This seemingly nondescript postcard long has been framed and hung in a prominent place on a wall at the home of retired Foss Maritime executive Drew Foss.

  The postcard note and many other items of memorabilia in Drew's home are reminders of a tragic period in the life of the son of Henry and Agnes Foss and the grandson of company founders Andrew and Thea Foss.

  Midway through World War 11, Henry and Agnes -at their home in Tacoma - received this postcard from Drew, who was a prisoner of war in Japan when he penned the brief message. The postcard - from the Imperial Japanese Army - was the Foss family's first word that Drew was alive, But it wasn't the first message that Drew had sent; there had been 22 other notes written by Drew to his parents before this note got through. The reference to J.P. McCrackin indicated that Drew indeed had written the postcard; McCrackin was a Sigma Chi fraternity brother of Drew.

  It was aboard the Foss-huilt oceangoing tug Justine Foss that Drew's four years of wartime incarceration unfolded,   The Justine - a 57-foot, 200-horsepower Atlas diesel tug built in 1930 by the Foss yard at Tacoma - was named for the youngest daughter of Wedell and Edith Foss (Wedell was the second-oldest son of Andrew and Thea) and was the third of five similar tugs built by Foss. The Justine towed extensively off the West Coast and in Alaska before being dispatched
to the South Pacific in 1941.

  Drew, who had been a liberal arts student at the University of Washington where he was active in the Naval ROTC, had earlier served as mate aboard the Justine in Alaska and had a chance to be aboard the same tug after it reached Wake Island in the Pacific.

  After flying to San Francisco and hopping ships from there to Honolulu and from Honolulu to Wake, Drew joined the Justine and its crew - Capt. Tom McInnis, another Foss employee, Ralph Van Valkenberg, mate, and two Wake Island resident deckhands.

  The Justine and three other Foss tugs - the Mathilda Foss, Foss No. 11 and Arthur Foss - were chartered by Pacific Naval Airbase Contractors, a joint venture of general contractors, to help develop a submarine base at the U.S. naval air station on
Wake.

  It was the Justine's job to lighter equipment, supplies and personnel to the island from ships anchored offshore, Drew recalled. In addition, the tug tended the suction dredge Columbia, which had been towed from the Columbia River to dig a channel in the Wake Island lagoon.

  A few hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 (but on the date of Dec. 8 because Wake is east of the dateline), Wake was bombed by the Japanese. Land-based planes from the Japanese- occupied Marshall Islands pulverized 10 out of 12 U.S Navy planes parked on the air strip, Drew related. Also, on hand at the time was a Pan American "flying boat," but it managed to get into the air unscathed.
  " They threw everything off and loaded up all their employees and took off back to Honolulu," Drew said of Pan Am's rapid evacuation.

  Hanging on the wall next to Drew's historic postcard is another important piece of Foss history - a retyped portion of the log of the Arthur Foss, which Was Linder way near Wake when the bombings commenced there. States the log, in part: "Dec.8, about 6:00 PM, 175 miles from Wake, report on radio from Japan that we were at war. Turned all lights out and all hands mixed paint and had the boat painted dark gray by 9:00 PM (very dark night and boat railing pretty heavily, 30 mile wind)."

  The Arthur returned safely to Honolulu, but the Justine was far less fortunate. Bombings continued on a daily basis at Wake and, with a Japanese invasion pending, there was no way the Justine - at eight knots - could escape., Drew related.

  "The (aircraft carrier) Lexington was supposed to come out and pick us up, but it never got there," he said. Although vastly outnumbered, U.S. Marines and other military personnel managed to repulse the first invasion attempt at Wake. But after throwing more vessels and men into action at Wake, the Japanese succeeded on their second attempt to capture the island, which occurred Dec. 23.

  Following the invasion, Drew and the Justine's crew continued their lightering between ships and shore. "It was the same thing - but we were working for the Japanese instead of the Americans," Drew related. "We were conscript labor."

  Later, Drew was assigned to help construct a marine railway on the island. While doing so, he injured his foot. As a result, he was reassigned to "light" duty in the camp, where he waited on tables.

  On Sept. 30, 1942, Drew - along with some 250 other American contractor employees - were shipped from Wake to Japan aboard a very old and very cramped tanker. Thinking that prisoner-of-war life would be better on Wake than in Japan, Drew had volunteered to remain where he was. But the Japanese ordered him to leave the island. It was a life-saving decision for Drew. Faced with a shortage of food later in the war, the Japanese executed the 98 Americans - including McInnis and
Van Valkenberg - remaining on Wake, The Justine was scuttled.

  In November 1985, Drew - accompanied by his wife, Diane - returned for the first time to Wake. Drew and some other Americans who were shipped off the island dedicated a plaque in memory of the men who were executed.

  After reaching Japan, Drew was placed into forced labor on a hydroelectric dam construction project. On his back, he packed out dirt and packed in concrete. Later, he was a prisoner-of-war laborer at an airport, at a shipyard, and in a coal mine.

  "We worked seven days a week 10 to 12 hours a day," he recalled. "A lot of guys laid down and died. It was easy to die, if you gave up. But I made up my mind I was coming home."

  Drew worked in the coal mine for only about a month; at that point, the war ended and the war prisoners walked free. However, Drew chose to remain at the coal mine prison camp for another three weeks to help tend the ill and injured. Eventually, Drew was evacuated aboard an aircraft carrier to Iwo Jima. From there, he was taken to the Philippines, where he had to wait for two weeks to board a combination hospital ship and troop transport to Honolulu.

  It was in Honolulu that Drew was reunited with his father, Henry, who had served as a U.S. naval salvage officer in the Pacific during most of the war. Drew was among hundreds of military personnel on the ship's deck when he spotted a uniformed naval captain - with a familiar face - aboard a pilot boat that had come alongside the ship. The Navy officer seemingly was searching for someone on board the troop carrier.

  "I didn't even know he was out in the Pacific," Drew said of his dad. In fact, Drew didn't even know that his dad was in the active Navy (Henry had joined the active service after war broke out). "I didn't even  recognize him at first; he had all those scrambled eggs on his cap. Finally, I decided that just had to be him."

  Just as Drew's wall at home contains the Arthur Foss' chilling prelude to the capture of Wake Island, the wall also has hanging on it an official U.S. Navy photograph of Henry and Drew chatting aboard a small aircraft carrier as both sailed from Honolulu back to Seattle, where they arrived Nov. 7. Says the Navy photo caption: "Himself a veteran of four major invasions in the Pacific, Capt. Henry Foss, right, looks incredulous as his son, Drew Foss, recounts his experiences in Japanese prison camps during the past four years. Both spent hours on the flight deck of the escort carrier Takanis Bay during the voyage from Pearl Harbor, sunbathing and catching up on long-delayed conversations."