In the 61 years since then, this remarkable man has inspired a growing number of admirers. After his death, the Army recognized his service with a Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross. Today, he is being considered for the Medal of Honor by the President and for canonization by the Vatican.

The Post acquainted its readers with him in 1954, when it carried Ray M. Dowe, Jr.’s account of “The Ordeal of Chaplain Kapaun.” Dowe had been in the same prison, and knew how the Captain’s self-sacrifice had helped save the lives of many GIs.

Even before his internment, Dowe said, Father Kapaun had become a legend. He visited front-line troops on an old bicycle after his jeep was destroyed.

Helmet jammed down over his ears, pockets stuffed with apples and peaches he had scrounged from Korean orchards, he’d ride this bone-shaker over the rocky roads and the paths through the paddy fields until he came to the forward outposts. There he’d drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole.

It was his devotion to the wounded that finally cost him his freedom, and his life.

On November 2, 1950, the 8^th Cavalry was encircled by Communist troops at Unsan. The soldiers were ordered to get past the enemy as best they could and regroup behind American lines.

Father Kapaun, who was unwounded, might have escaped with them. He refused to go. Of his own free will he stayed on, helping Captain Clarence L. Anderson, the regimental surgeon, take care of the wounded. And there, just at dark, the Chinese took him as he said the last prayers over a dying man.

Kapaun and Dowe were marched to a prison camp where they were barely kept alive on 500 grams of millet or cracked corn every day.

Korea 1950: An exhausted soldier is evacuated by Capt. Jerome Dolan and Chaplain Kaplaun.

Then they cut it down to 450 grams. It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly starve. And in that dangerous enterprise we must have the help of some power beyond ourselves. So, standing before us all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who was crucified at the right hand of Jesus, asking for his aid. I’ll never doubt the power of prayer again. Father, it seemed, could not fail.

At the risk of being shot by the guards, he’d sneak at night into the little fields around the compound… and find hidden potatoes and grain.

When men were called out to [the supply shed] Father would slip in at the end of the line [then] slide off into the bushes… He’d come up behind the shed, and while the rest of us started a row with the guards doling out the rations, he’d sneak in, snatch up a sack of cracked corn and scurry off into the bushes with it.

Father Kapaun took his greatest risks, Dowe said, to slip away with food and supplies to the isolated house where the wounded were kept.

He scrounged cotton undershirts to make bandages. He took their old bandages, foul with corruption, and sneaked them out and washed them and sneaked them back again. He picked the lice from their bodies, an inestimable service, for a man so weak he cannot pick his own lice soon will die.

He joked with them, and said prayers for them, and held them in his arms like children as delirium came upon them. But the main thing he did for them was to put into their hearts the will to live. For when you are wounded and sick and starving, it’s easy to give up and quietly die.

He gathered and washed the foul undergarments of the dead and distributed them to men so weak from dysentery they could not move, and he washed and tended these men as if they were little babies.

He traded his watch for a blanket, and cut it up to make warm socks for helpless men whose feet were freezing.

He did a thousand little things to keep us going.

Inevitably, Kapaun fell victim to the starvation and harsh conditions that struck down so many of his comrades. Captain Anderson, the camp surgeon, nursed him through two serious illnesses. Kapaun had just recovered from them when he contracted pneumonia and fell into a delirious fever.

I believe that period of semiconsciousness was the only happy time he knew during his captivity. Around him there seemed to gather all the people he had known in his boyhood on the farm in Kansas and in his school days. Babbling happily, sometimes laughing, he spoke to his mother and his father, and to the priests he’d known in seminary.

Finally, he sank into a deep and quiet sleep, and when he awoke, he was completely rational. The crisis had passed. He was getting well.

He was sitting up, eating and cracking jokes, when the guards came with a litter to take him to the hospital [where] men in extremis were left to lie untended in filth and freezing cold, until merciful death took them.

The doctors protested violently, but the Chinese ordered Kapaun onto a stretcher and forbad anyone from going along to care for him.

