POW Files Suit for Compensation

For nearly three years during World War II, Lester I. Tenney shoveled for 12 hours a day as a prisoner of war laboring half a mile underground, stripping the last scraps of coal from a Japanese mine deemed too dangerous for civilian workers.

“Many times, we knew how the war was going by how we were beaten,” Tenney, a retired college professor who lives in San Diego, recalled Wednesday. If things were going well for the Allies, the beatings were harsher, he said.

More than 50 years later, Tenney, who is 79, wants the multinational corporation that made billions of dollars from that coal mine to compensate him for his work and the cruelty he says he endured during his forced labor.

Tenney filed a novel lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court that is likely to serve as a test case of legislation enacted two weeks ago giving California courts jurisdiction over an emerging legal specialty--World War II slave labor cases. He seeks unspecified damages on counts including forced labor, slavery, civil assault and battery, and infliction of emotional distress. The law, written by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), allows POWs to sue private corporations for compensation for the work they performed and for damages for inhumane working conditions. It extends the statute of limitations in such cases to 2010.

While its origins lie in the legal claims filed by Holocaust survivors, the law also applies to corporations that allegedly enslaved POWs during the war in the South Pacific, said Tenney’s lawyer, David S. Casey Jr. He said he believes Tenney is the first POW to sue under the new law.

Named as defendants in Tenney’s suit are Mitsui & Co. Ltd. of Japan and New York and Mitsui Mining Co. Casey said the corporations profited from “unconscionable” exploitation of tens of thousands of prisoners of war, and “subjected them to physical and mental abuse and torture.”

Tenney claims that besides being regularly beaten and tortured, he suffered a broken nose, gashes on his face, knocked-out teeth, and sword and bayonet wounds to his shoulder and leg. The mining conditions were unsafe, the suit says, “and there were many cave-ins and tunnel collapses” that killed or dismembered POWs.

A Mitsui spokesman in New York declined to comment and referred calls to the parent company in Tokyo, where a spokesman could not be reached. The Japanese government is not a party to the suit.

The court papers claim that Allied POWs were executed, tortured, abused and intentionally starved by their Japanese captors. Those who survived, the suit claims, “were enslaved and forced to work for years under inhumane conditions for private Japanese business entities.”

The former POWs, the suit states, now “deserve to receive fair compensation, however long delayed, for their forced labor and for the atrocities committed against them. . . . Indeed, this is their last chance for justice.”

Tenney’s tale, as told in court papers, is typical, “a story of suffering and cruelty of the highest degree,” the suit says.

As a newlywed, he enlisted in the National Guard before the war, and was trained as a member of a tank crew. In October 1941, he was ordered to San Francisco and shipped to the Philippines. By December, he found himself in the middle of the war with Japan. He survived the Bataan Death March. His most horrifying moment, he says, was the instant he helplessly watched his captors behead a fellow prisoner whose malaria left him too weak to walk.

He spent 32 days crammed into the hold of a “hell ship,” the Japanese freighter Toro Maru, with 500 prisoners before reaching Japan, where a train carried him to Mitsui’s Miike coal mines in Omuta.

There, his suit says, Tenney “and those of his comrades who lived, were forced to perform backbreaking manual labor under extraordinarily harsh conditions, while being subjected to countless physical assaults.” He weighed barely 105 pounds--about 60 pounds less than what he weighed before the war--and subsisted on skimpy rations of soup and rice.

He was beaten when he didn’t shovel quickly enough. “Hayaku! hayaku!”-- Faster! Faster!--he says his captors shouted as the shovel and pick handles, chains and wooden canes came down on his back.

One thing kept him going--the thought that if he survived, he would some day return home to his bride. But his homecoming was heartbreaking; he learned that she had remarried after being told that he was missing in action and presumed dead.

Even now, the memory of his lost love brings a catch to his voice and a tear to his eye. He married a second time, but the union ended in divorce. His third marriage has lasted. “It’s been a wonderful life the past 39 years,” he says.

He became a teacher, and then a college professor. He is now retired. He has written a book on his war experiences, called “My Hitch in Hell,” and for years he stayed in touch with his fellow former POWs. Now, he says, time is running out; seven fellow captives died last year. Those still alive, he says, deserve a paycheck for work they performed under brutal conditions half a century ago.