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The Story Of The Bataan Death March And Its Aftermath
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 2009
On Sale: June 9, 2009
480 pages
ISBN: 0374272603
EAN: 9780374272609
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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