Joseph DeMott was born in August 1918 in Big Run, Pennsylvania. He was the only child of a railroad worker and a housekeeper. During the Great Depression his father was sometimes out of work, but he borrowed big areas of land from the railroad and grew crops of potatoes and corn. As a young boy, DeMott would sometimes walk along the railroad tracks to pick up coal for heat, and worked in a greenhouse. He went to high school in the next big town, Punxsutawney [Annotator's Note: Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania], and worked after school as a clerk in a grocery store. He attended college for two years. While there, he and his college friends deduced that a war was coming. DeMott wanted to become a pilot, so he joined the Army, knowing that his two years of college would make him eligible to be an aviation cadet. He was on a waiting list for pilot training, and in the meantime he went to radio school and became a radio operator and mechanic. In retrospect, he knows that as a young man he was looking for a purpose in life.

When the war started, Joseph DeMott was still working as a radio operator. His group was scheduled to take off for Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on the night before the Japanese attacked, but one of the engines on his plane failed. When the rest of the squadron flew off, DeMott and his crew remained at Hamilton Army Airfield north of San Francisco, California. They were sent to Muroc Lake, and carried out patrol duty along the Pacific coast. On 1 January [Annotator's Note: 1 January 1942] they left for Australia. What was left of his 7th Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 7th Bombardment Group] after the attack on Hawaii joined the remains of the 19th Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 19th Bombardment Group] whose airfields in the Philippines had been "pretty torn up." On 11 January, the combined groups were at the Dutch base at Malang, Java. DeMott was the lead radio operator for the B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 FLying Fortress heavy bomber] that bombed the Japanese convoy in Balikpapan Harbor [Annotator's Note: Balikpapan, Borneo] on 2 February 1942, and while returning from the raid, they were attacked by a number of Japanese Zeros [Annotator's Note: Japanese Mitsubishi A6M fighter aircraft, also known as the Zeke or Zero]. They made it back to base, full of bullet holes, and DeMott was shot through the leg. Another crewmember had used a wire for a tourniquet; otherwise he would have bled to death. He was sent to a Dutch military hospital. His squadron left Malang, but DeMott was too seriously wounded to go with them, and when the time came to evacuate, the Dutch had barricaded the area, and the B-17 he was to leave on couldn't land.

Stuck in a Dutch hospital in Malang, Java, Joseph DeMott was taken prisoner when the Japanese occupied the island on 8 March 1942. When the Japanese came into the hospital, DeMott asked his nurse for some kind of poison, because the enemy was known to behead American airmen. She did not respond. The people of Malang didn't resist the occupiers, so it wasn't a violent takeover. DeMott was allowed to stay in the hospital, and he was eventually carried into the prison camp because he couldn't walk. He got physical therapy from a Dutch masseur in the camp, and eventually regained his footing. Once recovered, DeMott was put in work camps, doing "all kinds of jobs" including digging post holes, unloading cargo at the docks, and working in the agricultural fields. DeMott made three good friends in the camp; after the war, one committed suicide, and another was put in a mental hospital. DeMott said they suffered all the atrocities one reads about. He prayed every night to be free for one day. He feels that when a person loses their freedom they have nothing. Fortunately, the mental anguish didn't affect him as much as the others, but he does understand what is now known as post traumatic stress disorder. DeMott insists that while a person can overcome the effects of a physical beating, the mental beatings are "absolutely terrible," and can have permanent effects.

Joseph DeMott and the other prisoners had to count off for role call in Japanese; otherwise they were kicked in the shins. He saw one prisoner's leg bleed profusely from such a kick. The guards could do whatever they wanted. After a breakfast of "sloppy rice," the prisoners had an eight or nine hour workday. Dinner was another portion of "sloppy rice." The prisoners slept on bamboo mats on the floor of a hut. They were kept fairly clean. There were no restrictions on the stalls where they would soap up then throw water over their bodies. Toilets were big, messy ditches, and dysentery was rampant. Fortunately, Quinine [Annotator's Note: an anti-malarial medication] kept malaria at bay. DeMott remembers being among nine Americans interrogated by the Japanese officers. First in line, the interpreter told DeMott that he had to answer a few questions and then they would probably shoot him. He repeatedly claimed he was "just a gunner," and could see that the interrogators had a dossier on each of them. It surprised him, but DeMott said he felt the Japanese soldiers "really respected Americans." He made it out alive, but DeMott's downfall was malnutrition. He went blind overnight, and although his peripheral vision returned, he has had no central vision since 1942. His peripheral vision was adequate enough, with correction, to get him through college and his work life, but DeMott said he doesn't know how he made it, and he has never gotten compensation for it. He said that for many years he wasn't treated well by the Veterans Administration.

According to Joseph DeMott, Americans were not beaten as badly as the other prisoners. Personally, he used "his brains" as a captive, and lessened the severity of his beatings by feigning severe injury. A buddy lost part of his kidneys; he saw friends get all their teeth knocked out; he saw Australian soldiers sit all day long in the sun with a bamboo pole between their legs; one negro from a tramp schooner was beaten until he fell down, and then he was kicked mercilessly. For extreme offences, the Kempeitai [Annotator's Note: Japanese Army military police] would punish a prisoner by pumping his stomach full of water and then stomping on it. In the town of Malang, the Japanese would tie the Dutch women to trees and the Javanese, who didn't like white people, would throw sticks at them. When DeMott saw that, he knew what he was fighting for. DeMott said these are not easy things to talk about. He had thought, from the beginning of the war, that the chances of getting out alive were were slim. He recalled several crash landings, and another near miss that came when the prisoners were moved from one camp to another and took their contraband radio to the new location in pieces. DeMott was carrying resisters and transformers in a carry bag, and the new camp commandant, reputed to be the worst in Asia, tapped DeMott's bag with his stick while threatening to kill anyone carrying radio parts. DeMott and the three friends he made in camp stuck together, and that really helped. Their talks usually centered on food, and DeMott remarked that women never entered the conversation. For his part, DeMott carried in his mind the picture of a counter he had seen in the Midwest that was full of cakes and cookies. DeMott's incarceration ended after three and a half years, on 19 September 1945.

