But then you pick up Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. It was not clear that this wall needed another brick. It is possible to buy volumes devoted to Bataan's nurses, its military chaplains and, in Hampton Sides's best-selling 2001 book, 'Ghost Soldiers,' the men who rescued its survivors.

'No aspect of this battle or the infamous march that followed seems to have been overlooked. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. The result is an altogether new and original World War II book: it exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate it makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides. Juxtaposed against Steele's story and the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of a number of Japanese soldiers.

Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy turned sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world. The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. From then until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture - far from the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. For the first four months of 1942, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was America's first major land battle of World War II, the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan.

Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman