Tears in the Darkness
The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath
By Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$30.00, hard cover, 464 pages, 978-0-374-27260-9 (2009)
If you’re like I was before reading this book, you probably don’t know much about the Bataan Death March. Oh, you might remember that it was something that happened in World War II in the Philippines. You might even recall that 76,000 Americans and Filipinos surrendered to the Japanese, the single largest defeat in American military history.
To label the movement a “march,” as the men took to calling it,was something of a misnomer. During the first few days of walking there were so many men on the road, one bunch following closely behind another, they appeared a procession without end, prisoners as far as the eye could see, mile after mile after mile of tired filthy, bedraggled old men, heads bowed, feet dragging through the ankle-deep dust.
But this book is so much more than just an historical retelling of a grim military defeat. The authors skillfully insert you into the Philippines before the battle and set the stage for everything else that later happens. They carefully show the toll of war from all perspectives: American, Japanese and Filipino. The result is an unflinching portrayal of not only the actions, but the thought processes behind the inhumane treatment of American and Filipino prisoners. You are left with a glimpse into the psyche of the Japanese that was — though far from morally justified, acceptable, or even remotely appropriate — somewhat understandable according to Japanese culture.
The surrender to the Japanese doesn’t occur until you are approximately 150 pages into the book, and by that time you are fully immersed in the narrative of courage, starvation, dehydration, and brutality. The death march itself is filled with examples of unimaginable cruelty, beatings, torture and death. The description of the Japanese mistreatment of prisoners is not for the faint of heart.
And when the prisoners have marched sixty-six miles and think that the worst is over, they find themselves subject to unspeakable conditions in the Japanese prison and labor camps. The degradation and deprivation suffered by the prisoners at these camps rivals the treatment the Jews received in Nazi Germany.
At the center of this riveting novel is a young Montana cowboy, POW Ben Steele, who became an artist after the war. Seeing the atrocities of war through Steele’s eyes and his remarkably harrowing drawings (reproduced throughout the book) leaves you with a gut-wrenching sympathy for these courageous prisoners.
They ate rice. Rice with stones, dirt, and weevils. They steamed, stewed it, made it into soup. Sometimes they supplemented the rice with vegetables — camotes, a poor-man’s sweet potato, kangkong, a spinach-like vine commonly known in America as swamp cabbage, as well as other assorted, and often unidentifiable, leaves and weeds. Once in a while they got meat (beef or carabao), but the ration was so small — one pound twice a month for every fifty men, or a third of an ounce per prisoner — it appeared as nothing more than flecks floating in the dirty rice
Starving men will eat anything, and much of the camp was picked clean of weeds and cogon grass. Army Corporal Johnny Aldrich told himself, “If cows and horses can eat grass, I can eat grass, too.” He tried it raw first but couldn’t get the bitter stuff down, then he took his forage to a friend in the camp kitchen, who boiled the long blades into a brown and green student.
They ate in the open, sitting or squatting in the dirt, spooning or fingering their food with one hand and swatting away the flies with the other. On the average they would given eighteen ounces of food a day (fifteen hundred calories and thirty grams of protein), half of what a healthy adult man (under ideal conditions and doing moderate work) needed to live. For sick men — and almost all of the Americans and Filipinos at O’Donnell suffered from something — this prison-camp “diet” was a disaster.
The lack of nutrients aggravated and accelerated their malaria dengue fever, blackwater fever, diphtheria, and pneumonia, and left them suffering from a host of painful, and lethal, conditions: wet beriberi (with its gross edema), scurvy (which made their noses bleed and their teeth fall out), pellagra (a feeling of pins in their skin accompanied by severe diarrhea), nyctalopia (night blindness), amblyopia (day blindness or loss of vision), tinnitus (ringing in the ears), vertigo (severe disorientation), burning feet, conjunctivitis (severe itching and burning in the eyes), and gross peripheral neuropathy (their limbs went completely numb).
Far and away, however, the worst of their maladies was dysentery. So many men had come into camp with it (a third? half?) the slit trenches they dug — and they dug them regularly — filled within days. And like the foul holding pens of Balanga and Orion along the route of the march, Camp O’Donnell started to look and smell like a sewer. Men who were too weak to walk fouled themselves wherever they happen to be when the urge seized them.
This is a war that brings out the black depravity most men hide all their lives deep, deep in their souls. It’s also a book about courage, sacrifice, and the indomitable will to survive despite overwhelming odds. Some passages will leave you shaking your head wondering how some men can treat others with such unwavering contempt. Other parts will leave you rejoicing over man’s capacity to endure and eventually forgive horrendous mistreatment. Ultimately, it’s a first-rate description of unsung heroes who endure draconian hardships while maintaining their basic humanity. This highly recommended novel is one you’ll never forget.
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