Caroline Burkhart

4 years ago
Posted in:Uncategorized
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Author: asia-pacificwarcollectivememories

Caroline Burkhart was born in 1947 in Fort Knox, Kentucky to Thomas “Tom” F. Burkhart (1914-1972) and DeRonda Weakland (1915-1966) as the eldest of three children. Since her father was an active first lieutenant officer in the U.S. Army, Caroline spent much of her childhood moving around different military bases across the country depending on where her father, Tom Burkhart, was stationed. Because the military was such an omnipresent part of her childhood, Caroline grew up always knowing that her father had spent time in the Pacific as a POW during WWII.

However, her father never fully revealed the details of his experience as a POW to her or her siblings. The first inkling of the true extent of his suffering were Caroline’s vivid memories of multiple refrigerators and kitchen pantries overstuffed with food, ensuring that her family never went hungry. Whenever her father went shopping, she also noticed that he would deliberately avoid buying Japanese-made products. Other clues came in short, sporadic anecdotes that were always injected with a bit of self-deprecating humor. One such story that Caroline distinctly recalls is that her father always stopped to admire the dandelions every spring, telling her that they were the first things that he first saw when his vision came back after going blind due to severe malnutrition.

Although Caroline’s father rarely talked about his experience during the war, she remembers being interested in his POW experience from a young age. She recalls eavesdropping on a conversation between her father and his wartime compatriots when she was eight or nine years old in an attempt to understand more about his experience. Nevertheless, her deep interest in rediscovering her father’s POW past did not begin until she joined the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC), an organization formed by former POWs in the Pacific, in 2002 as a volunteer long after her father had passed away. Caroline would later become the organization’s Vice President after the former POWs aged and their descendants transformed the organization into the current ADBC memorial society.

She believes that the stories of the men and women who fought in the Philippines during the early days of WWII and who later became POWs have not been given the importance that they deserve in WWII remembrance. As a result, she now works to educate the American public about her father’s experience, along with that of other POWs, and plans to publish a book about her father’s experiences.