Post by masterchief on Oct 19, 2009 12:54:03 GMT -5
Remembering Bataan Death March
By Divina C. Paredes
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 12:16:00 06/16/2009
The Normans walked the 106-km route of the Bataan Death March in the summer of 1999.CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/Michael and Elizabeth Norman
“By the fourth day of the march, the old National Road was lined with fresh corpses. Hundreds of dead, sprawled on the shoulders, strewn in the drainage ditches.
“First Lieutenant Ed Thomas of Grand Rapids, Michigan, caught sight of his captain and company commander lying in a ditch, dead from a bayonet wound… Bernard FitzPatrick kept passing corpses clad in faded blue hospital pajamas. Filipinos mostly, the cripples and amputees who had left their beds in the field hospital after the Japanese had assured them they were free to walk home.
“In the heat the bodies began to rot and it wasn’t long before great swarms of flies were feasting on them. During the day dogs and pigs joined the flies and at night the smell of death lured large carnivorous lizards down from the hills, but it was the crows that commanded the carrion, crows standing wing to wing on the bloated bodies, tearing at the flesh, crows roosting patiently on the wire fences along the road or, as Private Wince “Tennessee” Solsbee noticed, always circling overhead, waiting for their next meal to drop.”—From “Tears in the Darkness” by Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 2009)
ELIZABETH M. Norman, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, remembers her husband Michael’s remark after she finished her book, “We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Women Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese.”
“Half of the story had not been told,” said Michael, a former New York Times reporter and now journalism professor at NYU, who had edited the book published in 1999. “We should write about the men.”
And that is how “Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath” came about. The book describes the incidents of the three-month battle for the Bataan Peninsula, then moves on to April 9, 1942, when more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under the American command surrendered to the Japanese in what is now described as the single largest defeat in American military history. The sick and starving Filipino and American soldiers were ordered to walk 66 miles (approximately 106 kilometers) to their prisons.
It is estimated that up to 10,000 Filipinos and Americans died from torture, starvation, and disease during the trek, and that more perished during the 41 months in prison. The book also covers the trial and execution of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, former commander of the Imperial Army, and the impact of the war on the soldiers from all sides after the war.
The book took 10 years to finish. “We wanted to do something different from what has been done already,” explains Elizabeth in a phone interview from their home in Montclair, New Jersey. “We wanted to write the story about the battle and the aftermath from the American, Filipino, and the Japanese viewpoint, which had never been done before.”
Adds Michael: “We wanted to create a good strong nonfiction story. We wanted to understand the Japanese, and also the Filipino, point of view. To do that, we had to do a lot of reading [on] Japanese psychology and history and Filipino social psychology and history, so we can present three different sides equally.”
The Normans interviewed more than 400 people, both combatants and civilians. One of the central characters is Ben Steele, a cowboy from Montana, who became an art professor after the war. The Normans interviewed more than 200 American veterans but Steele had experienced almost every aspect of the battle—99 days in the battle and the surrender, and 1,244 days as a prisoner of war. He is turning 92 this year, and still sketches and paints every day. His black and white drawings portraying the various events throughout the march and in prison are featured in the book. (Sadly, his drawings as a prisoner of war were lost during the war.)
The Normans traveled back and forth across the United States, the Philippines, and Japan to interview the soldiers, their families, and civilians who had witnessed the march. They collected 2,800 books, documents, and other sources which they are donating to the MacArthur Memorial Library and Archives in Norfolk, Virginia.
In one of their trips to the Philippines, Michael and Elizabeth walked the 66-mile (106-kilometer) route of the Bataan Death March. Elizabeth says that these days, the distance walked by the prisoners of war would not seem far, as people drive that distance all the time. But when she and Michael started their trek, she adds, “We were so struck by how far that was to walk when you are defeated, when you are sick, when you are hungry.”
The Normans captured this feeling of desperation in the book:
It rained almost every day, not all day, but every day, monsoon rain… The rain turned the jungle dark, and in the perpetual gloom some began to believe that they had been forgotten.
The government had forgotten them, of this they were sure, and it seemed that God had forgotten them. He had sent them into a wilderness, into the heart of darkness…
Now the jungle was their enemy too and it showed them even less pity than the Japanese. Their captors were merely indifferent to their fate. They could live or not; the guards didn’t care. Nature, however, seemed bent on destroying them—the heat, the wet, the rot and disease. And they were alone, alone and utterly exposed in a world that hissed and snapped and stirred in the dark, shadows of men sleeping on rocks by a bend in a river on a ragged peninsula at the end of the world.
“The interesting thing about ‘Tears in the Darkness’ is that it is made up of 10,000 stories woven together and forming one coherent whole,” says Michael. “I like the fact that it is something different, a blend of many styles of nonfiction narrative [and] journalism. I think there is also a little bit of poetry.”
There were also stories of humanity, as the POWs related stories of Filipinos risking their lives to help them as they passed through the villages. “From the side of the road children would dash into the columns, shove something into a soldier’s hand—a banana leaf full of rice, a small melon, a sugar cookie—and dash off before the guards could kick or club them,” they wrote. A Japanese soldier would quietly drop a package wrapped in banana leaves for the prisoners. Inside was a rice ball and tiny quinine pills for malaria, a disease which had debilitated a number of the prisoners.
Elizabeth says including the civilian point of view is one of the things she is most proud of in the book. When they started working on the book, they were focused on the military side of the story. But it was Michael who suggested they talk to the civilians too. “People don’t write about what the civilians go through in the war and ‘Tears in the Darkness’ does that,” she says. “You appreciate these farmers, fishermen, and the other Filipinos in Bataan, what they suffered and endured during the battle.”
The title "Tears in the Darkness" comes from a literal translation of the ideograph, or kanji, for the Japanese word anrui. It was the term a former Imperial Japanese officer the Normans spoke to used to describe the reaction of General Homma (who was executed in 1946) when he read page after page of the Japanese casualties in the war. But the term, says Elizabeth, “is really what the book is about because whether it is the Filipinos, the Americans, or the Japanese soldiers, the suffering that all these people had in the battle were perfectly captured in that statement.”
For Michael and Elizabeth, one of the most “haunting” stories was about the massacre of around 400 Filipino soldiers by the Japanese in Pantingan River.
They wrote:
“As the prisoners waited in the holding compounds to entrain, they began to exchange stories, lurid catalogs of what they had seen on their long, brutal march north.
Here, for example, was a Filipino soldier talking about a massacre he had witnessed while hiding in the jungle. Hundreds of men, he said, prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs, had been bayoneted to death in a secluded spot near the Pantingan River. Impossible, thought doctor Alvin Poweleit, and yet there was something “sincere” in the man’s voice, something authentic.
A week or so later, Captain Pedro Felix, fleeing from bayonet wounds and shaking with malaria, appeared at his family’s house in Manila. Felix, a staff officer with the 91st Division, Philippine Army, said he’d been in hiding and on the run since April 12, the day the Japanese massacred hundreds of his comrades at the Pantingan River.”
The Normans had interviewed three Japanese soldiers who admitted to have taken part in the massacre of the Filipino POWs. One of them said he did not want to kill the prisoners but his sergeant ordered, “Bayonet the Filipinos or we are going to kill you.”
Michael was a Marine during the Vietnam War, and he believes it had helped that he spoke with the veterans from all three sides. “Whenever I would sit down with a soldier—Japanese, Filipino, or American—the very first words out of my mouth were, ‘I don’t know what you went through in captivity but I know what you went through in the battlefield because I was there. So let us talk, soldier to soldier.’"
Elizabeth says there was another reason why the Filipino, Japanese, and American soldiers were forthright about their experiences. “These men are old now. If they didn’t tell their story, it was going to die with them.”
Says Michael: “This was their last chance to set the record straight, the last chance to tell us exactly what happened and why it happened, on the record.”
And the stories came out one after another. Elizabeth recalls how one of the solders described in detail how he bayoneted enemy soldiers to death. “The story was told in such horrific detail that I felt the hair at the back of my neck standing up,” says Elizabeth. When asked why he told the story to them, he replied, “It is time for the world to know.”
Says Elizabeth: “One of the challenges of doing ‘Tears in the Darkness’ was listening to these stories about the prisoners of war. You really peered into the darkness of the human soul. It is not an easy thing to do. Every man, woman, and civilian we talked to, these people are haunted by what they saw and what they did and they saw the dark side of humanity.”
The Normans worked with experts to ensure the accuracy of their research and translations. Among them were Dr Ricardo Jose of the University of the Philippines department of history and his wife Lydia-Yu Jose of the Ateneo de Manila University, who shared their extensive research on World War II in the Philippines. Rico supervised the translations of the interviews with the Filipinos and joined them in their field trips to Bataan. In Japan, the Normans worked with Kyoko Onoki, formerly of the London Times. Wendy Matsumura, a doctoral candidate and instructor of Japanese at NYU, had vetted every page of the Japanese translations.
Michael says there was no easy explanation for what took place between December 1941 in the Philippines until the Liberation from the Japanese forces in 1945. “The purpose of the book was to ask the question, ‘Why do men behave so bestially towards one another?’ This went way beyond the bonds of warfare,” he says.
“We really wanted to show that there is really nothing good about war; and the way to do that was to interview the men on both sides to find out why they did the things they did.”
Elizabeth says it was interesting that every soldier they spoke to in the three countries said people have to learn to live in peace. “There shouldn’t be any more war, we should learn to live together,” she quotes the soldiers as saying.
So is this the major lesson from “Tears in the Darkness”?
“As a former combat Marine, here is the first lesson I learned,” says Michael. “As soon as the first shot is fired, in any way, everybody loses… You can call it a victory. You can call it a defeat. It doesn’t make a difference. Everybody loses something.”
Elizabeth, for her part, was particularly struck by the comment of a Japanese soldier, then 92, after he narrated his experience in Bataan. “He was quiet for a minute, looked at us and said, ‘There are no lessons from the war.’”
That was a profound statement, says Elizabeth. “There is nothing to be learned from what happened.”
Michael concurs, “Particularly if you repeat it in the next war, then you have never learned a d**n thing.” •
By Divina C. Paredes
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 12:16:00 06/16/2009
The Normans walked the 106-km route of the Bataan Death March in the summer of 1999.CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/Michael and Elizabeth Norman
“By the fourth day of the march, the old National Road was lined with fresh corpses. Hundreds of dead, sprawled on the shoulders, strewn in the drainage ditches.
“First Lieutenant Ed Thomas of Grand Rapids, Michigan, caught sight of his captain and company commander lying in a ditch, dead from a bayonet wound… Bernard FitzPatrick kept passing corpses clad in faded blue hospital pajamas. Filipinos mostly, the cripples and amputees who had left their beds in the field hospital after the Japanese had assured them they were free to walk home.
“In the heat the bodies began to rot and it wasn’t long before great swarms of flies were feasting on them. During the day dogs and pigs joined the flies and at night the smell of death lured large carnivorous lizards down from the hills, but it was the crows that commanded the carrion, crows standing wing to wing on the bloated bodies, tearing at the flesh, crows roosting patiently on the wire fences along the road or, as Private Wince “Tennessee” Solsbee noticed, always circling overhead, waiting for their next meal to drop.”—From “Tears in the Darkness” by Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 2009)
ELIZABETH M. Norman, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, remembers her husband Michael’s remark after she finished her book, “We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Women Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese.”
“Half of the story had not been told,” said Michael, a former New York Times reporter and now journalism professor at NYU, who had edited the book published in 1999. “We should write about the men.”
And that is how “Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath” came about. The book describes the incidents of the three-month battle for the Bataan Peninsula, then moves on to April 9, 1942, when more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under the American command surrendered to the Japanese in what is now described as the single largest defeat in American military history. The sick and starving Filipino and American soldiers were ordered to walk 66 miles (approximately 106 kilometers) to their prisons.
It is estimated that up to 10,000 Filipinos and Americans died from torture, starvation, and disease during the trek, and that more perished during the 41 months in prison. The book also covers the trial and execution of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, former commander of the Imperial Army, and the impact of the war on the soldiers from all sides after the war.
The book took 10 years to finish. “We wanted to do something different from what has been done already,” explains Elizabeth in a phone interview from their home in Montclair, New Jersey. “We wanted to write the story about the battle and the aftermath from the American, Filipino, and the Japanese viewpoint, which had never been done before.”
Adds Michael: “We wanted to create a good strong nonfiction story. We wanted to understand the Japanese, and also the Filipino, point of view. To do that, we had to do a lot of reading [on] Japanese psychology and history and Filipino social psychology and history, so we can present three different sides equally.”
The Normans interviewed more than 400 people, both combatants and civilians. One of the central characters is Ben Steele, a cowboy from Montana, who became an art professor after the war. The Normans interviewed more than 200 American veterans but Steele had experienced almost every aspect of the battle—99 days in the battle and the surrender, and 1,244 days as a prisoner of war. He is turning 92 this year, and still sketches and paints every day. His black and white drawings portraying the various events throughout the march and in prison are featured in the book. (Sadly, his drawings as a prisoner of war were lost during the war.)
The Normans traveled back and forth across the United States, the Philippines, and Japan to interview the soldiers, their families, and civilians who had witnessed the march. They collected 2,800 books, documents, and other sources which they are donating to the MacArthur Memorial Library and Archives in Norfolk, Virginia.
In one of their trips to the Philippines, Michael and Elizabeth walked the 66-mile (106-kilometer) route of the Bataan Death March. Elizabeth says that these days, the distance walked by the prisoners of war would not seem far, as people drive that distance all the time. But when she and Michael started their trek, she adds, “We were so struck by how far that was to walk when you are defeated, when you are sick, when you are hungry.”
The Normans captured this feeling of desperation in the book:
It rained almost every day, not all day, but every day, monsoon rain… The rain turned the jungle dark, and in the perpetual gloom some began to believe that they had been forgotten.
The government had forgotten them, of this they were sure, and it seemed that God had forgotten them. He had sent them into a wilderness, into the heart of darkness…
Now the jungle was their enemy too and it showed them even less pity than the Japanese. Their captors were merely indifferent to their fate. They could live or not; the guards didn’t care. Nature, however, seemed bent on destroying them—the heat, the wet, the rot and disease. And they were alone, alone and utterly exposed in a world that hissed and snapped and stirred in the dark, shadows of men sleeping on rocks by a bend in a river on a ragged peninsula at the end of the world.
“The interesting thing about ‘Tears in the Darkness’ is that it is made up of 10,000 stories woven together and forming one coherent whole,” says Michael. “I like the fact that it is something different, a blend of many styles of nonfiction narrative [and] journalism. I think there is also a little bit of poetry.”
There were also stories of humanity, as the POWs related stories of Filipinos risking their lives to help them as they passed through the villages. “From the side of the road children would dash into the columns, shove something into a soldier’s hand—a banana leaf full of rice, a small melon, a sugar cookie—and dash off before the guards could kick or club them,” they wrote. A Japanese soldier would quietly drop a package wrapped in banana leaves for the prisoners. Inside was a rice ball and tiny quinine pills for malaria, a disease which had debilitated a number of the prisoners.
Elizabeth says including the civilian point of view is one of the things she is most proud of in the book. When they started working on the book, they were focused on the military side of the story. But it was Michael who suggested they talk to the civilians too. “People don’t write about what the civilians go through in the war and ‘Tears in the Darkness’ does that,” she says. “You appreciate these farmers, fishermen, and the other Filipinos in Bataan, what they suffered and endured during the battle.”
The title "Tears in the Darkness" comes from a literal translation of the ideograph, or kanji, for the Japanese word anrui. It was the term a former Imperial Japanese officer the Normans spoke to used to describe the reaction of General Homma (who was executed in 1946) when he read page after page of the Japanese casualties in the war. But the term, says Elizabeth, “is really what the book is about because whether it is the Filipinos, the Americans, or the Japanese soldiers, the suffering that all these people had in the battle were perfectly captured in that statement.”
