MOUNT VERNON — U.S. Marine Sgt. Casey T. Bazewick was nearly killed by guards who repeatedly beat him for not bowing to the guardhouse in the camp where he was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II.

Bazewick’s 4th Marine Regiment was among the defenders of the Philippine island of Corregidor. He was taken captive along with his surviving comrades when the island fell to the Japanese on May 6, 1942.

The savage beatings were administered by three guards who wore leather gloves. When one grew tired, another would take over, said Bazewick’s son, Casey Jr. 

The guards would knock the defiant Marine down and pound his head against the floor. 

Each time he passed out, the guards revived him, only to pummel him again. 

“He may be one of the very few recipients of the Purple Heart who knows the names of the enemy who wounded him,” his son said.

Bazewick Sr., now 91 and living in a Mount Vernon senior care center, received his Purple Heart on Wednesday, 64 years after Allied Forces freed him and his fellow prisoners in August 1945. 

Prompted by an article in a veterans’ magazine in 2008, his son asked the military to review his father’s service record to determine if he was eligible for the Purple Heart. 

Prior to 1996, none of the POWs from World War II or Korea were eligible to apply for the Purple Heart on the basis of wounds and injuries received while prisoners, according to the military.

Bazewick was among the members of his regiment who survived the Battle of Corregidor, from Dec. 29, 1941, to May 6, 1942, and were imprisoned after Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered.

Corrigedor is strategically located at the entrance of Manila Bay, and the capture eased the way for the Japanese conquer the Philippines. 

Bazewick was held for 39 months. He survived beatings, starvation and the killing winters of Manchuria in Northern China, where he and other American POWs were transported by their captors. 

Marines presented Bazewick with his Purple Heart on Wednesday at Life Care Center of Mount Vernon while about 50 people, including three generations of his family, watched. National POW/MIA Recognition Day is Sept. 18.

“It’s an honor to be here, sir,” said Capt. Mike Rosen of the 4th Marine Landing Support Battalion at Fort Lewis. “This is the first time I’ve presented a Purple Heart to a World War II veteran and a Korean War veteran.”

To the audience, Rosen said: “The man’s been there and done that and has the T-shirt for lack of a better term.”

Rosen pinned the Purple Heart on Bazewick’s suit jacket. After receiving the medal, Bazewick grinned but had few words.

“Very good,” Bazewick said. “Son of a gun, yeah.”

Before he and other prisoners were taken to Manchuria, they were shipped from Corrigedor by rail and boat to Manila and eventually to China. During the sea voyage, the ship narrowly avoided two torpedoes.

As a prisoner, Bazewick was forced to work at an industrial complex run by Mitsubishi in Manchuria. The prisoners sabotaged equipment, Bazewick’s son said.

Winter temperatures dropped as low as 50 below zero. Hunger forced the prisoners to eat dogs that strayed into the camp. 

“My father said they were careful to avoid the liver,” his son said. 

Prisoners were called by numbers, not their names. Bazewick Sr. began to regard his POW number — 439 — as his lucky number, his son said. He also learned to speak colloquial Japanese. 

In August 1945, paratroopers from the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, liberated the prison camp, his son said.

Bazewick has suffered from intestinal ailments caused by poor diet and parasites during captivity. And he still suffers from a nerve disorder that causes attacks of searing jaw pain, which his doctor says could possibly be caused by beatings he received as a POW.

But battle and imprisonment didn’t affect his devotion to the Marines.

Upon returning home and receiving medical treatment, he served as a Marine escort for the war dead being returned to American soil.  As a member of Company B, 7th Marines, 1st Division, he had a brush with stardom as an extra in the 1949 film “Sands of Iwo Jima.” 

In the Korean War, Bazewick returned to battle for the Inchon Landing in September 1950 and participated in the hand-to-hand fighting to retake Seoul, his son said.

But the years of service took a toll, and his son said that Bazewick retired in 1958 with “anxiety reaction,” now called post-traumatic stress disorder. Bazewick went into real estate and raised three children with his wife, Thelma, who died in 1999.

Casey Bazewick Jr. and his wife moved to Anacortes in 2004, and a year later they moved Bazewick Sr. from Maine to Mount Vernon.

Bazewick Sr. said that he never expected to receive the Purple Heart.

When he saw the certificate, he told his son: “How about that. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful!”