Lore of the Corps

The Battling JAGs of the Philippines: Reserve Officers as Soldiers, Lawyers, and Prisoners of the Rising Sun

By Sergeant Major (Retired) Stephen W. Minyard

Article published on: December 22, 2025 in the 2025 Issue 3 of Army Lawyer

Read Time: < 25 mins

The Cine Corregidor, Officers’ Barracks prior to the 1942 Japanese attack on Corregidor Island, Philippines. (Source: Corregidor Historic Foundation)

Since the summer of 1916, Reserve Component members of the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps have left their civilian jobs, gathered around their friends and families, and announced their plans to volunteer for active duty. From the early years of World War I through support to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s, another World War, Cold War mobilizations, and decades of operations in the Middle East, citizen-Soldiers have raised their hands in defense of national security and the rule of law. In the summer of 1940, four National Guard and Reserve judge advocates (JAs) answered the call from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said goodbye to loved ones for what was initially a single-year tour, and departed together from California for the Philippines. Three never returned. Theirs is a story of duty, professionalism, and our Regiment’s unyielding search for justice and our Nation’s dedication to bringing every fallen warrior home.

Reserve Component service in 1940 was vastly different than it is today. The mobilization experience of World War I drove Congress to comprehensively reform the Army’s non-active forces via the National Defense Act of 1920.1 The act created an Organized Reserve (the forbearer of today’s Army Reserve) with a state-based National Guard. Soldiers were structured into divisions and lower echelon units like the Regular Army force structure and reported to Active Component (AC) corps headquarters that, in turn, had responsibility over geographic regions across the country. Active-duty officers and enlisted Soldiers were detailed as cadre for the various Organized Reserve Divisions to serve a similar purpose as the Active Guard/Reserve (AGR) program today.2 These divisions and their offices of the staff judge advocate (OSJAs) were largely formations bloodied in Europe and then inactivated shortly after the armistice. They form the lineage of the vast majority of Army Reserve (USAR) embedded units and some AC divisions today.3

The interwar period was characterized by lean funding and minimal training. Soldiers in the Organized Reserve’s divisions were obligated to serve up to fifteen days a year for training (or longer if they consented), but were not paid for anything beyond their active-duty service; standardized “drill” pay for federal Reserve forces would not come for another thirty years.4 Officers could also receive pay for mileage to and from their duty station, but neither enlisted nor officers serving in the JAG Department were afforded anything like a potential retirement or other benefits received today. While the appointment of JAs was still handled by the JAG Department in Washington, D.C., the nine Regular Army corps headquarters were responsible for recruiting enlisted Soldiers into the Reserve divisions in their areas of responsibility.5 Training for these new Organized Reserve Soldiers, between their annual periods of active duty, could be a combination of lectures, correspondence courses, or “actual drill” (1920-era terminology for today’s Inactive Duty Training), depending on resources available.6

The United States once again began to prepare for international conflict as war enveloped Europe in 1939 and Japan’s military raged across China and the South Pacific. On 27 August 1940, Congress authorized the President to mobilize both the Organized Reserve divisions and the National Guard for up to twelve months. In the next ten months, more than 100 JAs mobilized for this effort, including then-Majors (MAJs) Carlos McAfee of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Arch McKeever, mobilized from his private practice in Seattle, Washington; Frank Aigrisse of Maumee, Ohio; and then-Captain (CPT) Samuel Heisinger, of the California National Guard, all ordered to serve in the Philippines in April 1941.7

Initial active-duty tours were for a single year, and most Reserve officers assumed this would be the duration of their overseas duty. These intrepid JAs traveled to San Francisco first before boarding the SS Washington for travel to the Philippines. CPT Heisinger, a Bay Area native, gathered his family together for a final photograph in full uniform on 21 April 1941, while he awaited departure.8 En route to Manila, McKeever, Aigrisse, McAfee, and Heisinger made each other’s acquaintance and gathered for another memorable photo on the decks of the Washington as relations between Japan and the United States deteriorated.9 They sailed with other activated Soldiers to support the defense of the Philippines that would focus U.S. and Philippine forces on the narrow, jungle covered peninsula of Bataan should Japan invade. The U.S. military’s plan for war in the Pacific envisioned Army forces holding out on Bataan and the fortified island of Corregidor until the Navy’s battleships and carriers drove Japan from the island nation.10 Confidence in the plan was not high in 1941; the Navy believed they would need two years to fight their way back to the Philippines if Japan struck, while the Army assumed their garrisons, if attacked, could hold out for possibly six months before eventually falling.11

