Death march survivor Arnold Bocksel dies

Arnold Bocksel, a Bataan Death March survivor who was among the oldest former prisoners of war from the United States, died Sunday at a nursing home at the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. A former Army chief warrant officer, Bocksel was 98 and suffered from dementia.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1913 and enlisted in February 1941, when he was 27. The State University of New York Maritime College graduate was stationed in the Philippines aboard the USAMP Harrison, an Army mine planter assigned to defend Manila Harbor from Japanese attack. He was captured when the nearby island of Corregidor fell in May 1942.

He survived the Bataan Death March, a 60-mile forced movement of about 75,000 U.S. and Filipino prisoners of war to a camp in the Philippines that killed as many as one in four of them in 1942. Many of those who could not keep pace or were considered insubordinate were beheaded.

Evacuated again, to Manchuria, where he helped run the prison camp commissary, Bocksel drew the admiration of fellow inmates when he angrily confronted their captors over the prisoners' starvation rations.

"They could have killed you right then and there with the swords they all carried on their side," Bocksel's fellow prisoner, Vernon Stroschein, wrote Bocksel in 1984. Stroschein died in 1988 in Arizona.

Bocksel was liberated by Soviet troops on May 17, 1945, his mother's birthday.

"Mom, I made it," Bocksel later recalled saying tearfully as liberating troops arrived. He weighed 98 pounds, was riddled with parasites and spent two years recuperating in military hospitals.

After returning to New York, he got a job as a salesman with Coffin Turbo, a pump manufacturer that supplied shipbuilders worldwide. Bocksel used the Japanese he had picked up as a prisoner to help make sales to shipbuilders in Japan.

"When I asked him where he had learned Japanese, he told me he had been a guest of the emperor for 3 1/2 years," said his son, Robert Bocksel of Manhattan. "He never bore any bitterness, never blamed the sons for the sins of the fathers."

Bocksel lived in Syosset before he moved to the nursing home.

Besides Robert, survivors include sons Donald Bocksel of Syosset and Arnold C. Bocksel of Manhattan, and a daughter, Merrie Hines of Syosset. His wife, Peggy, died in 1984.

A funeral Mass was celebrated Wednesday at St. Edward the Confessor Roman Catholic Church in Syosset. Burial was at Nassau Knolls Cemetery in Port Washington.

Bocksel was given a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, among other citations. But he always insisted he was not a hero, family members said. "He never thought he would survive the war," Hines said at his wake Tuesday. "So he considered every day he had as a gift."