Bataan

The president has declared April 9 Prisoner of War Recognition Day, honoring all former POWs. On this date 56 years ago, American and Filipino troops surrendered in the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippine Islands. We American defenders of Bataan and Corregidor are the forgotten legionnaires--forgotten and abandoned by our generation of Americans. We were declared expendable in 1942. To add insult, younger generations of Americans don't even know we exist. Why? Nobody told them!

I'm sorry that Bill Dwyre had to camp out on Long Island for five days or more to report on a golf tournament. But shame on Bill and his editors for making reference to that as the Bataan Death March, a World War II Japanese atrocity that killed thousands of Filipino and American prisoners of war. Incidentally, would the media please refrain from calling athletes who never faced real danger or sacrifice for their country "courageous"? Larry Joe Alyea Santa Monica

Jean Kennedy Schmidt, one of the last survivors of the Angels of Bataan, the American military nurses who were Japanese prisoners of war for nearly three years during World War II, has died. She was 88. Schmidt, a retired Army nurse, died Saturday at her home in La Canada Flintridge of complications related to a fall, said Susan Johnson, her daughter. The nurses stationed in the Philippines became the first large group of American women in combat, according to Elizabeth M.

I recently returned from two years at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center in Bataan where I learned firsthand about Filipino idealism and ability to work selflessly and wholeheartedly for high principles. Sixteen of us, 15 Filipino and one American, working in an intensive English program funded by the U.S. State Department created an up-to-date language laboratory program to provide listening-comprehension instruction in American English to thousands of U.S.-bound Indochinese refugees.

I literally choked on my Cheerios as I read Honan's defense of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. I was stunned to learn that the Pacific war was not brought about by Japan alone, but that the U.S. was equally responsible. The Japanese are promoting the view these days that they went to war to save all of Asia from the Western menace. Of course, in order to correctly pursue this bit of revisionist history, we have to forget the rape of Nanking and the hundreds of thousands of other Asian civilians who were slaughtered by the Japanese military.

Two Southern Californians who survived the 1942 Bataan Death March were belatedly awarded the Bronze Star during an informal ceremony at Edwards Air Force Base. Retired Master Sgts. Joseph Stanko, 64, of Lancaster, and Harold Newton, 65, of Tehachapi, received the medals--awarded for gallantry during their years as prisoners of war--during a 15-minute presentation before family members and friends on Friday, base spokesman Don Haley said.

The "whitewash" that the Education Ministry of Japan gave to the brutalities and atrocities committed by Japan before and during World War II is an affront to every American serviceman who fought against this aggression. It is also a desecration to the memory of the Americans murdered on the Bataan Death March, to those Americans who were murdered and starved to death in Japanese prisons, and to those Americans who gave their lives in the Pacific. One thing these Japanese historians fail to remember is that were it not for Gen. Douglas MacArthur's stand against Russia, which wanted to carve out part of Japan for Russian domination, the people of Japan would be Russian slaves today.