Customer Reviews

Avenging Bataan: The Battle of Zigzag Pass

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Avenging Bataan does for the Pacific Theater in World War II what Hell in the Huertgen Forest did for the ETO. It fills a much needed gap between personal memoir and General Officer biography/campaign overview by focusing on a small but critical struggle on the island of Luzon during the Sixth Army's liberation of the Philippines in early 1945. This is a battle analysis, the dissection of tactical action at the battalion/regiment/division level to achieve the decisions that ultimately make a campaign successful. The book covers the effort of the U.S. Army's 38th Division (with the 34th RCT attached) to seal off the neck of the Bataan peninsula during the drive on Manila to remove it as a threat to the right flank of the Sixth Army and deny its use to any Japanese forces desiring to make a prolonged stand there.

Mr. Mann, who served as a platoon leader during the battle, is the ideal person to re-create the battle. He demonstrates considerable skill as a historian and battlefield detective, and brings a remarkable and admirable objectivity to the subject. His use of primary sources to describe the Japanese view, from translated records and journals to interviews with survivors, adds a tremendously valuable dimension to the account that is rarely found in other books about the Pacific War. The author has reconstructed the entire Japanese order of battle, from commanding officer to squad leaders, and provides a detailed description of their weapons, employment considerations, and dispositions. He also includes annexes on U.S. casualties by day and unit, and one that even lists the number of artillery rounds fired by day and type.

Mr. Mann has a very concise style that allows the narrative to move along at a good pace without sacrificing a bit of detail. He quickly demonstrates his credibility and mastery of his subject early on. There are points where you have to read a little between the lines to recognize where he is being critical, but I imagine this is because as a participant he understands all too well how decisions that look easy in hindsight are actually much more complicated when confronted with them on the ground.

There are two things I would add to this book. The first is to expand the maps, particularly to show the movements and locations of U.S. forces as they landed and fought their way across the neck of the peninsula. I should note that the author does provide a map of the initial Japanese defensive positions with a level of detail that is remarkable (down to machinegun level). It would be great to see this initial map modified with an overlay of U.S. units at various points later in the book to illustrate how the battle developed. The other thing I would add is to expand on the order of battle at Annex A with generic charts showing the organization of American vs. Japanese infantry formations down to squad level. These could easily be addressed in future editions of the book. For more information on organization and tactics in the Pacific theater, On Infantry and Touched By Fire are good references (Osprey also publishes several small books that are good references). For someone that is unfamiliar with operations in the Pacific, particularly those of the U.S. Army, the middle chapters of Eagle Against the Sun would serve as a good primer. Finally, a reader can get a could sense of how difficult the terrain was for an attacking force using on-line resources such as Google Earth and the West Point military atlas.

This book belongs on the shelf of every infantry leader. Although for the foreseeable future we will be engaged in urban ops against irregular forces, Mann's insights into training, cohesion, battle command, templating of enemy forces, tactics, and the fog of war are universal and timeless.

This book is a straightforward battle narrative of an obscure battle on Luzon in the Philippines in February 1945 that ultimately had little strategic or operational impact. It was written by a non-historian and published by a small press.

It has every reason to be a bad book, and yet it is not. Sure, it has flaws. The writing is serviceable but only that, the maps are poor and inadequate, and there's not really enough analysis.

However, the flaws are more than compensated for by the fascinating wealth of detail, and this is really possible due to one reason and one reason only: the Japanese side of the battle is fully covered.

Students of the Pacific War don't have to be told how truly rare this is. For so many land battles and engagements, there were simply too few Japanese survivors to be able to tell their side of the story in the postwar era. A number of volumes of the Japanese official history of World War II have to rely heavily on American sources simply because of the great lack of Japanese sources.

However, in Avenging Bataan, the author, who does not read Japanese himself, enlisted the help of a number of people in obtaining Japanese written materials (official histories, unit histories, etc.) and access to Japanese veterans, survivors of the conflict. He was lucky in that many Japanese survived the fighting on Luzon, which occurred so late in the war. But he made his own luck in reaching out to people, getting extensive translations, and so forth.

The result is a land battle history that fully covers both the American and Japanese sides--a truly rare phenomenon in Pacific War history. The Japanese side is often covered down even to platoon or squad level. And the American side, based on after action reports, documents, correspondence with veterans, etc., is of course well-covered too.

Another reviewer compared it with the good Hell in Hurtgen Forest. It is not as good as that book, mostly because of the lack of incisive analysis, but in some ways it is more valuable, because it is so much more difficult to do.

For people who really want to understand what it was like to engage in jungle warfare in the Philippines during World War II from both the American and Japanese perspectives, this is a great place to start. I recommend this very pleasant surprise.

I was a classmate of Dave's, OCS class 363 Ft. Benning, Ga., in 1944. He served as a Plt. leader in the 3rd Bn 3th Inf. while I was a Plt. Leader in the third Bn.He has been able to put in words the fear and the frustration that all of us felt as we tried, with little success, to break through the pass. This book then reflects not only the considerable research that he did after the war but eually important the first hand experience of an infantry officer who took part in that battle. As a participant, he was involved in tactics; as a historian he dealt with the strategy. Dave Mann walked the walk.