Who was Joe Kieyoomia?

Joe Kieyoomia (1919 -1997) was one of the unluckiest and luckiest men to survive WWII.

Initially tortured because his captors thought he was Japanese-American (and therefore a traitor), Joe suffered months of beatings before the Japanese accepted him as Navajo.

He survived the Death March that killed thousands of U.S. and Philippine soldiers. When the "Navajo Code" had the Japanese baffled, Joe was questioned and then tortured. Joe was not trained as a code talker and did not know about the code. Stripped naked and made to stand for hours in the deep snow, Joe’s feet froze to the ground where a guard shoved him, causing the soles of his feet to tear.

After surviving the prison camps, the "hell ships to Japan" and the torture, Joe was a prisoner in Nagasaki, Japan when that city was the target of the second atomic bomb. Joe survived the attack. After 3½ years as a prisoner of war, he was abandoned for three days after the bombing. Later freed he returned to the United States.