Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath [Paperback]

Michael Norman (Author), Elizabeth M. Norman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0312429703 | ISBN-13: 978-0312429706 | Edition: First Edition

For the first four months of 1942, American, Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought America's first major land battle of World War II: the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan. It ended with the single largest defeat in American military history. This was only the beginning. Until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered forty-one months of unparalleled cruelty and savagery. Michael and Elizabeth Norman bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a young cowboy and aspiring sketch artist from Montana who joins the army to see the world and ends up on a death march. Juxtaposed against Steele’s story are the heretofore untold accounts of Japanese soldiers who struggled to maintain their humanity while carrying out their superiors’ inhuman commands. 

            Tears in the Darkness is an altogether new look at World War II that exposes the myths of war and shows the extent of suffering and loss on both sides. 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This grimly absorbing history revisits the worst ordeal Americans experienced during WWII. Michael Norman, a former New York Times reporter, and Elizabeth Norman (Women at War) pen a gripping narrative of the 1942 battle for the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines, the surrender of 76,000 Americans and Filipinos to the Japanese and the infamous death march that introduced the captives to the starvation, dehydration and murderous Japanese brutality that would become routine for the next three years. Focusing intermittently on American POW Ben Steele, whose sketches adorn the book, the narrative follows the prisoners through the hell of Japanese prison and labor camps. (The lowest circle is the suffocating prison ship where men went mad with thirst and battened on their comradesÖ blood.) The authors are unsparing but sympathetic in telling the Japanese side of the story; indeed, they are much harder on the complacent, arrogant American commander Douglas MacArthur than on his Japanese counterpart. ThereÖs sorrow but not much pity in this story; as all human aspiration shrivels to a primal obsession with food and water, flashes of compassion and artistic remembrance only occasionally light the gloom. 8 pages of b&w illus., illus. throughout; maps. (June 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Unlike historians who have spotlighted the titans—MacArthur and Wainwright, Yamashita and Homma—who matched strategies in the Philippines in 1942, the Normans focus on the ordinary soldiers who bore the brunt of the wartime savagery. At the center of this searing narrative stands Ben Steele, a Montana cowboy remarkable for the fortitude that sustains him through fierce combat, humiliating surrender, and then the infamous Bataan Death March into imprisonment: four years of unrelenting slave labor, starvation, torture, beatings, and disease. Because Steele went on in his postwar life to capture his wartime ordeal in harrowing drawings (here reproduced), readers confront in both image and word the brutality of war and the desperation of captivity. Readers learn how news of Japanese atrocities inflamed an American passion for vengeance and justified horrific bombing raids—incendiary and then nuclear—against Japanese cities. But readers will find it hard to view such raids as fitting punishment of a bestial enemy after reading the Normans’ chronicle of the bitter experiences of very human and often guilt-wracked Japanese soldiers. The narrative even humanizes the anguished Japanese commanders condemned by a victors’ justice that held them accountable for offenses of out-of-control subordinates. An indispensable addition to every World War II collection. --Bryce Christensen --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (March 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312429703
• ISBN-13: 978-0312429706
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (116 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #88 in Books > History > Asia > Philippines

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

155 of 159 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars surprisingly great read, June 10, 2009

By 

Charles H. Perle (Jersey City, New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (Hardcover)

This book may be history, but it reads like a novel. The authors have obviously done a lot of interviewing- more than 400- and it really shows. They have woven a story that's hard to put down. My only knowledge of the "Bataan Death March' was from the movies. This is some story. They take you to the Philippines before the battle and set the stage for it. Then they take you into the battle itself, right into the action. It's like you are there with the men. Then comes the surrender on April 9, 1942, 76,0000 men under American command, the biggest military defeat in our history. Then comes the death march. I think it's the longest chapter in the book. It was both hard to read and hard to stop reading. The details that these writers have accumulated are just unbelievable. You can see the work that went into this. Two things I especially like. First, although there must be literally more than a hundred characters in this book, they keep coming back to touch base with one character, a guy named Ben Steele, who was a young cowboy who grew up in Montana. His story really drew me in and I liked following him from the first page to the last. He became an artist after the war, and a many of his sketches, from that time in his life, are in the book. Surprisingly, I enjoyed reading about some of the Japenese soldiers. What's interesting is that you are angry at the Japanese and also feel for them at the same time. That's the way this book is written. Sometimes the good guys are bad and sometimes the bad guy are good. In the end, of course, the American and Filipino soldiers really suffered, so this is really a story of great courage and endurance. This is now my favorite war novel. Five stars all the way through the read.

89 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exploration of the human spirit, June 9, 2009

By 

D. Abrahamson (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (Hardcover)

In their book, "Tears in the Darkness," Michael and Elizabeth Norman, have taken a historical event, the American defeat and its horrific aftermath in the Philippines at the start of Word War II in 1942 and turned it into a spell-binding exploration of the human spirit. At the center of the tale, of course, is the Bataan Death March. But after ten years of incredibly detailed research on both sides of the Pacific, the authors are able to render its full reality from a variety of individual perspectives: American, Japanese and Filipino. The result is a revelation -- not merely a narrative of courage, sacrifice, cruelty and suffering, but also, ultimately, of the redemptive power of reflection and forgiveness. It may also be the most moving book ever written about those dark April days almost seven decades ago and men who experienced them.

81 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, June 11, 2009

By 

Ann M. King - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (Hardcover)

I'm not usually inclined to read books about war, but I picked this up and couldn't put it down. It follows the story of a boy from Montana who ends up a soldier in the Bataan Death March. Even though the reader knows in the first few pages that the soldier, Ben Steele, survives, and is still alive in fact, I found myself on the edge of my seat and praying for him to make it. His story is heartbreaking, uplifting and compelling all at once. The book is not for the faint of heart and is harrowing in many places, but it's written with a kind of simplicity and grace that shows above all, the ambiguity of war. Tremendous.