"Tears In the Darkness" by Michael and Elizabeth Norman

"Tears in the Darkness" is a remarkable work. The result of more than a decade of research by the married authors, it calls on official and unofficial sources, on diaries and interviews, to tell the complete story of the tragedy of Bataan and of the men, American and Japanese, who endured it. The savagery of the battle, and of its aftermath, will haunt the reader long after the final page is turned.

The basic story is well-known and need not be repeated here. "Tears" is largely the story of Ben Steel, a Montanan who joined the army in 1941, and who was involved in the battle for Bataan and whose sketch drawings appear throughout the book, lending immediacy to the narration. Yet Steel's story is not the only one being told here. Accounts of Japanese soldiers and of American soldiers bring the story to ground level.

What we learn is that the tragedy of Bataan may have been avoided. MacArthur's bad decision making is evident throughout, from his failure to scramble air forces in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, to his decision to leave supplies in Manilla that might have enabled American and Filipino troops to hold out longer, to his evacuation from Corregidor. The hero of Bataan, if there is one, is General Ned King who, seeing the malnourished and diseased forces he commanded, disobeyed his superiors and surrendered the 76,000 men under his command to the Japanese. That he could not have known what awaited them should not be held against him.

What the prisoners faced was an army with a distinctly different ethos from their own. The Japanese army was skillful in its indoctrination and used brutal physical punishment to break its soldiers. They were trained only for death and to accept brutality from above, "one great primal horde, 2,287,000 men who had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent." (79) Little wonder, then, that they visited this brutality on their prisoners who, by surrendering, gave up the right to be treated as soldiers.

Yet even here, the Normans are careful to back off a step, to show that this was not a monolithic horde of evil men, but real people, with real misgivings, placed in impossible circumstances. The effect is not to engender sympathy for the Japanese cause, but to remind us of the humanity of individual Japanese men, something frequently lost. It is a bravura feat that we feel for some of these men, and even for General Homma, the commander of the forces in the islands.

The prisoners suffered every kind of privation, and the authors do not spare details. We learn how a bomb blast destroys the body, how various diseases waste the body, what it is like to suffocate. Through Ben Steel, we see the beatings, the depraved conditions that reduced men to savagery, the hell-ships carrying them to forced labor, the tiny slivers of humanity and redemption.

"Tears in the Darkness" holds nothing back. It is exhaustive and exhausting. The title, the authors inform us, is a translation of the word "anrui" which might be more colloquially rendered as "a broken heart." In the end, whether you shed tears in the darkness or, as I did, near the dawning of a new day, you will be reminded just how thin is the veneer of civilization, how fragile our lives are, and how carefully we must guard both.