A Stuart’s Story
By Curt Brown
Sergeants Jesse Fischer, Mark Tilton, Adam Schlangen, Russ Muholland
Russell Mulholland was just 13, listening from a couch as his great uncle, Henry Peck, fingered and squeezed his old accordion on what began as a routine day in 1988.
Mulholland’s mother had dragged him along to the Pecks’ house north of Brainerd as she ran errands with her aunt. So it was just the teenager and a 67-year-old World War II veteran, who sat on a nearby chair and took a break from his squeeze box.
“He started talking to me about being over there, giving me a glimpse of what it was like to survive the Bataan Death March,” recalled Mulholland, now 49, and still living in Brainerd. “I was young and dumb — well not dumb, but it just wasn’t personal for me yet. If I could go back, I’d ask so many questions.”
Private First Class Peck was among 64 young Brainerd men belonging to Company A of the U.S. Army’s 194th Tank Battalion. Half those men died in combat in the Philippines or along the forced Bataan march — an infamous and hellish 65-mile trek across a Filipino peninsula to disease-ripe prison camps in 1942.
“I wasn’t old enough to care, but he told me about the march and if you fell out of line or couldn’t keep up, they just killed you,” Mulholland said. “That kind of caught me off guard.”His Great Uncle Henry was held captive for 42 months until World War II’s end. “He told me how local farmers would sneak them rice balls as they worked in the fields,” Mulholland said. “That’s what kept them alive.”
Fast forward nearly four decades. Mulholland is now retired after 29 years as a lead mechanic in the Army and National Guard. As a member of Charlie Company of the 1st Combined Arms Battalion, 194th Armor Regiment out of Sauk Centre, he welded armor plates to fortify Humvees in Iraq in 2006 and served as a motor sergeant in Kuwait in 2010.
Russell Mulholland
These days, Mulholland is part of a team restoring a World War II-era Stuart Tank that will be among the highlighted artifacts on display when the $32 million, 40,000-square-foot Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum expansion opens in 2026 at Camp Ripley.
Henry Peck, Walter Straka and the other Brainerd boys from the 194’s A Company had 17 similar tanks with them in the Philippines.
“I don’t know if he ever would have climbed on the tank we’re restoring, but it makes you think,” Mulholland said.
Pre-World War II Training Exercises. Photos From the Museum’s Leland Smith collection
Military Museum Curator Doug Thompson said the restored tank is a Stuart M3A1 — “the next generation of the M3 Stuart tank that was predominantly used by the 194th Tank Battalion in the Philippines.
“We’re using this tank in our exhibit to help recreate that moment in time,” Thompson said in an interview with Randal Dietrich, the museum’s executive director. “We’re not suggesting that this tank was actually there, but it’s certainly representative of what the guys would’ve had at their disposal facing down the Japanese forces.”
The restored Stuart tank sat for 30 years outside the Brainerd Armory before soldiers from Camp Ripley employed an 80-ton crane to move it to the museum in 2022.
Relocation From Brainerd Armory To Camp Ripley
“It was in rough shape from just sitting out in front of the Armory,” said Sgt. Alex Smith, another member of the restoration team. “Animals had gotten into it, (along with) moisture, wear and tear. We just freshened it up, stripping out a majority of the paint, down to the primer in some areas, into bare metal.”
Specialist Levi Bartels used a laser cleaning machine to blast away decades of rust and get the old tank museum-ready.
“Thirty years of Minnesota winters took its toll on the exterior and the interior of the tank to the point where something really needed to be done with it,” said Thompson, the curator.
In addition to rust mitigation, scraping and painting, the devil of the restoration is in the details — including finding a historically correct shovel that will be placed on the back of the restored Stuart.
Outwardly, the M3A Stuart tank that will be displayed is about 90 percent the same as the M3s used in the Philippines, Thompson said, with a few minor modifications. So the artifact certainly helps tell the story of Peck, Straka and the other Brainerd boys who endured the Bataan Death March.
One of seven siblings, Henry Peck was 10 when his family moved from Huron, S.D., to Maple Grove Township east of Brainerd. He attended a one-room school and worked on family and neighbor farms before joining the Army.
Although U.S. forces in Bataan surrendered April 9, 1942, Peck’s parents — Charles and Lucy Peck — didn’t learn officially that he’d become a prisoner of war until April 13, 1943. A telegraph arrived at the Peck family home on Rural Route 6 near Brainerd, saying a “report just received through the International Red Cross states that your son … is a prisoner of war of the Japanese government.”
After more than three years fighting starvation and disease and the Bataan march, Peck finally returned to the Presidio in San Fransisco, where he was ordered to remain on base.
“To hell with this!’’ he said. “I have been told what to do in camp every day for the last 42 months.” So he and a friend went out for a beer, figuring a court-martial or other discipline would greet them when they returned to the base. “But nothing was done to either man,’’ according to a lengthy story about Peck on the Bataan Project’s website (bataanproject.com)
After the war, Henry Peck returned to farming and worked as a lumberjack and truck driver. He married Lilah Ann Sinclair on Oct. 19, 1946, and they raised six children. He remarried after his first wife died in 1987 — living another 24 years before Peck passed away in 2011. He’s buried at the Lake Edward Cemetery in Crow Wing County.
Peck’s death, at age 90, came just as his great nephew, Russ Mulholland, was training for his second deployment that would take him to Kuwait. He recalls Charlie Company of the 194th Armored Division serving as color guards and firing the 21-gun salute at his graveside — 23 years after that day when Peck took a break from playing the accordion to tell his teenaged great nephew what he’d experienced in Bataan.
I had the honor of interviewing 101-year-old Walter Straka, the last surviving member of Company A of the 194th Brainerd Tank Battalion, for one of my Minnesota History columns in the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2020.
Nine months before he died on July 4, 2021, Straka told me how he’d eaten one soup can of rice in a week and his thirst for water grew unbearable. A tank corporal who served on a Stuart, Straka recalled finding a four-inch water pipe snaking from an artesian well during the Bataan Death March.
“I reached my canteen down and felt the butt of a Japanese soldier’s rifle hit my spine, knocking me down,” Straka said.
A group of fellow Brainerd soldiers picked him up by his armpits and dragged him along. He had to keep marching “or they would have bayoneted me for sure. Men were going insane, starving, dropping like flies. Hell couldn’t be worse.”
Straka, then 22 and a shoemaker’s son, was among 32 soldiers from Company A who made it home from the war to Brainerd. He went on to sell used cars and raise seven children with his wife of nearly 65 years, Cleta. All told, 75,000 Filipino and American troops were part of the forced march through Bataan.
Straka and Peck are gone now, but an old Stuart tank — like the ones they served on in Bataan — has been painstakingly restored to help make sure their story endures long after the new museum expansion opens to the public next year.
“When I bring my kids down here, they’ll see we’re preserving history for the next generation,” said Mulholland, a father of four, ages 10 to 24. “It makes a guy proud to be doing work that my kids can enjoy. They can see this tank is not just decoration, but it was used by real people who died around these vehicles.”
Before and after restoration at Camp Ripley of the Stuart Tank