Pvt. Lester I. Tennenberg was the son of Mr. & Mrs. Gus Tennenberg.  He lived on the north side of Chicago at 1200 West Sherwin Avenue.  As a student, he attended Lane Technical High School in Chicago.  In September, 1940, Les knew that it was only a matter of time before he would be drafted into the army.  To prevent this from happening, and to have a say with whom he served with, Les joined the Illinois National Guard's 33rd Tank Company in Maywood, Illinois.

    In November, 1940, the men of the 33rd Tank Company were federalized and sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky as Company B, 192 Tank Battalion.  Here Les had the privilege of serving the company as its first cook.  When other members of the company completed baking school, he then trained as a tank crew member. 

    After Fort Knox, Les and the other members of the company were sent to Camp Polk, Louisiana.  The 192nd Tank Battalion took part in the Maneuvers of 1941.  To Les, these "maneuvers" were somewhat of a joke because the 192nd had few tanks.  Without knowing it, the 192nd had already been selected for overseas duty in the Philippine Islands.  On the side of a hill, the members of the battalion were informed that they would be in the Philippines from six months to six years.  The192nd was sent west to Angel Island where it awaited transit to the Philippines. 

    Upon arrival in Manila, the company was rushed to Clark Field.  Thanksgiving dinner consisted of leftovers from the 194th Tank Battalion.  For the next few weeks, the men spent the majority of their time loading ammunition and attempting to make their equipment combat ready.  

    War came to the Philippine Islands just ten hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when planes appeared over Clark Field and bombed the American planes sitting on the runways.  For the next four months, Les and the other members of his company fought to hold the Japanese as long as they could.  On April 9, 1942, the men of Company B were ordered to destroy their tanks and other equipment that could be used by the Japanese.  With this order, Les and the other men of the company became Prisoners of War.

    Les took part in the death march.  On the march he was accompanied by Bob Martin also of B Company.  Les would first be held as a POW at Camp O'Donnell and then Cabanatuan.  He would then be selected for shipment to Japan.

    In Japan, he was held at Fukuoka Camp 17, which was located near the town of Omuta.  Here, Les and the other prisoners would be used as slave labor to work in a coal mine that had been abandoned by the Japanese because it had been determined to dangerous to mine.  It was also at this camp that Les witnessed POWs willingly give up their food for cigarettes.  The men had given up all hope and wanted to die. 

    It was at Camp #17 that his friend, Bob Martin, would save Les' life.  Bob had been injured and assigned to work in the camp kitchen.  Bob would sneak food to the prisoners being held in the camp's internal guardhouse.  One of these prisoners was Les.  Bob did this knowing that he was risking his own life.  The two men would stay friends for the rest of their lives.

    In September of 1945, Les was liberated from captivity by the occupational forces of the American military.  In 1947, Les would change his last name to "Tenney," which is what many of the other POWs had called him in the camps.  Les would go to college and become a professor of finance and insurance at Arizona State University. 

    After he retired from Arizona State University, Lester Tenney wrote the book  My Hitch in Hell, about his experiences as a POW under the Japanese.  Today, Les travels the country talking about his life as a POW.

Credit: Jim Opolony: 192nd & 194th Tank Battalion 

  
  Lester Tenney  has been very involved in seeking an apology for the hardship and misery he and other American
  prisoners of war endured. See Related article below.
  

Long March to an Apology

By MINDY KOTLER   Published: May 26, 2008   New York Times, Washington

LESTER TENNEY, an 87-year-old veteran of World War II, plans to travel to Japan today to seek a meeting with the prime minister and an apology for the hardship and misery he and other American prisoners of war endured in that country. For a variety of reasons, beginning with the State Department's stance on the issue, it is an apology that he is unlikely to receive.

In the fall of 1940, Mr. Tenney enlisted in the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company B, of the Illinois National Guard,
which was sent to the Philippines a year later.

When the Japanese attacked in December 1941, the American and Filipino forces were unprepared. A three-month siege on the Bataan Peninsula left Mr. Tenney and his comrades starving and sick. On April 9, 1942, the American commanders surrendered, and the 65-mile Bataan Death March began. The march lasted four to seven days (for some it was 14), in the tropical sun with no food, water, medicine or rest. The Japanese guards beat, beheaded, bayoneted, buried alive and shot the Americans and Filipinos at will.

