Sgt. Arnold Lappert, the Army radio technician in Hawaii who received the last messages from the island of Corregidor before its surrender to the Japanese in May 1942, and nearly four years later realized a quest to find the fellow New Yorker who sent those final desperate words, died June 1 in Dania Beach, Fla. He was 86.
On May 5, 1942, Irving Strobing, an Army Signal Corps operator from Brooklyn, tapped the key of his radio inside the besieged Philippine fortress of Corregidor to tell of the last moments endured by American forces under Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright before they were captured by the Japanese.
“Gen. Wainwright is a right guy, and we are willing to go on for him, but shells were dropping all night, faster than hell,” he radioed to Hawaii. “Damage terrific. Too much for guys to take.”
In his book “But Not in Shame,” recounting the onset of World War II in the Pacific, John Toland wrote how “the man who had been listening, Arnold Lappert, wept over his key.”
A native of Manhattan, Mr. Lappert — Sgt. Lappert at the time — had been stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He spent more than four years in the Pacific, then returned home in October 1945. Strobing came back to America after three years as a prisoner of the Japanese.
Mr. Lappert tried to meet with Strobing when they both got back to New York, having known his identity from the transcripts of his messages reproduced in newspapers and broadcast on the home front radio soon after Corregidor fell.
The soldiers finally shared their experiences as radio operators in those dark days for America when the Jewish War Veterans of the United States brought them together at a news conference in Manhattan in January 1946. That was a prelude to their re-enacting their wartime roles at a Madison Square Garden pageant telling of the contributions American Jews had made in all the nation’s wars.
After the war, Strobing worked for the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Agriculture. He died in 1997.
Mr. Lappert designed and sold furniture.
His son-in-law Steve Benardo said in a telephone interview that Mr. Lappert had spoken over the years of how he “felt the fear, the intensity and the importance” of those messages from Corregidor.
Among the Corregidor messages hours before the surrender were the words: “We are waiting for God only knows what. How about a chocolate soda?”
Isidore Ginsberg, an official of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, served up a chocolate ice cream soda when Mr. Lappert and Strobing met in New York in 1946. Each soldier was given a straw. And then they drank the chocolate soda together from the same glass.
