Free Republic

Elias Saavedra, one of the last survivors of the Bataan Death March, died Wednesday. He was 96. Saavedra died of natural causes at his San Rafael, New Mexico, home after battling a number of illnesses, his son Alfred Saavedra said. Born in 1918 in San Rafael, Saavedra joined the New Mexico National Guard at the outset of World War II. He was one of 75,000 Filipino and American soldiers taken captive by the Japanese in World War II when U.S. forces surrendered in the province of Bataan and Corregidor Island in April 1942. In all, tens of thousands of troops...