Enjoy Thunder On Bataan: The First American Tank Battles Of World War II Rendered By Donald L. Caldwell Listed As Softcover

book presents the straight facts about how and why the tragedy of Bataan occurred including mistakes made by our military leaders.
Many men endured unspeakable torture, starvation, and maltreatment at the hand of their Japanese captors, True stories are told that are horrific to hear, Then after the war our soldiers had a difficult time getting our government to take, at least some responsibility for what happened.
Beside my general interest in American history and WWhistory, I took interest in this book after touring the Philippine memorials at the site of the Bataan Death March, hosted by the grandson of a Filipino survivor of that march.




This book includes much more than a recounting of the military events in the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in the immediate wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.
That in itself is interesting and took me beyond my very sketchy knowledge of that aspect of the Pacific War, However, there are three other distinct sections of the book of equal length and importance,

First, there is a detailed account of the formation of these National Guard tank units in the period before our entrance into the war.
This includes individual accounts of both officers and enlisted men, describing their lives and how they came to join up,

Then, after the account of the military actions, there is a section that tells of the fate of the men and officers as prisoners of war after the surrender.
We are told about the Bataan Death March, the conditions in the various prisoner of war/slave labor camps, the horrors of the deadly "Hell Ships" that transported prisoners away from the advancing American forces, and finally the liberation of the surviving POWs less than half their original number.


Finally, there is a helpful and sobering account of the lives of many of the individual men as they returned home: Some were broken physically and/or emotionally beyond recovery, some went on to live successful lives, but it seems that just about all were forgotten or betrayed by the government that sent them unprepared to the Philippines and then failed to support them, either during the war or after.
It was an interesting read and very sad If I was rating this strictly as military history I'd have given this work a higher rating, as Caldwell has pulled together a strong account of the U.
S. Provisional Tank Group sent to the Philippines in, Also, as a community history, it's actually pretty good, and one presumes that Caldwell drew on materials the late Iris Chang pulled together for her own proposed book on thend Tank Battalion Caldwell received intellectual support from Chang's family.


Where I mark Caldwell down is that there are places where he needed to be more forthright about his own political and strategic perspective, seeing as he ultimately considers the American defense of the Philippines to have been a worthless sacrifice.
In the bigger picture that's a defensible position which is hard to argue with, However, I expect the argument to be actually made throwaway snide comments about the American strategic leadership of the time and taking umbrage at how "supposed isolationists" were pilloried for their position doesn't cut it.
Detail

! The amount of information is incredible compared to other stories of the war in the Philippines, Information on the officer s decisions are laid out so that the reader can make judgements, The author must have been to a lot of the locations they are described well, This was a very disappointing book, made worse because the subject matter has incredible potential, The book is framed around six National Guard units formed into armored companies just before World War II, The first couple of chapters try to set the stage, however, the author mainly manages to literally repeat the same descriptions six different times.
Additionally, in attempting to describe how the Army was organized in, he shows that, either he did not research the topic, or he wasn't paying attention when writing.
It seemed as if he was attempting to mimic Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldier, I believe That Caldwell cast his net too wide, and it seemed to have gotten away from him,

As an example, on p,he speaks of the National Defense Act of, and it's impact on the formation of Army divisions, He writes, "Eighteen states were to maintain divisions having the same organization as those of the regular army: called "square" divisions, these were essentially infantry units but contained one special troops battalion with one tank company, etc.
. . " First, the army only had infantry formations because infantry and cavalry were the main maneuver units prior to World War II, and everything else supported these units.
They were called square divisions because they were made up of four regiments, When the army went to divisions of three regiments in, those divisions were called, . . triangular divisions. In chapteron page, while referencing the offduty activities in Louisville, the author writes, "One veteran fondly recalled "Dirty Nell", " That sentence was jarring because it has no relation to anything before or after, There are statements throughout the book that either don't really provide any detail or background on what is being said, or the statements are jarring because there is no lead in.
When the author describes the combat in the Philippines, it is quite obvious that he is trying to shoehorn in the experiences of the National Guardsmen, and instead of adding to the narrative, the way it is written distracts significantly from the story he is trying to tell.
From the way this book is laid out and how it is written, it doesn't seem like the author had enough material on the six groups of Guardsmen to justify this standalone account, as he relies on a narrative of larger events, using the tanks brigades as almost an insignificant detail to some of the events.


The bibliography is not very well laid out, Caldwell uses a great many sources, I just don't think he had enough material to justify the central topic, In looking through the bibliography, I don't see where he made any use of the S/Sjournals of any of the units engaged.
Samuel Milner's Victory in Papua is a good example of what could be done, This book covers the the tactical fight that the National Guard'sd Infantry Division had in Papua, down to squad level, and Milner made extensive use of operational journals.
All in all, a lost opportunity, The American Provisional Tank Group had been in the Philippines only three weeks when the Japanese attacked the islands hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor.
One of the tankmen parked his halftrack on a runway and shot down a Japanese Zero that day, but the group's first tankontank action indeed the first American armor battle of World War II would come two weeks later.
Sent north to meet the Japanese landings in Lingayen Gulf, the men of the group, still learning their way around an Mtank, found themselves thrust into a critical role when the Philippine Army could not hold back the Japanese.
The next day, General MacArthur ordered the retreat to Bataan, and over the next two weeks, the PTG, proving itself indispensable, formed a blocking force to cover the retreat and dealt the enemy tanks such a defeat that the Japanese would be timid with their armor for the rest of the campaign.
During January, February, and March, the light tanks of the PTG patrolled Bataan's beaches and, in a new role for tanks, encircled and destroyed Japanese penetrations and small amphibious landings these tactics would be used by other units later in the war.
By April the situation had become untenable, and,Americans, along with,Filipinos, surrendered in one of the worst defeats in U, S. military history. The Provisional Tank Group ceased to exist, and its men endured the Bataan Death March, the torture and starvation of POW camps, the hell ships that took them to Japan and Manchuria for slave labor, and the Palawan massacre where prisoners were lit on fire by the Japanese.
By the end of the war, only half the PTG's men were alive, Thecampaign in the Philippines has taken a backseat in the popular historical imagination to what came after the Death March, the prison camps, the rescue attempts and the role of tanks in that campaign has been largely ignored, in no small part because American field commander Jonathan Wainwright was an excavalryman who did not like tanks and gave them short shrift in his postwar writings.
In an evocatively written book that conjures the sights, sounds, and smells of battle in the Philippines, Caldwell restores tanks to their rightful place in the history of this campaign while also giving attention to the horrors that followed.
He has conducted impressive primary research to bring to life the short but noteworthy combat history of the Provisional Tank Group, and he has dug even deeper to tell the stories of the individuals who did the fighting, selecting soldiers from each of the group's six companies and recounting, throughout the book, the entire arc of their service, from enlistment, training, and combat to imprisonment, liberation, and return home.
It gives the book strong humaninterest threads to follow from the first chapter to the last, .