Lakeland PBS presents The Boys of Bataan brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

The 194 soldiers have continued to be front and center around the world.

They carry the tradition of the men of Company A wherever they go.

Remember Bataan, Never forget.

I'm John Erikson.

I'm the Brainerd Public Schools archivist, also the curator which means that I also get to put together exhibits for Brainerd Public Schools.

We are in the historic Tornstrom Auditorium, in the historic Washington High School now known as Washington Educational Service Building.

We're on the stage in Tornstrom.

This is a 1929 stage, a 1929 building, in the place from which many of the men we will be talking about went to school, many of them did not get to the high school level because there was a dropout rate that was very high in the 1930's which is the period immediately before our time.

So, it was brand new when many of the men of the 194th Company A were students here.

They were the first steps hitting those landings and that right foot hits the same spot all the time and then it turns to go down to the next level and that hitting and then turning over the years with the ten thousands of students who have been through the building have created a obvious spot for feet to land.

We have many other features in the building that are striking from the standpoint of the character of the building, probably the principal one of which is the gymnasium.

It has the same bleacher seats made out of oak planks but the girders that are in there, the whole closeness to the gym floor itself all of which would have been the same for many of these young men.

Many of them were star athletes as well.

The school itself housed these students over the years including these men.

So, for example, several of them were star theater performers.

They would have been on this stage, officers of the class of whichever year it might be.

From the standpoint of group pictures the back southern exposure of the school outside was a place where all the group pictures were taken because of the great south light coming onto the faces of the gathered students.

The National Guard was, in the 1930's was an option for young men who were dropping out of school to help their families.

It was a survival time.

Retention of young males was a definite problem recognized by the school district but there wasn't much to be done about it, in large part because of the Depression.

The National Guard Armory as we refer to it was actually The Armory not the National Guard Armory when it was built in 1936.

Now the other thing about that Armory, that I think is important to note, is that the builders of the Armory were people by the name of Samuelson.

The father, Ben Samuelson, was the lead contractor.

From all indications his son, Walter Samuelson, was also working on the site, on that Armory.

Walter Samuelson became a Sergeant in the Army National Guard.

The Armory was actually in the center of the government commercial area of the City of Brainerd.

It was the place to be and it was also the place to be for these young men.

They were interested in the vehicles that were there.

The Armory was made to take tanks.

The 34th Minnesota Tank Division was cited in Duluth but transferred down here into the new Armory and so tanks to young men is like, you know, a car and a truck and back in that era it was something to be able to associate yourself with the 34th Tank Division which ultimately was federalized as the 194th Tank Batallion.

These are young men who didn't have a lot in life in many instances including they did not have clothing that spiffed them up, if you will.

When you were in the military you were issued clothing that made you very distinctive, you were set apart from others and particularly when you went to a dress rehearsal kind of a place, for example, before they shipped out there was a ball at which they dressed up and they signed in on a register but they were able to dress themselves up for their being a soldier, it gave them status.

The men were first quarantined.

They were thinking that they were going to be taken to Washington State by train earlier than what turned out to be the case, but they were quarantined not for disease purposes but just to keep them cohered as a unit together before they left town.

On February 10 of 1941 the order came through we're leaving now and so they ready, they packed their bags literally and figuratively both, and they marched the two or three blocks to the train depot.

Again, the Armory being part of the center of downtown.

The train depot was an old-fashioned large wooden structure with a platform on the outside for baggage and people and it is on an East - West run, so the train ran, Northern Pacific ran from Brainerd directly west to Washington State, which is where the destination was for training.

This was late at night, it was February 10th, temperatures vary from reports but were anywhere reported from 6 below to 20 below.

The town turned out, they were there.

Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins and neighbors.

There was a band, a marching band, that accompanied the soldiers marching to the train depot and the train was delayed in departure because of the obvious emotional aspects of separating from the soldiers, some of whom, of course, were never seen again.

But the depot and the train loaded and the men went west to Washington State for training.

Many of these boys were friends in high school with people who weren't necessarily still in Brainerd and one of them was Julius St. John Knudsen.

He was a little bit of a free spirit and he graduated from here.

He didn't drop out, he stayed in school, he loved art, he was a yearbook guy and when he graduated he went west young man.

He went to California.

When the 194th was federalized or the 34th division, tank division was federalized as the 194th in February of 41, he was joining the California National Guard.

This was a time period within which war in Europe was already going on and there were indications of there was war in the Far East as well so he had joined the California National Guard perhaps for the same reasons, it was a job and etc.

He heard that his friends were going west to train in Washington State.

Julius decided to arrange for, if he could, a transfer from the California Guard to Company A.

Had he not done that, who knows what would have happened to him, but when he chose to cast his lot with his friends, the result was that he became a prisoner of war first and then he became a missing in action secondly.

He joined up with the Boys of Bataan from Brainerd Public Schools, numbering probably about 35 total out of Company A's 60 or so men, with highest of Brainerd Public Schools of which 19 died, KIA, and Julius was the sole MIA.

They didn't know they were going to war.

They knew they were going to extended training in Washington State but they hadn't been alerted that they were going into combat from there.

They didn't know that they were going to be deploying out.

It's 7,000 miles.

We don't necessarily think that that's a big deal these days when people are supplied by aircraft that can take off from here and land in Manila with, you know, a huge supply arrangement, but it was not possible in that day.

That was a 7,000 mile ocean trip and with Japan just to the north of the Philippines that was not going to happen.

Colonel Ernie Miller was not a colonel when Company A went west, he was Major Miller at the time.

Befitting the status that he had as commander of the battalion, the 194th Tank Battalion.

He had 62 men more or less.

They shifted in number as they went west and training and out to the Philippines with people being added and subtracted.

But basically we're talking about 62 or so and again, more than half of those had connections to Brainerd Public Schools.

Colonel Miller came to Minnesota from New York State and as a young man he had actually served with General Jack Pershing in World War I. I'm not sure that he went overseas with Pershing, but he was in Pershing's Army and ultimately came to Minnesota and became associated with the development of Camp Ripley just south of Brainerd.

Among his skills he was a surveyor, so he knew how to navigate land of different types and in fact surveyed much of Camp Ripley.

I make that point because when they landed in the Philippines the first thing that he wanted to know, he Colonel Miller then Major Miller, wanted to know, was what do we have for knowledge about the terrain that we may be fighting on.

Now that was pretty foresighted because they were fighting, about 90 days later they were in combat.

His men had hardly settled into training, they were reassembling tanks, they didn't have the right ammunition for the tanks.

It was a difficult situation.

Yesterday, December 7th 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Naval and Air Forces of the Empire of Japan.

As Christmas approached in December of 1941, the war office made arrangements for moms and dads, wives around the country and specifically in this community to make recordings of Christmas greetings on 33 and a 1/3 long-playing records, the old fashioned type.

Julius's parents, Julius's dad was a logger out in the woods of central Minnesota, recorded Christmas greetings for Julius.

Hello, Julius, this is your dad.

I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

We're all busy here at home and we've got a big job in the North Country and Don and Mr Carlton and several other the boys that you know are working for me.

We're going to be busy all winter here and our Spring Valley job is going along.

We're fighting some freight rates right now so as we can ship the ore. We're going to develop this thing in the spring and I think that we'll have a lot of things for you boys to do when you get back to this country which I hope will be soon now.

I hope that you aren't getting too much heat.

We know that you're in the other end of the world and that you're having your summer now but do what you can fella and I wish you a Merry Christmas again and hope you get along in good shape.

Write soon.

Hello Juli, this is mother.

I want you to know that this was dad's idea and it's just taken the town by storm.

I went downtown to find out first if there was a machine that could be used and John Linneman is running a machine for us and Dad talked to Henry Mills and Frank Johnson who were in charge of the local homeguard now and got the use of the Armory and the newspaper has been just wonderful putting in three different articles about this.

