About the Author

    In January 1941, Joe enlisted in the Army and volunteered for the 31st Infantry Regiment
    (the “Polar Bears”) stationed in Manila, P.I.  He was fourteen years old. He was assigned
    to a machine gun squad in D Company, a heavy weapons company.  Not long after basic
    training, Joe was selected as the company’s bugler and was often chosen from among
    the musicians in the First Battalion to play General’s Call when Gen. MacArthur would
    arrive at his headquarters.  Peacetime duty in the Philippines was good.

    Hours after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Manila was bombed.  War had come to the
    Philippines.  When Japanese forces invaded the island of Luzon, Joe’s regiment was
    mobilized.  Joe’s position as bugler also made him the company runner, giving him a first
    hand vantage point of the fighting along the line.  Traveling with MacArthur to Corregidor
    in late December, D Company sustained its first casualties of the war from enemy
    bombers.  When his company joined the rest of the regiment on Bataan, Joe fought his
    way down the Peninsula with his machine gun squad until April 9, 1942.  He escaped to
    Corregidor, just avoiding the Death March, when the Bataan garrison was surrendered.  
    Joe defended the beaches of Corregidor with the Marines until May 6, 1942 when
    Corregidor fell.  Young Joe began his life as a prisoner of the Japanese.

    Back home in Memphis his mother was frantic.  All correspondence with the Philippines
    had been suspended.  The Memphis papers dubbed him the “Baby of Bataan.”

    After being marched through Manila he was moved from camp to camp.  First, he was
    taken to Cabanatuan # 1, then to the horrific Nichols Field detail, then to Bilbid.  He was
    then placed on a succession of Hell Ships.  The first ship, Oryoku Maru was sunk off the
    coast of the Philippines.  Next came the Enoura Maru, then the Brazil Maru.   Many did not
    survive the horrific conditions of the ships, and many lost their lives when American
    planes and submarines sank the Hell Ships.  Those that did survive, including Joe, had to
    confront slave labor in Japan.  

    Surviving brutality, starvation, threatened execution, near fatal injuries and mine cave-ins,
    Joe’s courage, determination and internal fortitude kept him alive.  He was close enough
    to Nagasaki to see a curious huge white cloud hovering over the city a day before
    American planes began dropping food on his camp.  

    The war was over.  Joe’s long journey home began.  Of the thirty-one men in his recruit
    platoon who fought in the war, twenty-one had perished, most as prisoners of the
    Japanese.

    Joe returned home at the age of 19.  He served several more enlistments in the armed
    services before he retired.  He was in the Army Air Corps and then served as a Marine
    Drill Instructor in San Diego.  He was wounded in action in Korea.   Joe now lives in
    Arizona with his wife, Marilyn.  

    He published his memoir in a book entitled “Baby of Bataan.”
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