Jan Thompson

4 years ago
Posted in:Uncategorized
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Author: asia-pacificwarcollectivememories

Jan Thompson was born in California in the 1950s to Robert E. Thompson (1919-2014) and Fern Thompson (b. 1926) as the youngest and only daughter of three children. Since her father was an active member of the United States Navy for thirty-three years, she and her family often moved from station to station while she was growing up, eventually settling in Chicago where she currently resides. Growing up as a “navy brat” with a father in the military, Jan always had a vague understanding that her father had served the U.S. armed forces during the Asia-Pacific War, but she did not know the full details of his service.

Jan remembers that as a child, her father rarely talked about his experience during WWII. Nonetheless, some hints to his traumatic past came in short anecdotes infused with plenty of dark humor about his POW experience, such as when her father would recount one of his favorite stories about seeing a Japanese guard relieve himself on the electrical fence and electrocuting himself. Another indication of the extent of her father’s suffering was Jan’s vivid memories of her father’s impatience with both his family and the people that he interacted with. Even seemingly minor annoyances such as a traffic light being too long would draw her father’s ire.

Despite her father’s reluctance to discuss his wartime experience, Jan remembers being interested in her father’s past from an early age. When she was in either fourth or fifth grade, she remembers finding red cross bulletins that told stories of POW camps when looking through family archives held by her paternal grandparents. This was when Jan first learned that her father was a POW in the Pacific. However, it was not until she found a large suitcase containing letters, telegrams, and photographs that her father had sent his parents during the war that she truly understood the ramifications of her father’s POW experience. It was after this that Jan decided to attend meetings of the American Defenders of Bataan (ADBC), an organization formed by former POWs in the Pacific, with her father after his retirement from the navy.

Attending ADBC meetings exposed Jan to the experiences and stories of many former POWs in the Pacific. As asking her father about his own experiences rarely bore much fruit, she resolved to uncover her father’s past by interviewing other former POWs who were held at the same camps and were transported on the same “hell ships” as her father. Her involvement in ADBC led to her eventual appointment as the President of the ADBC memorial society, which was formed by the descendants after the former POWs aged and disbanded the original ADBC organization. She now works to create documentary films inspired by the experiences of former POWs in order to educate the American public about a part of history that is often neglected in WWII remembrances. Her currently produced films include The Tragedy of Bataan, Never the Same: The Prisoner of War Experience, and Survival Through Art.