They even took a list of some of the boys whose people didn't have telephones.

I didn't know how to get in touch with them to be sure that they knew about it and so the newspaper took down the names of those boys and their folks have called and everybody's had a great time over it.

John Linneman was here till half 12 last night, although his hours were supposed to be from 7 until 9 pm.

He had a fine time with those people that were there last night and tonight will be just as bad if not worse, I guess.

I telephoned to so many people and some parents that I've never seen and possibly never will but we've chatted about you boys and had a fine time about it all.

Aunt Emma sent us a road map yesterday and a bulletin with the attractions of Portland and so on.

I guess she's thinking that she's going to get us out west for a trip.

I'm going to wish you a Merry Christmas now, Juli, goodbye.

Those recordings were meant to be sent and received by the men of Company A in the Philippines.

Julius never heard those at Christmas 1941 when he was in combat at that time fighting for this country.

At that point the command went out immediately to evacuate to the Bataan Peninsula and that's where Ernie Miller took his men and that's where the Battle of Bataan began.

It was Colonel Miller who survived.

He kept his men together on reduced rations.

They cut the rations in half , they cut them in half again because the depots of food and ammunition were not well stocked out on the Bataan Peninsula.

They were fighting a retreat.

Ultimately he was ordered to surrender his men.

The call signal for that that went to all of the military people who had been battling the Japanese for 4 months, delaying for the benefit of America to recover after Pearl Harbor.

The call signal was crash and when that crash signal came Miller ordered all the tanks to be destroyed.

And so these men were destroying their own weaponry.

He kept with the men all the way, he survived hell ships, he survived the Death March, he survived the forced labor camp that he was in in Japan and all the way through he was keeping track of the history of what happened.

He would use small scraps of paper and hide them and he kept them all the way through the four years or so that he was in captivity, ultimately writing a book called Bataan Uncensored, which was critical of command, critical of the Japanese, critical of everything that happened to his men, but he kept his men together and when the war was over he was awarded the Silver Star, which can be awarded to a military person in a combat situation in a hostile environment.

And I think it was awarded to him not only for his gallantry in combat, he was on the front line running between tanks as they were repelling Japanese, but also because of his leadership.

During the time of his confinement he lost a son, he did not know this but he lost a son in combat in Europe.

He learned that when he came home.

Ed Burke is a graduate of this school that we're in today.

He would have seen the plays that I've made reference to.

He would have been in this auditorium many times.

Ed Burke was a bright young man.

He graduated at age 16 from this high school and his girlfriend at the time, and later wife who he married before he departed for the Philippines, was a year or so behind him.

She graduated at age 16 as well, so very bright people.

Ed Burke was an officer second Lieutenant so he was one of the line type officers with these young men who he was not that long older than them.

He went with the unit to Bataan.

When the attack first occurred on December 8 in the Philippines, December 7 at Pearl Harbor, he was wounded in the initial bombing runs that destroyed all aircraft on the ground, the aircraft didn't get off the ground.

He was wounded and he was taken into the hospital that was immediately nearby Clark Field and he walked through the wards of the hospital and he saw all the suffering, all the dead, all the dying, all the nurses who were and doctors attempting to help these young men.

He had received a wound shall we say in the posterior and very likely it was a shrapnel like wound, but it was a wound nonetheless and of course anything can happen with shrapnel.

Had he remained in the hospital he likely would have been evacuated to Australia, which was near, relatively speaking, nearby.

Bear in mind the Philippines are 7,000 miles from the United States.

They are a 1,000 miles or less from Japan.

That says a lot right there.

Ed Burke could have gone to Australia, he could have stayed in the hospital, he said no, I'm going back to my men and he went back into the battle.

On the initial round of trying to shoot down aircraft with cannon fire from a tank designed to be shot at subjects on the ground, it was not anti-aircraft ammunition they had, he led his platoon of tanks, probably a group of three into the Battle of Bataan.

