Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath |  | Authors: Michael Norman, Elizabeth Norman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 1830
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First edition.
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0374272603
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.547252095991
EAN: 9780374272609
ASIN: 0374272603
Publication Date: June 9, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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. |
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 64
Sobering Depiction November 19, 2009
D. Tierney (Seattle WA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a great historical book concerning the Bataan Death March and the hardships endured by US POW in the Phillipines during WWII.
My father's experience revisited November 18, 2009
Jidge Verity
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have read all of the reviews of this book contained at Amazon (62 as of now) and find almost all of them quite descriptive of the book. My father made this march and wrote his own book on it and his captivity. This book describes better than any other I have read the brutality visited upon these victims of atrocity. It is factual about the blundered gerneralship of MacArthur's command spun into his own false heroism. Like other reviewers I could not hold back tears when I read of Ben Steele's reunion with his family. As I read this book I am reminded that some men are not of good will and are unreasonable. When these men get in control of countries they are dangerous beyond description. We forget the lessons paid for by men like Ben Steele and the war they fought in when we are unwilling to label evil for what it is and to confront it rather than to negotiate with it. The atrocities visited upon these men were evil and after reading this book it is impossible to believe otherwise.
Brutality of the Bataan Death March November 11, 2009
Cy B. Hilterman (Cherry Tree, PA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The "Bataan Death March" during WWII in the Philippines was one of the most deadly and brutal excursions mandated by any enemy. The Japanese captured this area shortly after the beginning of WWII, which started when Japan destroyed Pearl Harbor in the Pacific. This scenario is captured through the eyes of those that lived it and the records they had kept. The writings or diaries that these men, mostly from the United States and the Philippines, wrote and managed to hide somewhere or wrote after their rescue after a harrowing ordeal that killed so many. The map included in the beginning of the book shows the Luzon Island, Manila, Bataan, and surrounding areas. All of this area was where most of this story occurred.
The attack on Pearl Harbor is described through both the American and the Japanese eyes and minds. Ben Steele was a young cowboy from Montana who rushed to join the Air Force once the war had begun. Being a country boy he wasn't used to war or people that acted much different than his wild western style. The story tells a bit of training then moves rapidly to the Philippines where Ben and his units were sent to defend an area that had many Philippine and American soldiers, along with some other nations. The military leaders felt there was plenty of military in the area to repel any Japanese attack attempting to take the entire area. They were dead wrong. Some of the natives took off for the hills of the island but most stayed and fought the oncoming enemy that sent unending lines of men to attack and capture all they could. Many on both sides were killed, but eventually the Japanese did overtake the entire island, making the forces fighting surrender to the Japanese.
Eventually the men were herded in lines as the victors moved inland and north and forced to march regardless of physical condition, without food and water for the most part. If they fell or faltered for any reason, they were bayoneted or shot with their bodies thrown off the dirty, bumpy road. The description of what they endured as seen through Ben Steele's eyes and many others, officers and enlisted men alike, was in most cases beyond human comprehension. When they did get something thrown at them to eat it was usually leftovers from the Japanese meals, bits and pieces of rice, moldy, maggot filled, flies included along with any foreign substances that would come from the dirt. Water was almost non-existent even though there were areas along the way that contained wells or cisterns but the prisoners were not allowed to drink. A few managed to secretly obtain some water but all it did was give dysentery even worse than the food did.
You have to read this story to understand what our military endured, if they lived through it, which many didn't. The Japanese would stop the march, separate lines of men, march them in small groups to the edge of a ravine, then bayonet them until they fell into the ravine dead or mostly dead. Very few did survive this method of killing. When the few that did survive arrived at Camp O'Donnell, they again were kept in very primitive enclosures and given very little to eat or drink.
Eventually over the many months as prisoners, the Japanese knew they were losing the war and they pulled back or were killed or taken prisoner, allowing the ravaged men to roam the camp until friendly forces rescued them. For most of the men that did survive this tortuous trek their physical and mental lives were forever changed. Ben Steele did survive by luck, prayers, and his outdoor knowledge of survival. I highly recommend this book for anyone that is a war buff but I warn you that you will be reading some things that are very disturbing. I knew from history that the Bataan Death March was a terrible event in the world's history but nothing could have prepared me for the actual story in detail as laid out by the authors.
A Shatteringly Powerful Epic of Narrative Nonfiction October 28, 2009
Mark Dery (New York)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Tears in the Darkness is a model of literary joinery, every sentence planed plumb-line straight and seamlessly dovetailed into the next. Full disclosure: I know the authors. That said, the swelling chorus of almost unanimous approval, here, argues my point that the Normans' fastidious craftsmanship and exhaustive, almost superhuman research propel what might have been one more tour of duty through the stoic sufferings of the Greatest Generation into an epic of narrative nonfiction, well-deserving of shelf space alongside John Hersey's Hiroshima.
Following Hersey's lead, the authors refract this grisly, gripping horror story through the prism of individual lives, juxtaposing soldiers' stories with the overarching narrative of the Bataan Death March. Readers with a litcrit cast of mind might recognize this multi-threaded approach to storytelling from the movie Crash or the TV series Survivor.
