For the Hub City Times

ABBOTSFORD – A reinterment service will be held May 11 in Abbotsford for a local Marine Corps captain killed in World War II.

Schade was killed on January 9, 1945, while being held as a prisoner of war (POW). He was just 27 at the time. His death was the result of an attack on the unmarked Japanese transport ship “Enoura Maru” – referred to as a hellship – by American carrier planes in Takao Harbor, Formosa, in present day Taiwan.

Captain Schade, “I” Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines had become a POW following the fall of the Philippines in April 1942. He survived the “Bataan Death March” and imprisonment at Cabanatuan Prison Camp No. 1. Schade was listed as “Lost at Sea” until January 1947 when a mass grave near Takao City was exhumed.

Later these remains were transferred to Hawaii and interred in Unknown Grave No. 423 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. In 2017, the remains were disinterred and on July 26, identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Schade graduated from Dorchester High School in 1935. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1939, he entered the Officers Training School in Philadelphia, PA. In June 1940, he left for the Philippine Islands.

A reinterment service will take place May 11 at 1 p.m. at the Abbotsford Cemetery with full military honors, facilitated by the U.S. Marine Corps and Maurina-Schilling Funeral Home.

Schade’s parents, Richard and Margaret Schade are interred in the Abbotsford Cemetery and adjacent to their headstone is a marker for Lester inscribed “Our Dear Son – Lost at Sea.”