This is a fighting retreat.

It is not, it's aggressive, but it's a retreat buying time.

And around December 27 of 1941 his tanks were caught in a murderous attack by Japanese who were approaching a critical river to go over.

He was wounded, his tank was destroyed.

The other tankers did not know what had happened to him.

He was badly wounded and left for dead.

Nobody knew what had happened to him but they couldn't find him.

He was found by a Japanese officer who did something remarkable.

At that time, if you were defeated in battle as an enemy of Japan, you were considered less than human and anything could be done to you.

But he was an officer, the Japanese officer was an officer, and Ed Burke was an officer.

The Japanese officer could see the strength and courage of Ed Burke because Burke showed no fear of dying.

Burke was a devout Catholic and he reported that he said many rosaries during the time that he was in the immediate presence of that Japanese officer who chose to take him to an American medical officer.

This is before the Death March.

This is while the Battle of Bataan is still going on.

The Battle of Bataan went on for another 3 months but Burke was already in custody.

The American medical doctor took care of him and actually was able to get Burke into a prisoner of war situation, a camp, without having to go through the Death March, which saved his life undoubtedly.

Burke could have left but he stayed, he stayed with his men all the way through, survived captivity, came home and became the father of six children, well four more and two from before with a remarkable wife by the name of Perky Burke who did just wonders for soldiers throughout her life.

And after Ed was gone penned an absolutely beautiful essay which was almost poetic in character published in the Brainerd Dispatch, reminding all of us to respect and honor our veterans and calling out the men of Bataan, 50, 60 years after they were gone.

Captain Burke, as he finished his career, experienced a lot of problems that were common to men coming home.

His body was wrecked by captivity and he's illustrative of the men who came home.

Only about 19 of them out of the 35 or so came home but they were with the exception of one or two they were debilitated and had short lives.

Private August Bender and Private Gerald Bell were tankers with Lieutenant Burke defending against the Japanese advance across the river.

It was obvious that the Japanese were going to be able to cross the river but they needed to be slowed down.

A request came from probably Lieutenant Burke as to obtaining volunteers to man a machine gun at the crossing of the river.

There was a bridge where the Japanese Army was expected to come fast.

August Bender, aged about 21, Bell aged about 19, Bell was a dropout but had attended school in Brainerd Public Schools, Bender was a graduate, volunteered to defend the retreat of the tankers who were trying to escape to fight another day.

It was a sure death sentence.

They manned the machine gun, no one ever saw them again, never seen again.

They're not treated as missing in action because of the obviousness of what they were volunteering to do and what undoubtedly happened to them.

Herbert Strobel is actually Sergeant Strobel.

He was a rural Brainerd young man working on a farm.

He graduated from this high school.

He also was a dairy deliverer, so he was a milkman.

Because that wasn't enough in the day he also became a member of the Minnesota 34th Tank Company and ultimately became part of the contingent that went to the Philippines.

Herbert Strobel was as a sergeant he was a tank driver, so he was in command of his tank.

He had a gunner or two on board as well, I think there were two additional soldiers.

They were in combat, this is toward the end of December, and so generally speaking about the time that Bell and Bender are in combat and unknown as to when they died.

We know definitely when Herbert Strobel died.

Major Miller commanded that there be a break and the tanks, our tanks stopped, they sought shelter.

They weren't out of firing range however.

The tanks are small, they're very small tanks, they're crowded things.

Herbert did what tankers do, it's a break so he goes up through the turret.

The turret is above him, he moves the turret aside and as he puts his head out of the tank turret a mortar shell explodes above his head, killed instantaneously.

Colonel Miller was there, retrieved, recovered Sergeant Strobel from the tank.

He is recognized as the first casualty, KIA, actual killed because we know for sure what the date of his death was.

Because of his service he, along with Julius St. John Knudsen and along with a Private Walter Straka, also of Company A, have been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award that can be given by Congress, as opposed to the President or the Department of Defense, to a citizen.

