Former Saipan resident writes about Word War II MIA

Bruce M. Petty, an author of World War II books, is well on his way toward completing his newest book, Missing in Action from the Pacific War, which he wrote to find out from families of those missing after the war.

Petty

“Vicky Vaghan (Setchan Akiyama) for example, told me in her oral history interview how her father, Tomomitsu, became separated from the rest of the family during the fighting and was never seen again.”

According to Petty, Carl Matthews, a Marine told him about men in their company who were killed but for whatever reasons their bodies were either lost or not recovered, and as a result their families were notified that they were MIA (Missing in Action).

“Likewise, when interviewing a Carolinian woman (Petty said she can’t remember her name), she mentioned that an entire family from Tanapag went missing during the fighting on Saipan and were never found,” Petty said.

“One of my theories at the time was that the family may have been among those hiding in one of many caves that were sealed by Marines and soldiers,” he added.

Petty came across several of these sealed caves in the Tanapag area back in the 1990s.

“This same [Carolinian woman he spoke too] also told me that a brother of hers was wounded during the fighting and was later taken to a U.S. field hospital, but he was never seen again and nobody told them what happened to him,” he said.

Petty said that according to John Dover in his book Embracing Defeat, the Japanese had at least a million Missing in Action, in addition to the millions who died. The United States has roughly 78,000 Americans still listed as MIA from World War II alone.
“That is more men than we lost in the Vietnam War,” Petty said.

“Some years back I set out to write a book about The Missing in Action from the Pacific War. I made contact with families of World War II missing, as well as individuals and groups involved in the search for wreck sites that might contain human remains,” Petty said.

According to him, however, he concluded after about a year that the only way he could do an adequate job on such a book is if he travels extensively and at a great personal expense, “something I couldn’t afford to do at the time, so I had to drop the project, at least as a book.”

He didn’t want to give up the idea entirely, so he now refers to his book as a work-in-progress.

“I continue to network with the families of the missing as well as individuals and groups involved in the search. More importantly, I now lecture all over the world, mostly on cruise ships, on MIA issues as well as other Pacific War topics,” Petty said.

Whenever he gets on the subject of MIA, there is “almost always” at least one person in the audience who can identify with the subject. “Quite often because somebody in their family of some family they know is among those many missing from WWII,” Petty said.

Petty was born in Long Beach, Calif., in 1945 and grew up in California. He enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserves at Alameda Naval Air Station in 1962 while still in high school. After graduation, he served two years aboard USS Yorktown as an aviation ordnance man, and is a Vietnam War veteran.

He later graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara, with a degree in history in 1972.

In 1995, along with his wife and children, he moved to Saipan, returning to California in 2000.

On Saipan, he wrote his first book, Saipan: Oral Histories of the Pacific War. Since then he has written three other books on World War II in the Pacific, the latest being New Zealand in the Pacific War.

For the past four years, Petty has been a Pacific War lecturer for Princess Cruises, and lives in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Petty will also be doing a book signing at the one-day history conference on June 14 at the Royal Taga Hall of the Saipan World Resort.

The conference is part of the activities for the 70th Anniversary of the Battles of Saipan and Tinian.