Welcome back to Our American Stories. Today, we’re joined by historian Rana Simmons, author of The Other Veterans of World War II: Stories From Behind the Front Lines. Rana shines a light on the brave men and women who served our nation away from the front lines, whose vital contributions were essential to winning the war. These are the remarkable other veterans of World War II, whose often untold stories reveal new depths of courage, ingenuity, and hope that helped bring America to victory.
One such incredible individual is Frank Cohne. Born into a prominent Maryland family, Frank followed his father’s footsteps through Johns Hopkins, earning multiple degrees and building a promising future in medicine. But as World War II began to loom, a polite letter from the U.S. government dramatically shifted his path. Frank soon found himself “volunteering” for the Army Medical Corps, assigned to horse-mounted troops—an astonishing detail for World War II—and embarking on an unexpectedly luxurious journey to the Philippines. This is the remarkable journey of Frank Cohne, a doctor who answered the call and served our country in ways few others did.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
He was born in Maryland to a very well-to-do family. His father was a position. He had graduated from John Hopkins University and had a medical degree, and Frank Cohne had a prediction to education as well. He became a leader in his class. He became an Eagle Scout. He was class treasurer. He graduated from high school, and then he went to Johns Hopkins University, just like his father. Graduated in there with a Bachelor’s Science degree, and also was recognized as being a member with the Omicron Delta Kappa Fraternity, which is a national leadership honor society. Now, that might be enough for you or me or many other people, but not for Frank, and he decided that he would go on with his education. He would continue them, and he earned a Bachelor of Arts at Johns Hopkins in 1933, and then a medical degree from John Hopkins in 1938, and that’s where he met his wife. They married, but he got married twice: once at the university in Annapolis by a Baptist minister, and then, because, of course, families want to have the weddings at their home, they married again at her home in Joplin, Missouri, by a Methodist minister. So maybe he was playing the odds. He could not only have several degrees; he might have two different religious avenues that he could pursue, if he chose so. Quite unusual thing to do. But, I guess, when you think back in the times, that the family wanted to be there, and it wasn’t as always as easy as we think to travel from place to place to attend a wedding, so they made sure they had all their bases covered. So, Frank and Marion started their life. They moved to Houston, where he was beginning his medical practice. Had a great future ahead of him, as he imagined. Was not very long after he started—after he began his practice—that he got a letter in the mail by the U.S. government calling him and requesting, quote, unquote, as he left in his notes, requesting he served in the Army Medical Corps. Now, others I’ve talked to said they got the same rather benign letter in the mail that requested them to report to their draft office or requested their presence at the recruiting center. So, these letters were very politely termed; and even though it requested, he certainly knew that it wasn’t an invitation that he could turn down. So, he did. He reported to the Army’s office, and has he said, he, quote, unquote, volunteered as he reported for duty, whether or not he didn’t. And we can imagine, in his case, he hadn’t volunteered, and he didn’t necessarily want to serve because he was just looking forward to his medical practice. But by no means did he say, “I’m not going,” or, “I don’t want to go.” It just blindsided him that just as his life was strutting, because this was 1939, and the war really was quite far away at that point in time. But he knew that he was going to have to take part, and he knew that his athletic ability—having played football, basketball, polo in college—that the Army had taken note of that from his draft registration and placed him with a Twelfth Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division. He would be, as it would turn out, one of the last men to serve with horse-mounted troops. And I think that’s so incredible and hard for us to realize. There were 550 positions different job positions in the Army, and I looked at some of the names of those positions. Of course, there were truck drivers and infantrymen, but there were also horse and saddle-makers, and that struck me when I read that list. I thought, “What? This is World War II!” There are tanks, they’re aircraft, there are battleships, there carriers. What are we doing with horse-mounted troops? And, in fact, yes, we still had horse-mounted troops. The draft boards, the recruitment centers had quotas to fill in. They might have to find five men, two men, one man who could ride a horse, so that they could fill out a platoon or a regiment