Military Review English Edition July-August 2015 | Page 115

MR BOOK REVIEWS
INSIDE THE BATAAN DEATH MARCH: Defeat,
Travail and Memory
Kevin C. Murphy, McFarland & Company, Jefferson,
North Carolina, 2014, 328 pages

T

he surrender of the combined U.S. and
Philippine forces following the Battle of Bataan
in the Philippines in April 1942 represents
the greatest defeat of a U.S. Army. The Bataan Death
March, the forcible transfer of sixty to eighty thousand
Allied prisoners by the Imperial Japanese army over a
distance of more than sixty miles from Bataan to Camp
O’Donnell, is viewed by some as the greatest war crime
ever perpetuated against American combatants in war.
The Bataan Death March marked only the beginning of
the great sorrow and travail experienced by thousands
of American service members in captivity, aboard
hell ships, and in Japanese forced-labor camps. Kevin
Murphy, the chair of the Department of Humanities at
the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, provides
one of the more comprehensive looks at the Bataan
Death March in decades.
Previous research focused primarily on survivor
accounts of alleged Japanese barbarity and war crimes
against Allied prisoners of war—both during the march
and during the prisoners’ subsequent incarceration in
the Philippines, China, and Japan. Murphy breaks that
mold in his consideration of three aspects of the march.
The author considers the impact of the overwhelming
Japanese army victory over the combined U.S. and
Philippine forces and the effect it had on the Allied
prisoners. He desc ribes the different dimensions of
suffering the Death March survivors experienced while
in confinement as well as after the war. Finally, he challenges the recollections of prisoner eyewitness accounts
of the alleged Japanese barbarity.
The strength of Inside the Bataan Death March
is Murphy’s account of an unprepared and underequipped Filipino-American force attempting to defend
the Philippines against a numerically superior and
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2015

better-equipped Imperial Japanese army. He contends
that poor leadership by Gen. MacArthur, in addition to
climate and language issues within the Filipino forces,
exacerbated the dire situation. Murphy’s experience
as an English teacher in Japan provides the author
with an insight of Japanese history and the culture
that contributed to the Japanese mindset pertaining
to military personnel and civilians vanquished in war.
Less compelling is the author’s attempt to marginalize the Japanese brutality against Allied prisoners of
war—and the local Filipino populace—by discrediting the eyewitness accounts of survivors and the
local populace. While other factors contributed to the
suffering by those forced to endure the Bataan Death
March, Murphy ignores the fact that almost 40 percent
of Allied prisoners died in Japanese confinement.
Conspicuously absent are eyewitness accounts from the
Japanese soldiers who participated in the Death March.
The only Japanese accounts consist of the trial testimony of Japanese army officers at Gen. Homma’s war
crimes trial in 1945.
Murphy persuasively tells the story of the Bataan
Death March—and those who endured it. Inside the
Bataan Death March may be the most comprehensive
study of the Bataan Death March in decades. I would
highly recommend this book to those interested in the
Pacific theater of war or the Imperial Japanese army.
Jesse McIntyre III, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

LINCOLN’S CODE: The Laws of War in
American History
John Fabian Witt, Free Press, New York,
2013, 512 pages

W

hile visiting the former Confederate
Richmond following its seizure by
Union forces, President Lincoln counseled operational commander Gen. Godfrey Weitzel,
saying, “If I were you, I’d let ‘em up easy.” Along
with political intuition and foresight for life after
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