There’s sorrow but not much pity in this story as all human aspiration shrivels to a primal obsession with food and water, flashes of compassion and artistic remembrance only occasionally light the gloom. (The lowest circle is the suffocating prison ship where men went mad with thirst and battened on their comrades’ blood.) The authors are unsparing but sympathetic in telling the Japanese side of the story indeed, they are much harder on the complacent, arrogant American commander Douglas MacArthur than on his Japanese counterpart. Military history buffs will be fascinated by Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath by Michael and Elizabeth Norman.
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. Focusing intermittently on American POW Ben Steele, whose sketches adorn the book, the narrative follows the prisoners through the hell of Japanese prison and labor camps. But then you pick up Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. ) pen a gripping narrative of the 1942 battle for the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines, the surrender of 76,000 Americans and Filipinos to the Japanese and the infamous death march that introduced the captives to the starvation, dehydration and murderous Japanese brutality that would become routine for the next three years. Reporter, and Elizabeth Norman ( Women at War 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.This grimly absorbing history revisits the worst ordeal Americans experienced during WWII. 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. The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. 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. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. Tears in the Darkness is an altogether new look at World War II that exposes the myths of war and shows the extent of suffering and loss on both sides.įor 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.
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