America's WWII Johnny Lindh

Michelle Malkin over at TownHall wrote a post on yet another quixotic quest by the parents of Johnny Lindh to get their poor wittle baby jihadi-killer son freed from prison. A prison he so richly deserves for sitting there while his co-religious thugs plotted a break-out that resulted in the death of Mike Spann. Scattered in the comments were references to Tokyo Rose and Frank Fujita which triggered a recollection of a real American traitor from WWII.

This putrescent bit of degenerate flotsam first came to my attention on page 316 of Prisoners of the Japanese by Gavan Daws.

Provoo was an American enlisted man on Corregidor. He had been a student of Japanese language and culture before the war. When Corregidor surrendered, out came Provoo in a kimono, speaking Japanese; and within days he was responsible for the killing of an American officer.

That officer was an American doctor on Corregidor. From the US Congressional Record - Senate January 1996 the following description of that murder was entered into the record.

He went with Japanese troops to the hospital wing of Malinta Tunnel and relayed their orders that all sick and wounded Americans should be moved out at once so that Japanese wounded could be hospitalized there. When he heard this order Captain Thompson of the Medical Service Corps told Provoo: `Tell them to go to hell, the men are too sick to be moved.' When Provoo interpreted this response to the enemy, they immediately dragged Thompson out of the tunnel and executed him on the spot.

Amazingly after the war in 1946 the US Army gave SGT Provoo an Honorable Discharge. He promptly re-enlisted and there Provoo's luck runs out to a certain extent. He started to get sent to either military hospitals like Walter Reed or the stockade like at Ft. Meade. Instead of prosecuting Provoo on charges of sodomy, the Army transferred their captive Ft. Jay in New York and promptly discharged him into the waiting handcuffs of the FBI who had warrant charging him with treason.
From Time Magazine's coverage of the trial a picture of Provoo as a kapo emerges in graphic detail.

The witnesses, most of them fellow prisoners of Provoo, pictured him swaggering about the prison cave on Corregidor with a riding crop, toadying to the Japanese and terrorizing his fellow prisoners. ... Provoo, said the witnesses, extorted cameras and other valuables from his fellow prisoners to pass them on to the Japanese, once knocked down a G.I. and stripped him of his boots because a Japanese officer said he wanted them. ... They claimed that Provoo often said he hoped the Japanese would win the war and that he called Emperor Hirohito "the essence of divinity." Corporal Robert Brown testified that Provoo hit him in the face because he did not know how to cook tempura (Japanese fried fish or shrimps) and declared that "all American
women on Corregidor should be turned over to the Japanese for immoral purposes."

Alas the conviction for treason, four counts, was later overturned because of that initial Honorable Discharge, how Provoo was turned over to the FBI by the Army, and due to the trial being tainted by the introduction of Provoo's homosexual proclivities that the appeal court said had no bearing on the case and only served to harm the defendant.

Provoo tried to put the trial behind him, but it followed him. Along with a sodomy conviction. He moved to Japan for many years and further studied Buddhism. Then he moved back to Hawaii as a Buddhist teacher and lived in the Islands until his death on August 28th, 2001. His ashes are buried at the Hawaii Veterans Cemetery #2. Which probably leaves many who knows Provoo's story sucking lemons to think he is buried there amongst those who are truly of America's Greatest Generation.