Forsaken Heroes of the Pacific War: One Man's True Story

He was the nation’s oldest living survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March and three and a half years in Japanese prison camps during World War II. He was also the oldest combat veteran of WWll at the time of his death on August 14, 2011; he would have been 106 on April 26,2011. As a youth, he was a four letter man and captain of his high school and college teams. After college, he captained a team that beat the barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters. In the late 1920’s, he bought two airplanes and began one of the nation’s earliest regional air travel businesses; then got his own pilot’s license after only four hours of training – and flew until he was 95. In 1937, as a dentist with a ten year old practice, a wife and three children, the 32 year old ROTC lieutenant was called up by the army, as America began to prepare for war. After Pearl Harbor, Al Brown and some 90,000 sick and starving American and Filipino troops fought valiantly for four months on the Bataan peninsula until they were surrendered to Japanese forces in April of 1942, food, ammunition and weaponry, virtually gone. After the Death March, four prison camps, a “hell ship” journey to Japan, starvation, torture, a broken back, a broken neck and fifteen major tropical diseases, including blindness, this once strapping, athletic six-footer was down to a starved 95 pounds. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, and three years stateside in a veteran’s hospital, Al Brown went home for the first time in eleven years. In 1950, though no longer able to practice dentistry because of his war wounds, he went to Hollywood, California and started a new life…