Does a Serviceman Who Died During the Bataan Death March Automatically Get the Purple Heart?

My uncle was a survivor of the Bataan Death March and wrote a book on it. It’s a small book, written so casually, but every page tells the most horrendous events.

He says the prisoners would try to bend down to get some grass on the march to put in their mouths, but if they got caught they got bayoneted. He also told me that when they finally got to the camp, the Japanese commander told them the only thing he wanted to hear bout them at the end of each day was how many of them had died.

I get sick when I hear whiney liberals talk about compassion over the Japanese. You can’t think that way. It was war. It was us or them. People seem clueless over that.

It is not a fancy book, nor written by a professional. But the events in it boggle the mind. I was always amazed reading it. I know I would not have survived what he just handled as life. But he grew up in the dustbowl, in a tiny house. Today’s children would have no understanding of how hard life was.

I think you can get second hand copies from Amazon.

Here is part of an article from a newspaper when he passed just this year:

Longtime Las Cruces resident died at son’s home in California on April 16.

Weldon C. Hamilton, a longtime resident of Las Cruces who survived the Bataan Death March and years as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, died April 16 at his son’s home in Sebastopol, Calif., the Las Cruces Sun-News reported Sunday. He was 86.

His experiences during the infamous 65-mile death march at the beginning of World War II and his 3 1/2-year ordeal as a POW were chronicled in his book “Late Summer of 1941 and My War With Japan,” the paper reported.

Hamilton joined the U.S. Army Air Corps on Oct. 5, 1940, and was sent to the Philippines in November 1941 where he served until the surrender of troops on Bataan on April 9, 1942, according to the Sun-News.

By the end of the war, Hamilton was working as a slave laborer at a coal mine just 30 miles from Nagasaki, Japan, where he saw the mushroom cloud from the second atomic bomb the United States dropped on Japan, effectively ending the war, the Sun-News said.

After the war, Hamilton remained in the service, retiring as a chief warrant office in the U.S. Air Force in 1969, after receiving The Presidential Unit Citations with two Oak Leaf Clusters and the Bronze Star.

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