The Lee Professorship/ By Martha Andresen
Nothing But Praise

The story of the late Henry Garnsey Lee ’37 is a story of buried treasure, of great gifts brought to light out of the darkest of circumstances. To honor the memory of this talented young poet who lost his life during World War II, a donor to the College has endowed a new chair—the Henry G. Lee ’37 Professorship of English—recently filled by acclaimed poet and accomplished teacher Claudia Rankine.

The gift from an anonymous donor was occasioned by a chance encounter with Lee’s story in Hampton Sides’ book, Ghost Soldier, which documents a nearly forgotten mission during the closing year of the war—the rescue from Cabanatuan, a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, of 513 prisoners of war, many of them American survivors of the Bataan Death March. Called the most daring raid in U.S. military history, this feat is also the subject of a recently released film called The Great Raid.

Absent from the film but a key presence in the book is a soldier called the “Cabanatuan poet,” a young man “universally beloved” by his comrades there: First Lieutenant Henry Lee.

Lee had been imprisoned in wretched conditions in the Cabanatuan Prison Camp since 1942, following the fall of Bataan. Serving with the Philippine Scouts, Lee had survived battle and the Death March, but tragically, three years later, he was not among those rescued. Months before, he had been removed, along with 1,600 other prisoners deemed strong enough to be shipped to Japan as slave laborers. Kept for months in the notorious Bilibid Prison in Manila, they were forced en masse, without light, air or water, into the hold of a Japanese ship, only to be bombed by American fliers, unaware of the POWs within. Survivors, including Lee, were then forced into another doomed ship. The Enoura Maru was also mistakenly bombed on Jan. 1, 1945. In this second attack Lee died. As the ship sank, hundreds of dead Americans were thrown by their captors into a cargo net, hoisted by crane onto a barge, and then, on a nearby beach, buried in a mass grave. Lee’s parents in Pasadena were told only that he was “Killed in Action.”

Preceding this catastrophe was a burial of another sort, a provident one, followed months later by a fortuitous recovery. Before Lee was taken from Cabanatuan, he had buried a treasure beneath the Nipa hut that had been the camp’s library. It was a small notebook, later described by his mother as “a Filipino child’s copy book of yellow paper,” which he had carefully wrapped in layers of canvas, then placed a foot deep within the dirt, hoping that after the war it would be found, and that what he had written there would be read and remembered. Printed in pencil, with corrections in red, was a collection of poems titled “Nothing But Praise.”

In his preface to this little volume, Lee had written:

The balance of these verses were hastily written in Japanese Military Prison Camp No.1, Cabanatuan, P.I., between October ’42 and June ’44. For such a collection, I feel that no apology is necessary. I make no pretense to being anything other than a layman, who, during an intense mental and physical experience, found verse the most effective means of recording his reactions—and incidentally, of ridding himself of some otherwise almost unbearable emotions. The best I can say of the majority of these poems is that they are as true as I could make them; the worst, that they are not written by a talented nor experienced poet.

The book’s title, Lee said, captures the terrible irony of his circumstance, shared by all those who had been abandoned in the Philippines after the Pacific Fleet—their one hope for rescue—had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor and America’s major efforts had turned to the European front. Lee’s title, he said, “was taken from a quotation which I believe was made by Secretary of War Stimson after the fall of Bataan and before Corregedor’s surrender: ‘We have nothing but praise for the men of Bataan.’ The sentence was much quoted during the fighting and after we became prisoners, with the half-sincere facetious bitterness which is so typical of Americans. It became a catch phrase—certainly without its original meaning.”
A month after Lee’s death, his collection of 34 poems was rescued in the “Great Raid.” Combat photographer John Leuddeke returned to the camp the day after liberation when alerted by a prisoner that documents might be buried there. Digging by the camp library, he found Lee’s notebook and gave it to his commanding officer, who sent it to Lee’s mother. Leuddeke later wrote to her: “I am very happy that I was allowed the privilege of bringing this wonderful manuscript to light.”

This incomparable gift to Lee’s mother then reached a wider world when she submitted several poems to the Saturday Evening Post, which published them in November 1945. Publication in several other national magazines followed. The entire volume was published by the Philippine Arts Council in Pasadena in 1945, followed by a second edition in 1985.
Every poem within this volume has the power of aching honesty, the raw truth of a soldier’s suffering and courage, and the comfort he finds in words. Among the most moving of Lee’s poems is “Anniversary of Parting,” surely a remembrance, during the desperation of his long imprisonment, of his Pomona days and a long-lost youthful innocence and joy:

Somewhere there lives a woman I suppose
Who once was you. All night I fought my brain,
All night with burning eyes that ached to close
I probed the whirling darkness while the rain
Played on the nipa with a rhythmic stamp,
And as forgotten memories seared my heart
The restless mutter of the prison camp
Mocked at the empty years we’ve been apart.
But now the hills that race the tropic dawn
Across a sky ablaze with pagan joy
Have touched me with their strength. Though you are gone
I guard one treasure nothing can destroy—
Across a spring green, a sunlit campus lawn
A golden girl laughs with her dark-haired boy.

A poem in a different mood, signaling his grim present reality and what was to be, is “Lethal Epidemic,” a poem probably occasioned by the diphtheria or dysentery epidemics that frequently swept through the camp:

I could not know the meaning nor the way,
I was not one with all that time must end,
Until one hopeless, joyless, bitter day
I looked at unmasked death and saw a friend.

Before death came to Lee, he left another legacy, a series of letters he wrote to his parents and sister in Pasadena during his war years. His family saved these letters; one in particular, written from the field in Bataan in 1942, was widely published:

I have seen some horrible things happen, and have had my share of narrow escapes, but I have also seen some very wonderful acts of courage, self-sacrifice, and loyalty. And I have found what I have searched for all my life—a cause and a job in which I can lose myself completely and to which I can give every ounce of my strength and my mind. And I have mentally and spiritually conquered my fear of death.

My prayer each night is that God will send you, who are suffering so much more than I am, His strength and peace. During the first few days of war I also prayed for personal protection from physical harm, but now I see that is something for which I have no right to ask, and I pray now that I may be given strength to bear whatever I must bear, and do whatever I must do so that those men under me will have every reasonable chance.

Life and my family have been very good to me—and have given me everything I have ever really wanted, and should anything happen to me here it will not be like closing a book in the middle as it would have been had I been killed in the first days of the war. For in the last two months I have done a lifetime of living, and have been a part of one of the most unselfish cooperative efforts that has ever been made by any group of individuals. ... If the same selfless spirit were devoted to world betterment in time of peace, what a good world we would have.

Such treasures bear witness to the gifts of character and expression that the Henry G. Lee ’37 Professorship is intended to memorialize. However brief his life, Henry Lee too was loyal to the College, bearing his added riches in trust for mankind.