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Writers bring new insights, humanity to story of Bataan

Reviewed by Dwight Garner New York Times News Service

The Bataan Death March has been written about before, and well, by a number of historians. Memoirs alone about Bataan fill a long, harrowing shelf. Their titles cry out in silent pain, bitterness and defiance: My Hitch in Hell, No Uncle Sam, We Refused to Die.

No aspect of this battle or the infamous march that followed seems to have been overlooked. It is possible to buy volumes devoted to Bataan's nurses, its military chaplains and, in Hampton Sides' best-selling 2001 book, Ghost Soldiers, the men who rescued its survivors.

It was not clear that this wall needed another brick. But then you pick up Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman's calm, stirring and humane Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, and you think: yes, we needed another brick.

Tears in the Darkness, which just entered the New York Times best-seller list, is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book's beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.

This story begins in earnest on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Japan had planned to attack American military bases in the Philippines, where the peninsula of Bataan lies, at the same time, but its bombers and fighter planes were delayed by fog, eliminating the element of surprise, Japan thought. But when its planes flew over, eight hours after Pearl Harbor, the American planes sat on runways, inexplicably, like sitting ducks. It was carnage.

Two weeks later Japan invaded the Philippines. The poorly trained and untested American and Filipino forces were overmatched; they eventually retreated into the mountainous jungles of Bataan for a brutal last stand, one that the Normans, who are husband and wife, describe as "a modern Thermopylae."

After four months of intense fighting, the Allied forces — their ranks decimated by hunger, dysentery and malaria, and with no relief or reinforcements in sight — surrendered. "No American general had ever surrendered such a force," the Normans write, "76,000 men, an entire army."

The authors are sympathetic toward Ned King, the surrendering American major general, who was beloved by his men. (King made it clear to his soldiers that he had surrendered, not they.) The Normans reserve their scorn for the initial Allied general overseeing Bataan, Douglas MacArthur, whom they accuse of not leading from the field and later abandoning his men there.

What is now known as the Bataan Death March began April 10, 1942. Some 76,000 soldiers, many already close to death, were forced to walk 66 miles during the hottest season of the year — there were almost no buildings along the way, no trees, no shade — with little food and almost no water.

It was called a death march for a simple reason: if you stopped marching, you were killed, by bayonet or rifle.

There were many other ways to die during the Bataan Death March; it was a spree of arbitrary brutality. For sport, Japanese soldiers fractured skulls with their rifle butts. Japanese tanks ran over men who fell. Good Samaritans who tried to help fallen comrades were beaten or stabbed. Men were forced to bury others alive.

To be on this march, one soldier said, was what it must feel like to "come to the end of civilization." Some 11,000 died along the way to the ultimate destination, a prison camp. (Sixty-six members of a Central Kentucky National Guard unit called the Harrodsburg Tankers were stationed on Bataan at the start of the war; only 37 survived the war.)

What's remarkable about this story, for Ben Steele and many others, was that it was just the beginning of the horrors that awaited them as Japanese prisoners of war. There are accounts here of train journeys in deadly, overheated box cars; of foul prison camps and hospitals filled with dying men; of being placed into the holds of transport ships like "pickles jammed into a jar"; of work details that were their own kinds of death marches. Many men who didn't die simply lost their minds.

There are many Japanese voices in Tears in the Darkness. The Normans don't excuse Japan's actions, but place them in careful context. Japanese soldiers, they write, were the products of "a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world." These soldiers "had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent."

Michael Norman is a Vietnam War veteran and formerly a reporter for The New York Times; Elizabeth Norman's books include Women at War: The Story of 50 Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam. In this book they step back, at regular intervals, to explain dispassionately what it was like to undergo the experiences these men went through.

Tears in the Darkness is a grim and comprehensive catalog of man's inhumanity to man.

In the end, though, it is a book about heroism and survival. All along you are glued to one story, Ben Steele's. If you aren't weeping openly by the book's final scenes, when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is alive after more than three years "missing in action," then you have a hard crust of salt around your soul.