COURTESY PHOTO
Donald Valentine Schworer, 90, an oil company marketing executive who was a civilian prisoner of war for four years in the Philippines, died Feb. 27, 2006, of heart failure at Doctors Hospital.
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"Manila was just as unprepared for a Japanese air attack on Dec. 8, 1941, as was Pearl Harbor the day before. My father said everyone actually stood on their porches to watch the bombs rain down," Zolnier said.
Schworer was captured several days later by the Japanese at bayonet point and marched with about 6,000 other civilians to Santo Tomas and then to Los Banos. "They didn't need a radio to know how the war was going," Zolnier said. "Living conditions were not bad at first but got worse each time the Japanese lost a battle.
"I'm sure my father's survival skills from the Depression and his wonderful sense of humor and adventure kept him alive," she said....
Schworer was near starvation when he and other prisoners were liberated by an airborne Marine division on Feb. 23, 1945.
He later told his daughter that the paratroopers "looked like angels floating down."
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He graduated in 1938 from Duke University and was a member of Exxon Mobil Retiree Club, Duke Alumni Association, Sigma Phi Epsilon and The Church of the Redeemer.
Oil marketing executive Schworer was prisoner of war
