Bataan, Battle of (1942): Books, Audiobooks, and DVDs owned by Avn Tech Library

Throughout history men and women have fought, endured, and sometimes emerged victorious though the odds were against them. What conditions must exist to enable relatively small or weak forces to challenge and even overcome the strong? Here are twenty historical examples, from 1777 to the present, that reveal both the common themes and the exceptional aspects of those achievements.

85 page book on the Battle of Bataan.

This book is a personal account of Col. Richard Carvel Mallonee's experiences with the 21st Field ARtillery Regiment, 21st Division, Philippine ARmy, 1941-42. "The Gathering Storm," relates events in the Philippines just before Pearl Harbor. The main part of the book, "Four Months and a Day," concerns the war in Lu8zon and the Bataan Peninsula: beach defense and the withdrawal. "The Death March," describes the situation just after surrender. Finally, "Guests of the Emperor."

The soldier reading these pages would do well to reflect on the wisdom of the statement exhibited in a Japanese shrine: "Woe unto him who has not tasted defeat." Victory too often leads to overconfidence and erases the memory of mistakes. Defeat brings into sharp focus the causes that led to failure and provides a fruitful field of study for those soldiers and laymen who seek in the past lessons for the future. The statesman and the informed citizen reading these pages will realize that our military means as well as our estimates and plans must always be in balance with our long-range national policy. This lesson signposted by the Battle of Manila Bay; the Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898 when we decided to keep the Philippines; the Washington Conference of 1921-22; and the Manchurian Crisis of 1931 we ignored before Pearl Harbor. The result was defeat on the field of battle and the loss of the Philippine Islands.

Based on exclusive interviews with more than thirty survivors, Undefeated tells the courageous story of the outnumbered American soldiers and airmen who stood against invading Japanese forces in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II, and continued to resist through three harrowing years as POWs.

“A fine, simply told and pitiless story of doom and defeat. To this, the author has added the story of his long captivity, his release, and final glory--the Congressional Medal of Honor.”– New York Times

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 Unpublished letters, written and oral testimony of over 350 veterans restores these gruelling months into a historical record.

On the morning of April 9, 1942, 75,000 American and Filipino soldiers on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese. Thus ended one of the most brutal and intense encounters of World War II.From over 120 sources, the history of the Battle of Bataan is told: the efforts of the eight-plane air force and small PT boat navy to defend the peninsula, the Japanese strategy, the various conflicts and battles, and the role of the Philippine army in the three months of brutal fighting.

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.

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. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, 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.

General MacArthur fled the Philippines on orders & abandoned thousands of American men, women & children who were there when WW II started. NPT is the story that details the experiences of men who survived the "DEATH MARCH" & the siege of Corregidor. They were starved, beaten, brutally murdered; tortured, suffocated in crammed freight cars; they died in the stinking holds of Jap freighters attacked by American submarines. American, British, Zealander, & Australian POWs suffered in the disease infested camps in the tropics & the frigid camps of Manchuria, these men still spelled trouble for their Jap captors. They became the sneakiest saboteurs that ever fought a war in a POW camp & survived. Included are the only published rosters of the MUKDEN, MANCHURIA POWs, & the story of the MUKDEN, POW camp bombing on December 7, 1944 by a B-29 crew member. Offered by AQUATAUR, Box 5163, Fullerton, CA 92635. (714) 879-4014. Discounts available.

We Band of Angels is the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces. Caught up in all of this were ninety-nine Army and Navy nurses--the first unit of American women ever sent into the middle of a battle. The "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor"--as the newspapers called them--became the only group of American women captured and imprisoned by an enemy. And the story of their trials on a bloody battlefield, their desperate flight to avoid capture and their ultimate surrender, imprisonment, liberation and homecoming is a story of endurance, professionalism and raw pluck. On the tiny island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, the Japanese took them prisoner. For three long years in an internment camp they kept to their mission and stuck together. In the end, it was this loyalty, this sense of purpose, womanhood and honor that both challenged and saved them. Through interviews with survivors and through unpublished letters, diaries and journals, Elizabeth M. Norman vividly re-creates that time, telling the story in richly drawn portraits and in a dramatic narrative delivered in the voices of the women who were there.

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. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, 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.

Based on exclusive interviews with more than thirty survivors, Undefeated tells the courageous story of the outnumbered American soldiers and airmen who stood against invading Japanese forces in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II, and continued to resist through three harrowing years as POWs.

Featuring first-person accounts from survivors of the conflict along with an unpublished diary, cartoons, and Japanese propaganda footage, this documentary chronicles the fall of the Philippines and the horrors of the Bataan Death March in the early months of World War II.

Pictorial record of some of the greatest battles of World War II, from the European to the Pacific theaters.