JACKSON - History records it as the Bataan Death March - a 60-mile trek across the Philippines in which casualties were counted by the thousands and survivors witnessed almost incomprehensible brutality.
On Saturday - the 63rd anniversary of the beginning of the Bataan Death March - the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum at Camp Shelby will honor the veterans who were taken prisoner in the Philippines during World War II.
Museum administrators expect a handful of survivors of the Death March and subsequent Japanese imprisonment from Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama to attend the ceremony. Estimates of the number of prisoners killed by Japanese captors during the Bataan Death March vary from 7,000 to 10,000.
Prisoners who collapsed en route to prison camps, without food or water, were shot or stabbed to death with bayonets. Thousands of other soldiers would die before the war's end after being shuffled to encampments in Japan, Korea or China.
The surviving soldiers are a dwindling source of firsthand knowledge of one of the most horrendous periods of the war.
Joseph C. Baxter of Bay St. Louis, who escaped the Death March and waged a guerrilla war with a band of Filipino resistance fighters before being captured, said there are only a few hundred survivors of the Philippine camps still alive.
Baxter, 86, told The Associated Press that he has been trying for years to increase awareness about sacrifices made in the Philippines, the torture endured by the Allied forces, and the determination of American soldiers.
The ceremony will be held at the same base where Baxter's military life began. In 1940, he trained at the National Guard base south of Hattiesburg before being shipped out to the Philippines.
Baxter said only about half of the Americans who served in the Philippines survived. Those who did make it were subjected starvation, beatings and torture.
"We were tied to the bumper of a truck in single file with ropes around our necks and we were paraded down the boulevard in Manila with a sign attached to the truck that said we were bandits," he recalled. "They took us to the dungeons of Fort Santiago where I was beaten and interrogated. My eye was put out by a cigarette butt."
Milton McMullen, who now lives in Madison, was assigned to the Army Air Corps 19th Bomb Group along with Baxter when he was captured in the Philippines. McMullen said only about 25 of the unit's 350 soldiers survived the war. Today only four are living.
McMullen, 84, said he was injured by bombers, hidden in a village and nursed back to health for about three months before he was captured.
He, too, avoided the infamous Death March, but he did not escape the ferocity of the Japanese prison camps.
"When you start seeing about 90 men a day dying, it gets pretty tough," he said. "I don't think most people, not even my own family, realize what really happened."
Both men will be at Camp Shelby for the ceremony.
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