My uncle was on the Bataan death march. He survived the march, only to die in the prison camp. My dad named me after him
I’m so sorry to hear that.
My dad was there for the invasion of Leyte island and was on the beach when Douglas MacArthur gave his I have returned speech.
Stories of the march and the prison camp were horrific..There’s a movie about a raid to free the prisoners on Cabanatuan..”The Great Raid” - Benjamin Bratt starred in it; American military and Filipino guerillas conducted the raid. There are also some good books about the American nurses in the Philippines who were taken prisoner.
My mother’s only brother was killed on Bataan January 24, 1942 on the Abucay line before the march and our family was notified in March or April 1942...
Years ago in Orange County, CA we met a survivor of the march..he and his brother were taken prisoners but his brother didn’t survive. I had letters from my uncle that my mother had given me and I took them with me when we met him and he gave me a 1989-90 yearbook about the 31st Infantry Regiment that my uncle was in...one of his letters had the logo of the Regiment on it..he also gave me a pin of the Regiment - polar bear..
My uncle’s name appears on the wall at the American Cemetery in Manila but his last name is spelled wrong. He wasn’t married and there was no next of kin to make the correction just in paperwork when my sister and I discovered it in clippings where no one had ever noticed it before.
There are so many in this country who don’t realize the sacrifices that were made - from our country’s inception to present day...shameful!
I also had a close in-law who was on Bataan death march. We never knew the scope of his whole story until he died (he had dictated it to a survivors group and the VA which was released later). After Bataan, Corregidor, and the Hell Ships, he eventually wound up in Manchuria in a coal mine.
We kids would only get small snippets of the story. Like the time my brother brought a Taiwanese classmate to the house, and he started conversing with that person - in Chinese. Everyone was like “What the heck? he speaks Chinese??!”
He grew up dirt poor, and joined the Army in 1939 to get 3 hots and a cot. He survived because he was young and tough as nails