| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780374272609 | | Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux | | Publish Date: 6/9/2009 | | Buy.com Sku: 210187576 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.5H x 6.5L x 1.75T |
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| | | This major new work about World War II exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate. "Tears in the Darkness" makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides.
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This stunning, in-depth account of one of the most horrific chapters of World War II history tells of the experiences of over 70,000 American and Filipino soldiers who had surrendered to the Japanese army during the Battle of Bataan in 1942. These soldiers experienced starvation, disease, torture, and forced labor, and many died before they were liberated at the end of the war. Michael and Elizabeth Norman tell the story through the focus of Ben Steele, an American soldier, as well as through the memories of those from both sides whom they interviewed for this well-researched, well-told military history.
| | Read A Chapter | Chapter One He enlisted on the advice of his mother, Bess. In the late summer of 1940, Ben Steele was working as a camp tender at a large sheep outfit east of town. It was hard, sometimes filthy work, but the freedom of it made him happy—on his own every day, riding a horse or driving a rig between the far-flung camps of the sheepherders, delivering mail and supplies, sleeping in the open, wrapped in an oilcloth, staring up at a big sky dark with bright stars. One weekend that summer Ben Steele’s mother and father drove out from Billings to visit. His mother had an idea. He’d been a ranch hand most of his life, she said. He was twenty-two now, grown up. Maybe it was time to consider something else. She’d heard on the radio that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed a law creating the first peacetime military draft. The inaugural call-up, she said, was scheduled f Click to read more... Chapter One He enlisted on the advice of his mother, Bess. In the late summer of 1940, Ben Steele was working as a camp tender at a large sheep outfit east of town. It was hard, sometimes filthy work, but the freedom of it made him happy—on his own every day, riding a horse or driving a rig between the far-flung camps of the sheepherders, delivering mail and supplies, sleeping in the open, wrapped in an oilcloth, staring up at a big sky dark with bright stars. One weekend that summer Ben Steele’s mother and father drove out from Billings to visit. His mother had an idea. He’d been a ranch hand most of his life, she said. He was twenty-two now, grown up. Maybe it was time to consider something else. She’d heard on the radio that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed a law creating the first peacetime military draft. The inaugural call-up, she said, was scheduled for late October.1 "You know, I’ve been thinking," she went on. "You really ought to get in before they draft you. Maybe if you do, you could, you know, do what you want in the army?" He wasn’t sure he wanted to wear a uniform, but since he usually took his mother’s advice to heart, he tucked her suggestion away, and a while later, over a smoky campfire perhaps or riding the green hills and valleys, he remembered something; the boys he knew from Billings who had enlisted in the army were usually sent west for training to the golden valleys of California. He thought, "Going to California—that sounds good. A little adventure." And on a nice warm day in mid-September, he borrowed a car, went into town, ambled over to the Stapleton Building on Twenty-eighth Street and into the recruiting station there, where he found a sergeant sitting at a desk. "I want to go into the army," he announced. "Well now," the recruiter said, looking up at the lean ranch hand standing in front of him, "we have the Army and we have the Army Air Corps, which one you want?" Ben Steele knew nothing about soldiering, but some years earlier a couple of fellows up at the Billings Municipal Airport got themselves a Ford Tri-Motor (a propeller under each wing and one on the nose) and for a dollar a head started taking people for a ride. It wasn’t much of a ride—the plane took off from atop the rimrocks, circled the Yellowstone Valley below, and a few minutes later landed to pick up another load of wide-eyed locals. But that short hop stirred something in Ben Steele. "The Air Corps?" he said. "That sounds real good. Give me that!" A few weeks later, on October 9, 1940, a month shy of his twenty-third birthday, Ben Steele stood in a line of enlistees at the United States Courthouse in Missoula, Montana, raised his right hand, and repeated one of the republic’s oldest oaths: "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic . . . So help me God." LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, like