Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath
Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Illus. Map. Bib. Index. 480 pp. $30.
Reviewed by Ferenc Szasz
"Remember Pearl Harbor" remains the best-known slogan of World War II. But for many, especially after the Dyess Report of 1944 (the joint Army and Navy testimony of officers who survived capture and imprisonment on Bataan and Corregidor) the phrase evolved into "Remember Pearl Harbor and Bataan." Yet the Bataan story does not resonate with most American as do the major battles of the European theater. Thus, Tears in the Darkness is a valuable addition to the literature on the war. It is the best single volume on Bataan now available.
Through a hard-driving narrative interspersed with numerous flashbacks, the Normans retell the painful saga of the battle to control the Philippines, which occurred in late 1941 and early 1942; the 66-mile Death March that followed the surrender; the atrocities that took place in the Japanese POW camps; and the Japanese "Hell Ships" that transported thousands of POWs to the home islands for slave labor. Although the authors weave the stories of many people in and out of the narrative, they focus largely on Ben Steele, a young Montana cowboy who endured 41 months of agonizing captivity. During this ordeal Steele discovered his artistic talents—he would later become an art professor—and quietly began to sketch his surroundings. Since we have minimal visual documentation of Philippine POW camp life, Steele's many pen-and-ink drawings, recreated from now-lost originals, are especially welcome.
The strength of this volume lies less with a radical reinterpretation than with a masterful compilation of new and fascinating individual stories. The Normans present the dramas of battle and captivity from a variety of perspectives, including the views of the average Japanese soldier. Their discussion of the impact of the Japanese code of honor on the various levels of the Japanese military is very well drawn. The authors are especially critical of General Douglas MacArthur, noting his lack of foresight, his failure to ensure adequate provisions, his decision in the Masaharu Homma war crimes trial, and his overall pomposity. "Dugout Doug," as the enlisted men scornfully referred to him, departed for Australia under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders, which left Generals Jonathan Wainwright and Ned King to oversee the surrender of 76,000 American and Filipino troops on 9 April 1942—still the worst defeat in American military history.
Tears in the Darkness revolves around three themes: brutality, suffering, and the power of human endurance. The unspeakable cruelty that infused the Death March, the POW camps, and the Hell Ships seems to have stemmed from Japan's refusal to sign the 1929 Geneva Convention; the harsh discipline accorded the average Japanese soldier, which he was eager to pass along to the disgraced "non-persons" who had surrendered; and the fact that Japanese command expected to deal with about 40,000 POWs but faced almost twice that number. The anonymous, kind-hearted Filipinos who handed out food and water to the endless stream of marchers emerge as unsung heroes.
How Ben Steele survived his excruciating ordeal is almost beyond comprehension. That he and others did make it back can be credited to chance encounters with physicians or medicine (especially quinine, so crucial to combating the ever-present malaria), the concern of fellow prisoners, and just plain luck. Perhaps as many as 9,000 Americans and about 45,000 Filipinos were not so fortunate. In addition, although this is only hinted at here, many of those who did return were so weakened that they did not long survive.
Based on ten years of research and 400 interviews, including several with former Japanese soldiers, the Normans conclude that in warfare, "nothing runs true to plan." Still, amid the atrocities, one can catch glimpses of basic human decency: the Soldier who secretly slipped quinine pills into the slop he fed his comrade; the physician who ran out of paregoric to treat dysentery and created homemade remedies (clay and water and powdered charcoal); and Father Bill Cummings on a Hell Ship who said that he hoped to work with street children in Tokyo after the war. "The bastards are hopeless," one Soldier protested. "Son," Cummings replied, "no one is hopeless." Unfortunately, Father Bill did not make it back.
If one plans to read but one volume on the Bataan story, it should be Tears in the Darkness.
How America Saved the World: The Untold Story of U.S. Preparedness between the World Wars
Eric Hammel. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2009. 400 pp. Bib. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Michael S. Neiberg
This book's overblown title notwithstanding, How America Saved the World does have an important argument to make. Although Americans like to celebrate their World War II experience as the triumph of amateurs over the best professionals the Germans and Japanese had to offer, America did not enter World War II as unprepared as the myth would have us believe. In fact, the American military began to make substantial preparations for war in 1938 that laid the critical groundwork for at least the war of 1942 and 1943 and quite possibly for the victories of 1944 and 1945 that followed.
