Carl John Pequignot; unmasked at last

We wrote about Carl John Pequignot earlier this month here and here. Thanks to Hondo, we’ve been in contact with Vivian Sade at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, where she has spent weeks researching Pequignot’s records as well as the history of the Second World War Pacific campaign – she did a yeoman’s job of correcting Pequignot’s story after all of these decades in her article entitled “Navy shoots down veteran’s war stories“;

[A]ccording to Navy records, Pequignot was never in battle and never left the U.S. during his military service. There is no official documentation that would indicate he was a POW, and archivists at Truman’s presidential library said they have no record of a meeting. In fact, the name Pequignot does not appear at all.

A convicted thief and bank robber after the war, Pequignot has insisted for years that the Navy lost all of his overseas records. But military records obtained by The Journal Gazette from the National Archives and Records Administration in St. Louis seem to account for almost every day Pequignot was in the service. Nothing in the records corroborates any of his military stories.

Of course, Pequignot complains that the stories he’s told are all true and he’s disappointed that the Navy has turned against him.

Probably not as disappointed as the state senator who pinned a Silver Star on him, a Silver Star for which there seems to be no paperwork anywhere on the planet. Or as disappointed as the veterans’ group that had tried to get Senator Dick Luger’s office to get Pequignot awarded a Medal of Honor. Or as disappointed as all of the folks who believed all of his tales all of these decades to include at least two journalists in the Fort Wayne press who had to walk back their articles about his daring-do. The other reporter was Kevin Leininger of The News-Sentinel.

ADDED: Vivian writes to point out that Pequignot also fooled the Library of Congress, but that they’ve removed the video that we included in the first post we wrote about Pequignot. She also wrote about that this morning in her companion article “Navy vet caught on tape, yet denies the interview“;

In the recording, Pequignot talks about being in a boat when the group hit a mine in November or December 1943. Ten of 14 men were killed. Pequignot and three others survived at sea and were taken as prisoners four days later by a Japanese submarine, he said on tape.

Pequignot does not appear in any of the POW lists for that period which are quite complete, said Jonn Lilyea, a retired infantry platoon sergeant who served in Desert Storm and has a popular military blog, “This ain’t hell, but you can see it from here.”

The 6th Army Ranger Battalion performed a POW rescue in January 1945 at Cabanatuan in the incident made famous in the movie “The Great Raid,” Lilyea said. But in early 1944, the group was being formed to lead an invasion of the Philippine Islands that would not occur for six more months.

Category: Phony soldiers