Every so often, a really wonderful story comes down the pike, and this most definitely is one of them.
PILOT DEDICATED HIS LIFE TO HELPING PACIFIC ISLAND VILLAGERS WHO RESCUED HIM AFTER HE WAS SHOT DOWN IN WWII
Mail Online
December 24, 2010
A World War Two Army pilot who was rescued by Pacific islanders after being shot down and devoted his life to building schools for his saviours has died aged 94.
Fred Hargesheimer, a P-38 pilot with the 8th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron, was shot down by a Japanese fighter while on a mission over the island of New Britain in the southwest Pacific.
He parachuted into a trackless jungle on the island, where he barely survived for 31 days before he was found by local hunters.
They took him to their coastal village and for seven months hid him from Japanese patrols, fed him and nursed him back to health.
In February 1944, with the help of Australian commandos working behind Japanese lines, he was picked up by a U.S. submarine off a New Britain beach.
After returning to the U.S., Mr Hargesheimer got married and began a sales career with a Minnesota forerunner of computer maker Sperry Rand, but said he was never able to forget the Nakanai people for saving his life.
The more he thought about it, he said, 'the more I realised what a debt I had to try to repay'.
After revisiting the village of Ea Ea in 1960, he raised $15,000 over three years and then returned with his 17-year-old son Richard in 1963 to build the villages' first school.
In the years afterwards, his determined fundraising would see a clinic, another school and a library built in the village, since renamed Nantabu, and surrounding villages.
In 1970, after his three children had grown up, Mr Hargesheimer and his late wife Dorothy moved to the island and began to teach the village themselves for four years.
On his last visit, in 2006, he was flown by helicopter over the jungle and carried in a chair by Nakanai men to view the newly discovered wreckage of his World War Two plane.
Six years earlier, on another visit, he was proclaimed 'Suaru Auru', or chief warrior of the Nakanai.
Ismael Saua, 69, a former teacher at the Nantabu school, said: 'The people were very happy. They'll always remember what Mr Fred Hargesheimer has done for our people.'
Mr Hargesheimer, in a 2008 interview, said: 'These people were responsible for saving my life. How could I ever repay it?'
He had been suffering from poor health and died at his home in Lincoln.
He is survived by sons Richard and Eric, and daughter Carol. He also has a sister and eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
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