Henry G. Lee
First Lieutenant, U.S. Army

Henry G. Lee was born in 1915 in Pasadena, CA, the son of Thomas and Mable G. Lee.

A First Lieutenant in the 31st U.S. Infantry Regiment, Lee was posted to the Philippine Islands in early 1940. When Japan attacked the U.S. in December 1941, the U.S. Army was unprepared to defend the Philippines, and Lee was captured when the Japanese overran the Bataan Peninsula. Lee survived the Bataan Death March and was incarcerated in the Cabanatuan POW Camp and used as a slave laborer by the Japanese.

In December 1944, just a few months before the Camp was liberated, Lee and 1,617 other POWs were packed into a Japanese cargo ship that was bombed by U.S. Navy planes that were unaware of that prisoners-of-war were on board. (The Japanese did not mark their POW ships, leaving them as legitimate targets). Approximately 1,350 POWs survived that bombing, and the survivors were loaded aboard another unmarked freighter, Enoura Maru, which was sunk in Formosa on 9 January 1945, where Lee was killed. Only 300 of the original 1,618 POWs would survive the war. His body was recovered by the Japanese and buried in an unmarked mass grave with the other dead American POWs.

When the Camp was liberated by the U.S. Army, Lee's writings were found at Cabanatuan, where he had buried them beneath a hut. They were contained in a Filipino school copy book and written in pencil.

In 1948, his parents, Thomas and Mable G. Lee, published his poems and a few letters he had written in a book, "Nothing But Praise."

Death

First Lieutenant Henry G. Lee died on 9 January 1945.

His name is listed on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in Manila, Philippines.