with the cavalry and horse-mounted battle surgeon, horse-mounted a medical officer in this Twelfth Cavalry Regiment, and Frank would be going off to spend his time in the Philippines. But he did have a very, very different transit than most of our troops that went off to war. We have seen thousands of pictures of men who crowded the decks of the carriers or battleships, troop carriers going to Europe. And these men were four, five, and six to a berth. They might have been aboard the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary; and at first, that sounded unbelievable to them till they got in and saw that all the finer parts of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth had been gutted to allow for maximum capacity of young men. But Frank was assigned to the S.S. Washington, which was a former Austrian luxury liner, and it had not been stripped in their case. Again, this is earlier on in the war, so they had some luxuries that other soldiers that would follow did not. But they sailed aboard this luxury liner, fully furnished, complete with stewards for their cabins, and one of his fellow Medical Corps officers said in his letters home that were preserved and sent to Frank’s children, “It was some trip,” and it didn’t stop there. When Frank arrived in the Philippines, he was stationed at Fort Stotsenburg, and it was a very different camp barracks—and again, the soldiers might experience who went in other directions. They had white-coat dinners. Frank wrote home about wearing his white coat and golden epaulets to dinner. Champagne being served, and you can imagine the chandeliers or the lights glistening, and them socializing with the other officers as they live. And he writes home about his fellow officer that he shared quarters with, and how they went and commissioned furniture to be built for them. They found artifacts or objects that were native to the Philippines that they decorated the walls of their residences with. Very, very difficult to believe, but we would learn, of course, that things changed very rapidly. We were in the Philippines, in part, knowing that it would be a strategic path between the Far East, Japan, and its aggression, even though it hadn’t come to Pearl Harvard at this point. But to stop the Japanese, to control the avenues of the ocean, and so we had an outpost in the Philippines, but not necessarily known to the troops at the time. There was a realization that while we hoped that we would be able to retain the Philippines in the course of the war, if push came to shove during the full-blown conflict, we would not sacrifice the European War for the Pacific War. We thought that all of our men—or most of our men—would be fighting in Europe. We would need to deploy there first and only secondarily to the Pacific. So, if they had to, and if the Philippines were threatened by the Japanese forces, the United States had a plan that we would not defend the Philippines. We would actually leave. We would by no means fight to the death.
And you’ve been listening to Rhana Simmons tell the story of Frank Cone. And, my goodness, to go from champagne dinners to the Baton Death March in only months—a stunning turnaround for his life and the people he was in the Philippines with. When we come back, more of Frank Cone’s story here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories, and the final segment of our story on Frank Cohne is told by author and historian Ronana Simmons. When we last left off, the Japanese had invaded the Philippines; and despite fierce resistance, America was forced to surrender 76,000 men: 10,000 Americans and 66,000 Filipino soldiers. These men were then forced to walk some 66 miles on what became known is the Batan Death Mark. Frank Coone was one of these men. Let’s continue with the story.
On the march to Camp Cabanatuan, there were some aid stations. The Philippine people were very sympathetic to the American soldiers and to the Philippine Scouts, so were also captured with them, and on this forced march they tried to help, but they were often beat back by the Japanese and prevented from helping. But they were able to smuggle a piece of fruit or some water from time to time to some of the soldiers, and the Japanese did allow us to have aid stations again—mostly, I’m sure, to help move more and more prisoners to their ultimate destination. If one of our men might be medically trained, they might patch a—or sew up a wound—or do whatever they could to bandage up these people on the march, perhaps thinking that the more survived, the more that would be able to work in this labor camp and serve the Japanese down the road. Frank was one of those, and he stayed behind, which obviously led to a longer march for himself. But he stayed in these aid stations and was tending to the wind, and at this time, at this point in time, he was not sick. But he was spotted by a number of the men who reported again back to Frank’s family after the war that he was helping, helping, helping. He did everything to help his fellow s
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