World War II veteran Valdemar DeHerrera, 105, of Costilla, N.M., shown here in an undated photo, died July 15, 2025. (New Mexico Department of Veteran Services)

The last surviving veteran of two New Mexico National Guard regiments associated with the World War II Battle of Bataan is to be buried Monday in Santa Fe.

Valdemar DeHerrera Sr., of Costilla, N.M., died July 15 at age 105, according to DeVargas Funeral Home of Taos.

DeHerrera was the last surviving veteran of the 515th Coast Artillery Regiment and possibly New Mexico’s last Bataan veteran, Charles Martinez, the acting historian of the New Mexico National Guard, said by phone Thursday.

The 515th and 200th Coast Artillery Regiments were revered across New Mexico for having endured three years of physical abuse — forced marches, hell ships and forced labor — as prisoners of the Japanese.

Bataan represented the largest single surrender of U.S. forces during WWII — Filipinos and Guard units from Illinois, Minnesota, California, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Valdemar DeHerrera, shown here in an undated World War II-era photo, died July 15, 2025. (New Mexico Department of Veteran Services)

“Mr. DeHerrera was one of the most resilient, kind and forthright people I’ve ever met,” said New Mexico Secretary of Veteran Services Jamison Herrera by phone Thursday. “It’s amazing to understand everything that he went through and how he turned out to be such a productive and positive individual in life.”

DeHerrera, a shepherd before the war, was with the 515th at Corregidor, a U.S. stronghold, when Bataan surrendered on April 9, 1942, and evaded immediate capture by the Japanese, said Steve Martinez, acting historian for the New Mexico National Guard, by phone Thursday.

“They resisted and evaded capture by scattering until they didn’t have any more food, weapons or resources to defend themselves,” he said.

DeHerrera was not among the approximately 78,000 U.S. and Philippine POWs forced into the Bataan Death March in April 1942, but he experienced a similar march after his capture months later, according to the historian.

A Japanese guard threatened to kill DeHerrera, but another guard intervened and saved him, the first of several acts in captivity that DeHerrera attributed to a “guardian angel,” Martinez said.

During the march, another soldier lifted an exhausted DeHerrera from the roadside, Martinez said. DeHerrera felt certain that without that hand up, a Japanese guard would have killed him.

The New Mexico Legislature designated Feb. 19, 2025, as Valdemar DeHerrera Day during a ceremony that day in the Roundhouse, the state capitol, in Santa Fe, N.M. (New Mexico Department of Veteran Services)

As a POW, DeHerrera worked in a Japanese textile factory in Manchuria, where he once resisted a guard who picked him for a beating, a potentially fatal act, Martinez said. But a Japanese officer spared his life, another “guardian angel” intervention.

DeHerrera survived imprisonment on one cup of rice and two cups of water per day, along with grasshoppers, monkey meat and wild spinach, according to a Feb. 19 state proclamation honoring his service.

DeHerrera weighed 80 pounds at war’s end, when he returned to civilian life.

“I think he did what a lot of other WWII veterans did,” Martinez said. “They kind of said, ‘Hey, we did our job,’ and, you know, ‘let’s get back to living,’”

DeHerrera worked for the state Highway Department, a molybdenum mine and eventually returned to ranching in northern New Mexico, according to a July 17 report in The Taos News.

“My father was an amazing man,” his daughter Juanita DeHerrera-Clements told the newspaper. “He was very smart. He had a very good personality. He was a hard worker, a good provider, a wonderful father, grandfather, brother. He was a very good man.”

The New Mexico Guard units that sacrificed on Bataan grew in stature as the veterans memorialized the comrades left behind. An annual ceremony April 9 in Santa Fe — in which a white flag is raised and lowered — commemorates their service.

“They are, I think, an anomaly in American history, where they were left on a peninsula with a lack of supplies and no further reinforcements and they were told to hold, and they held,” Herrera said.