----Today's date, Sept. 2, isn't likely to mean much to most people, except that it's the day before Labor Day, the last gasp of summer before school starts, a day for picnics, watermelon and lemonade.
The Labor Day holiday has eclipsed the significance of Sept. 2 V-J Day, remembered with a mixture of anguish and relief by those who lived through the final days of World War II.
On Sept. 2, 1945, 45 years ago today, and 27 days after the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, the Japanese signed surrender terms and the war in the Pacific was over.
Two Lewiston-Clarkston Valley residents were in Japan that day, being held as prisoners of war.
James T. (Bud) Sager, 80, of Lewiston, remembers riding on a train with other prisoners after V-J Day through Nagasaki, the second Japanese city hit by the A-bomb.
''I sat there looking out the window, and it was plumb bare, just all laid down. The steel in the buildings looked like a candle that was melted and bent.
''I saw these Japs working out there with baskets, just like they were picking up potatoes. But come to find out they were picking up bones of people in the bombing. They were gathering up their ancestors who had been killed.''
Charles B. Mellor, 70, of Clarkston, remembers a formation of B-29s flying over the camp in the closing days of the war, dropping food and clothing in 55-gallon drums for the prisoners.
A couple of the drums crashed through the roof of a building near the prisoners' compound, and Mellor and his buddy, Les Carney of Caldwell, Idaho, motivated by years of starvation, raced for the building to retrieve what food they could.
The drums contained cans of peaches, Mellor recalled, a delicacy they had tasted only in their dreams during their captivity. The drums had broken when they hit the ground, killing four Japanese guards who had been sitting together in the building for a smoke.
The cans of peaches, some split open, were scattered in a bath of blood and body parts. Les picked up a bloody, ruptured can of peaches with an eyeball stuck to the lid, tipped it back and started to suck down the peaches.
''I told him, 'God Les, there's an eye on it,'
arts. Les picked up a bloody, ruptured can of peaches with an eyeball stuck to the lid, tipped it back and started to suck down the peaches.
''I told him, 'God Les, there's an eye on it,' '' Mellor said. ''He told me, 'Oh, that don't matter.' ''
* Mellor and Sager sat at the coffee bar in the kitchen of Mellor's home at Clarkston recently, sifting through scrapbooks and other mementoes from their nearly four years as prisoners of the Japanese. Sitting with them was Carl J. Cox, 60, of Asotin, whose father, Karl L. Cox, was killed by the Japanese after being taken prisoner.
Mellor and Sager said they were beaten, starved and forced to work when they were ill and beyond exhaustion. They saw others tortured and beheaded.
But when they returned home to the United States, they weren't recognized as prisoners of war by the U.S. government and weren't eligible for veterans' benefits.
''When we got back, they disowned us,'' Mellor said.
Mellor and Sager finally received recognition from the U.S. Navy four years ago, more than four decades after their ordeal. They received discharge papers.
''Then we hung it on the wall and looked at it,'' Sager said sarcastically.
Cox said his father has never received recognition from the U.S. government.
The reason may be because Mellor, Sager and Cox' father weren't soldiers during the war. They were civilian construction workers who were taken prisoner when the Japanese captured Wake Island in December 1941.
Many of the workers on Wake were from Idaho, employed by Morrison-Knudsen Co., with world headquarters at Boise. They were building an airstrip and a submarine base.
The same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked Wake Island, first by air and then by sea, Mellor said. The 1,300 civilian workers fought side-by-side with the 400 Marines stationed on the island, he said.
''During the battle, we shot down 23 Jap planes, sunk 11 Jap ships and killed 5,000 Japs,'' Mellor said proudly.
They held out two weeks against Japanese attack, but were forced to surrender Dec. 23.
Most of the civilian workers were shipped from Wake to a prison camp at Shanghai, China. Later, they were moved to camps in Japan. But 98 civilians, including Cox's father, were detained on Wake and executed all in one day by the Japanese.
