Pvt. Michael Swartz was born in 1915 and was one of the six sons of Ignatius & Ursula Swartz.  He lived at 115 North 24th Avenue in Melrose Park, Illinois, and  attended high school for one year.  At some point, he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard and was called to federal service on November 25, 1941.

    At Fort Knox, Kentucky, his tank company was renamed B Company, 192nd Tank Battalion.  For nearly a year he trained at Ft. Knox before being sent to Louisiana in the late summer of 1941.  It was after the maneuvers at Camp Polk, Louisiana that he and the rest of his battalion learned they were being sent overseas.

    Traveling west by train, Michael was taken by ferry to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.  There, he was inoculated and received a physical.  He and his battalion boarded the President Grover Cleveland and set sail for the Philippine Islands.

    Michael arrived in the Philippines on Thanksgiving Day, 1941.  For the next few weeks, he and the other members of his company prepared their equipment for maneuvers that they were scheduled.

    The morning of December 8, 1941, the tankers were called together and told of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  They were ordered to the perimeter of the airfield to guard against Japanese paratroopers.  As they sat in their tanks, they watched as American fighters filled the sky.  At 12:15 in the afternoon, all the planes landed and the pilots went to lunch.  A half hour later, the Japanese bombed Clark Field.

    For the next four months, Michael's battalion fought to slow the Japanese conquest of the Philippine Islands.  On April 9, 1942, Michael became a Prisoner of War when Bataan was surrendered to the Japanese.  He took part in the death march from Mariveles to San Fernando.  There, he and the other POWs were packed into small wooden boxcars that could hold forty men or eight horses.  100 men were put into each car.  Those who died remained standing until the living exited the cars at Capas.  From Capas, the POWs walked the last ten miles to Camp O' Donnell.

    Camp O'Donnell was an unfinished Filipino Army Training Base.  There was only one water fountain for 12,000 POWs.  Since there was very little medicine, many POWs became ill and died.

    On May 1, 1942, Pvt. Micahel Swartz died of dysentery at Camp O'Donnell POW Camp, Philippine Islands.