Don Hanning is going on 93 years of age, but he’s still strong in body and mind. Certainly stronger than when the American troops rescued him from Santo Tomas University, Manila, Luzon, in the Philippines, in early 1945.
Coastal Point • GARRETT LAYTON:
Don Hanning reflects on his experiences during World War II.
He weighed just 89 pounds by that point, and he said it had taken him at least a year to recover. Hanning had been a Japanese prisoner of war for three years.
More than 50 years later, he ambles about his Bethany Beach-area home, watering the gladiolas and dahlias perched around the glassed back porch/greenhouse, pointing out some of the gnarled chunks of driftwood he uses in craft, and the religious statuary (St. Mary, St. Francis of Assisi) set here and there, near the bench in his quiet back yard.
A cut-through from the Assawoman Canal leads past steep, ivy-crowned banks and meets his front yard as it slopes down to the curving shore of a pond. Mallards stamp around in the clipped grass.
Hanning said he’d finally relinquished the landscaping duties, and now had a fellow come by for the mowing and trimming. And one or the other of his sons (Pat and Mike) stop by to take care of various odds and ends, he said — but he was still quite capable of playing the gracious host (and insisted on fixing a cup of coffee for a visiting reporter).
At peace, in peaceful surroundings, he reviewed his life — his upbringing in Watertown, Conn.: “I can remember when telephones first came out,” Hanning said. “I still remember our number — 580.”
One of his sisters (he had three brothers and three sisters) would play piano for the family’s entertainment, though “she was lousy,” Hanning said with a grin.
But kerosene lamps eventually gave way to electricity, and (perhaps something to do with the lack of musical ability around the Hanning household), he said they were one of the first families in town to have a radio.
His father, James, worked as superintendent of buildings at the Taft School, in Watertown. “It’s an exclusive prep school — really, students are supposed to go on to the Ivy League,” Hanning said. “I was a renegade when I went to Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame, Indiana).”
He majored in foreign commerce and, upon graduation, went to work for the Victorious Milling Company in Mindanao, Philippines. “I wanted to work in the tropics, and the offer came up through a classmate,” he said. “Once I got into it, I was very interested.”
Victorious traded in sugar. Hanning said most American sugar came from the western U.S., and from beets. In the Philippines, they grew sugarcane — which looked very much like fresh corn, he said. Farmers brought cane to the mill, where it was crushed and turned into sugar (with molasses as a byproduct).
Company policy allowed for six months’ vacation, every four years, Hanning pointed out. And he was about to return stateside for his paid leave in late 1941 when the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii.
President Franklin Roosevelt had directed the U.S. Navy to move its forces from the west coast out to Hawaii, in hopes of providing additional deterrent to Japan’s imperial expansion into Southeast Asia. But Pearl Harbor wasn’t really ready to accommodate a large fleet — the U.S. was still working on base improvements at the time of the attack.
“Six months later, and they would have been all set,” Hanning reflected. “But the Japanese came in too early. There was no declaration of war — they just hit us, so they really caught us with our pants down.”
Things went not much better in the Philippines, and with the U.S. scrambling for soldiers, he joined the Army. “I was young and patriotic.” He shrugged. (And perhaps somewhat headstrong, he added). He remembered an abbreviated basic training — “One day I was a civilian, the next I was a second lieutenant. We were at war, and they needed men,” he said.”
Assembled on Negros Island, northwest of Mindanao, his outfit joined the fray on Mindanao in early 1942 — but the Allied forces quickly found themselves outgunned.
“We fought as hard as we could, but the Japanese overpowered us,” he recalled.
But Mindanao is a large island, and wild, “as wild now as it was then,” Hanning said. His outfit retreated into the high country, taking up a hesitant alliance with a group of native guerillas, the Moros.
The Moros (Moors), a Muslim minority group, had been fighting for autonomy since time immemorial, and with the Japanese moving in, they offered greater cooperation. Hanning said they were prepared to hunker down for the winter and wait it out, but they were eventually ordered to surrender.