For Michael and Elizabeth, one of the most “haunting” stories was about the massacre of around 400 Filipino soldiers by the Japanese in Pantingan River.
They wrote:
“As the prisoners waited in the holding compounds to entrain, they began to exchange stories, lurid catalogs of what they had seen on their long, brutal march north.
Here, for example, was a Filipino soldier talking about a massacre he had witnessed while hiding in the jungle. Hundreds of men, he said, prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs, had been bayoneted to death in a secluded spot near the Pantingan River. Impossible, thought doctor Alvin Poweleit, and yet there was something “sincere” in the man’s voice, something authentic.
A week or so later, Captain Pedro Felix, fleeing from bayonet wounds and shaking with malaria, appeared at his family’s house in Manila. Felix, a staff officer with the 91st Division, Philippine Army, said he’d been in hiding and on the run since April 12, the day the Japanese massacred hundreds of his comrades at the Pantingan River.”
The Normans had interviewed three Japanese soldiers who admitted to have taken part in the massacre of the Filipino POWs. One of them said he did not want to kill the prisoners but his sergeant ordered, “Bayonet the Filipinos or we are going to kill you.”
Michael was a Marine during the Vietnam War, and he believes it had helped that he spoke with the veterans from all three sides. “Whenever I would sit down with a soldier—Japanese, Filipino, or American—the very first words out of my mouth were, ‘I don’t know what you went through in captivity but I know what you went through in the battlefield because I was there. So let us talk, soldier to soldier.’"
Elizabeth says there was another reason why the Filipino, Japanese, and American soldiers were forthright about their experiences. “These men are old now. If they didn’t tell their story, it was going to die with them.”
Says Michael: “This was their last chance to set the record straight, the last chance to tell us exactly what happened and why it happened, on the record.”
And the stories came out one after another. Elizabeth recalls how one of the solders described in detail how he bayoneted enemy soldiers to death. “The story was told in such horrific detail that I felt the hair at the back of my neck standing up,” says Elizabeth. When asked why he told the story to them, he replied, “It is time for the world to know.”
Says Elizabeth: “One of the challenges of doing ‘Tears in the Darkness’ was listening to these stories about the prisoners of war. You really peered into the darkness of the human soul. It is not an easy thing to do. Every man, woman, and civilian we talked to, these people are haunted by what they saw and what they did and they saw the dark side of humanity.”
The Normans worked with experts to ensure the accuracy of their research and translations. Among them were Dr Ricardo Jose of the University of the Philippines department of history and his wife Lydia-Yu Jose of the Ateneo de Manila University, who shared their extensive research on World War II in the Philippines. Rico supervised the translations of the interviews with the Filipinos and joined them in their field trips to Bataan. In Japan, the Normans worked with Kyoko Onoki, formerly of the London Times. Wendy Matsumura, a doctoral candidate and instructor of Japanese at NYU, had vetted every page of the Japanese translations.
Michael says there was no easy explanation for what took place between December 1941 in the Philippines until the Liberation from the Japanese forces in 1945. “The purpose of the book was to ask the question, ‘Why do men behave so bestially towards one another?’ This went way beyond the bonds of warfare,” he says.
“We really wanted to show that there is really nothing good about war; and the way to do that was to interview the men on both sides to find out why they did the things they did.”
Elizabeth says it was interesting that every soldier they spoke to in the three countries said people have to learn to live in peace. “There shouldn’t be any more war, we should learn to live together,” she quotes the soldiers as saying.
So is this the major lesson from “Tears in the Darkness”?
“As a former combat Marine, here is the first lesson I learned,” says Michael. “As soon as the first shot is fired, in any way, everybody loses… You can call it a victory. You can call it a defeat. It doesn’t make a difference. Everybody loses something.”
Elizabeth, for her part, was particularly struck by the comment of a Japanese soldier, then 92, after he narrated his experience in Bataan. “He was quiet for a minute, looked at us and said, ‘There are no lessons from the war.’”
That was a profound statement, says Elizabeth. “There is nothing to be learned from what happened.”
Michael concurs, “Particularly if you repeat it in the next war, then you have never learned a d**n thing.” •