In Memory of John Jacobs - A Tale of Many
In Search of an Unmarked Road: When Names Are Not Enough
By a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
I have been thinking lately about unmarked roads—the ones you go looking for only to realize they don’t appear on any map.
The other day, my search led me not to a cemetery or a forgotten crossroads, but to the story of the World War II Japanese prisoner transport ship Enoura Maru.
On January 9, 1945, the Enoura Maru was docked at Takao, in Formosa, overcrowded with Allied prisoners of war. During a raid carried out largely by American aircraft, the ship was attacked. As many as 400 prisoners died during the bombing and in the days that followed. The survivors were later transferred to another vessel, the Brazil Maru, and transported to Moji, Japan. More than 500 additional Allied prisoners died on that leg of the journey.
The account I read included eyewitness testimony from a US Air Force (then United States Army Air Forces) servicemember named John Jacobs.
John Jacobs is a name I should have been able to follow.
In my work with Everyday Patriot, I am usually able to piece together enough information, service records, hometowns, and enlistment dates to honor a single individual with clarity and care. But this time, the road dissolved beneath my feet.
It wasn’t that there was no information. It was that there was too much.
There was this John Jacobs, an Air Force servicemember from Cambria, California, who was captured in Manila. But there was also a John Jacobs, a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army, also from California, killed in 1946. Another John Jacobs enlisted from Niagara Falls, New York, in 1943. Two more served in the U.S. Navy, one aboard the USS Henderson, another on the USS Hull. Others appeared in records from Colorado, from Pennsylvania, from places that blurred together as I scrolled.
The number of records was staggering.
What should have narrowed instead widened, until the individual I was searching for disappeared entirely into repetition. Name after name. File after file. Each one is real. Each one altered forever by the same war.
Standing in that digital flood of records, I thought again of places I have passed along forgotten highways—houses collapsing back into the land, their windows dark and their stories unfinished. I thought of the small, abandoned cemeteries tucked behind trees and fences, where graves are marked incompletely, stones worn past legibility, and the people beneath them remain present even when their names can no longer be clearly read. In moments like these, I can see how often history erodes not through violence or intention, but through neglect, repetition, and the slow loosening of memory.
I am saddened and horrified by the sheer volume of men named John Jacobs whose lives were broken open by World War II.
I want to honor them all.
Some roads don’t take you anywhere you can visit. They take you into the math of loss, where names repeat, and stories blur, and you realize how much history cannot be held by one marker or one grave.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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