On December 29, 2022, Pearson Riddle, Jr was honored in a ceremony in the Burnsville NC Town Center as the last survivor of the attack on Wake Island at the beginning of WWII.

From the Asheville Citizen Times, May 31, 2011

Brevard, Yancey County veterans recount time as Japanese prisoners of war
World War II veterans reflect on years in Japanese camps

Today is set aside to remember our veterans who’ve fought for their country, especially those who did not return.
But some people don’t limit such thoughts to just one day. For World War II veterans and Japanese prisoner of war camp survivors Pearson Riddle and E.D. Winstead, the thoughts of their friends and comrades who didn’t make it home bubble up every day.
“I never knew people could be as cruel to each other as they can be in a war,” said Riddle, 89, who lives in the same Yancey County home he grew up in. His wife of 42 years, Wanda, said the memories still haunt her husband.
“It was a horrible experience for him, and he still has nightmares from it,” she said. “Not as bad as it was before — he’d be screaming and hollering, and I’d have to wake him up.”
Riddle’s long journey
One of six children, Pearson Riddle was born on a small farm near the Pensacola community in Yancey County. He grew up like a lot of mountain farm boys, working hard and not thinking twice about living in a house with no telephone, electricity or running water.
Riddle graduated from Burnsville High in 1939, and an itch for adventure quickly took him to the Civilian Conservation Corps and eventually to Oregon, where he worked in a remote location and learned to operate bulldozers, graders and other heavy machinery.
A buddy told him men were needed in Guam and at Wake and Midway Islands in the Pacific to build air bases. Riddle jumped at the chance.
He ended up on Wake Island, helping with defense projects, which included hauling sandbags for gun emplacements.
“I hauled sandbags until I could see blood,” Riddle said.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, it wasn’t long before they turned their attention to Wake and other islands, capturing the island Dec. 23. Riddle vividly remembers seeing American fighter pilots, stuck on the ground and being bombed and strafed by Japanese planes.
“It was pitiful to see them burn up in those airplanes,” he said.
Riddle was among 1,200 civilians and 200 Marines captured and forced to march wearing only shoes and underwear. They stayed in barracks in the islands until Feb. 13, 1942, when the Japanese shipped them off to a prison camp in Woosun, China.
More than 1,600 men were in the camp, which was overrun with “millions of mosquitoes,” Riddle said. The Japanese gave them about a teacup of a barley mixture and a little soup each day.
He spent 19 months there in forced labor, leveling land by hand — basically carrying bags of dirt from sunup to sundown. In the winter, Riddle became so ill he thought he might die.
“We called it the death row,” he said. “I had pneumonia and a collapsed lung that had pushed my heart to the side. They put a big needle in my side and took about eight pints of fluid out of there. It looked like motor oil.”
In 1943, the Japanese shipped Riddle and 500 other prisoners to Kobe, Japan. It took Riddle till May before he could work again. He moved again, ending up near Tokyo, working in a huge steel mill for two years, again logging 12-hour days.
Riddle survived by avoiding interaction with the guards as much as possible, but one day he slipped up and let a guard overhear him encouraging American B-29 bombers overhead to burn the city down.
“They’d hit you with anything they had — a gun, club, their hand,” Riddle said. “That time, he hit me with the butt of his gun.”
In March 1945, he moved again, this time to northern Japan, where he worked in an open mine. They knew little of the Allies’ advances until they saw the Japanese guards massed up, listening to Emperor Hirohito’s recorded surrender message.
The war was over, and Riddle had survived, albeit as a 97-pound shell of his former self. Before the war, he carried 160 pounds on his 5-foot 10-inch frame.
By the end, his body was nearly ruined by beriberi, a disease caused by a thiamine deficiency.
Eventually, Riddle made it back home, but his full recovery took two years. He went on to marry Wanda, and they had two children.
The adventure bug never waned in him, though, and Riddle worked in North Africa and Iceland before settling down for a 25-year stint working for International Telephone & Telegraph in the Alaskan Arctic region. He and Wanda retired to Florida before returning to their beloved Yancey County.
In 1987, the Navy gave him a rating of E4, meaning he was officially an armed forces veteran and survivor. He hopes others will never have to live through what he did.
“War is a very horrible thing,” he said simply.

Pearson’s Oral History was recorded in 2013 for The Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum.