FORT WORTH — Growing up, Mike Shaffer knew little of his great uncle, his grandfather’s brother.
His family rarely spoke of the horrors of war or even of Elbert Knox, who earned the nickname “Toughegg” for his propensity for fighting and his rough-and-tumble reputation.
As a teenager, Shaffer first learned his great uncle had been a prisoner of war during World War II, killed in captivity 11 years before Shaffer was born. His mother did not know much more, but that crumb of information would remain with Shaffer for decades.
On Tuesday, 80 years after his death in a prisoner of war camp, the U.S. Navy posthumously awarded Knox a Purple Heart and a Prisoner of War Medal. Shaffer, now 69, was given the medals at a ceremony at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth.
“Everything. This means everything,” Shaffer, who lives in Tyler, said after the ceremony. “This is proof of what he went through.”
Shaffer began researching his great uncle four years ago, when he learned about the Prisoner of War Medal. Five generations of his family have served in the military, including Shaffer, who served in the U.S. Army from 1973 to 1976, and Shaffer wondered why his great uncle had never received the medal. He began making phone calls and digging online.
Slowly, Shaffer unraveled his great uncle’s story.
Knox enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 19 and served as a cook at an Army hospital in Illinois after World War I. A year later, he returned to his hometown in rural Wisconsin, where he worked as a carpenter and cemented his nickname of “Toughegg” with occasional run-ins with law enforcement.
Still, Knox was respected in the community. He was known as a skilled worker and had no trouble finding work. That changed when the Great Depression hit, and finding a job became difficult, if not impossible.
When World War II began, jobs returned. Knox landed a job with a construction company building airfields and naval bases on Wake Island, a tiny dot in the Pacific Ocean. Knox, then 40, boarded a ship in September 1941 for Wake Island, with the promise of a stateside job when he returned home after a one-year contract.
On Dec. 8, 1941, within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces attacked Wake Island. American forces fought for more than two weeks until forced to surrender, and Knox was among the civilian workers taken as prisoners of war.
Knox remained on Wake Island working for Japanese forces until September 1942, when he and about 200 other contractors were relocated. Knox landed at Fukuoka Prisoner of War Camp No. 18 in Yunoki. Medical care and food were scarce, and prisoners were given little clothing to endure frigid winters.
Knox was eventually caught fashioning a blanket into an article of clothing — some said it was a shirt, others said socks — to try to stay warm. As punishment, Knox, who stood more than 6 feet tall, was placed in a small, open-air solitary confinement cell. On Jan. 15, 1944, Knox died from malnutrition and exposure to the bitter temperatures.
Shortly after World War II ended, Knox’s remains were exhumed and moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Shaffer learned about much of Knox’s background with the help of a school project in Wisconsin, who chose Knox for a research project because of his unusual story.
“No one should have to go through what he went through,” Shaffer said. “Nobody should have to suffer this way.”
Because Knox was a civilian worker, he was not awarded posthumous medals after the war, Shaffer learned. But in 1981, the U.S. granted veteran status to the civilians who fought at Wake Island. Shaffer made call after call without luck, until the office of U.S. Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R- Tyler, helped Knox get in touch with the office in charge of naval medals and decorations.
On Tuesday, those efforts culminated with a somber ceremony, a moment of silence for Knox and the sorrowful wail of Taps. Master Chief Sean Bohanan, with the Navy Reserve Region Readiness and Mobilization Command in Fort Worth, said the country must never forget its prisoners of war.
“Elbert’s sacrifice is a poignant reminder of the price of freedom and the heroism of those who defend it,” Bohanan said.
After the ceremony, after all the photographs and handshakes, Shaffer returned home, clutching the medals of a man he never knew.
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