Please convey my thanks to your uncle for his service and sacrifice.
Thanks, I will.
I found this article on him:
They split us up into groups of about 300,” Hamilton said. “We were then ordered to march.”
The men were to march from Mariveles to San Fernando, a 100-kilometer (62 miles) walk, then another 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) to Camp O’Donnell. But the Japanese had made no provisions for food or water. So, the already sick and half-starved men grew steadily weaker.
“The only food I had for eight days was a ball of rice the size of a golf ball,” Hamilton said. “But lack of food was the least of our problems.”
The men were dying of thirst. They desperately searched for water along the way, and many would drink anything, no matter how dirty.
Clarence Larson, a Bataan survivor, recalled the scene in his book, “A Long March Home:” “One of our stops was at a bridge. ... The water you couldn’t even see because there was a green scum covering it. Some of the guys jumped in ... and started to fill their canteens. I did not, as there was a dead soldier, perhaps several, that had been in the water a couple of days, and in 100-degree sunshine you could imagine the smell.”
For many, this drink became their last.
“It became a game for the Japanese,” Hamilton said. “They would lower their bayonets and run for anyone trying to drink. Either you were bayoneted or shot.”
Those who escaped a quick death were in for a slower torture. The contaminated water caused severe diarrhea and vomiting. And if you fell out?
“You were dead,” Hamilton said. “It was miserable. I was so tired I felt like I couldn’t take another step. But then I would hear someone being shot. It was like the Angel of Death was right behind me.”
Hamilton kept going, but many weren’t able. Fifteen thousand soldiers died or were murdered on the 65-mile march to prison camps. And more than 26,000 others would die in the next two months at the camps.
“I was determined to survive,” Hamilton said. “I didn’t make it through that march to die in a prison camp.”
Before his nightmare was over, Hamilton would withstand more than three years of torture, beatings, forced labor and near starvation at Japanese prison camps.
And then, one day, just as quickly as they came, the Japanese left.
“They just tiptoed out,” Hamilton said. “There we were, 1,800 of us. We heard there were Americans on the tip of the island so we stole a train and went there.
“The first thing I did was call my mom,” he added. “I told her I was alive and on my way home. It was an amazingly happy day for me.”
Hamilton made it home in October 1945. His body was ridden with disease — beriberi, dysentery and scurvy — and his doctor’s prognosis was grim. But in time, he recovered both physically and mentally. He married his childhood sweetheart, had five children and continued his service in the military. He was a cook in the Air Force, retiring as a chief warrant officer after 29 years of service.