Stuart A. Beardslee, age 20, from Illinois, Perry county.
Service era: World War II
Date of death: Friday, August 21, 1942
Death details: Following the Allied surrender on the Bataan Peninsula on April 9, 1942, the Japanese began the forcible transfer of American and Filipino prisoners of war to various prison camps in central Luzon, at the northern end of the Philippines. The largest of these camps was the notorious Cabanatuan Prison Camp. At its peak, Cabanatuan held approximately 8,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war that were captured during and after the Fall of Bataan. Camp overcrowding worsened with the arrival of Allied prisoners who had surrendered from Corregidor on May 6, 1942. Conditions at the camp were poor and food and water supplied extremely limited, leading to widespread malnutrition and outbreaks of malaria and dysentery. By the time the camp was liberated in early 1945, approximately 2,800 Americans had died at Cabanatuan. Prisoners were forced to bury the dead in makeshift communal graves often completed without records or markers. As a result, identifying and recovering remains interred at Cabanatuan was difficult in the years after the war. Sergeant Stuart A. Beardslee joined the U.S. Army Air Forces from Michigan and served with the 17th Pursuit Squadron, 24th Pursuit Group, which was stationed on the Bataan Peninsula when the Japanese attacked the Philippines. After the American surrender, SGT Beardslee was forced on the Bataan Death March before his initial internment at Camp O’Donnell. He was eventually held at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp, where he died of dysentery on August 21, 1942. He was buried in a communal grave in the camp cemetery along with other deceased American POWs; however, his remains could not be associated with any remains recovered from Cabanatuan after the war. Today, Sergeant Beardslee is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
Cemetery: Tablets of the Missing at Manila American
Source: National Archives, American Battle Monuments Commission, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency