Bataan: New Mexico's Disproportionate Loss

In the fall of nineteen forty-one, the New Mexico National Guard's Two Hundredth Coast Artillery Regiment was stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas, preparing to deploy to the Philippines. The regiment had been federalized the previous January. Its ranks drew heavily from small Northern New Mexico communities, disproportionately Hispanic men whose families had farmed the same valleys for generations.

They were among the first American military units engaged when Japan attacked the Philippines in December nineteen forty-one. They held the Bataan Peninsula with other American and Filipino forces for four months, fighting with inadequate supplies and diminishing hope of reinforcement.

On April ninth, nineteen forty-two, the garrison at Bataan surrendered. It was the largest surrender of United States military forces since the Civil War.

What followed was the Bataan Death March. Japanese forces ordered approximately seventy-five thousand American and Filipino prisoners, already weakened by months of siege, to march sixty-five miles to a prisoner of war camp at Camp O'Donnell. The march lasted from April tenth to approximately April seventeenth. Men who could not keep pace were killed. Some were killed for sport.

Approximately one thousand eight hundred New Mexico soldiers were among those who surrendered at Bataan. The exact casualty figures from the march and from subsequent prisoner of war camps have been documented by the New Mexico National Guard and the New Mexico History Museum; the commonly cited figure is approximately nine hundred New Mexico soldiers who did not return. Some historians and family records place the figure higher. The precise accounting is contested in the historical literature, and the New Mexico National Guard records are the most reliable source. What is not contested: in many Northern New Mexico communities, nearly every family lost someone.

The Five Hundred Fifteenth Coast Artillery Battery accompanied the Two Hundredth. Both units were from New Mexico. Both paid the same price.