Seminar on WWII March 20, 20121

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ON Saturday, March 20, 2021 the Friends of the National World War II Memorial will hold a seminar on World War II that will feature an ADBC-MS member talking about her search for her father. REGISTER HERE.

10:00AM to 10:50AM (EDT)

Patriots from the Barrio
With Dave Gutierrez, author and historian. In 2019 he was named President of Nuevo Mundo Historical and Genealogical Society of Silicon Valley. Patriots from the Barrio (2019) is the true story of Company E, 141st US Infantry: the only all Mexican American US Army unit in WWII and one with deep connections with his own family. The film rights to the book have been obtained in Hollywood.
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3s3IZ9X

11:00AM to 11:50AM (EDT)

Discovering My Father
With Nancy Kragh, former vice president of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society. She was instrumental in having a memorial stone to the POWs of the ill-fated hellship Enoura Maru. ‍Her presentation centers on her father's experiences as a POW of Imperial Japan during WWII and her odyssey to connect with a father she did not know who died on the Enoura Maru. She is a member of the American World War II Orphans Network (AWON), which unites the 183,000 Americans who lost a parent to World War II.
PURCHASE BOOK: (not by Ms. Kragh, Father Found by Duane Heisinger) https://amzn.to/3s1exNz

12:00PM to 1:15PM (EDT)

The Kitchen Front: Cooking with Rations in Second World War Britain
With Jennifer Ryan, author of The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, The Spies of Shilling Lane, and The Kitchen Front. Originally from Britain, where she was a book editor with The Economist, DK, and the BBC, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two children. The Kitchen Front (2021), a novel, was inspired by her grandmother's tales of the war.
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3qYTXfB

Merry Christmas Past - 1942

By Des Bettany. Reproduced with kind permission of his family.
To see more images, refer to http://www.changipowart.com/

Food was the stuff of dreams for a POW of Japan. Starvation was a Japanese strategy of both intent and error to subdue their Western captives. British Lance Bombardier Bettany captured in Malaya after the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and imprisoned at the infamous Changi used a purloined brush and pen to help transcend the POWs despair to hope.

In contrast to much of the Western POW art which survives from this period, Bettany’s finds uplifting humor in the day-to-day existence of the POW. Much of his POW work is one of light-heartedness, helping keep a sense of optimism in the face of a brutal captor.

Bettany's survival as a POW of Japan was in no small part due to his not being sent to work on the notorious Thai-Burma Death Railway, which claimed the lives of some 16,000 allied POWs and a much greater number of forced labor Asian workers. Des was repatriated to England late September 1945

Other well-know artists of the POW of Japan experience are Ben Steele (United States), Murray Griffin (Australia), Jack Chalker (Australia) and Ronald Searle (United Kingdom).

More on painting the horror.