After long weeks full of hope, the official Navy Department message of the death of Robert Baer, hospital apprentice, first class came Saturday to his mother, Mrs. Lucy Baer, Delphi.  The youth had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese since the fall of Manilla, in December, 1941.

    From the facts sent his mother, it is probable that Baer met he death when the Japanese troop ship, on which he was being transferred from a prison camp in the Philippines to the Jap mainland, was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of China.  No word had been received from him in eight months, and the last message received was dated sometime in May, 1944.

    Enlisting in the Navy in October, 1940, Baer received training at Great Lakes, San Diego, and Mare Island, Calif.  He was sent to Cavite, Philippines, where he was stationed at the hospital base in August, 1941.  He would have been 23 years old this past May 8.

    Survivors include the mother, the father John Baer of Ft. Wayne: two brothers, Harry of Delphi and Raymond, hospital technician, stationed at the navel hospital, Bethesda, Md.

 Obituary notice taken from the Delphi Citizen, Thursday, June 28, 1945

Additional information provided by Jeffery Post, CWO4 USN, Ret.

Bobby joined the Navy in September 1940 just prior to the pre-WWII draft.  He attended boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois followed by Hospital Corpsman school in San Diego.  Afterwards, he boarded the transport ship USS Henderson and sailed to Manila where he made his way to the Cañacao Naval Hospital which was adjacent to the Cavite Naval Base, Philippines Islands, arriving in September 1941. When the Japanese attacked the Philippines and destroyed the Cavite Naval Base and the hospital where he worked, several make-shift causality centers around Manila were established. Bobby worked at two of the casualty centers until April 1942.  The hospital staff that didn’t follow the Army troops to Bataan, became POWs when General MacArthur declared Manila an open city in January 1942. The Japanese moved the Cañacao Naval Hospital staff into the Old Bilibid Prison in Manila and used it as a hospital and transit location for allied prisoner moving out and around the Philippines. Unlike the prisoners who marched out of Bataan, the Sailors in Bilibid had it comparatively easy.  They were in Manila, close to food, and were allowed to establish a hospital administration and facilities to care for wounded and sick prisoners.  Some equipment and books were recovered from the destroyed hospital and moved to the Bilibid POW camp.  Records retrieved after the war and kept at the National Archives show that Bobby signed his initials next to his assignment in Quarters 5. For three days in November 1943, he was part of a group of Sailors that were transported to Corregidor Island to take part in the filming of the Japanese propaganda film Dawn of Freedom. For his forced participation, he and other were given a Letter of Appreciation from the Commanding Officer, Commander Thomas Hayes, Medical Corps. Hayes kept a secret diary which was found and published later in a book called The Bilibid Diary. Unofficial advancement examinations were administered, and Sailors were promoted in the camp’s personnel records.  Commander Hayes recognized that very junior enlisted personnel were treated poorer than more senior Petty Officers.  Bobby was eventually promoted to Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class.  In the summer of 1944 as General MacArthur’s troops closed in on the Philippines, the Japanese began to pack the prisoners into unmarked cargo ships and moved them to Japan for forced labor. Most of the hospital staff who were healthy were forced to move. In late October 1944, Bobby was one of hundreds of allied prisoners loaded into two holds on the Japanese transport ship Arisan Maru.  Their departure was delayed several days because of allied naval activity.  On October 24, in a Japanese convoy of ships located in the South China Sea, the unmarked cargo ship carrying POWs was struck by two torpedoes from a US submarine.  Several prisoners were picked up by Chinese fishing boats, but the majority, who were lucky to survive the sinking, were too weak to stay afloat very long. Of the 1,783 allied prisoners onboard, there were eight survivors.  News was slow to reach the families.  The Japanese didn’t provide a full list of prisoners on board until after the war.  A full list is at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.  Bobby was officially declared dead in 1946.  A video story of the Arisan Maru called Sleep My Sons was produced in 1996.