page_title: Joe Kieyoomia
section_title: Prisoner of war
hierarchical_section_title: Joe Kieyoomia / Prisoner of war
caption_attribution_description: Prisoners on the march from Bataan to the prison camp, April 1942. (National Archives) Left to Right: Pfc Samuel Stenzler, Pfc Frank Spear, Capt. James M Gallagher. All three men perished during the war. Gallagher died shortly after the photo was taken on or about 9 April. Stenzler died at Camp O'Donnell on 26 May 1942, and Spear was executed at a camp in Japan in July 1945. [1]
context_page_description: Joe Kieyoomia was a Navajo soldier in New Mexico's 200th Coast Artillery unit who was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army after the fall of the Philippines in 1942 during World War II. Kieyoomia was a POW in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing but survived, reportedly having been shielded from the effects of the bomb by the concrete walls of his cell.
  The Japanese tried unsuccessfully to have him decode messages in the "Navajo Code" used by the United States Marine Corps, but although Kieyoomia understood Navajo, the messages sounded like nonsense to him because even though the code was based on the Navajo language, it was decipherable only by individuals specifically trained in its usage.
  Kieyoomia is notable for having not only survived the Bataan death march and related internment and torture in a concentration camp, but also being a hibakusha.
context_section_description: Initially tortured because his captors thought he was Japanese-American (and therefore a traitor), Joe Kieyoomia suffered months of further beatings before the Japanese accepted his claim to Navajo ancestry.
  He survived the Death March that killed thousands of starved U.S. and Philippine soldiers. When the "Navajo Code" had the Japanese baffled, Kieyoomia was questioned and tortured although, as he was deployed to the Philippines with New Mexico's 200th Coast Artillery, he didn't even know about the existence of the code, he could only understand bits and pieces of what the Navajo Code Talkers were saying. Eventually, this led him telling the Japanese that it sounded like nonsense to him.
  As punishment for his inability to crack the code and possibly because the Japanese viewed him as unwilling to crack the code, he was stripped naked and forced to stand for hours in deep snow until he talked. When he was finally allowed to return to his cell, a guard shoved him, causing the soles of his feet to tear as they were frozen to the ground.
  After surviving the prison camps, the "hell ships" and the torture, Kieyoomia was a prisoner in Nagasaki when that city was the target of the second atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). Kieyoomia survived the attack, saying he was protected by the concrete walls of his cell. 
  After 3½ years as a prisoner of war, he  was abandoned in the city for three days after the bombing, but says a Japanese officer finally freed him.
caption: Prisoners on the march from Bataan to the prison camp, May 1942. (National Archives)
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