Radiogram from GEN MacArthur requesting designation of an “Assistant Judge Advocate General” and Board of Review from among the completely isolated JAs in the Philippines. (Source: National Archives)

Three Regular Army JAs were already in the Philippines, so Roosevelt’s mobilization order would more than double the JAG Department’s presence there.12 Then-Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Emil Rawitser, a former Tennessee National Guard officer with twenty years in the JAG Department, was the senior JA in the theater in early 1940. He was soon joined by then-LTC Thomas Lynch, who lived in the Philippines after retiring from the Regular Army but was activated under the same legislation as the general Reserve mobilization.13 Lynch was considerably senior to then-LTC Rawitser; in the 1920s, then-MAJ Lynch had served in the JAG Department with the Philippine Scouts, so he brought tremendous local knowledge to the JAG team. Finally, then-MAJ Albert Svihra, a recent transfer from field artillery after graduating from the University of Virginia in 1939, brought his family and car to the Philippines.14 He would provide a rich, detailed diary of his time both before the war and later in captivity.15

Two of the over 200 accounts of casualties captured by MAJ Koster from mid-1943 to the beginning of 1944. The “92d Garage Area” noted here was the first collection point for Corregidor’s survivors in May 1942. (Source: National Archives)

Signs of war came quickly to the seven JAs in the Philippines. Just two months after the reservist JAs’ arrival, on 27 July 1941, then-Lieutenant General Douglas MacArthur was recalled from retirement into active service and appointed commander of the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). The USAFFE’s establishment signaled that the Philippines needed an operational command to consolidate control over all forces in the region, and resulted in the eventual assignment of JAs to posts outside of the main headquarters at Fort McKinley.

On 8 December 1941, hours after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Japan initiated airstrikes in the northern Philippines and bombed Fort McKinley the next day. Then-MAJ Svihra recalled running in a gown and slippers and scrambling to find a hole or depression, “for we had heard that this was one method of protection against bursting bombs.”16 Caught unprepared, the fort staff began building shelters the same day.17 Two weeks later, MacArthur ordered execution of operational plans for the defense of the Philippines, declared Manila an open city, and moved his headquarters and staff to Corregidor. The last vestiges of a quiet tour for the JAs there vanished, although they did gain a new colleague. On Christmas Eve, 1941, Chief Warrant Officer Peter Koster, aged fifty-one with a wife and two daughters in San Francisco, California, was appointed from among Bataan and Corregidor’s defenders into the JAG Department. He remained “Chief” until appointed to captain in February 1942 and again, later, to major.18

Photograph of “Fifth Avenue,” a main walkway at Cabanatuan, depicting typical living quarters and dress for the camp’s JAs. The rectangular platform in the background supported a screen for occasional movies and Japanese propaganda. (Source: National Archives)

From roughly January to April 1941, Lynch, Rawitser, Svihra, Heisinger, and Koster appear to have been on Corregidor and intermittently assisting operations on Bataan. MAJ McKeever was called on to lead a replacement depot briefly in Bataan, then dispatched to provide legal support to the 20,000-strong Visayan-Mindanao Force on the southernmost Philippine island.19 MAJ Carlos McAfee was assigned to the Philippine Division tasked with Bataan’s defense. In March 1942, General MacArthur departed the Philippines for Australia. He left Major General (MG) Jonathan Wainwright as the islands’ senior commander and then-LTC Lynch as his legal advisor to what was now the U.S. Forces in the Philippines (USFIP).20

The JAs of the USFIP continued to serve the Regiment and the force’s general defenses as Japan relentlessly attacked the utterly isolated American and Philippine troops. Even as Lynch and Rawitser’s office was bombarded in Corregidor, McKeever’s forces on Mindanao continued to require legal support on a host of issues. Radiograms to MacArthur’s headquarters requested clarification on the duty status and pay entitlements of officers in the more remote command since 7 December; MacArthur bluntly replied they were in a “field status” and no longer TDY.21 Another transmission from MacArthur to his southern command urged a “caution to all agencies” to strictly adhere to international law in the treatment of Japanese prisoners of war (POWs).22 McArthur retained direct control over McKeever’s Mindanao forces when he left, instead of MG Wainwright, no doubt complicating the authorities McKeever worked with as he advised his commander in the last days of fighting.

