Bataan survivor art
The Alamogordo Daily News reports that the artwork of Ben Steele, an American soldier who survived the Bataan death march, will be put on display at a museum in New Mexico:
During his captivity, Steele managed to sketch scenes of the ordeal on scraps of paper when his Japanese guards weren’t looking. The scenes depicted the horrors of the march, guards bayoneting soldiers who fell out unable to continue because of starvation and disease. They showed the squalid living conditions where the march survivors were interred before they were transferred to Japanese transport ships bound for slave labor camps in Manchuria, Korea and Japan.
Steele’s sketches were lost while another soldier was carrying them for safe keeping and the ship he was in was sunk. When Steele somehow managed to survive the trip to Japan and the years of slave labor in a coal mine there, he came home to the United States and set to work recreating his sketches from memory as a tribute to his fellow soldiers who suffered and those who died during that dark period in American history.
More information on Ben Steele and his artwork can be found at this site. He’s also written a book about his POW experience.
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