On his way to enlist in the Army Air Force, George Wylie traveled in the black cargo space of a truck. His destiny would carry him into the dark belly of a hell ship as a prisoner of the Japanese. Born in Prescott, Arkansas, George enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1939 at Barksdale Field. He was a supply sergeant in the Forty-Eighth Material Air Squadron, of the Twenty-Seventh Bomb Group when the unit shipped out in September of 1941 to the Philippine Islands. They sailed aboard a luxury liner with movies and a dining room orchestra. Captured April 9, 1942, George survived the infamous Bataan Death March. After two years of captivity in the Philippines he was evacuated on one of the "hell" ships that ferried Allied prisoners of war to Japan and the Asian mainland. He toiled in a sugar mill on Formosa, and then was transported to southern Japan. Liberated in the fall of 1945, George returned to America and re-joined the Twenty-Seventh Bomb Group at Barksdale Field. He retired as a master sergeant on July 1, 1965, after twenty-eight years of service. George later worked at an ammunition plant in Doyline and at a machine shop in Shreveport.