Bataan survivor never forgot

Shrum shared experience and his mess-kit map

CARY -- At night, when the prison camp guards weren't looking, Robert Shrum created art.

Using shards of metal, he scratched to scale a map of Bataan in the Philippines, near where he was stationed with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Shrum enlisted in 1941. At the end of that year, the Japanese landed in Manila, and Shrum became a prisoner of war, forced to march for six days and more than 60 miles, in what is now known as the Bataan Death March.

Japanese forces herded 75,000 Allied captives -- about 12,000 of them GIs -- along pocked, bombed-out roads. Shrum and the rest of the troops got almost no food and water. Those who darted out of line to try to fill up canteens from streams were killed. Those who fell out of step, exhausted by the tropical heat, met a similar fate.

At least 6,000 prisoners died, and others escaped. The rest were taken to Japanese prison camps, where rations were meager. By the time Shrum was liberated in August 1945, he had lost considerable weight.

His experiences stayed with him forever, even as he married, raised a family and forged a career as an architect. For the rest of his life, Shrum reflected on what he'd endured, giving talks to schools, clubs and military groups about his experience as a prisoner of war. He delivered his final presentation less than a month before he died. Though he could scarcely get out of bed, he rallied to give an impromptu lecture in his room at Durham's VA Hospital to a group of doctors who worked there.

Shrum died of multiple myeloma Sept. 22, a week shy of his 87th birthday.

Robert Marshall Shrum was born in 1921 in Irwin, Pa.

Shrum arrived in the Philippines about two months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On Christmas Eve 1941, Shrum and his bomb group were converted to infantry, given rifles and bayonets and ordered to retreat to the southern tip of the Bataan Peninsula, where they held off the Japanese for more than three months.

When they surrendered on April 9, 1942, they were forced to march north to San Fernando, where they were transferred to a prison camp. Shrum survived backbreaking work building a road through the jungle for the Japanese.

In September 1944, Shrum was shipped to a prison near Osaka, Japan, where he worked in a factory for a year until gaining his freedom with the war's end.

The oldest of six children, Shrum decided to become an architect after returning stateside. He relished the way architecture combined the precision of mathematics and engineering with the creative aspects of art, enrolling at what is now Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, immediately upon returning from his honeymoon.

He'd gotten lucky at a nearby men's clothing store, where he found a tie, and a wife as well. Shirley Ann Larimer worked there and recognized Shrum from the newspaper as a local war hero. They married in 1948 and raised their children in south Florida, where they stayed until 1995, when they moved to Cary to be near two of their four daughters.

For 50 years, Shrum designed churches, banks, hospitals and public safety buildings. But in the early 1980s, he received an unusual commission. The Filipino government asked him to design the Cabanatuan American Memorial, dedicated to the Filipino and American soldiers who died during the Death March and while imprisoned at Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines. The camp was the site of a daring January 1945 rescue by U.S. Army Rangers and Filipino guerrillas to free more than 500 prisoners facing probable execution. He and his wife traveled there in 1982 as guests of the government.