There were only a couple of hundred other American prisoners with Joseph DeMott on the island of Java, mostly off the USS Houston (CA-30); they worked on the railway in what was called Death Valley. DeMott was moved from camp to camp five times, "from one end of Java to the other," and some camps were worse than others. Nevertheless, there were moments of comedy. At one point, some Japanese who admired the German soldiers' method of marching, attempted the goose step. DeMott said things like that kept him going. He had to admit that some of his captors were friendly. Toward the end of the war, the prisoners had a makeshift distillery to concoct a form of sake. A visiting Japanese soldier, who had gone to university in America, rather than arresting them for the illegal activity, sat and chatted with the Americans. DeMott said there was a bulletin board in each camp that bragged of the Japanese's ongoing success in the war, making him fear that the Allies could not overcome this enemy.

A few days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Joseph DeMott saw the devastation. With five battleships sunk or badly damaged, he feared the American forces would never recover. He recalled a mess hall at Hickam Field had been bombed, and about 150 people were killed at once. About a month after it happened, the dead men's khaki clothes were offered to anyone who felt they could use them. When DeMott looked on the stacks, he said, "no way." DeMott said he was just a little country boy, and had never learned to hate. Even after Pearl Harbor, DeMott said his feelings against the Japanese were only that they were the adversary until a Japanese officer threatened to cut off his head; from then on the war had meaning. However, after he was a prisoner for a couple of years, he realized he could get used to anything, and he felt nothing. He was resigned to his fate.

In the middle of July 1945, Joseph DeMott started seeing Australian Mosquito bombers [Annotator's Note: de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito multi-role combat aircraft] in the skies, and no longer heard Japanese planes overhead, and he found that peculiar. A week or so later, Japanese officers came into the camp and they weren't wearing their swords, which was an indication that they had already surrendered. DeMott doesn't remember exactly how the news was presented, but said there was no :screaming and yelling," just a quiet acceptance. He and a buddy broke the rules and left the camp to look around the village of Batavia [Annotator's Note: then Batavia, Java, Dutch East Indies; now Jakarta, Indonesia]. They were supposed stand guard and keep POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war] in the camp, but DeMott felt that ridiculous, and said so to his American commander. DeMott weighed 100 pounds when the Americans started getting food to the camp. One thing he remembers that was included in their re-introduction to real food was a cooked "banty rooster." The liberated Americans were flown to a hospital in Calcutta, India where they were deloused and given new uniforms. DeMott remembers being assigned a nice bed with a mosquito net, and having a restful night. But the next morning, when a nurse touched him, he jumped up and grabbed her by the throat. DeMott said it was "just a habit." DeMott was flown to New York, where he was able to call his parents, and he remembered that his mother cried. [Annotator's Note: DeMott becomes visibly emotional.] He was admitted to Fletcher General Hospital in Cambridge, Ohio, and felt the Army treated him very well. DeMott said it took a while for him to realize that he was finally home.

Joseph DeMott eventually lost track of the friends he made in the prison camps on Java. One of the men, who had part of his leg blown off, suffered progressively from post traumatic stress disorder, became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and finally committed suicide in 1979. DeMott said he met with the man's daughter and tried to help, but to no avail. Once in a while, DeMott feels the effects of his incarceration; he cited figures of those captured during the war, the number that died in prison camps, and the small number still alive of those who survived. DeMott said he was debriefed in Calcutta [Annotator's Note: Calcutta, India] and his travel ticket stated, "No reconditioning required," but the episode took its toll. He had made up his mind to finish school, get a job, get married and so on. He had a purpose in mind, and memories of the war had no place in it; but, of course, it cropped up every once in a while. He sometimes had dreams of fighting his way out with machine guns, but he got killed trying. DeMott said he never had a real hatred for the enemy, but would have liked to see what happened at the Tokyo trials [Annotator's Note: International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or IMTFE, also known as the Tokyo Trial or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal]. After using the G.I. Bill to complete his degree in electrical engineering at Penn State [Annotator's Note: Penn State University, State College, Pennsylvania], he made a career in that field with RCA. All through his life after the war, the damage done to his eyes reminded him of his ordeals in the Japanese prison camps.

Asked his most memorable experience of World War 2, Joseph DeMott said it was the camaraderie, and noted that it was a special kind of relationship. The war made him appreciate being free. He said he saw guys "crack up," and said that people have no idea what it is like to be in a prison camp, although the movie "Unbroken" was a good representation of the experience. As to what he thinks his service in the war means today, he quoted Tom Brokaw in calling his "the Greatest Generation," not that he advertises it. But he feels that Americans today are losing their grip, and uses the tragedy of 9-11 [Annotator's Note: the terrorist attacks on New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on 11 September 2001] as an example. He asserts that the nation needs institutions like The National WWII Museum to remind them of what happened.