Photo By Ken Scar | Col. Ben Skardon, 102, salutes as his friend, Trent Allen, places a flag on a stone in...... read more read more
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Clemson University faculty, staff and alumni gathered at the university's Scroll of Honor directly across from the 81,000-seat Memorial Stadium to place American flags around the monument for Memorial Day, May 21, 2020. This year it was a small number of people, wearing masks and working in groups of four or less, but every flag was still placed in less than an hour.
Clemson legend and WWII veteran Col. Ben Skardon, 102, joined the group and, as he does every year, placed flags on stones engraved with the names of Henry Leitner and Otis Morgan.
Col. Skardon was born in 1917 and grew up in Walterboro, S.C. He attended Clemson College from 1934 to 1938, and entered active duty as a second lieutenant after his graduation.
In World War II Skardon was the commander of Company A of the 92nd Infantry Regiment PA (Philippine Army), a battalion of Filipino Army recruits on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. He led his troops through some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the war, earning two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star for valor in combat, as well as a Purple Heart – an incredible array of awards for any one soldier.
On April 9, 1942, he became a prisoner of war with tens of thousands of his brothers-in-arms when American troops in that area of operation were forced to surrender to the Japanese. Skardon and his fellow POWs were marched 80 miles north by their ruthless captors in one of the most notorious war crimes in history: The Bataan Death March.
Skardon, already weak and starving from months of intense fighting and illness, was herded with other sick, wounded and starving soldiers through the searing heat of the Philippine jungles. Thousands died. Those who survived the march then had to survive the inhumane and brutal conditions of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
Skardon survived for more than three years in the camps, despite becoming deathly ill with malaria, beriberi, diarrhea and other ailments. Two fellow Clemson alumni, Henry Leitner and Otis Morgan, kept him alive by spoon-feeding him and eventually by trading his gold Clemson ring -- which he had managed to keep hidden -- for food.
Incredibly, as the tide of the war was turning against his captors, Skardon miraculously survived the sinking of two unmarked Japanese transport ships trying to steal him and other POWs away to mainland Japan -- including the infamous Oryoku Maru. Sadly, Morgan was killed during the bombing of one of the transport ships, the Enoura Maru, and Leitner died in a Japanese POW camp in 1945. The devastating news of their demise, Skardon says, was the lowest point of his entire ordeal.
He did not give up. Eventually he ended up in a prison camp in Manchuria, where Russian units freed him in August of 1945. He was 24 years old and weighed 90 pounds.
He placed the flags for Memorial Day, to honor his two friends and all of his brothers-in-arms who did not return from the war.
He will be 103 on July 14.
| Date Taken: | 05.21.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 07.28.2020 10:28 |
| Story ID: | 370724 |
| Location: | CLEMSON, SC, US |
| Hometown: | CLEMSON, SC, US |
| Web Views: | 82 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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