On 6 May 1941, LTG Wainwright surrendered all American and Philippine military forces to the commander-in-chief, Imperial Japanese Forces, in the Philippines. LTC McKeever’s Visayan-Mindanao Force was still nominally controlled by MacArthur, not Wainwright, so a written order to surrender “to the proper Japanese Officer” was conveyed to the force’s command and staff.23 Wainwright added that failure to fully surrender would have “only the most disastrous results.”24 The same day and into the morning of 8 May, the JAs of the Corregidor garrison (all JAs in the Philippines except for McKeever and McAfee) gathered what items they could carry and moved from the stifling, dusty tunnels of the island fortress to a ten-acre field used by U.S. forces as a motor pool. This area, known as the 92d Garage Area, with little shelter or food, an overused but reliable source of water, and swarming with flies and the stench of nearby latrines, would be their home for nearly two weeks.25

Life at the 92d Garage Area was miserable, bringing scorching heat, two meals a day of rice, issued by their Japanese captors, bloated, decomposing bodies, and the ever-present threats of dysentery, malaria, and skin diseases. To combat boredom and overwhelming uncertainty, many officers volunteered to supervise enlisted work parties, often accompanied by the boasting of their captors that Australia and Honolulu were next to fall.26 These excursions back to the tunnels of Corregidor typically involved pulling every conceivably useful item, like canned goods and machinery, out of storage for shipment to Japanese warehouses in Manila. Occasionally, work party members could keep a can or two of rations for themselves to supplement the meager but welcome rice rations. On 23 May, this dismal lull ended when the Japanese loaded the American and Filipino captives onto ships for transport through Manila to more permanent camps near the town of Cabanatuan.27

The other two Reserve JAs, McKeever and McAfee, were captured with their assigned forces, with McKeever eventually joining the Corregidor JAs in Cabanatuan a few months later. McAfee, captured first in April 1942, endured the notorious Bataan Death March and remained in the Philippines seven months as a POW; he was the first sent to mainland Japan for the war’s duration on 6 November 1942.28

As prisoners of Imperial Japan, the eight JAs would have every reason to sink to mere self-preservation. Instead, they continued to serve the Army as officers and leaders, and as lawyers charged with assisting camp discipline and order. Each camp had a senior officer commander, who in turn had appointed staff to include JAs. Investigations into misconduct or dereliction continued, as did courts-martial proceedings (with punishments ultimately approved by the senior Japanese officer for each camp).29 One such investigation, into maltreatment by the camp’s hospital, remains in our National Archives, complete with appointment orders, findings and recommendations of the panel, and summarized testimony from LTC Svihra (who praised his “excellent” medical care while hospitalized with a ruptured appendix).30 Then-LTC McAfee, alone as a JA in the Japanese homeland for most of the war, was at times the most senior officer in his camp, but deferred in light of his duties to a line officer as senior POW.31 Our Regiment’s heroes performed these duties amid rampant disease and diminished rations, but they quietly also served a far greater cause while in captivity.

The concept of the rule of law, both within our Army and across nations during international conflict, forms a bedrock of the JAG Corps’s mission; it also mightily drove our imprisoned JAs to acts of incredible bravery. In early 1942, just a few months into captivity, then-LTC Rawitser compiled a roster of POWs and illegal orders issued by his captors, as well as the words of “protest songs” under the guise of service as the camp’s librarian.32 MAJ Koster, while imprisoned at Philippine Prison Camp I, spent parts of 1943 and 1944 swearing Soldiers to sworn statements that both detailed the names and service numbers of Soldiers killed in Bataan and while in captivity, and gave vivid descriptions of atrocities against American Soldiers.33 These statements, handwritten in a notebook that survived the war, provided family members with the final moments of loved ones killed in the conflict and paint a damning record of Imperial Japan’s flaunting of international law. Interestingly, the notebook is largely in another’s handwriting, but bears little evidence of who else helped MAJ Koster in his efforts.34 Both COL Rawitser and MAJ Koster’s actions speak of the power of our Regiment’s ideals and their gallantry as an excellent example of principled counsel and selfless service.

