Growing up in Salt Lake City, Robert W. Sexton didn’t hear much about his uncle, the mysterious relative responsible for his middle name, Wayne.
He doesn’t remember seeing Doyle W. Sexton’s portrait hanging in his grandparents’ home. He can’t recall anyone discussing what exactly happened to the World War II airman who died before the now-75-year-old was born. But his uncle, who most called “Wayne,” was present in other ways — especially the sadness that seemed to permeate from Robert’s grandmother, Leona Wright Sexton.
Even Leona’s obituary, published after she died in 1996, mentioned the 95-year-old’s heartbreak.
“She was preceded in death by her parents and her oldest son, Doyle Wayne Sexton,” it read, noting he survived the Bataan Death March but died in a Japanese prisoners-of-war camp. “She carried this memory for over 50 years.”
“That isn’t the kind of thing you want your 8-year-old grandson to feel,” Robert Sexton said.
Now, all these decades later, Sexton said he is finally processing the grief his grandparents, father and aunt likely felt — and achieving some semblance of family closure.
It all started with an opportunity to share his DNA with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
‘Gave his life for his country’
Doyle W. Sexton was 21 years old when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1940. His name was listed alongside nearly 30 others — two from his hometown of Duchesne — in an October 1940 Salt Lake Telegram article. His younger brother, Bob, joined after that.
Robert’s father served in Europe, while Doyle W. Sexton was stationed in the Pacific, specifically in the Philippines. But Robert never learned much about either’s experience — his uncle’s because it was a mystery; his father’s because the older man didn’t, or couldn’t, talk about it.
“The guys that were in combat never really talked about war. ... They might have talked about getting drunk with their buddies in France or something, but they definitely didn’t talk about what happened in the field,” Robert Sexton said. “So, yeah, this has been an incredible journey for me into my family history.”
Robert Sexton said most of what he knows about his uncle came from reading old newspaper articles, or the letters his uncle wrote to relatives after he enlisted.
When training in the U.S. — California, Arizona and New Mexico — Doyle W. Sexton mostly penned questions to his mother, asking about his friends, his “girlfriends,” how others in the town were doing — “the same stuff that GIs had been writing about forever,” Robert Sexton said.
The family received their last letter in May 1942, after Japanese forces took control of the Bataan peninsula, where “Wayne” had apparently been called to fight after initially being stationed at nearby Corregidor island, according to an 1944 Salt Lake Telegram article.
By that spring, Japan had controlled nearly all of the western Pacific. American and Filipino military forces had hoped to stave off Japanese control in the Philippines until the U.S. Navy could arrive to back them up. That help never came, though, after the December 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor decimated U.S. naval forces, according to the U.S. Army Center for Military History.
The U.S. surrendered the Bataan peninsula on April 9, 1942. Those captured were then forced to march 65 miles through the “blistering” tropics to the Cabanatuan prisoners-of-war camp, with Japanese fighters killing anyone who slowed down. An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 died during the journey, later dubbed the “Bataan Death March,” the Center for Military History said.
Doyle W. Sexton survived the brutal “march,” records from the camp ultimately showed. But he couldn’t persist through malnourishment and the camp’s rampant disease.
He died of diphtheria on July 19, 1942, it was later determined. He was 23, one of an estimated 2,800 Americans who died at the same camp before American and Filipino forces liberated it in 1945, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
Sexton’s family received confirmation of his death in a letter dated Feb. 5, 1946, nearly four years later.
“You may have some consolation in the memory that he, along with his comrades in arms, who died on Bataan and Corregidor and in prison camps, gave his life for his country,” the letter read.
Sexton was initially buried in a mass grave. Later, his and others’ unidentified remains were relocated to an American mausoleum near Manila, before they were exhumed in 2018 for DNA and other testing.
The sample Robert Sexton provided led to a match, and that is how — eight decades after his death — Doyle W. Sexton’s remains were finally accounted for this summer.
‘Performing a service for my ancestors’
(Robert W. Sexton) Robert W. Sexton, the nephew of Doyle W. Sexton, who died at age 23 in a prisoners-of-war camp during World War II. Born after his uncle died, Robert W. Sexton was instrumental in identifying his uncle's remains.
As Robert Sexton was drawn into the process of trying to identify his uncle’s remains, he, for the first time, sought to learn more about who his uncle was.
“I feel like I’m performing a service for my ancestors,” Sexton said.
He knows Doyle W. Sexton was handsome, smart and strong. “He’s the oldest boy and, you know, got all the good DNA,” he said.
And he knows he was “stubborn,” an insight Robert Sexton gleaned from a “little teeny” article posted in a local Duchesne paper when Doyle W. Sexton was 15 years old.
“Being hit by a truck is not an excuse for being tardy or absent from the classroom, thinks Wayne Sexton, 15-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. M.E. Sexton,” the article began, according to Robert Sexton.
Wayne was apparently hit on a Sunday, “suffering bruises and abrasions,” but he still “limped to school with the aid of his younger brother” the next day, the article stated.
“Wayne has never been tardy or absent from school…he says the cuts and bruises don’t hurt much,” the article read, “and he is glad that his record is not broken.”
There’s limits to Robert’s exploration though — character traits and foundational moments in Doyle W. Sexton’s life that Robert may never know. That’s where his mind fills in the blanks, transposing his own experience over his uncle’s.
Like how he, too, enlisted in the military — the Marines — when he was barely an adult, at age 19.
“Life’s pretty fun when you’re 19. And I think Wayne was probably in the same frame of mind. It just seemed like a good thing to do at the time,” he said, adding that Doyle W. Sexton enlisted alongside some of his friends.
“I don’t know if they had any idea of what was going to happen,” he said.
Or how long it would take him to finally come home.
Doyle W. Sexton’s remains will be reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery some time next year, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Robert Sexton, his wife and his daughters all plan to be there, he said.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
