Here, from Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, is the story of the worst defeat in American military history, the four-month fight for the tiny peninsula of Bataan in the Philippine Islands – the first major land battle for America in World War II. On April 9, 1942, more than 76,000 men under American command surrendered to their Japanese captors, who set them walking sixty-six miles to prison camp, a notorious walk that came to be known as "The Bataan Death March."
"Tears In the Darkness" is history written as story, thousands of sources and hundreds of interviews carefully woven into a tight narrative that recreates those dramatic days and the men – Americans, Japanese and Filipinos – who lived them.
"Tears In The Darkness" has scores of characters, but Ben Steele, a Montana cowboy before the war and professor of art after, is the central figure in our book. Very much like a protagonist in a novel, his individual story holds all the other stories together. He is the only American veteran, out of the two hundred we interviewed, who experienced almost every aspect of the battle, the surrender, the death march and its aftermath. He emerged from the experience with his sense of humor, and perspective, intact -- a man of remarkable insight and grace, and the "star" of our 