As the war progressed, Lynch and Rawitser were transferred with more senior officers to mainland China. Aigirsse, McKeever, Koster, Svihra, and Heisinger remained in the Philippines, and McAfee transferred among a handful of camps in Japan. Some received short Christmas telegrams from home but depended on rumors, occasionally functioning clandestine radios, and new prisoners for information on how the war was progressing.

Two and a half years after boarding a PT boat on Corregidor, McArthur returned to liberate the Philippines. On 1 September 1944, American forces began tactical air strikes to soften Japan’s Philippine defenses; on 20 October, McArthur began the islands’ amphibious assault. Facing a naval blockade, Japan started a months-long transport of POWs to the Japanese homeland in the fall of 1944 that would prove deadly amid the chaotic air, sea, and ground battlefield.35 The first casualty was the Active Army JA, LTC Albert Svihra. He, along with hundreds of other POWs, was crowded into the transport Arisan Maru, only to be torpedoed and sunk by a prowling American submarine in the South China Sea on 24 October 1944.36

Japan continued the transport of POWs from Manila despite the dangers and likelihood of attack. U.S. forces controlled the seas and air at this point throughout most of the Pacific Theater, and little to no effort was made to properly mark ships transporting POWs. On 12 December 1944, more than 1,600 American POWs, including Aigrisse, McKeever, Heisinger, and Koster, who were told to pack their belongings for evacuation. Their transport from Manila to Japan, via Formosa (Taiwan), was the Oryoku Maru , captained by Shin Kajiyama and under the military supervision of Captain Junsaburo Toshino. As each left the Bilibid Prison to board the ship, their names were written with brief notes into a log later copied by an American officer who remained behind; McKeever’s entry reads:

Lt. Col. McKeever, JAGD-Res; practiced law in Seattle, Wash.37

This would be the last record of the Reserve JA alive.

Example of an administrative investigation, largely managed by MAJ Koster as the recorder, transcribed on the back of a Prisoner Identification Card. This case, in July 1944, would be one of the last handled by the Cabanatuan JAs. (Source: National Archives)

Japanese Imperial Army Soldiers and civilians were loaded into the ship’s main cabins and upper decks, while the POWs were herded into the ship’s four stifling hot, unventilated cargo holds.38 Anti-aircraft weapons were arrayed on the ship’s decks, giving the ship all the appearance of an armed warship. Rice and seaweed, but no water, were served into the cargo holds on 13 December as the ship left Manila. The already malnourished POWs were packed so closely the first night they could barely breathe and “went crazy, cut and bit each other through the arms and legs,” from dehydration and heat, according to one survivor.39 The next morning opened to anti-aircraft fire against an American observation plane, followed by dive bombers from the USS Hornet. Attacks from above arrived throughout the day, strafing and damaging but not sinking the ship, and the second night in cargo holds proved even worse than the first. An unknown number of Americans were killed by the dive bombers, subsequent flooding, and Japanese soldiers firing into the cargo holds to prevent escape. Some fifty Americans were estimated to have died from suffocation on the night of 14 December. This likely took MAJ Koster’s life as the ship listed in Subic Bay.40 Throughout the second night in the holds, as men lay dying in the flooding, stale-air-filled ship, some went “maniacal,” murdering their fellow Soldiers and leaving another forty dead the next morning.41 On 15 December, the ship was abandoned as POWs, including the last two JAs on the ship, MAJ Aigrisse and MAJ Heisinger, flooded out of the holds and swam to a nearby shore. McKeever was still in one of the ship’s holds as American planes returned and sank the ship later that day. In all, an estimated 300 American Soldiers lost their lives in the attacks.42

At top center, the transport Oryoku Maru carrying hundreds of American POWs, sinks in Subic Bay after multiple attacks from planes of the USS Hornet. The surviving JAs, MAJs Samuel Heisinger and Frank Aigrisse, swam from the sinking ship to the beach just to the south of the ship’s burning hull. (Source: Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, D.C.)

