"This Will Be Our Year": A Widow's Hope, a Sinking Ship, and a Heartbreaking Mistake

On New Year’s Day 1944, Helen Crawford received news from the War Department that her husband, Major George H. Crawford, had been captured by the Japanese and was now a prisoner of war in the Philippines. It was a message steeped in dread—but also one that left room for hope.

One year later, still clinging to that hope, Helen mailed him a simple postcard on January 1, 1945. “This will be our year,” she wrote—a quiet prayer from a wife waiting for a reunion.

But George was already gone.

On December 15, 1944, the Japanese began moving POWs out of the Philippines in anticipation of an American invasion. George was among the 1,620 prisoners forced aboard the Oryoku Maru, a transport ship that bore no markings to indicate it carried Allied prisoners. Instead, it traveled in a convoy alongside Japanese troops and military cargo. To U.S. Navy pilots overhead, it looked like a legitimate target. They attacked. The Oryoku Maru was bombed and sank in Subic Bay. Over 200 prisoners were killed—including Major George H. Crawford. 

But Helen’s anguish didn’t end there. In the weeks that followed, she received a telegram from the War Department stating her husband had been transported on a later ship—implying he had survived the sinking. For a brief moment, hope returned.

It was a mistake.

The truth came months later, sometime in the summer of 1945: George had indeed perished on December 15. The earlier information was tragically wrong.

And then, over a year after his death, on January 14, 1946, her New Year’s postcard was returned by the War Department—undeliverable. A message of hope… to a man already gone.

At Ghosts of the Battlefield, we remember not only the lives lost in war, but the private, quiet grief endured at home. Helen Crawford’s story reminds us of the heavy toll war takes on the families left behind—not only in loss, but in the cruel uncertainty of misinformation.