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Title: Bataan: The March of Death by Stanly L. Falk ISBN: 0-515-08918-4 Publisher: Jove Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $3.50

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Brief and serviceable history of The infamous Death March
Comment: The Bataan Death March was once part of the American conciousness, ingrained in the popular culture to the point that I'm sure most people would have thought it would never be forgotten. Well it has, largely, and that's not good. Stanley Falk's book, written forty years ago, is a useful survey of the incident, though it's short on the sort of personal or oral history that marks most of the WW2 books of more recent vintage, and probably suffers as a result.

The Death March itself was the last act, almost, of the American defense of the Philippines (then an American possession, though nominally independent) in 1942. Bataan is a peninsula to the West of the capital city of Manila, forming part of that city's large harbor, and American soldiers and their Philippine allies forted up there at the beginning of the war when the Japanese invaded the islands, and held out through the early months of 1942. They were finally forced to surrender, and as prisoners were marched to the site of the POW camps where they would spend the remainder of the war. During the march to the camps, many of the prisoners were badly mistreated by Japanese guards, and suffered greatly from starvation, thirst, disease, and the heat. Most of the marching prisoners were Filipino, about 10% being American. The Japanese were prepared for about half the number of prisoners they wound up capturing, and expected them to be in better health than they were. Japanese culture also emphasized discipline, violence, and a suicidal never-give-up mentality that made contempt for Westerners who had surrendered to the enemy very intense in some instances. That, combined with a lack of planning and staff work, made for a journey which killed a substantial portion of the prisoners involved (it's thought about 650 Americans and 10,000+ Filipinos) over several days.

Author Falk does a good job recounting this in the context of the times, though as I said in the intro, his work is rather short on the oral history that makes later accounts of events like this more telling. His writing is judicious, and given that he was writing relatively close to the events (seventeen years after) it's a balanced and fair account of what occurred.

Rating: 5
Summary: Important history, fading into the sands of time
Comment: Stanley Falk wrote this book originally about 40 years ago. It details the cruelty and mistakes made by the Japanese in moving some 80,000 American and Filipino prisoners out of Bataan after the surrender of April 9, 1942, which resulted in the deaths, mostly preventable, of several thousand. Falk interviewed the principle characters when most of them were still alive and their memories were still fresh. He does a good job of covering the subject in an unemotional and fair way. It is too bad this book is no longer in print. It deserves to stand with Iris Chang's book, "The Rape of Nanking" as an example of Japanese cruelty that has rarely been acknowledged in recent years. The Germans have come to grips with what they did during World War II -- the Japanese haven't.