S/Sgt Claude Taylor

Claude Taylor was born in Charlotte County, Virginia on 30 March 1920. His father was George Carrol Taylor (B: ~1888) and his mother was Carrie H Taylor (B: ~1887). He came from a large family, with three sisters (Dorothy, Eva, and Gracie) and five brothers (Curtis W., George C, Jr, Shelby, Lacey C, and Harold). According to his enlistment records, he completed four years of high school. He enlisted on 2 July 1940 in Richmond, VA, and was assigned to the Army’s Coast Artillery Corps.

SSgt Taylor was deployed to the Philippines and assigned to Battery E, 60th Coast Artillery Regiment (AA) on Corregidor. Corregidor is an island that lies a scant two miles from the tip of the Bataan peninsula at the mouth of Manila Bay. It is almost four miles long and about 1.5 miles wide at its broadest point. In military plans, it was to be fortified and used to deny enemy forces the sanctuary of the bay. The 60th’s mission was to provide air defense over Manila Bay and the southern tip of the Bataan Peninsula. It was equipped with 3-inch guns (an older model with a vertical range of 8,200 m), 37mm Guns, .50-caliber machine guns, and 60-inch (1.5 m) Sperry searchlights. These defenses proved inadequate when Japanese forces invaded the Philippines on 8 December 1941, just after their attack on Pearl Harbor. The regiment fought in the Battle of Bataan and the Battle of Corregidor, but by14 April 1942, only five days after Bataan’s surrender, all the seacoast batteries on Corregidor’s north shore were destroyed or out of action. The unit was part of the surrender of US forces to the Japanese on 6 May 1942.

SSgt Taylor was taken prisoner by the Japanese and transferred to Camp Osaka on the Japanese mainland. In Japan at the end of the war, there were seven main POW camps, 81 branch camps and three detached camps. 32,418 Allied POWs in total were detained in those camps. Approximately 3,500 POWs died in Japan while they were imprisoned. During his captivity in Japan, SSgt Taylor died from disease on 23 March 1943.

SSgt Taylor was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 12, Plot 638 on 11 March 1949. He was originally interred at the Manila Mausoleum but was repatriated as part of a government program to return war dead to the United States. His service number was 13016418.

This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see www.storiesbehindthestars.org). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen on Fold3 and/or Together We Served. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smart phone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen's name and read his/her story.

If you noticed anything erroneous in this profile or have additional information to contribute to it, please email feedback@storiesbehindthestars.org.

SBTSProject/Virginia/Charlotte

Sources:

· Ancestry, www.ancestry.com, 1930, 1940 US census; hospital admission record; enlistment record; interment record; WWII roster of the dead; DPAA POW list;

· Fold3 by Ancestry, www.fold3.com

· Newspapers by Ancestry, www.newspapers.com, Richmond Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA; Richmond News Leader, Richmond, VA

· Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/49302333/claude-taylor

· Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60th_Air_Defense_Artillery_Regiment and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Corregidor

· American Heritage, https://www.americanheritage.com/fall-corregidor

· POW Research, http://www.powresearch.jp/en/archive/camplist