Epilogue for a lost U.S. Marine found deep in China

(Analyst's note:  Our respects to Staff Sergeant Billy Lynch, USMC.  Semper Fidelis.)

By Kevin Cullen

... He left Neponset for the Marines in 1937, right out of high school, and never came back. He was stationed in China when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and then went to the Philippines and was there when the Japanese invaded. After the battle of Corregidor in 1942, the Japanese took him prisoner.

They beat him but couldn’t break him. As soon as he could run, Billy Lynch ran from the prison camp. The Japanese caught him and beat him again, worse, and then they put him on a “hell ship’’ to China, with no ventilation, no toilet, no water, no food. It was a death march at sea.

A lot of POWs died on the hell ships, but Billy Lynch wouldn’t give his captors the satisfaction. They stuck him in a prison camp called Mukden and he escaped again. Some of the local Chinese hid him, but a 6-foot white guy from Dorchester stood out in Manchuria, and the Japanese recaptured him.

They beat him again, and there would be no third escape for Billy Lynch. He was sent to another camp, Port Arthur, now known by its Chinese name, Lushun. Billy Lynch’s captors tortured him, peeling the skin from his body before killing him, cutting him up, and stuffing his remains in a barrel that was sealed.


.... Professor Yang found three elderly Chinese men who were slave laborers at Port Arthur and knew about the murder, dismemberment, and burial of Staff Sergeant Billy Lynch.

.... If, as they believe, their dig next spring yields Billy Lynch’s bones, he will come home, finally, first to St. Ann’s Church, where he made his First Communion, then on to Arlington National Cemetery.

“He deserves to be home,’’ Judy Armour said of the uncle she never met and never forgot. “That’s why he kept escaping. He kept trying, no matter what they did to him. He wanted to come home.’’