COL Thomas Sledge
In 1994, Kyle Thompson published his POW survival story entitled: A Thousand Cups of Rice = shorthand for the 3 and half years that the Lost Battalion men spent as POWs. In it, he describes the ‘near miss’ that the Tharp Party had when en route to Burma from Singapore, the ship the Dai Moji Maru was attacked by a flight of B-24s.
A few years later, Arthur Clark, a combat mate of Thompson’s was contacted by a retired USAF Colonel, Thomas Sledge. He claimed to have been one of the B-24 crewmen on that fateful day. He attended a Lost Battalion reunion and met the men that he almost killed.
[See Section 9.2 for a detailed accounting of that incident.]
