Daniel B.T. Lau, World War II combat veteran, pillar of Honolulu’s financial community and baseball lover, was buried Monday at Punchbowl cemetery with military honors — and after receiving a long overdue Bronze Star for his actions in the Battle of the Bulge.
Lau died Oct. 21 at the age of 101. He was scheduled to receive the Bronze Star 10 days later.
The McKinley High School and University of Hawaii graduate was the last surviving founder of Finance Factors, one of the first industrial and consumer loan companies established to help local people get a foothold in business.
Lau, Hiram Fong, Mun On Chun, Clifford Yee, Lup Quon Pang and Fong Choy made up the initial investors in 1952.
“At the time, when the financial institutions were all run by Caucasians, he and Sen. Fong and four others decided that the local people — whether they were Japanese, Chinese, Filipino — (deserved) an opportunity to get ahead, also,” Lau’s son Jeffrey Lau said Monday.
“They decided to form Finance Factors, giving small business loans so (borrowers) could acquire their basic financial needs, and it grew and grew and grew.”
Finance Enterprises has grown to 15 companies with about $600 million in assets and is around the 11th-largest landowner in Hawaii, Lau said.
>> PHOTOS: WWII veteran Daniel B.T. Lau honored
Daniel Lau was born on Oahu in 1919 and grew up in the Liliha area. The track and baseball standout graduated from UH in 1941 and was about to sign a professional baseball contract when he was drafted.
Assigned to the 298th Hawaiian Infantry, which became part of the 25th Division, Lau was sent to defend Castle Junction against a possible Japanese landing after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Chinese American volunteered for the Army Air Corps but was switched to be a drill instructor ahead of the Normandy invasion. He was with the 78th Infantry “Lightning” Division in Mons, Belgium, by December 1944.
According to an Army-produced news story, the soldiers took shelter in the Bauwens’ family tavern, but Tech Sgt. Lau couldn’t find a place to sleep.
Fourteen-year-old Marcel Bauwens gave up his bed to Lau, then 25, who had not slept between sheets for months. Lau gave the teen a pair of boxing gloves, and he and the Bauwens family became such good friends that Marcel later named his daughter Danielle after Lau. The Honolulu man’s boxing gloves reside in the Mons Memorial Museum.
In Kesternich, just inside Germany, during the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler’s last major offensive on the Western Front, Lau used his baseball skills to hurl grenades through the windows of homes occupied by German troops. The offensive ran from December 1944 through January 1945.
One grenade bounced off a windowsill and came sailing back. Lau used his fleet-of-foot skills as UH’s onetime 50-yard dash champ to escape injury from his own grenade.
He wasn’t as lucky days later when an 88-millimeter round hit a farmhouse he was in, killing two others. Jeffrey Lau said his father “was severely wounded in the back and arm and buried under debris in what was left of the basement they were trying to hold.” Medics found him and sent him back to Paris for recovery.
Lau’s Bronze Star was presented Monday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl by retired Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee, a former state adjutant, to Lau’s four children, Jeffrey, Vicki, Russell and Girard. The successful family includes Connie Lau, president and CEO of Hawaiian Electric Industries, who is married to Russell Lau.
The Bronze Star is for “meritorious achievement in active ground combat against the enemy” while serving with Company B, 1st Battalion, 309th Infantry Regiment.
The population of Chinese living in the United States during the war was estimated at more than 100,000, with about 29,000 in Hawaii. About 20,000 enlisted or were drafted nationally.
The Honolulu list includes Army Capt. Francis Wai, who received the Medal of Honor posthumously for leading and rallying fellow soldiers against waiting Japanese forces in the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines in 1944.
Japanese Americans “came back (from the war) and changed the atmosphere and climate in Hawaii by going after political power,” Lee noted. “The Chinese Americans did the financial development, so he (Daniel Lau) fell right in line with that World War II group to build Honolulu.”