Of course, the Normans are using this technique in the service of something far more profound, though no less spellbinding. Tears is briskly paced, careening from one cliffhanger to another. American and Japanese soldiers speak from the pages of their diaries, letters home, or interviews with the Normans, walking us through the circles of this surreal inferno, where it's every man for himself and God against all, as Werner Herzog put it (in another context). Careful not to jerk our tears, wave the flag, or grind an ideological axe, the Normans let the facts speak for themselves, detailing the catastrophic complacency of the American commanders in the Philippines, drinking and whoring away the sultry days in paradise and dismissing the Japanese as too slanty eyed to shoot straight, if things should ever come to a shooting war.
And then, out of sun, comes the Imperial air force, reducing American airfields to so much smoking rubble. The so-called Death March follows, in which American POWs are starved into human skeletons, marched until they die standing at roll call, and bayoneted if they speak or bayoneted if they don't speak or bayoneted for no reason at all, in this absurdist hell. It's a dizzy, gut-clenching descent into a moral abyss, and the spare, unsentimental prose of the Normans communicates its pathos and its horror as well as the flashes of humanity and, incredibly, humor that keep some of these men alive.
The authors are studiously apolitical, treading lightly on explosive questions such as whether Truman's decision to drop the bomb spared countless U.S. troops at the expense of apocalyptic devastation on the ground, in Japan. Even so, there's an implicit populism---and, I'd like to believe, an inherent proletarian politics---in the authors' decision to give us history from the bottom up, telling the story from a grunt's eye-view, rather than a commander's. Significantly, MacArthur emerges as creepily Karl Rove-ian and nakedly careerist, burnishing his public image and line-editing his own press releases with one eye on the Pentagon and the other on history's verdict. Now, the Normans undo the General's deft opinion management, revealing military blunders that may well have played a key role in bringing on the American nightmare in the Philippines.
Even more radically, the authors examine the brutalization of Japanese troops in the boot camps of the Imperial army, where savage beatdowns and nonstop psychological abuse melted men down and remade them as unquestioningly obedient killers. At the same time, the Normans restore the lost humanity of these men, some of whom were irreparably traumatized by the grotesque acts they were forced to commit. Their portrait of the Japanese general is especially affecting, movingly told through excerpts from his letters to his family while he waited, through long days of delay, for his appointment with the firing squad. The authors make a convincing argument that his culpability for the atrocities is an open question, given the palace intrigues of the Japanese high command and the astonishing lack of accountability of many field commanders. And they muster ample evidence to prove that his trial by an American military tribunal was a kangaroo court, its verdict foreordained by MacArthur for political---and self-promotional---purposes.
Echoes of Gitmo, to this reader's ear, which is why I found myself wishing, at the end, that the authors had interlaced some of the themes of their historical narrative with the imperial overreaching and clash-of-civilizations ideologies of the present, when we find ourselves ankle-deep in blood once again, this time in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Too, I wanted the authors to think a little more deeply about the cultural construction of masculinity, since cultural notions of what it means to be a man---whether a living archetype like the cowboy Ben Steele or the samurai general giving the firing squad back its hard-eyed stare---constitute one of this story's barely buried themes. On the movie screen of the American mind, military culture may be about glory and honor. But beneath all the Band of Brothers rhetoric about warrior culture and esprit de corps, it's also about a deeply pathological definition of masculinity. The Japanese military model, more brutal by an order of magnitude, only hyperbolizes that fact.
Then again, the Normans weren't ghostwriting a Chomsky speech. Besides, they'd probably argue that, yes, war is a slaughterbench, but it's also a crucible that boils us down to what we are, at our cores. In one of Tears's many searing scenes, a ship's hold full of half-dead, oxygen-deprived, starvation-crazed American POWs reverts to Hobbes's proverbial state of nature, tearing each other to pieces with their bare hands. At the same time, camaraderie brings out the nobility in others, common men who risk their lives to save their friends, without a thought for the history books, convinced no one will ever know how they lived or died.
Through the Normans' shatteringly understated testimony, we know.
 The Horror of being a Japanese POW in WWII October 21, 2009
Lael Prock (Mercer Island, Washington)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an outstanding book. The unrelenting horror of the the Battaan Death March and the subsequent prison camp is so terrible that one wonders how any human being can be so evil, especially to fellow human beings. But it is so common place, even today that such terrible things continue unabated. The veneer of civilization is still so very thin on humankind.
I would have given this a 5 star but I was a bit uncomfortable with the writting style. When I first started reading the book I thought that it was historical fiction where a fictional character (Ben Steel) is the person around which history is told with some liberties taken. I love historical fiction and there are so many good books out there. There were a lot of direct quotes from various people that I wonder if they were made up to enhance the story. I can't remember what I said last week and I wonder how various direct quotes survived for so long. I final realized that Ben Steel was a real person and this was his story to a great degree. He must have been an amazing man to have survived what he did.
The research is obviously extensive and the book well written. I am not sure that I agree with the sympathetic treatment of Gen. Homma. The commander is always responsible for what happens under his command. Looking at it from the passage of 60 years it seems that he was not treated fairly. But given the time, the horrors caused by his soldiers someone had to pay the price and he was the logical one. It is too bad given that he didn't participate directly that he wasn't sentenced to prison as he would have been released in a few year once passions had subsided. An awful lot of really guilty Japanese never were punished.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 64
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