The Q — Released P.O.W. tells his story
This is the latest in an occasional series of posts about history of The Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls.
It was a miraculous resurrection from the presumed dead for a 1936 Glens Falls High School graduate who later would have a hand in setting up a local radio station.
Members of the Glens Falls Rotary Club listened on Nov. 1, 1945 as Lt. Sylvian Robert Jalet, a Merchant Marine radio operator, related his experience as a prisoner of war for nearly three years during World War II.
Father John Jalet of Montcalm Street, for whom initial grief had turned to amazement, attended The Queensbury Hotel luncheon.
The federal government had notified the father in late 1942 that the son was “lost in action at sea” when the Merchant Marine ship he was serving on was sunk in the Indian Ocean.
In February 1943, the father was appointed administrator of the son’s estate, valued at $1,000.
Six months later, the Red Cross notified the father that the son was not dead, as supposed, but was a prisoner at a Japanese POW camp at Malay Peninsula.
The son, as reported in The Post-Star, picked up the story from there.
At 8:36 p.m. on Nov. 28, 1942, Sylvian Robert Jalet, on board the M.S. Sawokia, was receiving radio reports about the Cocoanut Grove supper club fire in Boston when a six-inch shell from a German surface raider struck the U.S. ship.
“In 18 minutes, he said, the raider blew the merchant vessel apart.”
Jalet was “fished out of the water” and detained as a prisoner on the German ship for 84 days and eventually turned over to Japanese authorities.
Later, during Jalet’s confinement at the Japanese prison camp, he was forced to work “on the business end of a pick handle” for about 90 days building a railroad.
On Sept. 5, 1945, a team of Indian Air Force physicians and an administrator parachuted into the prison camp, and the next day Jalet was among prisoners evacuated.
He spent 10 days at a convalescent hospital in Calcutta, and arrived in the United States on Sept. 21.
After World War II he worked at R.C.A. laboratories in Camden, N.J., and as a radio engineer at the R.C.A. Cost Station in Honolulu.
Jalet returned to Glens Falls March 1947 to work as assistant engineer and help set up WGLN, a start-up local radio station.
Also that month, he received the Mariner’s Medal, the Merchant Marine equivalent to the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Sources: The Post-Star Feb. 24, Aug. 25, Sept. 18, 1943; Nov. 2, 1945; March 6, 24, 1947
Click here to read the most previous post in the series.