The last year of the war would continue to claim the lives of Philippine Department JAs. MAJs Aigrisse and Heisinger and the Oryoku Maru survivors, many wounded and ill from deprivation, were herded back onto transports in the days following the Hornet's attacks. Heisinger would survive less than a month, killed in another bombing in a ship’s hospital ward on 12 January 1945.43 MAJ Aigrisse perished as a POW in Moji, Japan, on 4 February 1945, according to his Japanese “Death Identification Record,” with “unknown” as the cause of death.44 A post-war report provided more details: at some point, MAJ Aigrisse was wounded in a bombing and transported to the hospital camp at Moji, where he succumbed to his wounds and dysentery.45

Three JAs would survive captivity. MAJ Carlos McAfee, the first captured and only Philippine Department Reserve JA to live through the war, was imprisoned outside of Osaka in the war’s last days. On 22 August 1945, the camp commandant notified the senior American officers that Japan had surrendered, and immediately left the Americans to virtually fend for themselves. U.S. flags, hidden the entire war by two officers, were raised on the camp’s grounds, but food and other supplies were desperately low. After ten days of uncertainty, American B-29s dropped supplies on the camp, and on 8 September 1945, elements of the 1st Cavalry Division arrived to formally liberate McAfee and his fellow POWs. On his last day of captivity, he posed in a white T-shirt, bold and defiant, for a group photo of fellow Oklahoma-native POWs taken by his liberators.46 McAfee remained on active duty for another fourteen years before retiring as a colonel. He passed away 24 November 1991, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.47 COL Rawitser and COL Lynch both also survived war, as did MG Wainwright, liberated from the Mukden, Manchuria (China), prison camp in 1945.

COL Rawitser added an act of undeniable leadership and concern for his fellow JAs to this story. From 1945 to 1947, the War Department sought an accounting both of deaths in the Philippine Department and evidence of war crimes via questionnaires mailed to survivors across the Nation. COL Rawitser received one while at home in Memphis, Tennessee, shortly after the war. At some point since his liberation, he was provided a trove of information from a MAJ A.C. Peterson, 60th Coastal Artillery, Philippine Coast Artillery Command. The first JA Rawitser noted as a casualty was MAJ Koster. Rawitser wrote Koster’s date and cause of death and service information on the form, then provided the same information for McKeever, Heisinger, and Aigrisse, all with MAJ Peterson as the information’s source. He then filled the form’s margins with additional Soldier casualty information, in all giving closure to ten families who had not seen their loved ones for four years or more. Hundreds of these forms no doubt were sent by the War Department, but the Army’s Casualty Branch singled out his and a dozen or so other responses for archiving the fate of Soldiers killed during the POW transports of December 1944 to January 1945.48 As America was piecing together the inhumanity of the war’s costs, COL Rawitser provided servant leadership and vital information to our Regiment’s families across all three components.

World War II was over, but the JAG Department and its Reserve officers concluded a powerful postscript of justice for Svihra, Aigrisse, Heisinger, Koster, and McKeever. In 1947, the Eighth Army OSJA facilitated a series of courts-martial for several officers and civilians responsible for the treatment of “hell ship” POWs. One of the most significant cases, styled United States vs. Toshino et al., tried Junsaburo Toshino, the senior officer on the Oryoku Maru. Toshino was charged with, and found guilty of, causing “intense mental and physical suffering, impairment of health and death,” during the two-day period in which both McKeever and Koster perished.49 Toshino was also found guilty of abusing survivors, including MAJ Heisinger. The court’s charges, specifications, and sentences were reviewed by LTC Winston L. Field, a former Reserve officer.50 Toshino was hanged for his crimes and Field would go on to serve a pivotal role for Reserve JAs as the first Reserve Activities and Plans Department director at The Judge Advocate General’s School.

As of March 2025, the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency (DPAA) lists LTCs Koster, McKeever, and Heisinger as “Unaccounted For.”51 However, in 2023, DPAA embarked on an anticipated eight-year project to identify remains in two locations from the Philippine campaign. All three fallen JAs appear on the DPAA’s list of Soldiers who could one day be “accounted for,” bringing closure to their families and our Regiment; DPAA began reporting the first identifications from this project in February 2025.52

The story of these JAs who served in the Philippines during World War II is one of extraordinary courage, resilience, and dedication to duty. These men faced unimaginable hardships as prisoners of war, yet continued to uphold the principles of justice and leadership even in captivity. Their actions—whether documenting atrocities, maintaining discipline, or providing closure to families—reflect the enduring values of the JAG Corps and the profound commitment to making the rule of law an equal partner of violence on the battlefield. As efforts continue to account for the fallen and honor their sacrifices, their story serves as a powerful reminder of the strength of the human spirit and the unwavering pursuit of justice, even in the darkest of times. TAL

Notes