In the opening days of World War II, a joint U.S.-Filipino army fought desperately to defend Manila Bay and the Philippines against a Japanese invasion. Much of the five-month campaign was waged on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island. Despite dwindling supplies and dim prospects for support, the garrison held out as long as possible and significantly delayed the Japanese timetable for conquest in the Pacific. In the end, the Japanese forced the largest capitulation in U.S. military history. The defenders were hailed as heroes and the legacy of their determined resistance marks the Philippines today. Drawing on accounts from American and Filipino participants and archival sources, this book chronicles these critical months of the Pacific War, from the first air strikes to the fall of Bataan and Corregidor.

Focuses on America's first engagement in WWII. Unpublished letters, written and oral testimony of over 350 veterans restores these gruelling months into a historical record.

This is the story of the last mounted American troops to see action in battle, when, in late 1941, six-hundred men and their horses held off the Japanese invasion of Luzon in the Philippines just long enough to allow General Douglas MacArthur's forces to withdraw to Bataan. The 26th continued to fight on horseback until late February 1942 when, tragically, they were ordered dismounted and their horses and mules transferred to the Quartermaster's center and slaughtered for food for the defenders. It is on record that the 26th troopers refused to accept meat rations from their animals, regardless of their own starvation. This stirring account of a little-known aspect of the Philippine campaign is military history at its best.

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.

Like many other young American men during the depression-era 1930s, Gene Boyt entered Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Later, after receiving an ROTC commission in the Army Engineers and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Missouri School of Mines, Boyt joined the Allied forces in the Pacific Theater. While building runways and infrastructure in the Philippines in 1941, Boyt enjoyed the regal life of an American officer stationed in a tropical paradise--but not for long. When the United States surrendered the Philippines to Japan in April 1942, Boyt became a prisoner of war, suffering unthinkable deprivation and brutality at the hands of the ruthless Japanese guards. One of the last accounts to come from a Bataan survivor, Boyt’s story details the infamous Bataan Death March and his subsequent forty-two months in Japanese internment camps. In this fast-paced narrative, Boyt’s voice conveys the quiet courage of the generation of men who fought and won history’s greatest armed conflict.

Bataan, the last bastion stemming the Japanese tidal wave across the Pacific, was about to fall. Only one unit, ROld Two Hon'erd," a small band of New Mexico National Guardsmen, remained intact. In her award-winning history, Dorothy Cave follows the members of this small unit who played a key role in this pivotal moment in history.

For two weeks during the spring of 1942, the Bataan Death March--one of the most widely condemned atrocities of World War II--unfolded. The prevailing interpretation of this event is simple: American prisoners of war suffered cruel treatment at the hands of their Japanese captors while Filipinos, sympathetic to the Americans, looked on. Most survivors of the march wrote about their experiences decades after the war and a number of factors distorted their accounts. The crucial aspect of memory is central to this study--how it is constructed, by whom and for what purpose. This book questions the prevailing interpretation, reconsiders the actions of all three groups in their cultural contexts and suggests a far greater complexity. Among the conclusions is that violence on the march was largely the result of a clash of cultures--undisciplined, individualistic Americans encountered Japanese who valued order and form, while Filipinos were active, even ambitious, participants in the drama.