George Washington is one such former soldier who holds the Congressional Gold Medal.

Herbert does, Walter does, Julius does.

Sergeant Walter Samuelson is a very special story for a number of reasons.

His family accompanied him to training on the west coast in Washington State, which was not uncommon with the men going out there.

Sergeant Samuelson, because he had a family and because of his age, could have said I'm going home once the deployment order came through.

He had the option of declining to go with his men on the ship to the Philippines and he said I'm going to the Philippines.

He told his family at the kitchen table, I've heard this from Don Samuelson.

This was very traumatic for the family as can be imagined, that was the last he saw of his father.

His father ultimately survived combat, survived the death march, survived initial captivity as a POW, survived the trip on a hell ship, which was horrendous.

These are men stuffed into the hold - no water, no food.

Disease is rampant, sanitation facilities are non-existent, and they're transported from the Philippines in many of these instances to both Japan and Manchuria.

Manchuria is located adjacent to North Korea today, it wasn't North Korea at the time but it's North Korea today.

Also Mongolia is a bordering country, also Russia is, Northern Russia we're talking about, up north - cold hard conditions.

And when Samuelson's hell ship arrived in Manchuria to let people off he was in terrible, terrible condition.

I mean disease, again, it's just these were men who were already weakened from combat and lack of rations and etc.

Walter Samuelson died in Manchuria, he could have been home in Minnesota.

To this day it's the examples of men like Walter Samuelson, who helped build that Armory.

Don Samuelson learned a lot from his dad.

Don Samuelson went on to become a Minnesota Senator and a Minnesota House of Representatives, state level.

But he did it over decades of work.

Don Samuelson also was a bricklayer.

William Mattson was a tall, gangly young man who graduated from high school here.

He was the drum major in the marching band for Brainerd High School.

This Brainerd High School, back in the 30's and up until his graduation I think, shortly before 1940.

A very distinctive lankiness to him and if you were to look at him you might, from pictures, you might say I don't know that this is a guy who's going to make it through a Bataan Death March, but he did.

He survived the disease that was part of the combat of those four months and the lack of rations and the Death March.

And not only did he survive that, and I'm not quite sure off hand whether he was on a hell ship or not, the prisoner of war camps were bad enough.

The hell ships were much worse and tragic because of the sinkings by American submarines because the hell ships were not marked appropriately.

But Bill Mattson lived to tell the story and not only that but he decided he was going to go back to the Philippines after the war and walk the Death March Trail.

I know of no other 194th soldier who chose to do that.

There are others who were in the Philippines who returned to the Philippines to commemorate their service years there, but only one from 194th to my knowledge returned and that was Bill Mattson.

The Bataan Death March is a singular event in the history of the world, certainly in the history of American military experience and unfortunately it visited its carnage on all of these young men from this high school, many of whom did not come home.

But the Death March decimated the soldiers that were on it and it was unnecessary because they could have been driven, literally driven.

On the March were several young men of note and they were young men, none of these are over 21 years of age.

One of them is Jim McComas.

Jim McComas is also known as Whaler and he's known as Whaler because he was a great athlete.

He was not terribly tall but he was fairly wide and strong.

He became one of a gang of five on the Death March.

They tried to stick together, they tried to help each other through harder times on the Death March and there were many.

He was with Walt Straka.

Walt Straka was not an athlete, he was a high school dropout, but he was tough as nails.

Walt had an attitude that wasn't going to let anything stop him.

Walt was also an extremely devout Catholic and that comes into play as well.

Also part of this group was Ken Porwoll.

Ken was a great athlete as well ,and as life has it the two last standing of all of the men of the 194th Tank Battalion Company A were next to last, Ken Porwoll and last Walt Straka.

With them also was Julius St. John Knudsen and also Byron Veillette.

And one other, Saign was his name.

But those five began the March together and along the March, because they were all to some degree sick for the reasons that are rampant here, McComas, who is a great athlete, tells the other ones I'm having a hard time.

They carry him as far as they can but they're wearing down.

Literally they carry him.

And when men couldn't go any further and they lay down on the ground the Japanese guards would kill them, bayonet them, leave them for dead, push them off the road.

That was known to these men and at some point McComas said, he's a team player, McComas said you can't carry me, I can't walk, leave me.

They picked a spot and they left him.

He rolled into the ditch out of sight, apparently no guard saw him, the others went on and they didn't talk about him again.

It was hard.

Time passes.

The March is an extended March so there there are men marching in now a line that's many miles long probably.

And somewhere along the way McComas recovers his strength.

He doesn't die, he's too much of an athlete to die.

He regains the line of march, he shuffles back into it, and he walks the rest of the Death March.

Part of it was actually done by putting the men in cattle cars, shoving them in to the point for when they stopped the cattle cars and told everybody to get off those who could get off did and those who had died because they were so crushed into the cattle cars simply fell over.

McComas got back into the line of march and he is brought into the prisoner of war camp and he finds Ken Porwoll who is a childhood friend of his, they played football together, undefeated team.

And he hovers over Porwoll's bed and Porwoll looks up at him and says to the effect I thought you're dead, and he wasn't.

And that group of five, Julius St John Knudsen at some point is ordered to get into a Japanese truck we believe and is last seen driving off into the jungle in the back of the truck.

We don't know what he did, why that was done, but that's the last that was seen of Julius St John Knudsen.

It's remarkable that McComas survived all things, Porwoll survived all things.

Veillette, the star athlete, was a halfback type in great shape didn't carry excess weight, didn't.

Germs don't care.

If you get it you're dead and he was.

Saign survived as well.

McComas was put on a hell ship along with another Company A soldier by the name of Joseph Lamkin.

The hell ship was bound for Asia and the forced labor camps there, but it was torpedoed and in the process McComas was able to escape the hell ship, swim to shore and so did Lamkin.

But they both were recovered by guerillas, both were put back on a American submarine a month or two later, both made it back to the States.

Lamkin was a silver star winner in Korea, he wanted back in the fight.

There were only two more that I know of from the 194th who went back into combat after being discharged.

Lamkin was one and an enlisted man by the name of Swanson was another one.

McComas came home and he became a captain in the Brainerd police force.

His office was located in City Hall a block away from the County Courthouse, on top of which were carillon bells that on the hour rang the hour and on the half hour rang the half hour and also were capable of concert playing.

They were literally bells at the time.

Located on the top of the courthouse, they had a reach from the courthouse six miles in either direction.

That's a memorial there that is a reminder to everyone who knows that it's a memorial, which is not to say that everybody does, for not only the dead of Bataan, but also for all Brainerd veteran deaths in war.

And there were many more besides the Philippine experience.

Captain McComas heard those bells every day from a block or so away in his office in Brainerd City Hall.

They had to be very challenging reminders for what he had gone through.

Ken Porwoll, a word about Ken Porwoll, the second to last man standing.

Ken Porwoll again was a outstanding athlete and probably that helped him get through all of these things.

He was in Manchuria.

There's some telling pictures of Ken Porwoll looking like he's freezing to death and he probably was about that.

When he was discharged and finally was able to get out of the hospital systems and back home.

He in his later years was a frequent regular volunteer in the Veterans Administration hospitals I believe in the Twin Cities.

He had skills as a barber and so he was regularly going to the VA to offer haircuts to veterans.

He did that until his death not too many years ago.

We had remarkable young men that left and we had remarkable men who came back.

Walter Straka was a man I came to know well because he lived to be 100 years old.

He was the last man standing.

He was the first Congressional Gold Medal Award recipient from the men of the 194th here.

Walt survived everything.

He survived the Death March, he survived combat, he survived hell ship transport to Japan.

He worked in a forced labor camp in Japan for providing the Japanese military with metallic substances for their deployment back against Americans.

And he survived also the atomic bomb, literally, because his city was targeted he learned later for the second atomic bomb to be dropped on it after Hiroshima.