''They stood them up and shot them,'' said Cox, who was 10 years old when his father left for Wake. He said the bodies of the men have never been recovered.
Mellor and Sager wrote about their grim voyage to China in reports the U.S. military required them to make after the war. ''We were crowded into a hold down on the bilge with not enough room for all of us to lay down,'' Sager wrote.
He said the prisoners were given a small bowl of barley gruel twice each day and a half of a cup of water once per day during the 16-day trip. ''They had an inspection each night, and if you were not on your knees, they would beat you with a short bamboo staff,'' he said in his report.
Both remembered a night when a couple of the guards got drunk and beheaded five prisoners with their swords.
Mellor said he was beaten, had his teeth knocked out with a rifle butt, was tied with barbed wire and tortured in the Shanghai camp. He weighed 87 pounds when the war ended.
A hated guard, called the ''Screaming Skull'' by prisoners, tortured Mellor by making him lay face down on the floor, placing a thick bamboo pole behind his knees and then repeatedly bending his legs backward over the pole.
Mellor said he couldn't walk for a time and his knees sustained permanent injuries that have required surgery.
The abuse given prisoners was usually the result of some supposed insult or misunderstanding with a guard, Mellor said. ''Like I told my grandkid, the Jap said 'shut up' and I thought he said 'stand up.' ''
He said he was fortunate, though, because he isn't a large man. The Japanese guards were hardest on the biggest of the prisoners. ''The Japs were small, and they hated large men. They would jump up on the table to beat them.''
Both Mellor and Sager remembered in particular the treatment of Sir Mark Young, the former governor of Singapore who was 6-feet, 6-inches tall and ''would never do what (the Japanese guards) said.''
''They would fold him up and put him in just a little box, a sweat box, and they drove toothpicks under his fingernails,'' Mellor said.
Others were given the ''water cure'' a torture that involved placing a hose in the mouth of a prisoner and filling his stomach with water.
Sager remembered a young man named Lonnie Riddle from Virginia who was shot through the throat and killed. A guard had ordered him to replace a lightbulb, but the cabinet where the lightbulbs were kept was locked. When Riddle tried to explain, he was shot.
Mellor said he dug the bullet out of the wall and kept it as testimony to the killing. He brought out the bullet to show Sager, in a little frame with a Japanese coin and a few other prison camp reminders.
He also brought out a little can, like a cough drop tin, which he keeps in a strongbox. The tin contains treasures he traded for with other prisoners: a spool of thread, buttons, a small pair of scissors.
For Mellor, his years in the camp remain fresh. He remembers much of the Japanese he learned, and can still count off in Japanese, as the prisoners were required to do. He remembers names, dates and conversations. When he talks long enough, he will begin the same stories again.
Mellor remembers seemingly trivial things, like details of how he and another man smuggled salt into camp, and he remembers the horrors, the seemingly endless incidents of humiliation and unimagineable cruelty.
His wife, Fern, always in the background, fetched papers and other materials for him from his files as he talked.
Mellor has collected books and newspaper clippings about prisoners of war, attends the national convention of Wake survivors every year, and corresponds regularly with a number of them in Idaho and around the country.
Mellor tried to organize a POW group several years ago in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley. The group had 20 members and met monthly at the Moose Hall at Clarkston. But gradually the members stopped coming.
People don't remember the war anymore. Even the government forgot about the prisoners from Wake. But Mellor can't forget, and perhaps his persistence has paid off.
He and Sager and a number of other Wake survivors were awarded POW medals in a ceremony at Fairchild Air Force Base at Spokane a couple of years ago.
Mellor said he finally received notification two months ago he has been given a rank in the Navy. He's an E-4.
He is receiving disability payments for his war injuries, and Fern may qualify for a pension when Mellor dies.
But some of the Wake survivors and their families still aren't receiving benefits. And half of the 1,300 prisoners from Wake, like Cox's father, never came home.
Cox said his mother was left to raise eight children when his father was killed. But the significance of his death seems to have been lost, like the significance of today's date, Sept. 2, VJ Day.
