2004-04-18
by Lori Varosh
Journal Reporter
He survived the infamous Bataan Death March, and endured
savage beatings, bouts of dysentery and starvation as a Japanese POW in World
War II.
But Cecil Waldo Parrott lost his final battle.
The Bellevue resident did not live to win reparations for himself and thousands
of other POWs forced to work without compensation for Japanese companies.
Parrott died Thursday, April 15th at the Veterans Administration Hospital in
Seattle. He was 83.
Though he endured 1,228 days in captivity, as one of 70,000 U.S. and Filipino
soldiers who surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942, Parrott maintained
his faith in family and refused to hate his captors.
He was a gentle man who “loved the Japanese people,'' said his son-in-law
David Andress of North Bend. “He was very forgiving of the Japanese people,
because he knew it wasn't the people (who caused the suffering), it was the
military.''
Born in Mount Vernon on July 20, 1920, Parrott spent his
boyhood moving from town to town in Idaho as his carpenter father sought work
during the Great Depression.
He met his future wife, Ruby, at a vocational school in Weiser, Idaho. They
would marry in 1947, after the war ended.
Parrott enlisted in 1940, and spent more than a year stationed in the
Philippines before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was a corporal in the
U.S. Army Signal Corps when the Japanese captured the Bataan peninsula.
More than 10,000 soldiers would not survive the resulting Death March, victims
of exhaustion, thirst, disease and horrific treatment by their captors.
“If you had a ring that was so tight on your finger, because your finger had
swelled up some, they would cut your finger off. That's how cruel they were,''
Parrott told the Journal in an interview in 2001.
“I saw men bayoneted for trying to get a drink. I decided that dying of thirst
was preferable,'' he said.
He credits a cook from the Japanese army with helping him survive and enabling
him to see the enemy as individuals
He and other stragglers were stopped by the cook, who shared what little he had
----some boiled rice, sweet tea and one mackerel, cut into five pieces. The tea,
the only clean water he had during the march, probably saved his life, Parrott
told the Journal.
Surviving the nearly 70-mile march was no guarantee of
surviving the war. By late 1942, in Camp O'Donnell in Luzon, dysentery, beriberi
and starvation had carved 68 pounds from his 165-pound frame. He was sent to
“Zero Ward,'' a crawl space under the barracks where men were left to die.
Every morning, Parrott would wake up with yet another dead man next to him.
“I noticed that the night before a guy died, he would talk about how abandoned
he felt, how he was convinced no one cared, that his family had forgotten him,
''Parrott told the Journal in May 1995. “Not me. I would get home to my
family.''
Parrott simply refused to give up.
He weighed 96 pounds when he was liberated from a Japanese work camp on Aug. 19,
1945.
Parrott moved to Bellevue in 1955 and worked as an engineer for Boeing until the
layoffs of the early 1970s, son-in-law Andress said. Then he opened his own
general contracting business before retiring a decade ago.
He was known for helping veterans and for putting in grab-bars for seniors for a
minimal charge, just to help out, Andress said.
The war brought Parrott a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and other
medals, but left him with nightmares and digestive problems throughout his life,
Andress said.
He testified against some of the prison guards after the war, “but he was able
to separate individual Japanese people,'' Andress said.
“We should never forget the sacrifices Americans have made in war,'' Parrott
told the Journal in 1995. “But we also should remember the point of it all:
peace and brotherhood among all peoples.''
In 1999, Parrott joined a class-action lawsuit filed in
California seeking damages against present-day Japanese corporations Mitsui and
Mitsubishi, owners of the mining companies that used the labor of 20,000 POWs
during the war. They have not been compensated to this day.
Parrott is survived by his wife of 56 years, Ruby of Bellevue;
daughters Cheryl (and David) Andress of North Bend and Marcy (and Tim) Davis of
Yakima; and five grandchildren.
Lori Varosh can be reached at lori.varosh@kingcountyjournal.com
or 425-453-4243.
WORLD WAR II U.S. ATROCITIES OBITUARIES