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US ex-POW in Japan to travel with Obama to Hiroshima
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Former US prisoner of war Daniel Crowley speaks during a press conference in San Antonio, Texas, May 21. (Kyodo News via AP/-)
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n American held by Japan as a prisoner of war during World War II and forced to work in a copper mine has been invited to accompany President Barack Obama on his historic visit to Hiroshima this week, a US veterans group said.
Jan Thompson, head of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, said Sunday by email that the group has chosen 94-year-old Daniel Crowley of Simsbury, Connecticut, and submitted his name to the White House.
Obama, who is in Vietnam, is coming to Japan later in the week for the annual Group of Seven summit, after which he will visit Hiroshima on Friday. He will become the first serving US president to visit the city hit by the first of two atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan near the end of World War II.
Crowley was among 10 former POWs who sent a letter to Obama dated last Thursday urging the president to focus his remarks at Hiroshima "on the events leading to the decision to use the bomb and recognize the effects it has had on the people of both countries." They asked him "to acknowledge who was responsible for starting World War II in the Pacific and why it was fought."
Crowley was in the US Army Air Corps when his unit surrendered on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines in 1942. He was shipped to Japan in March 1944 on what the veterans call a "hell ship," and put to work as a slave laborer at a copper mine operated by Furukawa Co. in Hitachi, northeast of Tokyo, until the end of the war.
Crowley visited Japan in October 2014 as part of the friendship program sponsored by the Japanese government with several other members of the veterans' group. He has said that he never forgets the years stolen from him by the Japanese.
"It's a living thing with me," he was quoted as saying in a biography provided by the group. "It's not ancient history at all."
Obama, in an interview aired Sunday evening in Japan, confirmed that he would not apologize in Hiroshima for the American atomic bombings.
"I think that it's important to recognize that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions," he told public broadcaster NHK. "It's a job of historians to ask questions and examine them, but I know as somebody who has now sat in this position for the last seven and a half years, that every leader makes very difficult decisions, particularly during war time."
In a weekend poll by another broadcaster, Nippon TV, about 50 percent of respondents said they don't think an apology is necessary, while about 30 percent said they do.
