Rev. Benjamin ‘Ben’ R. Morin, soldier who survived Japanese POW camps, dead at 94

Ben Morin was beaten, tortured and starved in Japanese POW camps for almost all of World War II, but he was not ruined by his ordeal.

It took a long time, but 2nd Lt. Morin forgave his captors, a shift that made him feel renewed. After his post-war return to his hometown of Maywood — where he ran up the front porch and swept his crying mother off her feet — he thought of the priests who ministered tenderly to Allied soldiers in the camps. One “said he’d be content to spend the rest of his life there,” he recalled. “He [said he] was very happy in that prison camp because ‘This is where God wants me. Providence has kept me here.’ He was content to be there and to die there.”

Inspired by those chaplains, he joined the Jesuits less than a year after his liberation, he told “Partners,” a magazine of the religious order. He went on to serve as a priest in Arequipa, Peru, for more than 30 years. Villagers had a special name for Rev. Morin, who journeyed deep into the Andean Mountains to say mass by candlelight in primitive towns.

“They referred to him as ‘gringo macho,’ ” said his sister, Rose Marie Hayes.

Rev. Morin, the first U.S. tank commander to engage enemy forces in World War II — and the last surviving officer of the National Guard’s 192nd Battalion — died on April 23 in Clarkston, Michigan, at the Columbiere home for senior Jesuits. He was 94.

Many Maywood men suffered in POW camps in the Philippines and on the infamous 65-mile Bataan Death March, where Japanese captors drove sick and wounded Americans and Filipinos beyond exhaustion into death, bayoneting, shooting and beheading those who fell behind.

These late-1930s graduates of Proviso Township High School, including 2nd Lt. Morin, were weekend warriors. They had enlisted in the 33rd Tank Company at the National Guard armory in Maywood. As Europe devolved into war, the 33rd Tank Company was activated and renamed Company B of the 192nd. On Nov. 20, 1941, the men deployed to the Philippines.

Within days, American forces were under fire at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, and Lt. Morin was leading five tanks through the jungle to attack the Japanese.

With that, he made history. Morin led “the first U.S. tank engagement of World War II,” said Lt. Col. Brad Leighton, a spokesman for the Illinois National Guard.

The other four tanks made it back safely, but his was set ablaze. He and three other soldiers surrendered, leading to a 3½-year ordeal in camps in the Philippines and Japan, where dysentery, dengue fever, malaria, beriberi, scurvy and diphtheria ran rampant. He and other Americans were pummeled for refusing to bow to their captors. Once, he once saw a Japanese officer beat two Filipino prisoners to death with a baseball bat, he said on the Proviso East website, where students have preserved the memories of veterans.

Always, he prayed. “He said, ‘Let’s put ourselves under the protection of the Blessed Mother, and she will see us through this’ — and they all three survived,” his sister said. His early capture meant he missed the Bataan Death March.

Eventually, he was moved to a camp in Japan, where temperatures fell below freezing at night. The lice were so bad, the men rinsed out their clothes in icy water to stun them and pick them off.

Assigned to a burial detail, he picked up a body and recognized Sgt. Jack Griswold, a high school classmate, he told Proviso East students.

Caught attempting to steal bread, “I was beaten with kendo sticks across the back and buttocks. My hands were twisted behind my back and I had pencils wedged between my fingers to break the skin as they twisted my hands,” he said on a blog. His daily rations were cut to half a cup of rice and thin soup.

Once Japan surrendered, B-29s air-dropped so much food into the camp, “I put on 40 pounds the first 30 days,” he said on the blog.

After retiring in 1999, he moved to the Jesuit Columbiere Center, where he especially enjoyed the company of female nurses and visitors, said the Rev. John Libens. “He’d always give the ladies a kiss,” he said.

Of his captors, the most he would say was, “ ‘They were not the nicest people,’ ” said Maj. David Pond of the National Guard’s 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

He also is survived by another sister, Audrey Morin Gearhart, and his brothers, Arthur, George and Paul Morin. A funeral Mass is scheduled Wednesday at the Columbiere Center in Clarkston, Michigan.

Of about 86 men who shipped out from Maywood’s Company B, only half came back, said Edwin H. Walker IV, vice president of the Maywood Bataan Day Organization. With the death of Rev. Morin, he said, two people are left from Company B.