Eric Hammel blames the usual suspects for the sad decline of the American armed forces in the 1920s and early 1930s, including a parsimonious Congress, an amorphous "peace lobby," and misguided diplomats who agreed to deals such as the Washington Naval Conference disarmament treaties and the Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war as an instrument of state policy. The book is organized around choppy subchapters, many of them only a paragraph long and focusing on details of a given weapon system. The quality of the writing is also uneven at times, and the author has a tendency toward the kind of hyperbole that produced his title. To cite an example, Hammel describes a November 1938 meeting at the White House as "the single most important meeting in modern American history, maybe even in world history" (italics in the original).
The book picks up steam when it turns to an analysis of the process whereby the American political and military establishment awoke to the danger of war and took active measures to confront it. To Hammel, the turning point occurred after 1937, when several incidents highlighted the danger the nation faced if it continued to ignore the perilous global situation: the possibility of a Latin American state becoming a fascist ally of Germany; the Japanese attack on the USS Panay (PR-5); the redrafting of War Plan Orange to meet the threat from a rising Japan; the development of a naval agreement with the British for mutual protection of shipping lanes; and Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that occurred in Germany on 9 November, 1938.
Rather than burying their heads in the sand as conventional historians have sometimes claimed, American defense leaders, Hammel argues, made dynamic and important changes to meet the new threat environment. Led predominately by the vision of General George Marshall, the military invested in new generations of weapon systems, found a way to pass a peacetime draft bill, and developed an active strategy for the defense of vital American interests, most notably in Latin America, the western Atlantic, and the eastern Pacific oceans. The politicians, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, created the necessary bureaucratic structures to bring science and industry into the effort to defend America and pass the necessary budgets to fund the military's expansion. Not all ideas came to fruition, and not all ideas were good, but the result was a preparedness movement much more formidable than most recognize.
Although its fundamental arguments are well worth noting, the book suffers from the fatal flaw of having no footnotes and no primary research. It contains plenty of quotations, but as they are not footnoted there is no way to check them or to give proper credit to the historians who did the leg work to pull these items from the archives. There is a bibliography, but it is missing a number of key secondary works. It does, however, include Wikipedia references and a misspelled link to Arlington National Cemetery's Web site. We are thus left with a good idea, but one that will need the work of more dedicated researchers to test and develop.
The Intelligence Wars: Lessons from Baghdad
Steven K. O'Hern. Foreword by Bart Bechtel. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2009. Notes. Index. 292 pp. $25.98.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
The Intelligence Wars represents a common type of post-9/11 literature: a critique of policy-based on the experiences of a recently retired-federal or military officer. Such books emphasize tradecraft within the broader context of contemporary politics while steering clear of big conceptual issues. When measured by this standard, The Intelligence Wars amounts to a worthy assessment of tactical intelligence planning and operations.
Steven K. O'Hern served as the director of the Strategic Counterintelligence Directorate of the Multi-National Force in Baghdad, Iraq in 2005. A retired U.S. Air Force-colonel, O'Hern spent his career as a counterintelligence specialist. He draws on his military experience and his skills as a practicing attorney to offer well-conceived and clearly expressed criticism of how intelligence is employed in counterinsurgency operations.
O'Hern sheds light on the foibles and inefficiencies of the bureaucracy that far too often stymies the efforts of bright, energetic intelligence professionals serving on the front lines. Intelligence operations in Iraq and, indeed, across the globe, are "hampered by turf wars," O'Hern writes. "Lack of cooperation among military units and intelligence agencies are common." O'Hern thus demonstrates the timelessness of Karl von Clausewitz's observation that fog and friction are most often self-inflicted.
The governing idea of The Intelligence Wars is that our obsessive faith in gadgets and, collaterally, our view of intelligence as principally a technical activity justify a reckless under-appreciation of human intelligence. Until we address this problem, O'Hern asserts, we haven't a prayer of defeating the terrorist threat in its many mutations.
O'Hern's book is not without flaws, among them a willingness to assume that current strategic priorities will remain so. Media accounts and think-tank reports constitute the raw material of the book while the fields of history, anthropology, and philosophy appear hardly to have been consulted at all. This approach gives the book a thinness that is unworthy of its subject. "A massive cultural change will be required to convince the leadership of the U.S. military that counterinsurgency is not an aberration," O'Hern states. "It is instead one of the primary missions of our military." One could argue that "counterinsurgency" is not the best term for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, given the frailty of the political arrangements that the U. S. military is trying to protect. The grab-bag of anarchists and sectarian zealots are not opposing an established civil order. In other words, there's nothing substantial against which to rebel
apart from American attempts to install ordered liberty in places where it is an alien idea.The conflicts O'Hern sees in our future are optional: we can choose not to fight wars of counterinsurgency, and the odds are that we will choose not to fight them. There is no popular urge for another Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nevertheless, O'Hern is on target in regard to the specific reforms that will make our intelligence agencies perform their invaluable services with greater skill.
