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Another family tragedy
occurred in 1942 when tall, lanky, 20-year-old Howard Kirkman of Manhattan, NY, son
of Frank and Mary Kirkman, one of CWK III’s adopted children,
died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Philippines. During the depths of the Great Depression, Howard dropped out of high school and like many American teenagers joined one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s make work programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps. Howard spent 17 months as a firefighter in CCC camps in Oregon, Montana and Washington. |
| In May 1941, he joined the Army and had the terrible luck to be assigned to the Army Air Corps’ 680th Ordnance Company, a unit that was shipped to the Philippines in October 1941 and attached to the Far Eastern Air Force. Howard was a private first class at Nichols Field outside Manila when the war began. After the FEAF was wrecked by Japanese bombers in December 1941, Howard’s company retreated to Bataan and handled the armaments of a handful of P-40 fighter-bombers that harried the Japanese from January 1942 to April 8, 1942 when the Battered Bastards of Bataan surrendered. Howard was one of 12,000 Americans who survived the ghastly Bataan Death March and was imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan. But he succumbed to malnutrition, malaria and dysentery on July 11, 1942 in Cabanatuan, 100 miles north of Manila, and was tossed into a pit with 30 other Americans who died that day. After the war, it took Air Force forensic investigators five years to identify his remains which were reburied in Air Force Military Cemetery No. 2 near Manila. Howard’s sergeant remembers the tall, quiet youngster as "a good kid." His mother, Mary Bush Kirkman Corwin, received Howard’s posthumous Purple Heart. Howard was one of five Kirkmans to die during World War II. The other four were from Illinois, Kansas and Missouri. Family members who visit the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. will find PFC Howard Kirkman’s name on the memorial’s Registry of Remembrances.
Two Kirkman cousins, Edward and Albert Koch (sons of Alice Foster Koch, a sister of Edith Foster Kirkman) served in the Army during World War II. Ed was a rifleman in the 98th "Iroquois" Infantry Division in the Pacific, one of the units slated to invade the Japanese home islands in November, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki canceled the invasion and ended the war. Ed always claimed the A-bomb saved his life because the Battle of Japan would have caused tremendous American casualties. A brother-in-law, Paul Rossi, husband of Natalie Kirkman’s sister Gloria, saw extensive combat with the 2nd "Indian Head" division in Europe. Also a rifleman, Paul landed in Normandy 48 hours after D-Day and participated in the siege of Brest and the Battles of France and the Bulge in 1944. He also participated in the final offensive that overwhelmed Nazi Germany in 1945. Paul won the Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman’s badge. |
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