Bataan Survivor--A book talk May 5

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Dr. Frank Blazich, curator for the Division of Armed Forces History at the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian), will discuss a POW memoir that he edited for publication, Bataan Survivor: A POWs Account of Japanese Captivity in WWII in a talk entitled,  Dapecol: the Davao Penal Colony as Experienced by Col. David L. Hardee on May 5, 2018 at the annual convention of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

2:30pm - Hotel Albuquerque Old Town in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Franciscan Ballroom

Colonel David L. Hardee, drafted his memoir at sea aboard the SS Cape Meares (C1-B) from April-May 1945 following his liberation from Japanese captivity. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Surrendered on April 9, 1942, a wounded Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps on the Philippines. 

He spent most of his time at "Dapecol"-- an abbreviation for the Davao Penal Colony, a POW farm labor camp on Mindanao. In June 1944, he was sent to Mania to be imprisoned in Bilibid where he was liberated on February 4, 1945.

A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan during 1944 with most of the remaining POW officers on the Philippines. He was one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war.

As a primary account written almost immediately after his liberation, Hardee’s memoir is fresh, vivid, and devoid of decades of faded memories or contemporary influences associated with memoirs written years after an experience. This once-forgotten memoir has been carefully edited, illustrated and annotated to unlock the true depths of Hardee’s experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War.

In April 2018, Dr. Blazich made a podcast on the book for the MacArthur Memorial. You can hear it here.