every American who read the newspapers, listened to the radio, went to the movies, and watched newsreels, Private Ben Steele of the United States Army Air Corps was convinced his enemies would be German. Japan was a threat, all right—that fall, in fact, America cut its shipments of scrap steel and iron to Japan—but Germany, threatening all Europe, was the menace of the moment.2 The Germans had invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. By the time Ben Steele arrived at the induction station in Missoula in the fall of 1940, the German Luftwaffe had been bombing Great Britain for three months. Reading about all this in the Billings Gazette or listening to it on KGHL radio, the most popular station in that part of the West, most Montanans wanted no part of the trouble overseas. Like the rest of America, they were focused on finding jobs and recovering from the Great Depression, not crossing swords with the saber-rattling Germans. In a national opinion poll conducted the week Ben Steele enlisted, 83 percent of the those surveyed said they did not want to send American troops overseas.3 Young men looking for a job or a little adventure don’t pay much attention to opinion polls. The army was offering a paycheck, plus "three hots and a cot" and perhaps a chance to travel. Since they had no feel for the killing and dying in Europe, no sense at all of facing Panzer tanks and Stuka dive-bombers, the ranch hands, soda jerks, delivery boys, and railroad workers on their way to training camp with Ben Steele were full of brio and eager for action. "If war’s gonna come, I wanna be in it," Ben Steele thought. "Hell, I want to be over there where it’s happening." Saturday, October 4,1941, San Francisco Blue sky, bright sun, seventy-two degrees, a good day to set sail for paradise. On a pier off the Embarcadero, the men of the 19th Bombardment Group, United States Army Air Corps, waited in long queues to board the United States Army transport General Willard A. Holbrook, a lumbering troopship used to ferry men and matériel to American bases overseas. In the ranks on the wharf, moving slowly toward the gangway, was Benjamin Charles Steele, serial number 190-18-989, a newly minted private. He had been in uniform nearly a year now, and he liked the life of a soldier. The army had given him just what he wanted, a chance to cross the mountains and see the Golden Land. California wasn’t as golden as he’d imagined, but he liked it well enough. Training camp was a dusty tent city on the dry brown flats at March Field near Riverside. The boys from the cities and suburbs thought these accommodations "kinda primitive," but the men who had been ranch-raised looked around and saw luxury: tents with wooden floors and gas stoves, hot showers nearby, latrines that weren’t buzzing with flies, and a mess hall that served seconds if a man wasn’t sated. Air Corps basic training was short, just six weeks, long enough for men who would be working as airplane mechanics, gunners, ground crews, and supernumeraries. They attended classes on military courtesy and discipline. They reviewed army rules and regulations. They endured hours of close-order drill and the ritual of forced marches. These little walks, as Ben Steele thought of them, were too much for many of the men. After one eight-mile hike the road was lined with recruits doubled over, gasping for breath and grousing about their training. Ben Steele had never heard such bellyaching. "Holy Christ!" he said, to no one in particular. "Eight miles is nothing. Back home I’d walk that far before breakfast." "Oh yeah?" one of the malcontents came back. "Where the hell did you come from?" "I’m from Montana," Ben Steele said. THE ARMY sent him to New Mexico after basic training and assigned him to the 7th Matériel Squadron, 19th Bombardment Group, Kirtland Field, Albuquerque. As soon as he was settled, he made inquiries about buying a horse. A local stockman wanted fifty bucks for an old plug named Blaze. Not much of a horse, nothing like the spirited animals he was used to, but he missed riding, so he went to a finance company, borrowed the money (agreeing to pay five dollars a week against the balance), and made a deal with a nearby rancher to pasture his mount. His father shipped him a saddle, and every weekend Ben Steele rode out among the cactus and scrub grass. It was hot, sandy country but he didn’t care— he was on a horse, and a horse reminded him of home. The Air Corps made him a dispatcher, tracking flights, and after a month or two of this work he got it in his head that he wanted to be a pilot. Never much of a student, he found a math professor at the University of New Mexico to tutor him privately in the algebra and geometry that he would need to pass the exam to become a cadet. He studied for several months and was about to take the test when word came down that the 19th Bombardment Group was being sent overseas. "You can’t ship me out," he told his commanding officer. "I’m fixing to take the cadet exam." "Oh yeah, we can," the squadron commander said. "The whole out-fit’s goin’." October 3, 1941 Dearest Mother and Family, Thought would drop you a few more lines before departing the U.S. Am sailing tomorrow afternoon ...We don’t know for sure how long we will have to stay in foreign service but hope it isn’t too long, but it may be alright... Will write you every chance I get so you will know about where I am at... Just heard we were going to the Philippines, but that is just a rumor not certain. Can’t believe a thing you hear around here... Don’t worry about anything, because everything is O.K. Will write as soon as I can make connections. It is possible we will stop at some port along the way, and if we do will send you a line. Lots of Love to you all Bud. AMERICA REMEMBERS the attacks on its bases in the Pacific in 1941 as acts of treachery, but to label them "sneak" attacks is more propaganda than plain truth. For more than twenty years, a standing committee of admirals and generals in Washington had been planning against just such an attack. They looked at Japan as America’s chief antagonist in the Pacific, and they knew well the value of surprise and Japan’s history of success with this tactic. The military planners were sure that when war came, it would begin "with a sudden, surprise attack." They did not know exactly where or precisely when, but they were convinced that the Philippines, just eighteen hundred air miles from Japan and sitting directly between it and the oil- and mineral-rich Indonesian archipelago in the southwest Pacific, would top Japan’s list of targets. So in the early fall of 1941, with war consuming Europe and with the Japanese Army on the march in Asia, American war planners—more in an attempt to deter an attack than defend against it—began to rush cannon, tanks, airplanes, and men to the Philippine Islands. The men of the 19th Bombardment Group, United States Army Air Corps, were part of that consignment.4 The Holbrook set sail on the evening tide that October 4. In the ship’s galley cooks had prepared a greasy ragout of pork, and as the men passed through the mess line, stewards slopped the dinner on their trays. Later that night the wind picked up, the waves began to swell and the Holbrook began to pitch and roll, and it wasn’t long before all that greasy pork began to reappear. Soon the crappers were clogged and the sinks were overflowing. October 10, 1941 Dearest Mother and Family, Have been sitting out on the deck this morning watching flying fish. They are about six inches long and sail through the air like a bird...The water has been sort of rough all the way... The ship is bobbing up and down and from one side to the other till I can’t even sit still. Am sitting here on the deck and writing on my knee. Hope you can read this. AFTER HAWAII, the sailing was easy, flat water most of the way and light tropical breezes. Most men spent mornings topside, watching the water or staring at the horizon, absorbed by the vast vista of the sea. Some played cards on the hatch covers or spread out their towels and baked in the afternoon sun. In the evenings Quentin Pershing Devore of eastern Colorado came topside to listen to his Hallicrafter shortwave radio. One evening a dark-haired fellow with a friendly face eased over and sat down next to him. "I’m Ben Steele," he said, holding out his hand. "I’m Pershing Devore." "What do you get on that thing?" the fellow asked. "I get the news, sometimes I get music," Devore said. Devore too had grown up outdoors, working the land and livestock in the rye- and wheat-farming country of Yuma County, a day’s drive or so from the Nebraska border. He considered himself "a plain boy with no frills," and that’s how this fellow from Billings struck him, too, "real plain." "Where did you get that name, Pershing?" Ben Steele asked. "Well, my name is Quentin Pershing Devore, but they call me Pershing." "That’s too complicated," Ben Steele said. "I’m just going to call you Q.P."5 October 18, 1941 Dearest Mother, Dad + Family, Met a new friend. He likes hunting and fishing about as well as I do. We get together and talk over old times. It sort of makes me feel at home... They talked for hours, about farming and ranching and cattle and sheep, about the "hard-up" life on a Colorado farm and the hardscrabble days on a Montana homestead. Ben Steele often turned the conversation to horses—cow ponies, broncs and quarter horses, chestnuts, Appaloosas and bays. Q.P. thought, "This guy is crazy about horses." They talked about war as well. Their convoy was flanked by destroyer escorts, and at night the ship was blacked out, a shadow on the sea. A week and a half out of Hawaii, their company commander called them together. They were going to the Philippines "to fight a war," he said. Thursday, October 23,1941, Pier 7, Manila, Philippines Assembled on deck, the thirteen hundred soldiers of the 19th Bombardment Group were preparing to greet paradise. Down the pier a line of trucks was waiting to take them north to their billets at Clark Field, a lattice of sand-and-turf runways laid out on a hot, dry plain fifty miles northwest of Manila. As the young Americans made their way down the gangways and ladders to the queue of open trucks, they were wide-eyed with wonder and delight. October 24, 1941 Was sure glad to get off the boat after being on it for so long. We were as dirty as a bunch of hogs when we landed. It is sure interesting around here... The natives are as thick as bees... and live in little bamboo shacks...Drive little horses about the size of a good sized dog, hitched to a little cart. Some have oxen [carabao] hitched to old wooden wheeled carts, sure is interesting to watch them . . . They are always trying to sell us something. They are running from one barracks to the other trying to get a job making our beds, and shining our shoes...Would hate to think I was so lazy I couldn’t make my own bed. We have to have mosquito nets over our beds at night so we can sleep. The mosquitoes here are like humming birds... Don’t worry about me because I never felt better in my life, and am having a swell time. So please don’t worry. This will be one of the greatest experiences of my life. FOR DECADES the Philippines had been a backwater post, a collecting pool for those on the way up, young officers eager to get their tickets punched for promotion, and those on the way out—the deadwood, the drunks, the disappointed who had been passed over for rank and were now holed up in a quiet billet, waiting to put in their papers and take a last parade. It was a gorgeous backwater. Manila was known as "the Pearl of the Orient," and parts of the city, especially the precincts where Americans and Europeans lived and worked, looked like arboretums. Along the boulevards, the trees were trimmed and ringed with pink hydrangeas, and white butterfly orchids grew in the coconut husks. The duty was easy too, inspections and formations for the most part, then at noon, the workday ended and the enlisted men would head for the beaches and ball fields and brothels of the nearest barrio where they would "shack up" with their "brown-skinned squaws," their Filipina concubines. Life had its annoyances, of course—the soaking summer monsoons, the suffocating heat of the hot season, the incessant insects, the choking dust—but for less than a dollar, a trooper could buy enough Ginebra gin and San Miguel beer to drink himself senseless. The officers lived like aristocracy. They played polo, tennis, and golf, then made for their private preserve, Manila’s fabled Army and Navy Club, a three-acre toft and croft along the east shore of Manila Bay that looked like a beaux arts mansion set on a waterfront green of palms, flame trees, and bougainvillea. The club hosted dinners and soirees, women and their escorts dancing under the stars and toasting one another over centerpieces of yellow trumpet flowers and white Cadena de Amor. First, and above all, however, the Army and Navy Club was a men’s club, and the men of the Philippine garrison and Asiatic Fleet liked to drink. Almost every officer in the islands bellied up to the club’s long polished bar—pilots, tankers, artillerymen, chasseurs, submariners, marines—but none more frequently than the gentlemen of the 31st Infantry, the only "all-American" army regiment in the islands. We are boys from the Thirty-first We are not so very meek We never wash behind our ears And seldom wash our feet. Oh we’re below the scum of the earth And we’re always looking for booze Now we’re the boys from the Thirty-first And who in the hell are youse!6 That was garrison life. Then—it seemed to happen so fast—those unhurried mornings, sultry afternoons, and sybaritic nights were interrupted by an irritating interloper: the Japanese. Nippon had been on the march in Asia. In 1931 the Imperial Army occupied Manchuria; in 1937 that same army, reinforced, moved south to invade northern China; in 1940 Japan pushed into lower Asia and stationed troops in upper Indochina. To the Roosevelt administration, the Japanese now appeared ready to move against the Dutch East Indies, islands and archipelagoes rich with tin, rubber, oil. Convinced that America would soon be fighting in Europe, the president wanted to avoid a two-front war, and he decided to impose economic sanctions on Japan, hoping to get them to pull back, perhaps even declare a cease-fire in China. He withheld the carrot, then in the early winter of 1940 he started to show them the stick. America’s military planners began marshaling reinforcements for the Philippines. They knew they could never make the islands a redoubt— Japan, with millions of men under arms, could easily overwhelm any garrison—but, as the thinking went, the new defenses, especially a new long-range B-17 bomber, might deter the Japanese, make them reconsider the cost of attacking the Philippines. If not, then the presence of reinforcements might at least make them pause long enough for the garrison to ready itself to receive the blow. In the late spring 1941, the wives and children of American servicemen were ordered to evacuate the islands and sail for home. In July the president recalled General Douglas MacArthur from retirement (he had been serving as a military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth government since 1935) and named him commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East. The same month the Commonwealth government mobilized the tens of thousands of reservists that made up the Philippine Army. In September, American troop ships and freighters began to arrive regularly at Pier 7. By the end of November, the U.S. Army garrison had been increased to nearly 31,000 troops (19,000 Americans, 12,000 Philippine Scouts), triple its original strength. Almost immediately thereafter MacArthur ordered beach defenses dug and manned by the Philippine Army at the most likely landing spots on the main island of Luzon. November 9, 1941 Dearest Mother, Dad and Family: ...Well I suppose you have been reading the head lines about the U.S .and Japan, but don’t get excited. Can just see you running around worrying yourself sick. Of course we don’t hear much about it. I think we are safe .We get some of the news and there is a lot we don’t get. The workday was longer now as men and machinery moved north and south from the piers and warehouses of Manila. Days carried the din of hammering and sawing, nights the rumble and whine of trucks on the roads. The polo fields were often empty, the tennis courts quiet. Some evenings the bar girls at Cavite’s Dreamland Cabaret ("Call us ballerinas, please!" the taxi dancers insisted) toured the dance floor alone or in one another’s arms. And yet there was still an air of assurance in the islands, a sense that the latest alarm or clarion call would pass without incident and paradise would soon be paradise again. Intelligence reports about Japanese troop movements arrived daily at headquarters, but the majority of officers under MacArthur’s command had convinced themselves "it would be absolutely impossible for the Japanese to attack the Philippine Islands successfully!" Japan, they reasoned "had everything to lose by going to war and nothing to gain."7 So they went about preparing for war with little sense of urgency or imminence. And this strange stupor, this "weakness," as Colonel Ernest B. Miller, a tank commander from Brainard Minnesota, saw it, led to "things left undone," so many things that even in the end, "with the black clouds of war directly overhead, it was well nigh impossible to quicken the tempo" of the work.8 And why should they? General MacArthur had told his officers that intelligence reports on "the existing alignment and movement of Japanese troops" had convinced him that if Japan, in fact, attacked, it would not do so until the spring of 1942, April at the earliest. Many of his subordinates disagreed, but there was no arguing with the general. The enemy, he insisted, wasn’t coming till spring.9 Japan wasn’t much of an enemy either, or so the Americans believed. For more than a century whites in Asia had looked on the tawny "locals" as less than human. They thought the Japanese "monkey men"—short, slight, bucktoothed, "slant-eyed sons of bitches" who "couldn’t see straight," even through their horn-rimmed glasses, because, as everyone knew, "their eyeballs didn’t open up to the proper diameter." An enemy who could not see straight could not shoot straight, could not keep his planes on course or drop his bombs on target. The war wouldn’t last three weeks, they told one another. "We’ll knock the living shit out of them.10 Even at General MacArthur’s headquarters, where war planning should have sent up a din, "men went about their work as usual." On the evening of December 5, for example, MacArthur’s clerk, Paul Rogers, settled himself in a seat at the Manila Symphony and enjoyed a program of Mozart.11 And it didn’t take long for the young enlistees and reservists fresh from the States to assume that same attitude of indifference. To be sure, there were a few who went against the tide, officers who’d come to the islands "to soldier," as they put it, professionals who now bridled at being part of "a military force afflicted" with "siesta-itis," but their complaints were lost in the laughter around the bar and the sighs coming out of the seraglios.12 Monday, December 8,1941(December 7across the International Dateline), Manila, Philippines Frank Hewlett, a United Press wire service reporter, got the cable from a colleague in Hawaii around 2:00 a.m. local time. Stunned and looking for official confirmation, Hewlett quickly called the office of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet. At Fleet Headquarters in Manila, a duty officer answered the phone. Hewlett read him the cable: "Flash! Pearl Harbor under aerial attack." What did he mean, under attack? The man at Fleet HQ thought Hewlett was goading him. He was tired and in no mood for another "Jap joke." "Tell your Pearl Harbor correspondent to go back to bed and sleep it off," he told Hewlett, then hung up.13 At the same time, across Manila Bay at the Cavite Naval Base, Seaman Second Class Frank Bigelow, a tall, lean message clerk from Pleasant Lake, North Dakota, stumbled aboard the submarine tender USS Canopus tied up at a wharf. Bigelow had been out drinking and "catting around" with the local amourettes at one of many brothels in nearby Cavite City. Now, "about half drunk," he crawled up into his bunk and was just about to drift off when another sailor came running into the compartment.14 "They’re bombing Pearl Harbor!" the man shouted. "They’re bombing Pearl Harbor!" Bigelow didn’t believe him and turned his face to the bulkhead to sleep. The first public word of the attack came over KZRH commercial radio sometime after 2:30 a.m. A short while later, MacArthur and Admiral Hart alerted their commands, but the officers, for the most part, did not tell the men in the ranks until they awoke for breakfast. North of Cavite and Manila, some fifty miles up the dusty main highway, was Fort Stotsenberg, an army base adjacent to Clark Field. At the nurses’ quarters near the fort hospital, the women had just settled themselves down in the mess to their fruit, eggs, rolls, and coffee when someone reached up and switched on a radio and the familiar staccato of announcer Don Bell started to issue from the box. "Hey, listen to that!" one of the women said. "They’re having a war in Hawaii. And here we are in the Philippines, and we’re going to be left out of it.&34;15 Less than two miles away, on a road just east of Clark Field, Corporal Zoeth Skinner of Portland, Oregon, part of a five-man crew in a half-track, a kind of tank without a top, was parked in the sun at the side of the highway. The tank battalions had a complement of half-tracks to cover their flanks and scout their points, and for several days the battalions had been on "maneuvers" near the field. In fact they had been deployed to protect the airplanes, but the crews thought they were on another pointless exercise. Then their platoon commander rolled up on a motorcycle. "Hey, fellas!" He was excited. "The war’s started. They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor!" Then he roared off. "Aw, that’s just part of the maneuvers," one of the men said.16 West of the road, across acres of bamboo and sugarcane, sat airplane hangars and barracks for the ground crews at Clark Field, among them the men of the 19th Bombardment Group. At morning chow an officer had climbed up on a chair and announced: "We’ve been attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, but there is no word yet on the extent of the damage." Maybe "it wasn’t all that bad," Ben Steele thought. Then, throughout the morning each new report brought a few more details: battleships had been hit, sunk, or badly disabled; casualties were rumored to be high; there was talk that the country’s formidable Pacific Fleet had been hard hit, perhaps crippled. The men at Clark Field could "hardly believe" what they were hearing. They had not expected war to "start so soon" or the enemy to sally that far from home. It just didn’t seem real. Shocking, perhaps, but not real, a war without pain or pounding fear, far away, five thousand miles to the east. So the men at Clark Field went to work. The flight crews reported to the flight line, the armorers to the armory, the pilots to their planes. And they waited. They waited and watched the sky. Seven o’clock, seven thirty, still nothing. They were also waiting for word to strike back. Air Corps commanders in the Philippines knew from intelligence reports that Japanese Army and Navy bombers would likely come at them from Japanese bases on Formosa, five hundred miles due north. And Major General Lewis H. Brereton, the commander of the Far East Air Force, and his staff had been prepared since November 27 (the day Washington warned all commanders in the Pacific that it believed Japan was ready to go to war) to bomb the Formosan airfields or the harbor at Takao, the likely place the Japanese would gather an invasion force. To his staff, Brereton was "a square-rigged, stout-hulled believer in action." Earlier that morning, after he had learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had rushed to MacArthur’s headquarters at One Calle Victoria in Manila and asked permission to arm and launch the nineteen new B-17 bombers of the 19th Bombardment Group standing by at Clark Field.17 MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Richard Sutherland, told Brereton to wait for MacArthur’s approval. Brereton went back to Air Corps headquarters at Nielson Field and sat. And sat. At seven fifteen he could sit no more and returned to headquarters. Again Sutherland told the Air Corps commander, wait. |
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