Atrocity Road

For instance, there were village roundups in which an informant wearing a bag over his head would point out to his Japanese masters members of the resistance. The accused were then taken away, never to be seen again. When his school was converted into a local headquarters, my father sneaked onto the grounds, peered through a classroom window, and saw a Japanese interrogator wacking a guerrilla insurgent on the back with a two-by-four until he vomited blood.

Of course, that wasn’t the worst of it. In the spring of 1942, on the main island of Luzon, facing unbeatable odds and with no relief in sight, General Edward P. King surrendered a force of 76,000 Americans and Filipinos to the Japanese Imperial Army–the largest surrender by an American general in history. The prisoners were then instructed to march toward a rail station where they would be transported to a prisoner-of-war camp. Little did the captives realize their journey would become a nightmarish 66-mile hike known as the Bataan Death March.

The subject–one of the worst atrocities suffered by American forces during the Second World War–is well-covered ground. Nevertheless, in what amounts to 10 years’ worth of research and reporting, Michael and Elizabeth Norman, a husband-and-wife academic team, have written a compelling and exhaustive account of the incident.

Although the authors designate one survivor, Ben Steele of Montana, as their focal point, the book is sprawling: Not only is the death march captured in horrific detail, but, as the subtitle suggests, its aftermath is captured as well: the mass suffering at Camp O’Donnell, where soldiers were sometimes buried alive; the torture within the walls of Bilibid Prison; the passage of thousands of POWs (Ben Steele included) from the Philippines to mainland Japan, to be used as slave labor; and the trial and execution of General Masaharu Homma, who initially presided over the invasion of the Philippines and who, the authors believe, was wrongly convicted.

The Normans are unsparing in their criticism of General Douglas MacArthur, commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East. His delayed reaction to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, also noted by other historians, proved costly. The bulk of the Army Air Force was caught on the ground just as the first wave of Japanese Zeros approached Clark Field: “Many were parked in neat rows in the open on their ready lines, noses to the runway. From above they looked like toys on a large lawn, silver toys perfectly outlined against the greensward of Luzon’s wide central plain.” The Japanese pilots took full advantage of the opportunity, leaving only wreckage behind.

It wasn’t long before MacArthur moved his operations to Corregidor, an island fortress in Manila Bay, just south of the Bataan Peninsula. (Filipinos pronounce this as “Bata-ahn.”) In bracing for the Japanese invasion, a hasty retreat was sounded, and the consequences were tragic:

One soldier “spotted the skeletal paw of a monkey reaching up from the depths of the pot.” I think I’ll pass, “he decided.” By the time MacArthur fled to Australia in March 1942 (he visited Bataan just once), malnutrition had set in among his troops. The average weight loss was estimated to range between 20 and 30 pounds, which partly explains why, despite a numerical advantage, the U.S. and Philippine armed forces were ultimately no match for the resupplied and reinforced Japanese Army. (Another reason was that the Philippine Army, with the exception of the elite Scouts, was poorly trained and ill-equipped.)

Though General Jonathan Wainwright had been left in charge by MacArthur, it was General King who surrendered the bulk of the force on the mainland on April 9. King saw no point in continuing the fight. Defeat was inevitable. Rather than sacrifice thousands more of his men, King sought to spare them, simply hoping for humane treatment at the hands of the enemy.

King, in fact, asked a Japanese colonel if his men would be treated well. The colonel responded, “We are not barbarians.” But they were. To get an idea of what the POWs experienced:

The Normans also relate an incident that took place along the Pantingan River in Luzon: a massacre of Filipinos (and some Americans) that is now mostly forgotten. According to Pedro Felix, one of a handful of survivors, hundreds of Philippine Army officers, bound by telephone wire, were bayoneted to death or beheaded, despite having surrendered. (Felix managed to escape after being stabbed multiple times and falling into a pile of bodies in a ravine.) The authors also provide accounts from the Japanese perspective–soldiers explaining the need to avenge the deaths of their comrades, others who viewed the order to kill with suspicion, and those racked by guilt after committing the crime.

Such impressions are invaluable as the reader is left wondering: Just what goes through one’s mind when killing the helpless? The Normans thoroughly explore the motivation and reasoning behind such atrocities. Take, for example, the brutal nature of Japanese basic training: “Men were beaten till their teeth fell out or their eyes swelled shut or they lost their hearing, ‘beaten like a dog!’ one recruit wrote home, ‘beaten like a bag of flour.'”

Perhaps the authors put it best when they explain that

But there is also illogic. On the one hand, “Here were the very men who had made [one Japanese soldier’s] life so hot, so hard, so damn miserable. Hai, yes, he knew the rules, he’d read the Senjinkun, the military code–‘do not punish them if they yield’–but he thought, ‘How can we stick to the rules?’ Comrades had been killed, good Matsuyama boys butchered. ‘How can I forgive them so easily?’ he asked himself.” On the other hand, the soldier reflects, “In the middle of a battle they had laid down their arms and raised their hands, a shameless act for any soldier. Should such men be received with respect? What did they think they were going to get? ‘a welcome, a bath, a rest?'”

Some of the Japanese justified the Pantingan massacre by explaining, “They’re not yet imprisoned so we can’t call them prisoners. It would be hard for us to kill the prisoners in a camp, but these men are still the enemy and we’re still in the middle of a war. We have to kill them.”

If, by some miracle, prisoners were not outright executed by their captors, disease and illness could just as easily claim them:

Worst of all 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.”

In Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John Dower wrote that “whereas 4 percent of Americans and British servicemen taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians were calculated to have died in captivity, the incidence of death among American and British Commonwealth prisoners of the Japanese was estimated to have been 27 percent.” And yet, there are survivors like Ben Steele, who suffered from beriberi and malaria, and was even administered last rites (he remembers watching other prisoners divide up his possessions). Thanks to Michael and Elizabeth Norman, these survivors can tell their tales–and not just the evil that men do but also the sacrifice and good works of others. The authors note that throughout the Bataan Death March local villagers would line the road and make every attempt to give the prisoners food and water at the risk of suffering punishment by the Japanese.

In Hampton Sides’s Ghost Soldiers, an earlier account of the Death March, we learn of a pregnant woman who offered food to an American and paid a terrible price. This detail stood out in my mind because of the stories my father tells about the liberation of his island in March 1945. He was seven at the time and vividly remembers not only the dogfights between Zeros and P-38 Lightnings but also the GIs who gave out treats like chewing gum. Whenever he encountered an American, my father would ask, “Chiclets, Joe?” And sometimes the soldiers would simply press a Hershey bar into a child’s hand without his even asking.

They were always good like that.

Victorino Matus is deputy managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.