The makeshift American flag, made 69 years ago from bedsheets, was a symbol of defiance, perseverance and patriotism to the American prisoners of war who were beaten, tortured and starved by their Japanese captors at the Omori POW Camp during World War II.

Richmond native James “Denny” Landrum, an electrician’s mate first class who had just turned 20 when captured, was among them.

He and his fellow submariners of the USS Grenadier were taken prisoner after their ship was attacked and eventually scuttled on April 22, 1943, off Penang, Malaysia.

Landrum eventually made it home. But the flag he helped to secretly create and later waved in an iconic photograph taken as he and his fellow POWs were liberated on Aug. 29, 1945, vanished over time.

“He wanted to find it, but they lost track of it,” Landrum’s eldest son, Jerry, said of his father and fellow POWs after they returned from the war. “Later on when they were having reunions, they kept talking about trying to find the flag.”

But when Landrum died in 1980 at age 56, the survivors’ hope of finding the flag faded.

The task fell to their descendants, and Jerry Landrum and his siblings took on the daunting challenge. After decades of searching, Landrum uncovered the flag’s chain of possession after it was initially given to the POW who provided the bedsheets and stitched them together.

Landrum traced the flag’s path through several people and finally to the Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia where a Navy museum curator — after being contacted by Landrum — found it inside a box in an off-site artifacts warehouse in Virginia.

“I think if we had known the historical significance of the flag we would have tried to highlight its significance prior to Mr. Landrum contacting us,” said the curator, Allison Russell. “We had very little information in our records to go on, and it didn’t stand out to us.”

On Wednesday, the 74-by-44-inch flag will be displayed publicly for the first time as the Landrum family joins Sen. Mark R. Warner for an unveiling ceremony at the Virginia War Memorial. Warner, who learned about the flag from a local reporter, arranged through the Naval History and Heritage Command to have it brought here on loan and put on temporary display in honor of Denny Landrum’s sacrifices and triumphs as a POW.

Virginia War Memorial Curator Jessie Smith ranks the Omori flag as one of the most famous American flags of World War II, alongside such greats as the Iwo Jima flag.

“I think this has got to be up there in the Top 10 at least, just because of the significance of it,” Smith said. “It was made in secret. If Denny Landrum and his fellow POWs would have gotten caught by the Japanese they would have been severely punished — beaten if not killed.”

The flag also has significant ties to Virginia and Richmond more specifically, since Landrum helped create it and waved it on the day his camp was liberated, Smith said. “This is a good place for it to be. I don’t want to see it go back to the Navy Yard.”

The flag will remain in Richmond for at least eight months and possibly longer, depending on what future plans the Navy might have for the artifact.

Jerry Landrum’s desire to find his father’s POW flag dates to his days as a teenager in the mid-1960s, but his interest accelerated in recent years as Internet research became more promising. Landrum, 65, also had more free time to look for it after retiring in 2012 as the Chesterfield Police Department’s electronic surveillance technician.

“In 1965 I had three things I wanted to do,” said Landrum, who was 16 at the time. “I wanted to find the submarine, visit the prison camps and find the flag. Those were my three goals.”

He joined the Army the following year at age 17, expecting to be sent to Vietnam. But he was never shipped overseas, which scuttled plans to find the prison camps where his father was held and possibly even locate the submerged sub.

Landrum today can precisely recount how his father’s submarine was attacked and ended up at the bottom of the sea, and the subsequent mistreatment he endured as a POW. Landrum has closely held his father’s POW diary that describes many of the hardships and experiences.

His father’s perilous journey began as he and his 75 crewmates were on their sixth war patrol in the Straits of Malacca, a gateway between the Pacific and Indian oceans. Coincidentally, the waters are near where missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 made its last contact before disappearing nearly a month ago.

On April 21, 1943, the Grenadier crew was trying to catch up with some Japanese ships to attack when the sub was spotted by an enemy plane. It was Denny Landrum’s 20th birthday.

The Japanese pilot dropped a bomb as the submarine was diving to escape, and it hit the ship’s stern section where Landrum and the other electricians were gathered. The blast crippled the ship and it sank 270 feet to the bottom, Jerry Landrum said.

“There were fires and leaking and all kinds of damage done,” he said.

After sweating it out for 13 hours on the bottom, the crew managed to bring the sub to the surface but it was dead in the water. “The rear hatch was cracked and the bulkhead was caved in, and they couldn’t turn over the props to maneuver,” Landrum said.

The captain considered rigging some sails to propel the stricken sub to nearby land, but there was no wind. As they considered their options the next day, another Japanese plane attacked but its bombs fell short and the crew managed to shoot down the plane with machine guns, Landrum said.

As Japanese ships closed in, the Grenadier crew scrambled to destroy their secret equipment before scuttling the ship. Crew members were floating in the ocean when the Japanese arrived and picked them up.

They were first taken to Penang in Malaysia, where they were beaten, tortured and starved for seven days. They were then separated and transferred to various camps before finally being brought to Japan. Landrum ended up at Omori, a man-made island in the Tokyo harbor.

There, during the closing days of the war, Landrum and several colleagues created an American flag from 1½ bedsheets that were sewn together. Without any rulers or other measuring tools, they precisely laid out a grid for the flag’s field of stars and stripes, and colored in those sections with blue and red pencils, Landrum said.

“They pretty much made it in secret, because they could have been executed if they were caught with it,” Landrum said. But the men would sometimes unroll it on the roof of their barracks as U.S. war planes passed over so “they would see that they were there.”

Finding the flag became somewhat of an obsession for Landrum, who scoured the Internet looking for clues and emailing the grown children of the Omori POWs held captive with his father. Landrum discovered that others were also looking for the flag.

“Every time I was on the Internet and saw the picture, I would post that my dad was waving the flag and that I’m looking for it,” Landrum said.

The game-changer occurred last year when Jeanna Johnson, the daughter of Omori POW Johnny Johnson, emailed him back with a July 3, 1973, newspaper clipping about the death of Omori POW Raymond Jakubielski, the prisoner who stitched the flag.

Landrum learned that Jakubielski’s relatives gave the flag after he died to the commander of a submarine base in New London, Conn., who in turn passed it to a U.S. senator. The flag was flown over the U.S. Capitol for one day before it was transferred to the Washington Navy Yard and its museum there.

Landrum then contacted Russell, the curator of the Naval History and Heritage Command, who, using the search term Omori Prison Camp, checked the museum’s collections database and easily located the flag folded in a box padded with archival tissue paper. It had been in storage for 40 years.

She soon called Landrum, who excitedly made arrangements to drive to Washington to see it. He gathered up two of his siblings and Johnson and, after initially getting lost during a frustrating drive to Northern Virginia, the group was ushered into a room with the flag fully unfurled on a table.

“We were just amazed, just so excited to see it,” Landrum recalled. “I think (the Navy museum officials) were thinking we were going to break down in tears and everything. But no — it was a happy thing.”

Aside from some minor wear, the flag was in great shape, Landrum said. Its colors are remarkably bright and vibrant for its age, Landrum said.

Landrum brought along his father’s POW diary and compared the red and blue pencil writings in the notebook with the red and blue colorings on the flag. They matched perfectly.