Father himself made no protest. He looked around the room at all of us standing there, and smiled. He held in his hands the golden ciborium, the little covered cup in which, long ago, he had carried the blessed communion bread.

“Tell them back home that I died a happy death,” he said, and smiled again.

Then he turned to me. “Don’t take it hard, Mike,” he said. “I’m going where I’ve always wanted to go. And when I get up there, I’ll say a prayer for all of you.”

I stood there, crying unashamed, as they took him down the road, the little gold cup still shining in his hand. Beside me stood Fezi Gurgin, a Turkish lieutenant, a Mohammedan. “To Allah who is my God,” said Fezi Bey, “I will say a prayer for him.”

A few days later he was dead.

We hasten to add that Emil J. Kapaun, while a remarkable and inspiring individual, made no greater sacrifice than any of the 36,000 Americans who died in that war, or the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives defending this country.

All are heroes. All deserve to be remembered for the price they paid for our liberty.

Father Kapaun helping a wounded comrade. Statue located in Pilsen, Kansas. Image taken by Art Davis… Wikipedia

The Non-Combatant Hero: Emil Kapaun The Saturday Evening Post

We’ve come a long way in the past century, when the government discharged veterans with little help to resume their lives and careers, and Americans viewed their return as a challenge to their standard of living. As a Post editorial observed,

In time, millions of Americans will be released from military service and return to civil life… [already] war’s enormous demands upon industry are diminishing or have ceased.

A good many people are disturbed over that prospect.

Various expedients have been suggested—some of them admirable, such as reclaim­ing more land for agriculture by irrigation, drainage, and so on. ["Demobilizing" Nov. 30, 1918]

The expedient to which they referred was the land-reclamation project launched by Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior. The Post offered Lane’s own explanation of the project:

“These boys will come back. How are we to meet them? They will be proud; they will have seen the world as we have never been able to see it; they will have a spirit that we will envy and a comradeship that we can never have.We do not want to give them charity. We could not if we wanted to.

“[However] we have approximately from 200 million to 250 million acres of land at present unused which can be made as productive as any agricultural land in the world.

“It is an easy thing to do. The land is there; and we should say to the boys… ‘Here is a job at your hand; current wages, four dollars a day, if you please. Go; build dams on the Colorado Rivera. Go; redeem swamps in Southern Maryland. Go; clear the lands in Northern Michigan.” ["When the Boys Get Back From France," Nov. 30, 1918]

The ultimate goal was to create new farm land in the western states, which veterans could buy with a 10% down payment.

“[The veteran-farmer] will add to the wealth of the nation; but he will add far more than the physical wealth—he will add a richness of life and independence of spirit, and have in his heart always gladness, because he…found on his return that he had come back to a republic that was not ungrateful.

“The opportunity is…to bring the land and the soldier together, to provide work and homes for hundreds of thousands of American citizens, to furnish a supply of foodstuffs sufficient for our growing population.”

It was an admirable idea to many, but Emerson Hough, the Post’s “Out-Of-Doors” columnist, saw it as a threat to the wilderness.

Secretary Lane’s reclamation idea is born out of this war. It surely will tend to kill American outdoor sports.

The interior Department has taken stock of every acre of wild land in America—marsh, forest, desert or foothill. Millions of acres of unused lands have been discovered which are now to be utilized—

Surely this means that the last of the American wild places are to be used as soon as possible. The last resort of wild game—the last home of the last bird and beast—is to be cleared, drained, plowed and planted. Enter industry; exit game; exit sport. Enter a new country and new philosophy of all work and no play—unless that shall be play in some rich man’s yard.

It [could mean] the growth of the law of trespass; a future of less and less open sport in America.["Sport After the War," March 1, 1918]

Both Lane and Hough were wrong.

The wilderness did not disappear. The hydroelectric projects did not destroy the beauty of places like

Crop failures, drought, and falling prices doomed many farms, and farm towns like this one in Keota, Colorado.

Jackson Lake in Jackson Hole, as Hough declared they would. Even more land was set aside for national parks, making the wilderness open to more Americans.

