There is a traditional military cadence used as a marching song that has gained recent viral popularity in the age of social media.
It is called “I Left My Home” and it mostly goes like this:
“Your daddy was home when you left (you’re right)
Your mama was home when you left (you’re right)
Your sister was home when you left (you’re right)
Your brother was home when you left (you’re right)
The dog was home when you left (you’re right)
The cat was home when you left (you’re right)
The fish was home when you left (you’re right)
Your daddy, your mama, your brother, your sister,
The dog, the cat, the fish was home when you left (you’re right)
And that’s reason you left (you’re right)
I left my home (I left my home)
To join the arm—-y (to join the arm—-y)
I left my home (I left my home)
To join the arm—-y (to join the arm—-y)
The day I left (the day I left)
My mama cried (my mama cried)
She thought that I (she thought that I)
Would surely die (would surely die)”
Selfless service
Claude Albert Dewberry left his family farm in Central Virginia in 1940 at the age of 25 to join the U.S. Army.
He never made it home.
Until now.
Dewberry survived the infamous Bataan Death March in the Philippines and endured two more torturous years as a prisoner of war before he was killed aboard a Japanese ship in 1945 eight months short of the end of World War II in the Pacific Theater.
Saturday, 81 years after he made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, the remains of PFC Dewberry will be laid to rest in a family plot in a small cemetery in the Pittsylvania County community of Hurt.
On what would have been his 111th birthday.
Claude was born July 25, 1915, in Pittsburgh, the second of nine children blessed to Albert Sidney Dewberry and Katie Bell Wilkinson. His father was a bridge builder, eventually moving back to Virginia and setting up a permanent homestead in Hurt, just south of the Pittsylvania-Campbell county line.
Dewberry attended Hill Grove Elementary School and Gretna High School but did not graduate, instead choosing to enter the workforce at Burlington Mills across the Roanoke River in the nearby town of Altavista.
With the outbreak of World War II in Europe and subsequent expansion of hostilities by Axis powers permeating the American consciousness, he enlisted in the Army in 1940 at the age of 25.
His family would never see him again.
Duty
PFC Dewberry was stationed in the Philippines in 1942 when he was wounded in battle. A short convalescence sent him back into the combat.
On April 9, 1942, while serving with the medical detachment of the 194th Tank Battalion on the Bataan Peninsula, Dewberry was among a U.S. force completely overrun by a devastating Japanese attack. The result was the largest force in American military history to surrender, some 12,000 soldiers along with approximately 66,000 Filipino troops.
Already lacking sufficient food, water, medicine, munitions and sleep — and shellshocked by a stunning military defeat — Dewberry and the other prisoners were forced to march through mud and the jungle approximately 65 miles from the southern tip of the peninsula to the village of San Fernando.
The conditions were a living hell. It is estimated that more than 10,000 men — mostly Filipinos — died on the march of malaria, thirst, starvation, dysentery from drinking filthy water, exhaustion from what was known as the “sun treatment” or inhumane cruelty at the hands of the Japanese guards who sometimes shot prisoners for getting out of marching formation.
One month after the Bataan surrender, Dewberry’s mother received a letter from the Army stating that all personnel serving in the Philippines would be considered “missing in action” for a period 12 months from the surrender of Corregidor on May 7, 1942, unless other information came to light.
The POWs were taken to Camp O’Donnell on Luzon Island, where it is estimated that 20,000 men died in the first two months of their imprisonment. Camp O’Donnell closed in January 1943 and most of the Americans were transferred to Cabanatuan POW camp, where thousands more died of starvation and disease.
On Feb. 21, 1943, the Army sent another message to Dewberry’s mother that her son “is now a prisoner of war of the Japanese Government in the Philippine Islands.”
Dewberry was transferred to Bilibid Prison in Manila in October 1944.
World War II was 11 months from concluding, but he would not see the end of the conflict.
Personal courage
When the tide turned in the Pacific Theater toward the American side and U.S. forces advanced on the Philippines, the Japanese in late 1944 decided to transfer POWs by ship to Japan or other territories.
The POWs called them “Hell ships.”
Dewberry boarded the Oryoku Maru. But unaware that 1,619 POWs were crammed into the cargo holds of the vessel, bombers from a nearby U.S. aircraft carrier attacked the ship on Dec. 15 and it sank in Subic Bay.
A chaplain on the sinking ship offered the following prayer:
“Father forgive them. They know not what they do.”
