Bataan Survivor

the long version

Drafted in 1945 following the author's liberation from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, this personal memoir of Colonel David L. Hardee was forgotten for over seventy years. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Captured in April 1942 after the American surrender on Bataan, Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps. A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan in 1944, making him one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war. Unlike memoirs written after decades of fading memories and contemporary influences, this unique prisoner of war memoir is a primary account written almost immediately after liberation from internment. This once-forgotten journal has been carefully edited, illustrated, and annotated to reveal the depth of hardee's experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War. -- Inside jacket flap.