For the first four months of 1942, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was America’s first major land battle of World War II, the battle for the tiny
Philippine peninsula of
Bataan. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history.The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. From then until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture far from the machinations of General Douglas
MacArthur.The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy turned sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world. Juxtaposed against Steele’s story and the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of a number of Japanese soldiers.The result is an altogether new and original World War II book: it exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate; it makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides
Click for the original review.
Background Information
From the Spanish-American War to World War II, the Philippines were governed by the United States, which fought to retake them from the Japanese after losing them in the early months of combat. Douglas MacArthur commanded American troops in the war against Japan, but was dismissed as commander in Korea by President Truman.