KATIE WHITE: This is Bringing War Home, the show that connects listeners with the history of war through sharing wartime objects and the personal stories that surround them.
This collaborative project is led by Utah State University professors Susan Grayzel and Molly Cannon from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. I’m Katie White, the producer of the series.
During WWII the Imperial Japanese government sought control over all of East Asia. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese military attacked both the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines — bombing airfields, bases, harbors and shipyards.
General Douglas MacArthur led Filipino and American troops as they tried to defend the country against Japanese occupation in the Pacific theater. However, the troops were already dealing with disease and living off half-rations when the Battle of Bataan began on January 7, 1942.
By April 9, the sick and starving Allied forces had no other choice but to surrender. The Japanese army assembled the 78,000 prisoners of war and took them on a forced march up the Bataan Peninsula. They crossed 65 miles in the tropic heat. Among the beaten and tortured prisoners was an American man named Harvey, marching on the deadly path to Camp O’Donnell.
A few years later in Richfield, Utah, a three-year-old boy discovered a heap of military items in his upstairs bedroom. He didn’t know how they got there. The boy, Brent Hanchett, knew only that the items once belonged to his uncle Harvey Rice, who died in the Bataan Death March, his body lost among the many dead buried in a communal grave.
Hanchett’s family didn’t talk about Rice or what happened to him. Hanchett wanted to know who his uncle was — what he was like — but, he says, it simply was not a topic of discussion in his family.
Hanchett held onto one of the items Rice left behind in the upstairs bedroom, an aluminum canteen in a canvas cover. Though Hanchett knew little about his uncle, the canteen became a daily reminder of his uncle’s memory and his sacrifice for his country.
BRENT HANCHETT: As a young boy growing up and going into the Boy Scouts in the mid 50s, I hooked onto this canteen and used it pretty much for the next 55 years — when I was a Scoutmaster, when I was in the boy scouts, when I went hunting and fishing with my family and hiking in the High Uintas. It was a part of me and alongside me the whole time.
KATIE WHITE: Do you have any stories of camping trips where you had it with you?
BRENT HANCHETT: Oh, well, there's a whole bunch of them. With my daughter Portia, we went up to Lake Shore basin. The fish weren't biting. We went to about three or four different lakes. Finally, right at noon they were biting. So we were able to catch a few fish to eat and we had some pudding that we brought along, but no spoons. So I had to whittle out a flat spoon for her to eat the pudding and we drank out of this canteen, and she remembers it.
KATIE WHITE: Working in the Forest Service — yeah, you spent a lot of time outdoors.
BRENT HANCHETT: Yes — yeah. And I did modify [the canteen] by making a belt strap into where it'll fit in my belt on my hip as I went hiking. So I did make that one modification. Other than that, it's all original.
These things are what [soldiers] had in their hands and what they used to sustain themselves and to survive with. It seems kind of tiny at this point in our day and age — with all the technical stuff that we have — but this was a basic necessity for those guys over there in the trenches, and in the war. It was very personal to them and to my uncle, and the price that they paid. They were the greatest generation. They did with what they had, which is impressive to me.
KATIE WHITE: When you decided to take it with you and bring it all these places were there any of those thoughts and feelings that carried with you on those trips?
BRENT HANCHETT: Yes. I've thought about it probably more in the last 30 years — what he meant and what he did. As a kid it was more [of] something that I used that I thought was pretty neat but it was always in the back of my mind that it was his. I'm only going to be around for another five or 10 years probably, but it'd be nice to know who he was and what price he paid.
KATIE WHITE: Because of the efforts of the United States Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and The Bataan Project, we now know what happened to First Lieutenant Harvey F. Rice.
According to these sources, Rice grew up in North Dakota. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering while also in the ROTC program and received a commission in the Army Reserve. In June of 1941, Rice married Brent Hanchett’s aunt Virgie. He entered the U.S. Army from Washington and served with Company C of the 194th Tank Battalion in the Philippines.
While estimates vary, it is believed that more than 600 American and 16,000 Filipino soldiers were killed during and after the Bataan Death march. Those who survived the prison camps weren’t freed until 1945.
Though Rice survived the march, he died of dysentery and malaria at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp on July 1, 1942. He was buried in a communal grave in the camp cemetery. Unable to identify his remains after the war, First Lieutenant Rice is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
Support for Bringing War Home comes from Utah State University, the National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War, and Utah Humanities. More resources available at upr.org.
Sources
“1STLT HARVEY F RICE.” Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/dpaaProfile?id=a0Jt0000000LlnEEAS.
“Bataan Death March.” National Museum of the United States Air Force, U.S. Air Force, www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196797/bataan-death-march.
Hughes, Thomas A., and John Graham Royde-Smith. “Japanese Policy, 1939–41.” Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 June 2024, www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II/Pearl-Harbor-and-the-Japanese-expansion-to-July-1942.
“Japan’s Quest for Power and World War II in Asia.” Asia for Educators, Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 2024, afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1900_power.htm#:~:text=The%20Japanese%20nation%20and%20its,East%20Asia%20by%20military%20force.
Norman, Elizabeth M., and Michael Norman. “Bataan Death March.” Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 May 2024, www.britannica.com/event/Bataan-Death-March.
Onion, Amanda, et al., editors. “Bataan Death March.” History, A&E Television Networks, LLC, 12 Dec. 2022, www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bataan-death-march.
“Remembering Bataan.” U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense, www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Experience/Remembering-Bataan.
“Rice, 1st Lt. Harvey F.” Bataan Project, Jim Opolony, 15 Nov. 2023, bataanproject.com/rice-1st-lt-harvey-f.
