Gold - $16
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Sterling Silver - $20
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Pewter - $10
Proceeds from the sale of the medals go to the Father Kapaun Guild to help
pursue his canonization. To place your order, please contact Ann Maley in
the Chancery Office at either (316) 269-3917 or by email at maley@catholicdioceseofwichita.org.
Additional information on the life of Father Kapaun
is available on the diocesen website: Click
HERE