When they reached the town of San Fernando, the P.O.W.'s were herded into boxcars and packed so tightly they could hardly move. Men gasped for air in the rising heat and died standing up. Those who survived the 4 hour ride then had to stumble six miles to Camp O'Donnell.
But Mr. Tenney's ordeal was just beginning. Herded onto a 'hell ship', he and his comrades were sent to Japan to work in mines and factories and on docks owned by companies like Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Nippon Steel. Beatings and other abuses continued. Food and medicine were in short supply; Red Cross food boxes were never delivered to prisoners. Mr. Tenney spent more than two years in a Mitsui coal mine so dangerous that some Japanese miners refused to work there. The death rate for the Allied prisoners of Japan in World War II was 27 percent, far greater than the rate for British and American soldiers in German captivity, about 4 percent.

Since the war ended, the Japanese government has either ignored or denied efforts by US former prisoners of war to obtain compensation or an apology. Japanese companies have sought to suppress historical documentation of forced P.O.W. labor. In 2005, one of Japan's most prominent magazines, Bungei Shunju, published an article arguing not only that the Bataan Death March was less severe than reported but also that the testimony of the survivors was 'gathered based upon the assumption that an atrocity of the Death March did take place.'

Remarkably, members of Japan's Parliament plan to introduce a bill having to do with prisoners of World War II' but it is meant to provide back pay and pensions for Korean and other non-Japanese camp guards who had been convicted as war criminals for abusing Allied P.O.W.'s. More troubling in some ways, however, is the American government's attitude toward the legal claims that former P.O.W.'s have filed in American and Japanese courts. In many cases, the State and Justice Departments have supported arguments by Japanese corporations that the 1951 San Francisco Treaty between the Allies and Japan waived all compensation claims. The State Department has also on occasion joined forces with the Japanese Embassy to argue against legislation in Congress asking for compensation from either the American or Japanese governments. Australian, British and Dutch prisoners held by Japan during World War II have received apologies from Japanese prime ministers and invitations to visit Japan to encourage healing, understanding and education. Their own governments have also compensated them.

Lester Tenney, the current and most likely the last commander of the veterans' organization American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, wants only the same: an apology and an honorable closure of this horrible chapter in American-Japan relations. And he hopes that this time the American government, which so far has not supported his request for a meeting with Japanese officials, will not abandon him.

Mindy Kotler is the director of Asia Policy Point, a research center that studies Asian regional security.

It took writing a book for a former World War II captive of the Japanese to cast off the shackles

Press Enterprise New Article:    Wednesday, September 16, 2009

By MARK MUCKENFUSS, The Press-Enterprise

Lester Tenney says he was a Japanese prisoner of war for 50 years.

An Army staff sergeant and tank commander in the Philippines, Tenney was among 75,000 troops, 12,000 of them Americans, who surrendered to Japanese forces April 9, 1942 at Bataan. He survived the torturous Bataan Death March and spent most of the next 3½ years performing slave labor in a coal mine as a prisoner of war. Although he was liberated at the end of the war, Tenney, 89, of Carlsbad, says it wasn't until he wrote a book about his experiences in 1995, "My Hitch in Hell," that he felt he was truly freed.
His wife, Betty, and some of his close friends knew something of his wartime years. But Tenney says over the years he really hadn't talked about the horrors he went through. Part of it was the shame of being captured, part was having signed an Army affidavit saying he wouldn't speak about his time as a POW.
"I sat down and wrote my book and I cried and cried," Tenney says.
"Everything was as clear to me as if it was yesterday. Sometimes I would write two or three sentences and cry for two or three hours. Writing the book broke open everything. It relieved tremendous pressure."   The fifth edition of the book recently came out in paperback.

On Saturday, Tenney will be the keynote speaker for National POW-MIA Recognition Day at Riverside National Cemetery. The program begins at 10 a.m. in front of the cemetery's National POW-MIA Memorial and will feature other dignitaries from veterans organizations.

