14.6°N 120.5°E Pacific Fall of the Philippines & Bataan
Briefing
Japan's conquest of the Philippines ended in April 1942 with the surrender of some 76,000 starving American and Filipino troops on Bataan — the largest capitulation in American history. The Death March that followed killed thousands on the road to the camps, and the prisoners' three-year ordeal became the war's defining atrocity story for the American public.
Books Covering This Event (3)
Popular History
The American nurses trapped on Bataan and Corregidor — the first large group of US women in combat, then three years as POWs.
The true story of the raid to rescue the survivors of the Bataan Death March from a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines.
The Bataan Death March and its aftermath, told through one American POW — and, unusually, his Japanese captors.
The War in Books: Bataan and the Philippines
The largest American surrender in history, and the long captivity that followed.
The fall of the Philippines has a smaller literature than the great American victories, but it may be better for that, because what exists is focused and direct. The story is one of abandonment and endurance: a garrison on short rations, cut off from help, surrendered in April 1942 and then marched to camps in conditions that killed thousands. Michael and Elizabeth Norman’s Tears in the Darkness follows one American prisoner through the Death March and its aftermath, and it does something unusual by also telling the story of the Japanese soldiers involved.
Elizabeth Norman’s We Band of Angels recovers a story that is too little known: the American nurses trapped on Bataan and Corregidor, who kept working through the siege and then spent nearly three years as prisoners. Hampton Sides’s Ghost Soldiers gives the campaign the closest it has to a redemptive ending, with its account of the raid on a prison camp in early 1945 to free the survivors. Read in that order, the three books carry the story from surrender to rescue. Sides is the page-turner of the group, and the Normans offer the broader moral view.