Captured

The story of Ojai’s WWII Prisoners of War

by Perry Van Houten

Photos: courtesy the Wall of Remembrance

At the entrance to the parking lot at the east end of Ojai’s Libbey park is an engraved bronze plaque installed by the Ojai Lions Club.

The plaque, unveiled on Memorial Day 1947, lists the names of 20 American veterans from the Ojai Valley who died in the service of their country. Two of the men honored on the plaque died while prisoners of war in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II.

Here are their stories and those of other POWs who called the Ojai Valley home, including some who returned from the war and became friends.

Third from left: Ventura native Larry Moraga

Robert Pierpont

Robert Pierpont was the grandson of Ernest and Josephine Pierpont, who founded the Pierpont Cottages in the area of what is now Thacher Road. Born in 1916, he was educated in Ojai and graduated from The Thacher School. After attending the California Institute of Technology for a year, he entered the military academy at West Point. Upon graduating, Pierpont was assigned to the U.S. Army Engineers in the Philippines at Bataan and Corregidor until American forces surrendered and he was taken prisoner. He survived the Bataan Death March in April 1942, where as many as 650 American fatalities were reported, and was imprisoned for more than two years in a Japanese POW camp on the island. In October 1944, Pierpont was sent to Japan on a troopship carrying 1,775 American and British prisoners of war, but the ship was sunk in submarine action in the South China Sea. The ship had no markings that it was carrying POWs. Lt. Pierpont was 28.

Lewis Hayes

Another Ojai survivor of the Bataan Death March is memorialized on the plaque at Libbey Park, but whether U.S. Army Pfc. Lewis “Skeet” Hayes knew Robert Pierpont is not known. After enlisting in the Coast Artillery, Hayes fought on Bataan and Corregidor, but was captured when Bataan fell and he was forced to march more than 60 miles with very little food or water. An estimated 80,000 American and Filipino troops suffered extreme brutality during the march, including beatings, shootings, stabbings and torture. Hayes survived, but later died in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. He is buried with more than 17,000 other American servicemen and women at the Manila American Cemetery. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans A airs, 130,201 Americans were captured and interned during World War II.

While 14,072 died as POWs, 116,129 returned to the U.S. military. From the U.S. Army and Air Corps, 93,941 servicemen and women were taken prisoner in the European theater, while 27,465 were POWs in the Pacific Ocean theater, the vast majority in the Philippines.

John Real

John Real of Ojai was another survivor of the Philippine invasion. As told to historian and author David Pressey in “Veterans’ Stories of Ventura County,” Real grew up in Ojai and graduated from Nordhoff High School in 1940. He was sent to Clark Field in the Philippines and, during the battle, went from being an aerial photographer with a squadron of B-17 bombers to an infantryman armed with a 1903 Springfield rifle.

Real was captured in the Japanese invasion and survived the Bataan Death March. He became ill with dysentery and malaria and was sent to a hospital where he met Robert Pierpont. Shipped to the mainland, Real worked in the rice paddies and coal mines, unloading coal at Niigata, Japan, originally one of the prime targets for the atom bomb. He found out the war was over when the Japanese guards disappeared and American troops marched into camp. Sent home after V-J Day, Real landed in Washington state, went to Redwood City in Northern California, and hitchhiked home to Ojai. Real died on June 8, 2014, at the age of 92.

René Diets

René Diets lived the best years of his life in Ojai. Born in Indonesia, Diets was a sailor in the Royal Dutch Navy, stationed on the island of Java. The fleet was destroyed in the disastrous Battle of the Java Sea and Diets was captured. He was shipped to Nagasaki, where he worked in the shipyards riveting steel plates to the hulls of Japanese ships. Transferred to the Japanese coal mines high in the mountains behind the city, Diets was on a work detail away from camp on Aug. 9, 1945, when he saw the mushroom cloud rising from the city, the second to be wiped out by atomic attack. wife, Maria. Ten years later, he was accepted into the United States through a sponsor in New York, and was told he and Maria and their three daughters would be going to a town in California named Ojai. Before he received the telegram announcing the move to America, Diets had a prophetic dream about a valley covered in orange groves, according to eldest daughter Suza Francina, who currently serves on the Ojai City Council. The family’s first home in 1957 was in the middle of an orange orchard on Thacher Road, Francina said. Her dad, an accomplished artist and painter, worked as an accountant at The Thacher School.

Diets’ eldest grandson is former Ojai representative to the California State Assembly and current Santa Barbara County Supervisor Das Williams. In 2014, the State Assembly recognized Diets by honoring him as Veteran of the Year. Diets died in Ojai on Oct. 16, 2016. He was 93.

An American POW’s chances of surviving internment were far greater when held by the Germans as opposed to the Japanese. Germany ratified the Geneva Convention — rules on how POWs should be treated — in 1934, and despite some problems, the German military generally upheld the rules when it came to American and British POWs.

But the protections were largely ignored when it came to Russian and Polish prisoners, who the Nazis considered racially inferior. Japan, like Russia, signed the 1929 Geneva Convention, but never ratified it. Accordingly, military records show that 33% of American POWs held by the Japanese died in captivity, while just 1% of American POWs held by the Germans perished in prison camps.

Donald Betlach

Longtime Ojai resident Donald Betlach spent four of his eight months overseas as a POW in Stalag XIIA near Limburg, Germany.

Born on May 12, 1924, in rural Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Betlach attained the rank of staff sergeant in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the officers’ mess of the 106th Infantry Division, fighting on the Western Front. Less than two months after his unit shipped o to Europe, Betlach was captured by German forces in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge and was reported missing Dec. 21, 1944.

In a letter to Betlach dated Dec. 27, 1944, his mother, Anna, wondered why she hadn’t heard from him in four weeks. She also described a recent experience in which she was awakened by the sound of his voice. His sister, Dorothy, reported an identical experience. “My first thought was that there was something wrong,” Anna wrote in the letter to her son.

Betlach was liberated in April 1945 and returned home in June. His brotherin-law, Pfc. Robert Link, was also held prisoner in a German POW camp before being liberated in April. After the war, Betlach attended the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arizona, earning his degree in Engineering. While working for the Shell Oil Company, he was assigned to the oil fields on Ventura Avenue in Ventura. He met and married Mary Jane Sarzotti, and the couple spent four years in Montana before returning to Ojai. In 1981, Betlach retired as deputy director of the Ventura County Public Works Department. He served on the Ojai Planning Commission and was a member of the Ojai Valley Retired Men’s Club.

Betlach passed away at his home in Ojai on Feb. 15, 2020. He was 95. Every Memorial Day, hundreds of posters featuring the stories and photos of Ventura County veterans are put on display at Libbey Park. “The Wall of Remembrance” was developed by Nancy Hill, a member of the Ojai Valley Women’s Auxiliary of the American Legion who undertakes nearly every major patriotic and veterans event in the valley. Hill interviewed Betlach prior to creating his poster, but said he never spoke much about his time in captivity. “It was just something he experienced and he didn’t want to relive it,” Hill said. “You’d never know that he had this history as a prisoner of war, because he was so humble.”

Larry Moraga

Ventura native Larry Moraga survived six months in a POW camp in Germany.

Betlach attended services at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Ojai, where his friend Larry Moraga was also a parishioner. Raised in Ventura, Moraga joined the Army after graduating from Ventura High School. He was sent to the Western Front and served with the 84th Infantry Division before being captured by the Germans. He spent six months at a forced labor camp in Germany. After the war, Moraga met his wife, Evelyn. The two were married in 1951 and lived in Ojai for 48 years. He worked as a plumber for 40 years before retiring, and belonged to American Legion Post 482 in Ojai. In 1989, Moraga was presented with the Prisoner of War Medal by the United States Armed Forces, during a ceremony in Ventura attended by Congressman Robert Lagomarsino of Ojai. He was 76 years old when he died at his home in Ojai on Oct. 17, 1999.

Ben Livesay

Ben Livesay

Both Betlach and Moraga were friends with Ben Livesay, an Ojai man people called “Bennie.”

Livesay grew up in Casitas Springs, then known as “Stoney Flats,” and attended Ventura High School and Ventura College. He worked as a forest ranger with Los Padres National Forest before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force and becoming an airplane mechanic. But fl yer sounded like a more glamorous job than mechanic, so he became a waist gunner, manning a 50-caliber machine gun on a B-17 bomber for the 8th Air Force’s 94th Bomb Group. During Livesay’s seventh mission, his plane was shot down over France.

He had never parachuted before, but he bailed out at 10,000 feet and tried to hide in a fisherman’s shack before he was quickly captured by German soldiers. Livesay marked his 21st birthday as a prisoner of war at Stalag XVIIB in Krems, Austria, spending three years in the camp with 4,500 other prisoners from all Allied armies, including thousands of Russians.

When Russian forces closed in from the east, the Germans marched the Allied prisoners westward, past death camps where Livesay experienced the Holocaust firsthand.

After the war, he went to work for Getty Oil Company and spent 43 years working in the Ventura oil fields. He was active with the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Ojai and the Church of Christ in Meiners Oaks.

Livesay died Sept. 3, 2007, at the age of 83.

Heroes with a common bond

Though Betlach, Moraga and Livesay became friends, they never got together to reminisce about the war, according to Hill. “I don’t know that they discussed this stuff ,” she said. “They were all just so tight-lipped about it.” All three men stayed involved in the Ojai community. They donated money at fundraisers for veterans and didn’t consider themselves heroes. “They are real heroes, these men. I imagine they were pretty scared, but they went to war,” Hill said.

“But they didn’t go to war because they loved to go to war,” she added. “They went to war because they loved what they left behind. It was just an honor for me to know them.”

Written by Perry Van Houten

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