5 – 6 MAY 1942 | THE FALL OF CORREGIDOR — AND THE BEGINNING OF A LONGER ORDEAL
Eighty-four years ago today, a young man from the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York was spending his 25th birthday under relentless Japanese bombardment — fighting for his life, and for an island that could not be saved.
The hell would come soon enough.
Private Joseph Minder of the 803rd Engineer Aviation Battalion had been fighting and surviving since the Japanese attack on the Philippines in December 1941 — retreating across Luzon, digging foxholes on Bataan, watching friends die, eating whatever he could find. By the time Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, Joe had made it across the water to the fortress island of Corregidor, where the shelling never really stopped.
He kept writing it all down — on cigarette paper and scraps, hidden from his captors.
May 5, 1942:
“Plenty of fireworks to celebrate my birthday today! The Japs have been shelling and bombing continually since early this morning. All communications have been cut off from the other end of Corregidor!”
11:00 p.m.:
“For the past three hours, there hasn’t been a single break in the hundreds of shells which hit this end of the island!”
11:30 p.m.:
“INVASION!”
That night, Joe and a group of men loaded into a truck — its tires flat from shrapnel — and drove over a shell-blasted road to set up a machine gun on a small hill overlooking the beach. They held through the night. One of his close calls came when an American soldier, mistaking him for a Japanese sniper in the darkness, opened up on him with a tommy gun.
Then came daylight.
May 6, 1942 — 8:00 a.m.:
“By this time we have suffered many losses; we managed, however, to continue holding back the main force of Japs until they started landing tanks. With no guns left to combat the tanks, we were forced to surrender at noon. Then is when I received the bad news of Drake’s and Bailey’s deaths, two very close buddies of mine.”
General Jonathan Wainwright had already radioed President Roosevelt: “There is a limit of human endurance, and that point has long been passed.” The formal surrender on May 6 marked the complete fall of the Philippines — the largest surrender of American-led forces in U.S. history. Joe Minder, exhausted, scratched, and now a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army, climbed on top of a stack of empty ammunition boxes and slept until the Japanese came and stripped him of his belongings.
What followed was a descent that is almost beyond comprehension. The 92nd Garage holding pen. Starvation and disease. By July 1942 — early in his captivity — Joe weighed 115 pounds, and things would only get worse. He would endure the horrors of the hellships — crammed into the holds of unmarked vessels dodging American torpedoes and bombs — writing in his diary as he crossed the seas: “I hate to think of dodging those torpedoes and bombs on the open seas again, but God saved us on that last trip and if he answers our prayers, we will make this okay, also.”
Eventually he ended up slaving in a freezing copper mine in northern Japan, carrying 70-pound bags of ore on 16-hour days while being beaten by guards. By 1945, men were passing out on the job — walking skeletons, in their own words. Nearly forty percent of the 27,000 American slave laborers did not survive captivity.
Joe did.
August 20, 1945:
“War’s end was officially announced by interpreter, ‘Mosiki,’ at 1:15 p.m.! Still hard to believe!”
Two days later came a moment he would carry for the rest of his life. The camp tailor had worked through the night to construct an American flag — blue from a GI barracks bag, red from a Japanese comforter, white from an Australian bed sheet. Joe walked out of the barracks and saw it flying.
August 22, 1945:
“After three and a half years of starvation and brutal treatment, that beautiful symbol of freedom once more flies over our head! When I came out of the barracks and saw those beautiful colors for the first time, I felt like crying! I know now, like I never did before, what it means to be able to live in a peaceful nation like the U.S.A. with its unlimited amount of liberties and freedom.”
The B-29s dropped supplies. Joe ate his first doughnuts since May 1942. He gained 13 pounds in 19 days, packed his belongings — stuffed into old barracks bags that had come all the way from Bataan — and boarded a train for the coast. He sailed home past Corregidor on October 10.
The joyful reunion was tempered by the news that his mother had died while he was in captivity.
Joe Minder came home to North Creek, New York, married Hazel Allen in 1948, raised two sons, worked at the local garnet mine, and became a beloved ski instructor — patiently teaching the community’s young people the sport he had loved since the age of seven. He gave back through his church, his fire department, and countless civic organizations.
Despite everything he had endured — the beatings, the starvation, the years of brutal captivity — he never harbored bitterness or hatred. His ethos of patience, kindness, and compassion for others shines forth in every page of his diary, and was confirmed in the way he lived out his days. That, too, is something we cherish as Americans — the capacity to suffer greatly in freedom’s defense, and then come home and quietly build something good.
When Joseph Minder passed away in 2006 at the age of 88, the entire community grieved. The local ski bowl lodge was named in his honor.
He kept writing. And because he did, we remember.
The full story of Joe Minder and the men of the 803rd Engineer Aviation Battalion, and our nurses, Marines, Army and Airmen, and Navy, is told in my the first and eighth volumes of my series The Things Our Fathers Saw: Voices of the Pacific Theater/On to Tokyo.
— Matthew Rozell, May 5, 2026
Teaching History Matters 