Hilton Head WWII vet knows cost of freedom, joy of peace

This aging vet found freedom in a prison camp.

It was in the Philippines at the end of World War II, light years from his comfortable retirement on Hilton Head Island.

John D. “Tex” Farrington Jr. was a 25-year-old Army captain when the epiphany came that he could make lifelong friends among the enemy.

With no training, Farrington was ordered to command that camp of 3,000 Japanese diehards. It ended up freeing him from a hatred that had been building since Pearl Harbor.

His heart had been softened weeks earlier when he was among the first Westerners to view the horror left in Hiroshima by an atom bomb named “Little Boy.”

“We left shaken, stunned,” he says in a booklet written as a message of hope for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren called “Waging the Peace.”

“We were changed forever. We felt only profound compassion. The leaders of the world today should have shared this.”

He would have today’s leaders see the wilted leaves and experience the dead silence.

He would have them see a pathetic, makeshift hospital on the edge of the city.

“Dying souls huddled on mats, skin and bones, losing hair in clumps,” he writes. “Some had huge keloid scars protruding from their ragged limbs. Sighs and moans, fetid, putrid stench, a few corpses, more to come.”

On this Fourth of July weekend, 95-year-old Farrington worries that these are lessons the world has forgotten.

FOUR FREEDOMS

Farrington still doesn’t know why he was spared from the effects of radiation.

He was on temporary assignment to inspect defense installations in the Hiroshima area after Japan surrendered and before the arrival of tens of thousands of occupying troops.

This took him to the small town of Hiro, where he and the mayor exchanged promises of good will. The mayor presented him a folded Japanese national flag that had flown over city hall.

“I nodded; they bowed,” Farrington recalls. “It was the beginning of a profound change in attitude that affected all the years to come. It was, in a way, my epiphany.”

For the next nine months, before gliding home under the Golden Gate Bridge to a young wife and baby, Farrington was ordered to command a POW camp.

He laughs about building a 32-hole outhouse.

“It was the wonder of the area,” he said.

He shunned corporal punishment for the Japanese troops who arrived in cattle trucks wormy, wounded and emaciated.

He says he went by the principle that each man was valuable to rebuilding the destruction he had just seen.

He wanted them to learn the “four freedoms of democracy: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of initiative (enterprise) and freedom of speech.”

He said he held Sunday afternoon meetings where the Japanese and the Americans could ask each other any questions. They discussed checks and balances, the three branches of government, MacArthur and emperors.

“It was the thrill of a lifetime for hundreds of them and for me.”

FULL CIRCLE

Kenji Mizushima was small, soft-spoken and born of humble circumstances.

Farrington appointed him adjutant of the POW camp.

They became close friends, and now three generations of both families have exchanged visits, letters and gifts.

After the war, Kenji became a successful real estate investor and railroad executive.

Farrington also succeeded in a career in protective packaging. He retired to Hilton Head in 1985, but it would be a decade later before he and fellow members of his Princeton University class of 1942 started opening up about the war.

When Farrington decided it was time for the Japanese flag from Hiro to go home, he turned to Kenji’s son, a professor at the University of Tokyo with a television show on public policy.

In a ceremony on Oct. 7, 2011, the flag was presented to the mayor by the granddaughter of the mayor who had given it to Farrington 66 years earlier.

The flag’s journey symbolizes one of Farrington’s two messages to the world in his twilight years.

One is that people who think they hate each other can learn to respect each other.

But his more urgent message is reflected in today’s headlines on Iranian nuclear power. Farrington warns of the danger of atomic weapons.

“Its proliferation can end society as we know it,” he said. “It’s a very, very serious situation, but people don’t seem to give a bloody hoot about it.”