Beyond the March of Death: Memoir of a Soldier’s Journey from Bataan to Nagasaki

The first to admit that he did not volunteer for military service, Myrrl W. McBride, Sr., was just a young man trying to work and return to college when he was drafted into a world completely foreign to him and a war he never envisioned. Soon he would suffer through one of the most tragic events in U.S. military history--the U.S. surrender at Bataan and the Bataan Death March.

This memoir, written in 1948 while memories were fresh but never before published, recounts the horrors of the march and its aftermath, followed by three and a half years as a prisoner of war at Camp O’Donnell, the Bilibid and Cabanatuan prisons, onboard a prison hellship, and in slave labor in Japan. The heartbreaking narrative reveals qualities that were undoubtedly critical to the author’s survival--his courage, ingenuity, sense of humor, and enduring hope.

After the war, Myrrl W. McBride, Sr., secured a graduate education at Sul Ross College and the University of Texas. Later an educator at St. Joseph’s College and in the public school system in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he died in 1993.