Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, 2009. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pages, $30.
The central character in this history is Ben Steele, the Bataan survivor and artist who, now in his mid-90s, lives in Billings. Given that I greatly admire Steele and have written about him on several occasions, why did it take me four years to start reading this book?
I don’t really know. I seem to get around to reading books when the time is ripe, when they push themselves out from my bookshelves and demand to be read. I’m just glad this finally one stepped forward.
And I am happy to report that it is much more than a biography of the remarkable Mr. Steele, as sufficient as that would have been. It is military history of the first order, a complete and detailed telling of the fate of the Americans and Filipinos who became prisoners of war after the Japanese invaded the Philippines at the start of World War II.
It is also an examination of the command decisions on both sides, with the familiar catalog of miscalculations, missed opportunities and botched operations. In that respect the book is a useful reminder that before the American troops in the Philippines were brutalized by the Japanese, they were all but abandoned by their own country.
The only other book I’ve read about the Philippines during World War II was W.L. White’s “They Were Expendable,” published in 1942 soon after the fall of the Philippines. The hopelessness of the American soldiers, all of whom felt miserably expendable, is hard to exaggerate. An anonymously written ditty recorded in “Tears in the Darkness” captures the despair:
We’re the battling bastards of Bataan
No momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,
No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn.
They were further demoralized by their surrender, which remains the largest surrender of American troops in our history. The soldiers who survived the terrible fighting on the Bataan Peninsula were half dead when they surrendered, but for many of them their suffering had just begun.
The Normans — both of them professors, he a former reporter and combat veteran of Vietnam and she an author and historian — don’t pull any punches in describing the horrors to which American and Filipino POWs were subjected. They were starved, neglected and beaten, shot for falling sick or falling out of the march, denied water and medical attention. And even the infamous “death march” was not the end of the suffering, not by a long shot. After the slightest bit of recovery after the march, Ben Steele was among the unfortunates assigned to a months-long work detail in the dense, waterlogged jungles south of Manila. Here is how the Normans describe his condition upon his return to Manila:
His falciparum malaria (the worst form of the disease) had turned the blood in his brain to sludge, and he was unconscious for long periods of time. His beriberi was advancing rapidly—his ankles were swollen to the size of melons and the edema had climbed up his legs and into his scrotum. The wound in his right foot that had given him blood poisoning was suppurating, and doctors thought they detected the first signs of gangrene. … His lungs were gurgling and his temperature was spiking, sure signs of bronchial pneumonia. He still had dysentery, and he was jaundiced, a liver infection, doctors said.
And so it goes for hundreds of pages. Just when you think you’ve read of the worst thing that one person could do to another, or of the worst suffering that a person could endure, there is still some slightly lower level of hell to be described, and then another.
In Steele’s case, after the death march and the horrors of his months in the jungles, he was sent to Japan in a ship every bit as awful as an American slave ship and forced to work in a coal mine until the war’s end.
Given this catalogue of war crimes, it is even more remarkable that the Normans manage at the same time to make you feel some sympathy for the Japanese soldiers. Without absolving them of their guilt, the Normans show how the Japanese soldiers were themselves criminally mistreated.
They describe the Japanese training camps as “a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world,” where civilians had every molecule of individuality beaten out of them. The real culprit, the Normans seem to be saying, is war itself, the devouring machine that teaches men to regard their enemies as less than human — as yellow animals or American dogs.
I suspect that the Normans arrived at this dispassionate perspective partly as a result of their very thorough work in the archives and in interviewing participants on both sides of the Bataan tragedy. But surely it was their close relationship with Ben Steele that did the most to establish the tone of this book.
I’ve felt the power of Steele’s saintly peacefulness myself. You cannot spend more than a few minutes in his presence without understanding the redemptive power of forgiveness, of letting go of hate.
This book reminds us of that, and of how fortunate we have been to have had Ben Steele in our midst.