Atomic America: How a Deadly Explosion and a Feared Admiral Changed the Course of Nuclear History
Todd Tucker. New York: Free Press, 2009. 277 pp. Illus. Index. $26.
Reviewed by Norman Polmar
This book seeks to provide a history of America's efforts to develop nuclear energy—the Army's power generators for remote areas, the Air Force's nuclear-powered bomber, and the Navy's nuclear-propelled submarine. The author, Todd Tucker, a former nuclear submariner, concentrates on the disaster of the Army's SL-1 power reactor at the Idaho reactor test facility and the highly successful submarine Nautilus (SSN-571).
He is only partly successful. The biography of the small, 200-kilowatt SL-1 reactor is easy: the Army's second effort in this field, it went critical in 1958 and exploded less than three years later, horribly mutilating and killing two Soldiers and one Navy Seabee who were working on it at the time. The Army wanted these reactors to provide power in remote areas, especially the Arctic, without a difficult logistics train. A prototype was built at Fort Belvoir, Virginia—18 miles from the White House; five were erected in remote areas, including Greenland, Antarctica, and Panama; and one was installed in on a barge. These were all successful, with four of them providing electric power for more than a decade. The failure of SL-1, a test reactor, was due to poor design and poor maintenance, "a disaster waiting to happen," writes the author.
Tucker lavishes praise on Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and credits him with developing the entire nuclear submarine program. The author does not acknowledge that the Navy began to fund the development of nuclear propulsion as early as 1939 and initiated a major nuclear-propulsion study in 1945. The latter led to the Bureau of Ships assigning several civilians and officers to study nuclear technology. Rickover was one of those officers, being sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to study at the Army-controlled facility. But as a little-known engineering captain, Rickover could not have initiated a nuclear-propulsion program or have been "double-hatted" in the Navy and the newly established Atomic Energy Commission, as the author credits. Those accomplishments belonged to several admirals, to whom the author refers throughout the book as "gold braid" and "fancy dans," without mentioning their names or their roles in atomic America.
In 1947 the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, approved a major nuclear propulsion program. Vice Admiral Earle Mills, Rickover's World War II supporter and protector, put the acerbic captain in charge of the program. Similarly, admirals convinced Congress to fund the Nautilus, and other admirals led the team who designed and supervised its construction.
Tucker ignores all of this. Indeed, in his attempt to demonstrate Rickover's omnipresence, Tucker observes that by August 1950 "the water-cooled Westinghouse [reactor] design had become the clear winner over the sodium-cooled General Electric plant." True, but—not mentioned by the author—exactly two years later Rickover and the Navy ordered the submarine Seawolf (SSN-575) with a sodium reactor. Many other pieces of the Rickover story Tucker ignores or misinterprets.
Only later, especially after the loss of the Thresher (SSN-593) in 1963, did Rickover achieve the level of influence attributed to him some 15 years earlier. The book omits the Thresher disaster, with the initial event that led to her tragic loss most likely having been a scram (shutdown) of her nuclear reactor.
The author does address the Three Mile Island reactor accident of 1979. He cites Rickover telling a congressional committee, "The thing wrong at Three Mile Island was not the design of the plant. It was the lack of supervision and carelessness in operation." Most of the operators at that plant were Rickover-trained, ex-Navy men. But, as Tucker concludes, "In short, the problem with Three Mile Island was that Rickover was not in charge of it." Three years later Rickover was "fired." But his vision—demand some would say—for an all-nuclear Fleet had by that time long been buried.
Tucker's book is well-written. The professional, however, will be bothered by many of its small errors: ships do not receive the sobriquet USS until they are commissioned. The "A" in CVA at the time indicated "heavy," not "atomic" (as CA indicated heavy cruiser). Ships have displacement and not "weight."
The book does provide an excellent review of the Army's nuclear-power program and, especially, the SL-1 disaster. It is less valuable for an understanding or insight into the Air Force and Navy nuclear programs. Still, it is useful reading as the United States considers an increase in the use of nuclear energy for civilian electric power.