John R. Breeze: a rescue at Guam and a Silver Star on Corregidor

Twice in the first months of 1942 the papers named a young Marine whose father lived at Arbon. On February 19 an Associated Press item reported a Treasury lifesaving medal for Corporal John R. Breeze, for a rescue at Guam in 1940. In May the Army and Navy Journal listed Sergeant John R. Breeze among the Fourth Marines decorated in the Philippines. By then Corregidor had fallen.

A Crystal baby

The Breezes were a Crystal family. Crystal, a high basin of springs and dry farms, has its own history on the site's Crystal page. John's father, William Henry Breeze, went by Henry in the Crystal news. He appears as "Wm. Henry Breeze, Crystal" on the list of Power County men registered for the draft in 1917. His brother, Spencer D. Breeze of Crystal, is on the same list. When their parents came from Walla Walla, Washington, in June 1918, the American Falls Press said they were visiting "their sons, Henry and Spencer, of this place."

The same Crystal column of June 18, 1918, carried this notice:

Born, to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Breeze. Sunday, June 9, a fine baby boy, both mother and child doing nicely.

The paper did not give the baby's name. His Find a Grave memorial gives John Robert Breeze's birth as June 9, 1918, at Pocatello, and one service index gives the same date, though another has June 19. The notice is almost certainly his. That September the same column reported that Henry Breeze had threshed 600 bushels of wheat from a 17-acre field.

The rescue at Guam

John Breeze enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1938. On September 8, 1940, at the Pacific island of Guam, he rescued two youths from drowning. The Treasury Department announced a silver lifesaving medal for the rescue, and the Associated Press carried the news on February 19, 1942.

By then Guam was in Japanese hands. The Pocatello Tribune printed the AP story on its front page under the heading "Former Pocatellan Receives Medal." The same page carried a Navy list of Idaho men from Wake and Guam who were probably prisoners of the Japanese; most of the men it named were civilian workers, and Breeze was not among them. The AP story said the Treasury had honored the "fortitude and presence of mind" Breeze showed in the rescue. It gave his age as 23, said he was born at Pocatello, and called him the son of William H. Breeze of Arbon. The Ogden Standard-Examiner ran the same story on a classified-ad page. Neither paper said where the corporal was serving that winter.

The Silver Star

By April 1942 he was a sergeant in the Fourth Marines in the Philippines. The sources found do not say when he joined the regiment, though his obituary says he fought on Bataan and Corregidor. The Army and Navy Journal, published in Washington, gave the regiment's story in its issue of May 16, 1942. The regiment had been moved from Shanghai to the Philippines just before the war began. The Journal said it had fought at the Cavite Navy Yard, at Olongapo, at Mariveles and on Bataan, and that its Marines, about 1,500 officers and men, withdrew to the island of Corregidor on the orders of Lt. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright in the closing phases of the Bataan battle. Later histories date the move much earlier: by December 29, 1941, after leaving Olongapo, the regiment had become the main fighting force on Corregidor, more than three months before Bataan fell. Shortly before Corregidor fell, word had come out that 21 officers and 155 enlisted men of the regiment, with a few Navy medical men serving with it, had been decorated. All the medals were Army decorations.

Under the heading "Silver Star" the Journal printed "Sgt. John R. Breeze; William H. Breeze, father, Arbon, Idaho." The paper said nothing was known of the actions behind the awards. It added that when Corregidor surrendered the week before, the Fourth Marines were presumed to be prisoners of war.

The citation for his Silver Star, reprinted in the Military Times Hall of Valor, tells what he did. It was issued in General Orders No. 24 of the Philippine Coast Artillery Command, dated April 14, 1942. On April 9, 1942, the day the forces on Bataan surrendered, an enemy bomb caved in a tunnel at Fort Mills, the Army post on Corregidor. A gun crew of the 91st Coast Artillery had taken shelter there, and several men were trapped. Sergeant Breeze, of the headquarters company of the Fourth Marines' Second Battalion, left his own shelter "without regard for his personal safety." He crossed two hundred yards of open ground and helped dig the trapped men out while enemy planes overhead dropped bombs nearby.

Prisoner, and after

Corregidor surrendered on May 6, 1942. Prisoner-of-war records, as the Hall of Valor summarizes them, show John Breeze held by the Japanese from then until September 1945. One index of those records places him at a camp in the Tokyo area and dates the end of his captivity September 12, 1945. The sources found so far do not tell how he lived through those three and a half years. His obituary said he was credited with saving the lives of many fellow prisoners.

He stayed in the Marine Corps. His gravestone records service in World War II and Korea, and he retired as a major in 1958, twenty years after he enlisted. He then worked as an aerospace engineer. His obituary listed the Silver Star, the Purple Heart and the Treasury lifesaving medal among his awards. John R. Breeze died at Brawley, California, on July 4, 2002, at the age of 84. He is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego.

The story as reported

Pocatello Tribune, February 19, 1942, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department awarded a silver lifesaving medal to a Pocatello-born Marine who saved two young people from drowning at Guam.

Corporal John R. Breeze of the Marine Corps made the rescue on September 8, 1940, at the Pacific island, when two youths were in danger in the water. In announcing the award, the department cited the "fortitude and presence of mind" he had shown.

Breeze was 23 years old. He was born at Pocatello, Idaho, and was the son of William H. Breeze of Arbon, Idaho. He had joined the Marine Corps in 1938.

On this site: the rescue at Guam is also told among the valley's Stories, and the Crystal page tells the history of the basin where his family farmed.