Don W. Butler, 91; Engineer Was a POW in World War II
By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008;
Don W. Butler, who went to Wake Island in the Pacific in 1940 to help build a military base and ended up a prisoner of war, died of complications of a subdural hematoma Feb. 20 at George Washington University Hospital. He was 91.
Working for the firm Contractors Pacific Naval Bases, Mr. Butler joined about 1,000 other civilian contractors who had come to help the Marines and other service members transform the desolate coral strip into a strategic naval air station and submarine base.
Mr. Butler, who was a mechanical engineer, also volunteered to be part of a civilian defense force to help the Marines if the atoll were attacked. He took weapons classes from Marine instructors with about 200 other contractors.
"We learned to strip the [machine] gun on a ground sheet . . . change barrels, belt ammo, feed ammo into the gun, clear a jam, and fire the weapon," Mr. Butler later testified, according to an account in "The Siege of Wake Island: Facing Fearful Odds" (1997) by George J.W. Urwin.
Urwin wrote that at the time, Mr. Butler and his fellow trainees never thought Wake Island would need them to defend it. "The classes with the Marines simply offered the Contractors an opportunity to escape the monotony of atoll life," he wrote.
But Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese assault on Wake Island began. Until Dec. 23, Mr. Butler and several hundred other U.S. civilian contractors fought alongside about 445 Marines and a few sailors and Army radiomen in a fierce yet relatively small battle that came to symbolize the defiant spirit of the American people.
During the fighting, Mr. Butler suffered bayonet wounds to his left arm.
No longer able to hold off their attackers, the group of Marines, soldiers, sailors and civilians was captured. On Oct. 1, 1942, Mr. Butler and 264 of the prisoners were moved by ship to Yokohama. Five civilians, including Mr. Butler, were sent to a Japanese naval interrogation camp in Ofuna in Japan.
Mr. Butler worked in the Mitsubishi Shipyard until it was destroyed in B-29 raids, then was moved with 150 other POWs to Kamaishi, Japan, to work in the Sumitomo Steel Works. His family, thinking that he was dead, did not know he was a prisoner until May 1943.
In the summer of 1945, a U.S. fleet of battleships, cruisers and destroyers shelled the steel mill for about seven hours. Dozens of POWs were killed. In October of that year, Mr. Butler was freed.
Mr. Butler was a native of Clarion, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State University, where he was a wrestling champion. He also received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and a PhD in earthquake engineering from Nihon University in Tokyo in 1969.
Mr. Butler returned to Japan for war trials and, not one to sit idle, formed a business partnership there. From 1951 to 1961, he worked in the architecture and engineering firm of Baker, Butler and Triplett, which designed heavy industrial plants and military facilities and had offices in Honolulu, Tokyo, Okinawa and Manila.
For more than two decades, he worked with the Army Corps of Engineers and rose to deputy chief of the engineering division for military construction. He retired from the Corps in 1985 and worked for the State Department in Rosslyn for several years.
In 1983, he received a Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Executive.
Mr. Butler, a resident of Arlington County and Falls Church for 44 years, was granted active military service credit in 1988 for his participation in World War II and was awarded the Purple Heart and other medals.
A noted technical engineer, he was project engineer for the Lunar Rover and co-wrote several books on earthquake engineering. He also took part in a White House study on the effects of major earthquakes in California.
His other honors included a distinguished service award from the Second World Conference on Earthquake Engineering.
His wife, Naomi Vincent Butler, died in the late 1970s.
Survivors include a sister.
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Don W. Butler, 91; Engineer.Civilian fighter and Survivor of Wake Island
For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman
