A Box of a Veteran's Mementos

Burbank resident Robin Leslie looks through a chest filled with her father's equipment from World War II at the Howard Museum on Monday. It was shipped to her grandparents after he was shot down and captured by the Japanese. (Roger Wilson/News-Press)

Daughter of a World War II POW donates a box full of his war keepsakes to the Burbank Historical Society.

By Joyce Rudolph, Burbank Leader
Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Robin Leslie was only 15 and just getting to know her father, Jack R. Lewis, when he was killed in a private-airplane crash in Newhall in 1962. Leslie knew he had been a prisoner of war, but her father never spoke about what he endured in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. “I never heard the story, but I knew he had been in the POW camp, and that he had been tortured,” the Burbank resident said. It wasn’t until she went through a wooden box filled with his mementos that she found a letter Lewis had written for the Navy, recounting his experience with the enemy.“From the sound of his stories, he was lucky to be alive,” Leslie said.

Lewis, a 1943 graduate of Burbank High School, was an aviation machinist mate in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He joined the Navy in January 1943 and after training, served on the Bombing Squad No. 124 beginning on April 9, 1945. His bomber was shot down on July 7, 1945. “When I came to, I was underwater still in the plane,” he wrote in the letter. “I made my way to the surface.”The life raft had split and sunk, so he grabbed a tire and strut, he said, and that’s when he realized he had lost feeling in his right leg and arm.

After he was captured, he struggled to walk, and when his legs gave out, the Japanese soldiers beat him, he wrote. He was fed dry biscuits and no water.“I had no idea how it had been in reality,” Leslie said. “It was an eye-opener to finally read the story about his capture. Burbank should be proud of him. He is special for who he was and what he went through.”He was liberated on Aug. 18, 1945, and discharged in September 1945. He returned to Burbank, finished his education, got married and started a family.

After his death, the box remained in the garage, Leslie said. A few months ago, she went through it, and decided to donate it to the Burbank Historical Society. But she kept his Purple Heart.“It seems like the time is right,” Leslie said. When volunteers at the historical society’s Gordon R. Howard Museum told Mary Jane Strickland about Leslie’s phone call, Strickland remembered she and Lewis were classmates.

Strickland created a display with the box and its contents, pictures of the veteran, and a shorter version of the letter. Her husband, Harry Strickland, has suspended a model of a bomber jet over the display.The salute to a Burbank sailor was perfect for Veterans Day, Mary Jane Strickland said. “I think it’s nice to bring it to people’s attention again — what these guys went through,” she said. “You didn’t know what was happening to them at war. You would only see pictures in the newspaper or if you went to a movie and saw it in a news reel.

”Leslie wondered what a moment it must have been when her father was liberated from the enemy camp.“They were living minute-to-minute, not knowing how long anyone would last,” she said. He seemed to realize what a gift it was to be able to come home, Leslie said, because he made an effort to enjoy life.“He was a sports guy,” she said. “He rode a motorcycle, flew private planes, did scuba diving and spearfishing on Catalina.”Lewis even handmade a full body wet suit, she said, and tested it scuba diving in a neighbor’s pool, she said.“I think it might have been that what he went through in the prison camp gave him this real joy of life and he wanted to do everything he could.”