The Japanese government reported that 942 POWs aboard the Oryoku Maru were killed, and Dewberry mistakenly was listed among the dead. As a result, the Army sent the following telegram to his mother in Virginia on July 23, 1945:
“THE SECRETARY OF WAR DEEPLY REGRETA [sic] TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON PFC DEWBERRY CLAUDE A. WAS KILLED IN ACTION IN PACIFIC AREA 15 DEC 44 WHILE BEING TRANSPORTED ABOARD A JAPANESE VESSEL CONFIRMING LETTER FOLLOWS.”
The following day, the Army issued a letter to Dewberry’s mother that provided little more clarity:
“Nine hundred and forty-two of the prisoners of war, among them your son, are officially reported by the Japanese to have lost their lives at the time. … I regret that the known circumstances and reports received offer no hope that your son survived this catastrophe. He will be carried on the records of the War Department as killed in action 15 December 1944.”
However, the information was incorrect. Dewberry was aboard the Oryoku Maru, but he survived and had been transferred to a steamship called the Enoura Maru.
The Enoura Maru suffered the same fate. Allied planes destroyed the vessel on Jan. 9, 1945, at Takao Harbor in Formosa (now Taiwan) and Dewberry was killed.
His mother received another dispatch more than one year later on Sept. 27, 1946, this time from Brigadier Gen. H.B. Lewis, the acting adjutant general of the Army:
“Additional information has now been received in the War Department which states that your son had been transferred from the prisoner of war ship ‘Oryoku Maru’ after bombing of that ship on 15 December 1944, to the Japanese prisoner of war steamship ‘Enoura Maru’ which was subsequently bombed and sunk by allied planes on 9 January 1945 in Takao Harbor, Takao, Formosa. Therefore, on the basis of the additional information which has been received, the records of the War Department have been amended to show that he was killed in action on 9 January 1945.
“The added confusion caused by the conflicting reports is deeply regretted, however, I am sure you will understand that reports furnishes [sic] by the enemy government involve many difficulties and require intensive investigation by the War Department.”
By this time Katie Bell Dewberry was a single mother. Her husband, Albert, died in 1937 at age 50 when the oldest Dewberry child was 23 and the youngest was 4. The couple lost a young daughter, Phyllis, at the age of 5.
She remained the matriarch of the Dewberry family for 48 years after Albert’s death.
Saturday, PFC Dewberry’s remains will be buried in the family plot alongside his father, mother, younger sisters Phyllis (1917-22) and Betty (1931-2017) and younger brother Earl (1923-2012).
And it is happening largely because of a family that never completely gave up hope.
Honor
Dewberry’s younger brother, Sid, was widely known as a founding partner of the Dewberry corporation, a civil engineering, surveying and planning business that now has more than 50 offices nationwide.
Engineering might have been Sid Dewberry’s life’s work, but he had another life mission. A U.S. Army veteran who served from 1945-47, he spent his later years consumed with claiming the remains of his older brother.
Because Claude was unmarried and had no children, a geneticist needed DNA from a known living male relative such as a brother, a paternal uncle or paternal nephew in order to match a Y chromosome.
Sid Dewberry died in 2022 at the age of 94 but not before he supplied DNA samples to the Army. So did PFC Dewberry’s nephew Raymond Dewberry Jr., whose father, Ray Sr., was born in 1920.
Thirteen months ago, the science provided a hit.
On June 11, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced it had identified a skull, part of a femur and metatarsal bones as belonging to PFC Claude Dewberry.
He finally would be coming home.
“Eighty-one years in the making … I just can’t describe how it felt,” said Carolyn Boyd, one of Dewberry’s nieces who lives in the Altavista area. “It was the last thing on my mind. You never give up hope, but I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Just out of the blue. I can’t believe how it’s all coming together. It amazes me.”
How on earth did DNA from the East Coast of the United States get matched to a fallen soldier half a world away?
Information posted at the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond shows that “in May 1946 an American Graves Registration Command Search and Recovery Team exhumed a mass grave on a beach at Takao, Formosa and recovered 311 bodies.”
The unknown remains could not be identified and were reburied in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Sometime between October 2022 and July 2023 the DPAA disinterred the remains and sent them to a laboratory for further analysis. According to the War Memorial display, “the laboratory analysis and the total circumstantial evidence available identified one set of the remains as those of Dewberry.”
DPAA protocol calls for notification to be made to the oldest living relative. That honor fell to Bill Dewberry Jr., whose father Willis was the oldest of the nine Dewberry children.
Now 88 and living in Newark, Delaware, Bill Dewberry said the hair stood up on the back of his neck when he opened the letter, which resulted in a subsequent telephone call with DPAA personnel.
“I was extremely pleased because Sid had spent so much time and effort trying to track down our uncle,” Bill Dewberry said.
The 88-year-old is the only living relative who had any contact with the fallen soldier although he was too young to recall it.
“I’m sorry I can’t remember being held by him,” Bill Dewberry said. “I was [2] when he was still around in the Hurt area, so I’m sure he held me in his arms.”
The DPAA held a thorough, 90-minute Zoom call with family members in April when they were able to view photographs of PFC Dewberry’s remains. The family also was briefed on aspects of the recovery and the protocol for the return of the remains to Virginia.
One week ago, on July 17, Dewberry’s remains were flown to Raleigh, North Carolina, the same city where at age 25 he enlisted in the U.S. Army on Jan. 10, 1940. As the American Airlines commercial flight approached the gate on the tarmac at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, it was hailed with a water salute, a traditional symbolic gesture used to convey respect, honor and celebration.
Dewberry’s great-nephew, Rob Dewberry, who lives in Raleigh, witnessed the solemn ceremony.
“There were several veterans there who met us and shook our hands,” he said. “There was an honor guard. There were nine active service members who escorted us to the gate. At the gate where the plane was arriving they made an announcement to all the people in that part of the airport just to give a summary about Claude, the time he served and what happened to him.
“The honor guard marched to where the casket was. It was a very formal thing where they were in formation and on command. They picked up the casket and went over to the hearse and put it in in a very formal way and saluted. We were all there with our hands over our hearts.”
Rob Dewberry was joined at the airport by his wife and their 7-year-old son, Sid.
“Claude had a brother named Sid, and his dad went by Sid,” he said. “We didn’t name our son after this necessarily, but it was still neat that there was a Sid Dewberry there to receive Claude.”
PFC Dewberry then began the final leg of his historic journey as a hearse transported him across the state line to Finch & Finch Funeral & Crematory Service in Altavista. Virginia State Police, flanked by members of the Patriot Guard Riders motorcycle team, escorted the vehicle on the final 50 miles of the trip, arriving in Campbell County at close to 11 p.m.
“We didn’t stop at one stoplight,” Finch & Finch director Trey Finch said.
Official estimates indicate approximately 1,000 of the 10,000 to 12,000 American servicemen who participated in the Bataan Death March died or were killed along the route. It is estimated that roughly 3,500 who survived the long march also survived the war.
Among the survivors was Harold K. Johnson, who not only survived the Bataan Death March but also made it alive off the Enoura Maru, the same Enoura Maru where Dewberry was killed. Johnson later achieved the rank of four-star general and eventually served as the Army chief of staff under President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War from 1964-68.
Johnson, who died in 1983 at age 71, has a direct family connection to Central Virginia.
He was the father of the late Bob Johnson, who served as the men’s head basketball coach at Emory & Henry University in Washington County for 27 seasons and also was the school’s athletic director.
Bob Johnson’s son, Casey, has been a high school basketball coach at a variety of stops in Virginia.
Currently, Casey Johnson is the head coach at, yes, Altavista High School, which sits 1 mile up the hill from the funeral home where PFC Dewberry’s remains have awaited final victory.
It is indeed a small, small world.
Respect
Saturday services for Dewberry at New Prospect Baptist Church in Hurt will begin with a 10 a.m. flag ceremony conducted by soldiers from Fort Lee. New Prospect pastor Brady Willis will officiate an 11 a.m. funeral service, followed by the internment of the remains along with a replica of Dewberry’s Army uniform and its adornments.
His niece, Boyd, will make the short drive to the church, carrying mixed emotions.
“We’re happy that he’s coming home. It’s sad, but it’s a happy occasion,” she said.
For service and bravery, the Army posthumously awarded Dewberry the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star and POW Medal; and he also is remembered as a World War II Gold Star Veteran. The extended family plans to put all Dewberry’s medals and commendations on display at the Dewberry firm’s corporate headquarters in Fairfax.
Finch, a fifth-generation owner of the Altavista mortuary, thinks Saturday’s service might not be the first held for PFC Dewberry, whose mother had a grave marker installed in the family plot not long after the Army informed her of Claude’s death.
“I don’t have records back that far, but I would assume we did a funeral for him in 1945,” Finch said.
Katie, who died in 1985, is buried at the church alongside her husband.
Perhaps she believed that one day they would be reunited with their beloved son.
Or perhaps “believed” is not a strong enough word.
“She knew,” Boyd said.
PFC Dewberry’s mama and daddy have been home awaiting his return.
Welcome back.
