On July 28, 1942, Lakeland High School graduate and U.S. Army Air Force Pfc. Robert Colter Jr., 23, died a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in the Philippines. Colter succumbed to dysentery and malaria, following the infamous Bataan Death March.
On Feb. 7, Colter finally made it back to Lakeland, where his remains will be reinterred, with full military honors, on Feb. 22. He’ll now rest in Lakeland Memorial Gardens, just 50 yards from his parents’ graves and a few miles from the house where he grew up, at 504 Easton Drive.
“I’ve been very touched, and it’s very emotional sometimes,” said Colter’s niece, 69-year-old Sue Jean Jones. She never met her uncle, she said, but she always heard about him. Of the honors and the return, she said she’s struck that the Army “would would care enough to do that and … want to honor him in this way.”
It would mean a lot to her late father, Charles Colter, Robert’s brother, and to her Colter grandparents, Jones said. “I know my grandfather had wanted to, had tried to find out information for years.”
Fishing, hunting — and serving: Charles, who also served in WW II, and Robert, who went by Bobby, grew up together in Lakeland, Jones said, fishing in the lakes and in old phosphate pits and hunting in the woods and orange groves.
When Bobby graduated from Lakeland High, in 1937, he had no clear plan for his life. In 1940, Bobby’s parents encouraged him to enlist as a good career option. His younger brother, Charles, followed in his footsteps in the fall of 1941.
Bobby was first stationed in Savannah, Georgia. In late 1941, he was transferred to the Philippines with the 91st Bomber Squadron’s 27th Bombardment Group. En route, he wrote home from Hawaii. It was the last letter from him that his parents would receive.
Japan attacks: Bobby’s unit arrived in Manila on Nov. 20, 1941 — two weeks before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. And Japan attacked the Philippines.
On Dec. 22, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur withdrew 86,000 soldiers to the Bataan Peninsula to hold out for reinforcements, which never arrived. The soldiers joined about 20,000 civilians on the peninsula. As the months of fighting wore on, American and Filipino forces, short on food and medical supplies, suffered from starvation and disease.
On April 9, 1942, the Americans surrendered to the Japanese, the largest American force ever to do so.
Bataan Death March: The Japanese marched the soldiers to prisoner-of-war camps 65 miles away during what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.
The tens of thousands of soldiers were forced to walk for weeks through intense heat and humidity, with little water or food. If they tried to stop to rest or if they collapsed, if they took food from Filipino civilians, they were shot or bayoneted.
Some soldiers carried those who were wounded or tired so they wouldn’t meet that fate. Between 5,000 and 11,000 men died along the march.
The Zero Ward: Colter made it to Cabanatuan POW Camp, where the prisoners lived in bamboo barracks. There was also a hospital, nicknamed the “Zero Ward” because there was zero probability of getting out of it alive. Colter entered the hospital on July 5, 1942, and died in the heat 23 days later.
His body and those of 12 other servicemen were placed in a common grave. The Japanese would not allow the Americans to place names on it.
It was at least a year before his parents got word, in a letter signed by MacArthur, that Colter had died.
Japan surrendered in September of 1945. From December of that year through March 1946, the U.S. military exhumed the bodies of the men buried at Cabanatuan and moved them to Manila, where they were interred in a U.S. cemetery.
A large memorial to those who died on the march and in the camps stands in the cemetery, with Colter’s name etched into the marble.
Eight of the men in the Cabanatuan grave, including Colter, could not be identified at the time and on Sept. 9, 1949, Colter’s body was declared “non-recoverable.”
Painful for the family: Jones said that while Charles talked about his boyhood pursuits with his brother, neither he nor her grandparents talked about Bobby’s death or any of the events surrounding it.
“I think that it was so upsetting to the whole family that they just didn’t,” she said. “I remember my dad mentioning that … my grandparents had a lot of remorse,” because they’d encouraged Bobby to enlist.
Several years ago, Jones got a call from Fort Knox, in Kentucky. An Army officer told her the military was trying to identify Bobby’s remains.
“That just came out of the blue,” she said. She was dumbfounded “that they’d have a division that did that … and that they were still looking.”
The road home: In June 2018, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed the remains of the eight men from their Manila grave and sent them to a lab in Hawaii. A cousin in Georgia provided DNA for testing and on Sept. 25, 2023, the bones were positively identified as Bobby Colter’s.
On Friday, Colter’s flag-draped coffin arrived at Tampa International Airport on an American Airlines flight from Hawaii. It was escorted to Heath Funeral Home on Ingraham Drive by Lakeland Police officers.
As an Army officer, Mayor Bill Mutz, Lakeland Police officers, and half a dozen veterans and veterans organizations officials looked on, the coffin was removed from the hearse. Bobby was home to stay.
Services:
Several events will take place this month to honor Colter. The public is welcome at all of them.
Feb. 17 at 9 a.m.: Mayor’s proclamation of Pfc. Robert Colter Day during the City Commission meeting, 228 S. Massachusetts Ave.
Feb. 21, 2 p.m.-4 p.m.: Viewing at Heath Funeral Home, 328 Ingraham Ave.
Feb. 22 at 11 a.m.: Reinterment ceremony at Lakeland Memorial Gardens, 2125 Bartow Road.
Kimberly C. Moore is a reporter for LkldNow, a nonprofit newsroom providing independent local news for Lakeland. Read at LkldNow.com.
