"With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander,'' Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright told President Roosevelt in a radio message.

And a young soldier from Duluth named Walter Kwiecinski would be among the Americans left on Corregidor.

Staff Sgt. Kwiecinski had manned the last anti-aircraft gun to fire at the enemy.  For the next three and one-half years he would be a prisoner of the Japanese.   Kwiecinski would return home, meet future wife Mary Anne Krebs at a dance hall in Chisholm, marry and raise a family.

His widow, Mary Anne Kwiecinski of Virginia, doesn't want people to forget those who sacrificed years of their lives as POWs. She and Marge Pearsall of Virginia, whose husband Ed was captured on Wake Island and remained a POW for three months shy of four years, sell daisies as a reminder.

The flowers will be sold from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday at Festival Foods and at Super One in Virginia.

The number of World War II ex-prisoners is dwindling fast, with two -- Charles Snyder of Virginia and George Costello of Leonidas -- dying just recently.   Ed Pearsall died in 1998 and Walter Kwiecinski in 1988.   There are just a few remaining members of the Arrowhead Chapter of Ex-POWs, sponsor of the daisy sale.   Proceeds go to veterans hospitals and to the Iron Range veterans van.

Walter Kwiecinski had joined the Army in 1941, before the United States was in the war, as Pearsall had joined the Marines.   "They knew the war was coming.   There wasn't work for these guys,'' Kwiecinski said.   Kwiecinski was assigned to anti-aircraft on Bataan, then Corregidor, putting up searchlights.   On Corregidor he manned a 12-inch mortar, the last gun fired there.   He was in prison camps in the Philippines until July 1944, then spent 62 days on a "hellship'' to Japan, where he remained until the end of the war. He almost met death in the prison camp at Kokura, a Japanese steel-making town.   The plant there was to be the site of the second atomic bomb on Aug. 9, Kwiecinski's birthday.   But because of clouds and smoke that obscured the target, the bomber went on to its fallback site -- Nagasaki.

Kwiecinski said her husband didn't talk much about his time as a prisoner at first.   But she knew he bore emotional scars -- and scars across his back from a beating.

She has learned a great deal from the book, "Corregidor: From Paradise to Hell!'' given to her by the author, Ben Waldron, taken prisoner on Corregidor.   "As daylight broke, we could still hear firing all around us, but thank God our front was quiet.   When we counted the dead Japs, the body count was near one hundred,'' Waldron wrote.   Then came the news of the surrender.   "The shelling on Corregidor had ripped out all of the trees, brush and vines.   The entire island looked like some no-man's land of plowed earth and rocks....   There must have been a hundred or more dead bodies lying in grotesque positions.   That's one thing about war, when you die it is seldom done in a neat and tidy manner as some funeral parlor might have it.   You could use your imagination forever, and never come up with all of the twisted and gross shapes of death on a battlefield.''

Until war's end, Kwiecinski would witness the things Waldron wrote of.   At the first labor camp, Waldron wrote, "The flies were so bad that you had to shoo them away from your mouth constantly in order to breathe.   The worst part was the stench...  It got to the point where, even though we saw all of these sights, our minds would block out the horror of what we saw...  We just slogged along like zombies, walking through all the bodies...  I had learned that the dead were dead -- like a sack of potatoes with no feelings whatsoever.

"No matter how hard you tried to keep out of trouble and stay inconspicuous, sooner or later some Jap guard would command you to stand at attention and then proceed to beat you up,'' Waldron wrote of life in a prison camp at Cabanatuan.   "Some men became so weak, they couldn't even walk out to the slit trenches which were our latrines.''

Kwiecinski and his fellow prisoners endured a 62-day "hellship'' voyage to Japan to the next prison camp.   "After two days at sea some of the men began to go out of their minds,'' Waldron wrote.   "We were not getting enough water or food...  The men were becoming like wild beasts...  Whenever it rained, the water would come directly into our hold.   This was a God-send and we would try to wet our towels or any other piece of cloth we had, then we would wring out the water for drinking.   If it rained hard, they would cover the hatch.   The men would scream and several went mad, causing more killings.''

Liberation finally came.   "Sept. 8, 1945, was a beautiful day,'' Waldron wrote.   "At last we were really free, which was still hard to believe.   We sat back and relaxed, enjoying the scenery as the train carried us back across the trestles and around through the mountains and valleys.   I sat in a daze and became sad, thinking of all the men I had known and seen who had either died or had been killed.''

Walter Kwiecinski came back to Minnesota in October 1945.   It was a bittersweet homecoming, for his mother had died just a month before.   "She waited all that while,'' Mary Anne Kwiecinski said.   "One month before, she passed away.''

"Eddie's mother got to where she couldn't talk anymore,'' said Pearsall.   "She would go to the piano and play 'The Maiden's Prayer.'   It was how she prayed for Eddie.''

For years the former POWs carried the reminders of such horror.   And when the United States government planned to pay reparations to those Japanese-Americans held in camps during the war, both Pearsall and Kwiecinski were angry.

Kwiecinski and Pearsall support the movement to allow former American prisoners of war captured in the Pacific to sue Japanese companies for compensation for their suffering.   However, a 1951 peace treaty stands in the way -- the federal government last year stopped litigation against Japanese companies on the grounds that a California law extending the statute of limitations for World War II crimes violates the peace treaty with Japan.

"We don't want people to forget,'' said Kwiecinski.   Pearsall is fearful that a younger generation of Americans doesn't know enough about history.

"I would hope that the people wouldn't forget what these brave men went through.   They just don't realize if they would lose one day of freedom, what these men went through for three and a half, four years,'' Kwiecinski said.

"People are soft now,'' said Pearsall.   "These men survived.   They lived through the Depression.   They had to go without.   They were tough.''

Both women spoke of how patriotic their husbands were.   "In parades or when they heard the national anthem, they had tears in their eyes,'' Kwiecinski said.

The men made trips back to where they had been taken prisoner.   For Kwiecinski it was a healing experience, Mary Anne Kwiecinski said.   "He was a little bit more peaceful after he had been back there.   It gave him some peace of mind.''