Lane’s hope for a new generation of veteran-farmers never materialized either. When the Federal government stopped buying food for the war effort, farmers had surplus crops at the 1918 and 1919 harvest. Prices dropped. Farms failed. New farms made in the high plains of the Dakotas, Montana, and Colorado quickly depleted the soil, adding to the number of farm failures. In 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than farms.

Instead of choosing careers for veterans, today’s GI benefits help veterans pursue their own futures. And have proven a much wiser investment.

America’s Early Effort to Honor Its Veterans The Saturday Evening Post

It is an extremely hard medal to earn; more than half of the men who earned the Medal of Honor died in their achievement.

Since 1862, when it was first given to members of our armed forces for gallantry and bravery beyond the call of duty, it has been awarded 3,445 times.

During the First World War, the President, acting on behalf of Congress, awarded the Medal to 124 servicemen. During World War II, it was awarded 464 times. All of the World War I recipients are now gone, and only 32 remain of World War II’s recipients. One of these is Wilburn Kirby Ross. “Wib”, as he is affectionately known by family and friends, is now 86 years of age and still reflects the modesty known to most heroes as only doing their duty.

He was born on May 12, 1922, in McCreary County, Kentucky, about 30 miles north of Pall Mall, Tennessee, the home of Sgt. Alvin York. Just four years before Ross was born, York won the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest in France. Commanding seven other men, York captured 32 machine guns, killed 28 German soldiers, and forced the surrender of 132 other Germans.

Ross would have grown up hearing about Sergeant York’s accomplishments again and again; it was an area with few opportunities for distinguishing yourself. Most people made their living cutting timber, coal mining, and subsistence farming. At best, life was hard and most people were poor. Opportunities for education and good jobs were almost non-existent. Faith, family, and freedom were, and are, important to these people whose background was forged by generations of hardy pioneers.

On October 30, 1944, another representative from this region achieved recognition. Wilburn Ross, serving as a private with the 350th Infantry, manned a machine gun to drive back six attacks by German troops. He held his position even after the riflemen supporting him ran out of ammunition. He continued firing even as enemy soldiers were lobbing grenades at him from just 4 yards away. He refused to withdraw when he ran out of ammunition. Instead, he held his position as the German prepared for another attack. The ammunition arrived at the last minute, enabling him to repulse the German assault. All tolled, Ross held his position under intense fire for 36 hours.

The heroes from Kentucky: MSG. Ross, with World War I veteran Alvin C. York, was 23 when this 1945 picture was taken. Sgt. York was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during World War I.

Asked about his heroism, “Wib” has said, “I had been in this so long, I knew what they (the Germans) were doing. When they would charge, I would mow them down.”

While serving on the Italian front, Ross was captured at the Anzio beachhead, but miraculously escaped. Dusk was coming and, for some reason, the enemy guard did not appear to be paying much attention to him, instead fixing their attention on his buddies and talking to them. Ross moved out of sight and commenced to walk away. It was night now, and those moving about him were not able to see that he was an American.

He eluded further capture and survived on his own for three days and four nights. He says, “I didn’t get hungry. I didn’t get thirsty. I was worried about getting out of there.” Traveling at night, he hid under leaves during the day. Once the Germans got so close to him, he said, “I could have reached out my hand and touched the man on his coat.”

Later, seeing American planes in the sky, he followed the direction of their flight and was happy to reunite with American forces, where he gratefully dug into a can of meat and beans.

When Ross returned to Strunk, Kentucky, he was greeted by a crowd of 3,000 citizens, Governor Simeon Willis, and a neighbor who could best appreciate Ross’s bravery and dedication: Sergeant Alvin C. York.

Americans should be grateful that uncommon valor has commonly appeared among the men and women in our armed forces. They have served their country beyond the ability of our small tributes to repay them. We must never forget those who have stood in harm’s way to defend liberty and to pay the continually rising price of freedom.

Private Wilburn Kirby Ross: An American Hero The Saturday Evening Post