Lester Tenney, 96, passed away February 17, 2017. He earned business degrees from San Diego State University and the University of Southern California. In 1966, he moved to Tempe where he taught at ASU in the College of Business. He retired in 1983. He started a company, University Research Associates, which provided financial and retirement planning for dozens of U.S. companies.



Tenney joined the Army National Guard’s 33rd Tank Company in 1940 and was sent to the Philippines. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces overran other islands in the Pacific, including the Philippines, and Allied forces retreated to the Bataan peninsula. He was an Army tank commander who survived the Bataan Death March. By the time he and the other survivors staggered into Japanese prison camps, thousands had died. He briefly escaped from the camp into the jungle, was recaptured, and then put on a ship to Omuta, Japan, where work in a coal mine awaited. He was in the prison camp there, across the bay from Nagasaki, when the U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb in August 1945 and Japan surrendered. His memories of the eight-day, 73-plus mile trek and of his subsequent three years in a forced-labor coal mine are shared in his memoir titled “My Hitch in Hell”.



In 1999, he and other POWs sued five mining companies for reparations. A federal judge dismissed the suit, citing a 1951 peace treaty between Japan and the U.S. Still, Tenney persisted. In 2009, as national commander of the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, he welcomed Japanese ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki to the group’s annual convention. Fujisaki apologized on behalf of his country, a gesture met with applause from only half the survivors. Tenney was among them. “If you hate the Japanese, have hatred in your heart, you are still a prisoner of the Japanese,” he said. A year later, he went to Tokyo as part of the first-ever American delegation to Japan’s “Peace, Friendship, and Exchange Initiative,” a gesture of reconciliation from the Japanese government to its World War II prisoners.

In 2015, Tenney was invited to Washington, D.C., when Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, gave a speech to Congress. Tenney and other veterans told reporters they were unimpressed by Abe’s attempt in his remarks to move beyond the atrocities. But later that day, at a gala outside the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery, Abe apologized to Tenney in person.



Tenney's one final mission was getting an apology from the mining companies. One arrived last month, in a letter from the Mitsubishi Materials Corp. Mitsubishi isn’t the company that imprisoned him, but Tenney was grateful; and optimistic that the other companies, including Mitsui, which owned his mine, will eventually apologize, too. That, he said after he received the letter, is all he ever wanted.



Tenney’s first wife, believing him dead, had remarried. In 1950 he married Betty Levi. He is survived by his wife, Betty, a son, two stepsons, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.



A memorial service was held February 26, 2017, at La Costa Glen’s Catalina Hall. The family asks that donations be made to the Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas foundation, macular degeneration research at Scripps Research Institute, or Elizabeth Hospice.

(Source: San Diego Union Tribune)