Lester Tenney, an Army staff sergeant and tank commander in the Philippines during World War II, survived the Bataan Death March and more than three years in captivity.  The Bataan Death March became a rallying point for American anger during the war. Shortly after the surrender at Bataan, the prisoners of war were forced to march north to Capas, a distance of about 80 miles. Estimates of the number of prisoners who died on the way, either from illness or execution, range from 10,000 to 20,000.
When Maj. Gen. Edward King Jr. surrendered to the Japanese, his men were cornered on a peninsula with no way out.
"We had nothing to eat and no ammunition," Tenney says. "It was the worst defeat the Americans had."
The first four days of the march, he says, the prisoners were denied both food and water. Soldiers who tried to drink from roadside springs or puddles were killed. Some were beheaded or had their throats cut for no apparent reason.

"I lost an awful lot of my friends," Tenney says. "I had to watch them bury a man alive." One of his friends was ordered to dig the grave, he says, "and because my buddy said, 'I can't do that,' they shot him and dug two ditches."
On the fourth day of the march, Tenney says a Japanese officer on horseback struck him across the back with a sword.
"I thought I was dead," he says. Some of his fellow soldiers were able to stitch up his wound. But the wound became infected. Days later, lying in a prison camp bed, Tenney was not only battling the infection but dysentery and malaria as well. He was sure he would die. But within days he recovered.

He was eventually shipped to Fukuoka Camp 17, in Omuta, Japan, 30 miles east of Nagasaki.
The POW camp there eventually housed 17,000 soldiers, including Australians and Europeans.
They were made to reopen a coal mine that had been shut for safety reasons. One of their first jobs was to build a stone wall to support the unstable ceiling of a mine shaft. Their two Japanese guards belittled the Americans when it took three of them to move a large cut stone.
Tenney told the guards he was sure it would only take two Japanese to do the job. One guard said no, and showing off his strength, moved the stone by himself, he recalls. Tenney encouraged his fellow Americans to clap for the guard's feat. The other guard then wanted to show his own prowess, he says, and it soon became a Tom Sawyer-like venture.
"Those two Japanese built the whole wall," he says. "All we did was stand there and applaud."
Most days did not go as well. The prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured.
"If you didn't work hard enough, the Japanese would hit you with boards, shovels or a pickax," Tenney says. "I had my nose broken twice, my shoulder broken, my head split open, my leg broken. The camp commander tortured one man so bad he had to have both legs cut off."

Even with the brutal treatment and 12-hour shifts in the mine, Tenney found the energy at one point to help mount a musical review for his fellow troops. The soldiers used cardboard, bits of broken colored glass and paste made from grinding rice to create headdresses.
They sewed their own brassieres, panties and gowns and eight soldiers dressed in drag presented the "Great Ziegfeld."

He also got involved with illegal trading with the Japanese guards and got caught. He and five other prisoners were lined up in a field for execution.
"The commander came down the line and told us how each of us were going to die," he says. "He'd point and say, 'bayonet,' 'shoot.' I was going to be paid the honor of having my head cut off."  Tenney's gut told him the commander was having second thoughts. He was hesitant. "I thought,  'He doesn't want to kill us. He wants to get out of this,' " he says. "I thought the best way was to compliment them." Given a chance to say some final words before his death, "I said, 'I have to tell all my friends, don't do anything against the Japanese because they're too smart.' "
As he continued to praise the Japanese, the commander's countenance lifted.
"I talked myself right out of that execution," he says, "and I haven't stopped talking since."

The War Was Over

When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 8, the prisoners saw the mushroom cloud but didn't know what it was. A week later, they were told they didn't have to go to the mines. A fellow prisoner encouraged Tenney to greet one of their guards, without bowing, something that would normally result in a beating.  The guard, he says, "bowed to me and I knew the war was over."
After the war, Tenney returned to school and became a college professor teaching finance at Arizona State and San Diego State universities. He is a professor emeritus at ASU. In recent years, he and Betty helped establish Care packages from Home, a group that sends 50 care packages a week to troops in the Middle East.
Writing his book and telling his story have changed him, says Betty.
"He was an angry man before," she says. "You never knew when he was going to fly off the handle. It's made him lots more mellow."
One of his biggest challenges these days, Tenney says, is condensing his story. He will try to convey his experience in just 20 minutes to those attending Saturday's event.

"Maybe my being there can help them understand the true meaning of POW Day," he says. "I want them to know the price we paid for freedom."