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Sixteen United States paratroopers following close on the heels of friendly Russian forces liberated the priest. Father Duffy joined his Protestant minister friend, Reverend Taylor, in conducting a thanksgiving service a few hours later. In his sermon, Taylor said they were all humbled to have their prayers of deliverance answered, “and in that humility must commit ourselves to rebuilding a world where such a war can never again occur. We’re going back to our families soon. Let’s go back with love in our hearts and His work in our hands. Let’s tell the world what God did in Cabanatuan, Bilibid, O’Donnell, Fukuoka 22, and Hoten. This is not the end but the beginning. Let’s turn the world right side up—for God and for our country.” Father Duffy then closed the service by leading them in the Lord’s Prayer.
After a period during which Father Duffy rested, ate decent food, and focused on his health, he turned to correspondence with people back home. Telegrams from the American Red Cross had already alerted Duffy’s superior in Toledo, the Most Rev. Karl J. Alter, that Duffy had been freed and would soon be on his way to the United States, but the priest now wanted to provide additional information. In a long letter to Bishop Alter written eight days after his liberation, Father Duffy provided further details about his condition. “At last we are free and by God’s mercy, alive. I’m one of the few survivors of a trip in which we rode four ships to get to Japan, one of the two chaplains and the only priest out of the nine who were originally aboard.” He explained that he was still slow in moving around, mainly due to swollen feet from beriberi, but expected to return home on the first plane out. “Henceforth, Alcatraz will hold no terror for the survivors of Bataan and Corregidor. All of us who have survived know God has been very good and are most grateful, to many has been the day in the past when death would have been a merciful end to temporal suffering.” Referring to man’s ability to triumph over evil, proof of which Duffy had seen since his capture in 1942, he added, “It is difficult to understand the wonderful and mysterious works of God but He certainly looks after His own.”
Father Duffy had changed in the previous three years. Before the war, he had enjoyed the company of generals and colonels, politicians and bigwigs, especially Generals MacArthur and Wainwright. After enduring months of pain, torture, and misery, and after administering Last Rites to many individuals, including his fellow alumnus, Father Carberry, Duffy was more attuned to the attributes and needs of those people that he may have overlooked earlier in his career. Duffy’s Pacific ordeal had strengthened his faith, and he now shared an affinity with Father Barry, the priest who had focused on serving the troops he called “my boys.”
The atom bombs had made the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands unnecessary for Father Boland. When his ship, the Highlands, lifted anchor in the Philippines on August 25 and set course for Japan, he and the crew left as victors and occupiers instead of invaders.
During the trip he wrote Father Steiner that he would soon be in Tokyo Bay, where he would send Steiner “greetings from the Nipps [sic] capital.” He wrote that they expected to dock at Yokohama in Tokyo Bay on September 2, where they would have a front row seat to that day’s surrender ceremonies. “It should be a very interesting sight with so many ships present. They are taking no chances and we will enter the bay at general quarters. We have thirty transports in our group alone and are heavily escorted.”
As expected, Highlands arrived in Tokyo Bay on V-J Day and landed elements of the 1st Cavalry Division for occupation duty. After unloading her cargo, two days later Highlands steamed out of the bay, now resplendent with ships of all sizes, for the voyage back to the Philippines. The ship made additional supply runs to Okinawa and Japan before departing for the United States, where ship and crew arrived on November 2.
Boland left behind one of his Holy Cross associates. Father Hewitt, who had served in New Caledonia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and now Japan, volunteered to remain in that defeated country with the occupation forces. The priest at first feared an unfriendly welcome from Japanese civilians, but after Emperor Hirohito urged them to lay down their arms and accept defeat, Hewitt moved about unhindered.
One place, in particular, must have left a lasting imprint on Father Hewitt. The twisted building frames and leveled structures of Hiroshima, a city of 350,000 residents now reduced to ashes, covered the landscape for miles. Just as Father Barry had stared at Dachau and failed to find the words to convey his emotions, Father Hewitt now stood silent before Hiroshima. The priests confronted two of the most devastating instruments of the war, the concentration camps and the first atom bomb, and wondered if hopes for a better mankind had dissipated in vapor, just as did so many lives in the ovens of Dachau and in the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima. If the world were to improve, both mused, more was needed than the same weary remedies and temporary fixtures. People would have to exhibit the goodness and decency that Father Duffy saw in Bilibid and the Holy Cross missionaries witnessed in Los Banos. They would have to imitate the valor of Father Sampson’s paratroopers leaping into the Normandy darkness and the unselfishness of Barry’s 157th Infantry Regiment as it battled the Germans in Sicily, at Anzio, and through France. Anything less was bound to lead to a repetition of depravities.
They dashed to war eager to serve their fellow man, but returned pessimistic that the war had helped create a better world.
(excerpted from chapter 12)
