Please accept my respect, gratitude and reverence for your lost relatives. It’s long frustrated me that so many of our countrymen do not really know their story. God rest them.
Thank you so much! I never heard anything about the March either. Neither of my grandparents talked about losing their sons. My dad's mom had pictures of their son's caskets with the American Flag draping across them. By the time I started going to visit with them during the summer, it had been many years since they were killed, so they didn't talk about it. One time I asked my grandma who was in those caskets and she said "those are my sons who were killed in the war." That was it. She never said another word about it.
I heard more about it from my mother's side of the family because their son/brother was still buried in the Phillipines. Mom told me that my grandparents were poor during the war and didn't have the money to bring him back to the states so they buried him there. She always hoped that some day he would walk through that door since she never saw him in the casket, she held out hope that it might have been a mistake, and wasn't him. She grieved a lot over him. I can only imagine how difficult it was never really knowing for sure if that was him.
I think the government should have brought all of those men home. They abandoned them in the Death March and they abandoned them in the cemetery!
Accept my gratitude and respect also.
I think that too many young people don’t know their history of World War II. I guess they don’t teach it in school much anymore.
Whenever I have talked to young people nowadays about history, they don’t seem to know a lot. They don’t know about the Bataan Death March. They don’t know how Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo rallied the nation. They don’t know what happened at the Battle of Midway. They don’t know what happened at Dunkirk. They don’t know about Guadalcanal. They don’t know the significance of D-Day and the Normandy invasion.
They do know, however, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how some people view these bombings as war crimes. They do know about the internment of Japanese-Americans, and how some people view that as a war crime. They do know about Pearl Harbor, but think that we somehow invited the attack.
I think they are being taught politically correct history in the schools. Sometimes I wish I was a teacher and could teach the kids real history.