Beyond the Bataan Death March: The Life and Times of K. L. Berry (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)

K. L. (Kearie Lee) Berry was a star athlete at the University of Texas at Austin from 1912 to 1916, playing on the undefeated national championship football team of 1914. He began his military career with postings along the Mexican border. Berry served as an officer and advisor overseas, including an assignment in Siberia just after the Bolshevik Revolution, where he was a member of the 27th Infantry “Wolfhounds” of the American Expeditionary Force. Prior to and during World War II, he was stationed in China and the Philippines, where he was captured by the Japanese army on Bataan in 1942. He survived the infamous Bataan Death March and was incarcerated in various POW camps over a period of forty months until his liberation in August 1945.

Upon returning to his home state, Berry was promoted to brigadier general, serving one more year as an active-duty officer before retiring in 1947. He didn’t stay retired for long; he was appointed as Adjutant General of the Texas Military Department just five days after leaving the military, and it was a post he went on to hold for fourteen years. Upon his “second retirement” in 1961, he served as president of the University of Texas’s Forty Acres Club (now Forty Acres Society). He remained active with various alumni activities of the University of Texas until his death in 1965.

Dana Berry Frazee, granddaughter of K. L. Berry, has prepared this biography with the aid of her grandfather’s POW journal and considerable outside research. What unfolds in the pages of Beyond the Bataan Death March: The Life and Times of K. L. Berry is a story of honor, courage, and dedicated service over a lifetime and often under the most difficult of conditions. 

DANA BERRY FRAZEE, a retired educational consultant and educational counselor, is the granddaughter of Lt. Gen. K. L. Berry. She lives near Denver, Colorado.