When Kenneth Schacht was freed from a Japanese POW camp at the end of World War II, he took home an unusual reminder of his grim experience - some 70 drawings of his three and half years of hunger, deprivation and torment.
His secret drawings - some resembling cartoons, others more shaded and serious - didn't explicitly portray the beatings, the deaths from starvation and overwork, and the other depravities levied upon POWs in Japan. But they offer a rare glimpse into a life concealed from much of the world during those painful years.
"He was a fantastic artist," said his daughter, Marcia McInerney of Annapolis, Md. "It kept him mentally straight."
Schacht grew up in Skagit County, one of four sons of William and Evelyn Schacht, owners of the department store that bore the family name in Burlington. Schacht died in 1985 at the age of 71.
The last of the four brothers, Bill, a teacher at Bellingham Technical College, died last year.
Surviving relatives include two Bellingham nephews named Fred Schacht; one a retired insurance businessman, the other the owner of Benchmark Document Solutions, a downtown business.
Described by one writer as "tall but thick," Kenneth Schacht excelled at sports, earning varsity letters in football, wrestling and lacrosse at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1935.
He was a first lieutenant aboard a submarine, the USS Perch, in the Pacific when Japanese pilots attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. A few months after the outbreak of war, Schacht and his crewmates narrowly escaped disaster at sea, but fell under the control of Japanese guards and interrogators for the remainder of the war.
As an officer, Schacht should have been afforded extra consideration as a prisoner of war, but that wasn't always the case in Japanese camps.
According to Laura Hillenbrand's new bestseller "Unbroken," the story of an aviator imprisoned by the Japanese, American POWs in German and Italy fared much better than those held in Japan. Of the nearly 35,000 U.S. POWs held by Japan, more than a third, almost 13,000, died during captivity.
Six Perch crewmen died as POWs. Schacht and 52 other crew members survived.
"He was so abused," said McInerney, now 65. "He never wanted to talk about what he went through."
STRICKEN SUB
On Feb. 25, 1942, the Perch surfaced to attack a Japanese freighter, but the freighter fired first with its deck gun, damaging the sub's conning tower.
Four days later, while running at the surface at night in the Java Sea, a Japanese destroyer fired at the sub. The Perch dove and hit bottom 147 feet down. Depth charges damaged the sub, but the destroyer left, apparently persuaded that oil on the sea meant the Perch had been sunk.
The next morning, March 2, a destroyer saw that the Perch had resurfaced. The Perch dove 200 feet and became stuck on the bottom as 30 more depth charges were dropped. Again, the Japanese left after air bubbles smelling of diesel burst the surface.
The Perch later surfaced at dusk with extensive damage.
"We had to limp away, hopefully to some shallow water area where we could stay barely submerged during the day," Schacht later wrote. "We could surface at night and work on the damage. That was the thinking."
They tried a test dive, but couldn't stay below. Later that morning, Japanese ships saw the Perch low in the water, unable to dive and unable to defend itself. With no other choice, the crew sank classified material in weighted bags and jumped into the water to await an uncertain future.
"Somewhere along the line our cook had shoved a couple of turkeys into the ovens," Schacht later wrote. "They were never touched but we were to think about them a lot over the next 31/2 years."
To scuttle the sub and keep it out of enemy hands, Schacht and another crewman ran to the engine room to open vents, then dashed a goodly distance to the sole open hatch. Schacht was the last man out, fighting through a torrent of water in the hatch, by then below the surface.
Schacht didn't mention his role in the scuttling in a 1972 article, but the Navy certainly valued his contribution. He received the Navy Cross, the service's second-highest award, below only the Medal of Honor, for his effort to repair the sub and then, when all else failed, to scuttle it.
The Perch was one of 52 U.S. subs lost in the war. Japans took POWs from seven of them.
HIGH-VALUE PRISONER
Schacht was soon taken to Ofuna, a camp in Japan where officers, submariners and aviators were, in Hillenbrand's words, "starved, tormented, and tortured" with the hope they would divulge military details.
Under questioning, Schacht sometimes lied and sometimes mentioned submarine information readily available elsewhere. At one point, he was placed in solitary confinement on a starvation diet for 10 days, according to "Presumed Lost," Texas writer Stephen Moore's book about submarine POWs during the war in the Pacific.
Schacht was sent to a hospital twice for dysentery, Moore writes. One time, he was beaten on his kidneys and buttocks for talking to a nurse. Another time, he was struck in the jaw numerous times for allegedly watching a Japanese plane fly over the hospital, even though he was asleep at the time.
Schacht spent time in several other POW camps, including the last two and a half months of the war at Rokuroshi, an isolated, frigid camp for more than 300 U.S. prisoners on a 6,500-foot peak in western Japan.
On Aug. 15, 1945, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan announced its surrender. Five days later, the camp commander at Rokuroshi presented the news to his prisoners.
Within a few days, pallets of food began to drop from the sky from U.S. planes. An American flag, long hidden by a POW, was raised over the camp.
Along with his drawings, Schacht left with a one-page, 1,200-word "loss report" about the Perch that he had written while a prisoner.
GETTING ON
After the war, Schacht finished out his 32 years of active duty in the Navy. Among various assignments, he commanded the Pacific submarine fleet and chaired the department of seamanship and navigation at the Naval Academy.
McInerney said her father sometimes talked to midshipmen about his experiences in the war and showed them his drawings. But he didn't reveal much about his time in the war to her, his only child.
"He did his thing," she said. "He did what he had to do, and that was it."
Fred Schacht, the retired insurance businessman, didn't see his uncle Kenneth often, but recalls visiting him at the Naval Academy in the 1970s.
During dinner in the officers' club, Fred Schacht didn't finish the peas on his plate. His uncle, the decorated war hero and POW, put the uneaten peas on his own plate and finished them off.
"He still couldn't stand to see food go to waste," Fred Schacht said.
MORE INFORMATION
• Military service stories and photographs submitted by Whatcom County veterans and their families will appear on Veterans Day, Friday, Nov. 11, in The Bellingham Herald. For a look at stories submitted in years past, go to our Veterans Day web page.
• To learn more about POWs held by the Japanese, read "Presumed Lost" by Stephen Moore and "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand.
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