“It’s a terrible feeling, to lay down your arms,” Hanning pointed out. It was an impossible situation, and they had their orders — but in retrospect, he said, he suspected it was maybe the worst thing they could have done.
He said their commanding officer had been in the Philippines for years, and had established a certain rapport with the Moros. The Japanese were aware of this and asked him to help pacify the guerillas — he refused, and the entire outfit watched as he was forced to dig his own grave.
Hanning admired the man’s bravery, but even 50 years later, he chafed at their captors’ disregard for the Geneva Convention. Shortly thereafter, three men escaped, and another three officers were publicly and brutally executed in retribution, he said.
There were no walls to their prison and, Hanning said, they could have walked off into the forest at any time. In fact, they sometimes did, while on work detail, or while they were still allowed to forage for food.
They would come across armed civilians and Philippine Army regulars who hadn’t surrendered in the forest, he remembered, and the guerillas would try to convince them not to return to the camp. But after seeing those three men die, Hanning said no one left.
“You knew, if you tried to escape, your best friend was going to be executed,” he pointed out.
After a year or so, they were moved to the Santo Tomas campus, in Manila (the capitol). Hanning said he hadn’t been sure if anyone back in the U.S. knew he was still alive – they were allowed to write notes to relatives back home, but not many missives made it through.
There were around 3,000 prisoners at the camp in Manila, he said. Rations dwindled — eventually, they were all too weak to work, or do much of anything, Hanning remembered. By the time the Allies came to their rescue, many were dying from starvation.
“The only bright side to all of this — I met my wife in Santo Tomas.” He brightened.
Josephine was a “Washington, D.C. gal,” he said. She’d married her childhood sweetheart and followed his job (Goodyear Export) to the Philippines, but he’d contracted polio and died shortly thereafter, Hanning said.
“We had 51 happy years together,” he reflected. “We were married almost as soon as we came home — we were going to wait six months, but we actually only waited about six weeks.”
Japanese fortunes had turned by early 1945, and Hanning remembered the prisoners’ cautious hopes as they started to see Allied planes flying overhead. “We knew they’d been bombing, and a couple of times, planes flew over and dropped messages,” he said.
He remembered the day of their liberation quite clearly. “There was a big fence around the university, and a heavy gate,” Hanning recalled. “An American tank hit the gate and came bursting in. The fellow in the turret leaned out and asked ‘Is this the g– d– place?’”
Many of their captors fell quickly in the ensuing firefight, but there was a hostage standoff at one of the buildings, until the Americans and Japanese reached an agreement. “It was quite dramatic,” Hanning said, remembering their captors, still carrying their sidearms, marching through a corridor of American soldiers, out of Santo Tomas. They didn’t get far, though, before the guerillas blitzed them, Hanning recalled.
Back in the U.S. with Josephine, he slowly regained his health. Eventually, he ran into a fellow Notre Dame alumnus who told him the FBI was looking for help, and Hanning signed up.
He went on to work for the FBI for 26 years, first in San Diego, then in Los Angeles. He spent the bulk of his career at headquarters in Washington, D.C., though.
Throughout those years, the Hannings vacationed in Bethany Beach. “I came down to spend two weeks’ vacation one time, loved it, and just kept coming back,” he said. They bought a place next to the ocean first, a summer cottage, and then built their retirement home west of Route 1 in the early 1980s.
Hanning doesn’t get out as much as he used to, but said he tries to stay up to date. He reads three newspapers a day, including the Washington Times and the Washington Post (primarily for the sports section, he said).
Notre Dame takes precedence over all others, but he remains a diehard Redskins fan, as well, though he hesitated to predict their playoff chances this season. “I think they’ll have more wins than losses — that’s as far as I’ll go,” he quipped.
Hanning’s been through more than most, but at nearly 93 years of age, he’s still smiling.