Reality TV programs are popular in millions of homes across America. Participants in the Survivor series are everyday people from different walks of life placed in a confined and contrived environment where they are expected to endure hardship, struggle, and companionship-turned-rivalry using their wits, strengths, and relationship skills. The final survivor is simply the winner of an extended contest marked by a series of races, stunts, inter-personal drama, sand, dirt, water, and mud. Life and death do not really hang in the balance, although cash winnings and ratings do.

By contrast, there are real survivor stories from the most horrifying of humanity’s contests—our world wars—where life and death are determined by place, date, time, circumstance, and individual effort. Ken Gaunt of Denver recently gave the Society’s books and manuscripts department a collection of memoirs written by Pearl Harbor survivors and a few Bataan Death March survivors. The collection is the result of three years of work and collaboration with the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

Each memoir—or in some cases, each biographical account—is from someone with a Colorado connection. While the collection does not include material from all known Pearl Harbor or Bataan survivors related to the state, the stories shared are personal and intense.

Among them are accounts from Edward J. Dvorak of the U.S. Army Air Corp, who survived the Japanese attack on Hickham Air Field and went on to become a fighter pilot in Europe and provided air cover for the D-Day invasion forces on June 6, 1944. Seaman, First Class, Donald Inselman survived the sinking of the USS Arizona by escaping through a darkened turret and finding his way to a nearby repair ship. The sole woman represented in the collection, Dorothy Francis (Elkins) Young, was a U.S. Army nurse who cared for the wounded for forty-eight hours straight. In the Philippines a few months later, John Coleman Strader was one of some 70,000 Allied prisoners forced to march sixty-five miles along the Bataan peninsula to a POW camp. He suffered from Malaria and a fever of 104 degrees, but he made it. Eleven thousand of his comrades did not.

Television shows come and go and most will be forgotten, but the stories of the men and women who experienced the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and World War II will always survive.

BY KEITH SCHRUM, Associate Curator Books and Manuscripts Dept.