On April 9, 1942, nearly 100,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war in the Phillippines were forced by Imperial Japanese forces to march 55 miles across the Bataan peninsula. Along the way, the prisoners were beaten and many were executed. This infamous event, known as the Bataan Death March, was the death of between 7,000 and 10,000 people. Its oldest survivor, Albert Brown, is a Creighton graduate.

Brown, who celebrated his 102nd birthday last October, graduated from Creighton University with a degree in dentistry in 1927.

“They [Creighton] had a great dental school,” he said. He was the captain of the basketball team in his senior year, in which he fondly remembers Creighton beating Iowa, the Big Ten champions from that year. He also played quarterback on Creighton’s football team, one of his teammates being the famous Notre Dame football coach, Frank Leahy.

Brown, after graduating, practiced dentistry in Council Bluffs. Being a member of ROTC in high school and college, he joined the army in 1935. When World War II broke out in 1941, he was transferred to the Bataan Peninsula in the Phillippines.

Brown was one of the American prisoners captured at the Battle of Bataan. The Japanese transported the POWs by making them walk 55 miles north.

“We started out, we marched for five days without food or water,” Brown said. Along the way, Brown witnessed American prisoners being forced to kneel down by their captors before being beheaded. Brown himself fell towards the back of the group at one point. He was jabbed in the backside with a bayonet and resolved not to fall to the back again.

Eventually, the roughly 54,000 prisoners who were still alive and had not escaped along the way arrived at Camp O’Donnell, which was being used as an internment camp for Allied POWs.

“We arrived, everybody just fell down to the ground and lay on their backs,” Brown said. “That’s all they could do.”

Brown spent two years in the Philippines as a POW before being transferred to a prison camp in Japan, where he spent the rest of the war before being liberated. Throughout, the war, his family did not know whether or not he was still alive, said his oldest daughter, Peggy Eoughty. They eventually learned that he was alive on Easter Day, six months before the end of the war.

“It was unbelievable,” Eoughty said about learning that her father had survived. “It was a real blessing.”

Brown was taken to a hospital in San Francisco, where he was treated for a broken back and a broken neck.

“I was never able to practice dentistry after that,” he said. Brown went back to school, this time at the University of Southern California, where he majored in government. He lived and worked in California until 2000, until he moved to Pinckneyville, Ill. Today, Brown lives at a bed and breakfast that is owned by Eoughty. He spends much of his time doing one of the things he loves best: watching sports.

“Anything that happens,” Brown said, “you just have to learn to adjust to whatever it was.”