Long ago, after meeting a veteran who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese on Guam, Roger Mansell realized that many of the ex-POWs had never told anyone about their experiences in what was a crucially important part of the history of the war in the Pacific.

Another man, his former office manager who had been interned in Santo Tomás in Manila, advised him, “Someday Roger, when you retire, you should research what happened to all of us and write a book about it. Tell the whole story, not some officer’s point of view.”

Roger later wrote, “That had to be in September of 1987. I note that my oldest POW files (in DOS) stem from that date. Since then, I have easily spent many thousands dollars and more than 10,000 hours researching and documenting the Allied POWS of the Japanese.”

After retiring in the 1990s, Roger began his “second career” — researching the Allied POWs of the Japanese, a gruesome story that had been largely buried in inaccessible archives. Over more than twenty years, he made multiple and extended visits to the National Archives Modern Military Records in College Park, MD, and to the Hoover Institution Library and Archives and many other military historical centers, scanning and photographing thousands of documents that had never before been been centralized or complied.

The material he gathered he enthusiastically shared with would-be researchers, POWs and their descendants at ADBC and Far East POW conventions until shortly before his death.

Since the beginning of Mansell’s project, his chief goal was to compile a database of more than 100,000 records to document what happened to every Allied soldier who was captured by Japanese forces during the war. Approximately 90 percent completed at the time of his death, this vast database contains information on when soldiers were captured, where they were interned, the conditions they had to endure during their captivity, and whether they died or were repatriated at the end of the war. [Editor’s note: Currently, there are at Mansell.com over 9,000 files totaling some 25GB.]

Sometime in the summer of 2001, he founded the Center for Research Allied POWs Under the Japanese which posted the research on its website, www.mansell.com. That website has been turned over his colleague, Wes Injerd, who, incidentally, posted his own research on Fukuoka POW Camp #1 in May 2001.

Roger turned his retirement into a full-time job, not only undertaking research and constantly updating his website, but also assisting the hundreds of people who came to his website looking for information about what had happened to friends, fathers, grandfathers, and others.

In his own words, “The introduction of NETSCAPE in 1994 changed the world and the direction of my research. I decided that I would convert my company website into a site to document all that I had learned and what I hoped to learn. My father, as a young man, owned a newspaper in Brooklyn New York and I suppose I acquired a reporter’s gene. I wanted the world to know the facts: who, what, why, where and when.

“I started the Center as a non-profit organization and solicited volunteers from the local schools where 20 hours of “volunteer” service are required each year. So far, I have funded every cent of the operation. With but rare exception, I freely make copies of everything we have for any researcher, former POW or descendent anywhere in the world. I pray this attitude will spread amongst those who research how the Japanese exploited the POWS.”