Lawrence County Tennessee

Taylor J. Yeager, age 24, from Tennessee, Lawrence county.

Service era: World War II
Military history: Infantry

Date of death: Thursday, September 24, 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, with food and water 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. Private Taylor J. Yeager, who entered the U.S. Army from Tennessee, served with Company K, 31st Infantry Regiment, and was stationed in the Philippines at the time of the Japanese invasion. He was taken prisoner by the Japanese after after the American surrender interned at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp, where he died of tuberculosis and malaria on September 24, 1942. He was buried in an isolated grave in the camp cemetery; however, his remains could not be associated with any remains recovered from Cabanatuan after the war. Today, Private Yeager is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency