Former war prisoner honored

A potent concoction of bitterness, confusion and heartbreak had been brewing inside 79-year-old Glendale resident Dottie Stone ever since she was liberated from a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines during World War II.

Her pent-up feelings were derived in part from the nightmarish years she endured at the University of Santo Tomas, a college the Japanese converted into an internment camp, where she ate little more than rice and watched fellow prisoners starve to death.

And decades later, hard feelings have lingered mostly because few people seemed to know anything about the plight of some 3,000 American, British and other allied nationals, herself among them, who were held by Japanese forces in Manila for more than three years, she said.

She grew irritated every year when newspapers would print stories commemorating Pearl Harbor and the ensuing internment of those of Japanese descent on American soil, and not mention her story.

“What about us?” she asked.

But when Dec. 7 came last year, instead of just scoffing at the expected newspaper stories, she picked up the phone and started telling her story.

And ever since, a landslide of recognition has come her way. A story published in the Glendale News-Press in December connected Stone with a thriving network of Santo Tomas survivors and American and Filipino military veterans who liberated the country.

In January, she joined that network at a survivors reunion in Northern California that drew 270 people, Stone said.

She and her family were with some 2,000 other passengers on a ship bound from China — where her British father had been stationed to work for the United Kingdom — when Japanese forces attacked a U.S. Naval base in the Philippines as Stone’s ship neared the island nation. The captain of the ship opted to pull into Manila, where American military forces were still present. But when Japanese forces rolled into Manila in January 1942, Stone, her father, American mother and five brothers and sisters were rounded up and taken to Santo Tomas.

“Before, when it came to Santo Tomas, people didn’t talk about it, didn’t want to get involved; you had to suppress that inside you,” she said. “After we had that reunion, it was like a brick was lifted. Gosh, we wish we could have all met sooner. I wish we could have met when we were younger and gotten it all out then.”