It wasn't dropped because of weather.

The weather was not sufficient to allow the bombardier to figure out where to drop that sucker.

The bomber went on to Nagasaki, Nagasaki got hit.

Walt didn't get hit, Walt survived.

In that sense he survived the atomic bomb.

Walt said that he survived all of this because he repeatedly prayed the rosary.

The rosary, I'm not Catholic, but I understand that the rosary can be prayed for hope, for faith and for charity.

I think Walt got all of those.

Not only did he get all of those but he also had what his parents gave him to begin with, which was the ability to survive through anything and the surliness that really was part of his charming character, but that helped him get through, along with his Catholicism that had him praying for those three important things.

Remember Bataan.

Never forget.

That message gets repeated in the community in many ways on many occasions, including on the annual Memorial Death March Run, which is a 13-mile run, mostly by younger military people who are associated with the National Guard in Minnesota but also by the community as a whole.

194th people are also exalted every year on April 9th, the surrender date.

It is a very moving ceremonial event in which the roll call of all men is called in the Armory on the floor, the drill floor of the Armory, with facsimile dog tags hung on Colonel Miller's ceremonial sword.

I'd like to thank you all for joining us today on this Day of Remembrance of the 82nd anniversary of the Fall of Bataan, April 9th, 1942.

I'd also like to welcome the family of Julius St John Knudsen who served with Company A 194th Tank Battalion and is still missing in action.

He is being represented by Jim Knudsen who will assist in laying the wreath today.

I'd also like to welcome the family of Herbert Strobel who served with Company A 194th Tank Battalion and Jerry Strobel will be also assisting in laying the wreath today.

As we gather here today to commemorate the Fall of Bataan, I'm deeply moved to address you as we reflect upon the events of that pivotal moment in history.

As the current Battalion Commander of the 194th Army Regiment I am humbled to get the opportunity to honor those who served and sacrificed in the defense of freedom years ago and whose historic bravery and service live on to this day.

The Fall of Bataan stands as sober testament to the resilience of a valour of the American and Filipino forces who fought valiantly against overwhelming odds.

It was a chapter marked by the spirit of the soldiers who despite facing insurmountable challenges, refused to yield in their commitment to fight for our country.

So as we gather today to remember the veterans of the 194th it is only just and right that we should also take time to remember the Filipino veterans of Bataan.

There was a brotherhood and sisterhood on Bataan that was forged with fire and blood.

We honor that today.

Remember Bataan, Never Forget.

They need to be remembered, their names need to be spoken, their stories need to be told, so that we learn from them leadership, responsibility, and commitment.

For any other walk of life they are exemplars, they are aspirational, not just as military people but beyond that in anything that any one of us do.

Milan Anderson Gerald Bell August Bender Billie Brown Ernest Brusseau James Clevenger Pearly Clevenger Richard Davis Maxwell Dobson Harvey Finch Arthur Gattie Claude Gilmer Wallace Goodrich Ernest Gorden Carroll Guin David Carlson Julius Knudsen Howard Larson Wallace Lee Roy Maghan Roy Nordstrom Donald Paine Clinton Quinlen Arthur Root Paul Saarinen Walter Samuelson William Smith Harold Snell Wince Solsbee Frank South John Sporintz Herbert Strobel Byron Veillette We will now call out the names of the members of Company A 194th Tank Battalion that survived the war and returned home.

Ernest B Miller John Scotty Muir Edward Burke Melvin Ahlgrim Lawrence Alberg John Allen James Bogart Alpheus Brown John Falconer Raymond Fox Kenneth Gorden Ralph Hollingsworth Boyce Hyatt Carl Kramp Warren Lackie Joseph Lamkin Lee MacDonald James McComas William Mattson Glenn Oliver Henry Peck Kenneth Porwoll Clifford Rardin Sidney Saign Walter Straka Robert Swanson Russell Swearingen Arthur Thomas Henry Turner This program is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.