‘Raw Individualists’: American Soldiers on the Bataan Death March Reconsidered

Abstract

The Bataan Death March has entered historical consciousness as one of the four great Japanese atrocities during WWII. Along with the Rape of Nanjing, the Burma-Siam Death Railway, and the Rape of Manila, it stands as one of the ultimate measures of twentieth-century wartime barbarity. Both primary and secondary sources share a central preoccupation with Japanese behaviour and therefore assume American prisoners were little more than a passive presence during this episode. In this essay I examine the Bataan Death March from a new vantage point, asking salient questions that lead to modi?ed understanding: who were these Americans, and what kind of soldiers, at war’s dawn for the US, did they make? What features of their cultural make-up help explain their behaviour? What were the fault lines in the allied, Filipino-American force that faced the Japanese Army? This article explores the numerous problems the American forces in the Philippines faced: the hybrid nature of the army, the tension between career soldiers and recent draftees and poor training and leadership. These problems, American soldiers’ cultural predisposition, and military inexperience all combined to render them signi?cantly more vulnerable to Japanese cruelty on the Death March than they otherwise would have been.     

Gaston Paris. August 9th, 1839–March 5th, 1903

RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND HERESY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. By the Rev. F. W. BUSSELL, D.D. London: Robert Scott. 1918. Reviewed by J. Kennedy.

SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE TAIN AGE AND OTHER STUDIES. By M. E. DOBBS. Price 2s. 6d. net. Dundalk.. 1917. Reviewed by J. Baudi?.

THE MEGALITHIC CULTURE OF INDONESIA, by W. J. PERRY, B.A. Manchester: University Press. Longmans, Green &; Co. 1918 Reviewed by E. Sidney Hartland.     

Le Marché au Cœur de L’Invention Muséale?

Before Vivant Denon, the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun played a crucial role in the creation of the Louvre collections, despite the revolutionary discourse which opposed the market to the museum. Lebrun's position as a polemicist is interpreted here as a strategy of self-presentation which made possible the controversial birth of the figure of the museum expert. With Lebrun, the Louvre imposed itself as a public space of artistic expertise, where values imported from the market - such as attributionism, materiality, and authenticity - became prominent in the evaluation of paintings.     

Response of the outer ionosphere to the magnetic storm of 20–22 March 1990

Measurements of the thermal plasma parameters in the interval 17–23 March 1990, made within the scope of the ACTIVE Project, were analysed to study the response of the outer ionosphere to the storm with SSC at 22.45 UT on 20 March. These measurements in the morning sector at altitudes around 2000 km clearly reflect the enhanced geomagnetic activity. They allow us to estimate the radial depth to which the plasmasphere has been affected by increased magnetospheric convection and at which a new equatorial plasmapause has formed. They also provide the possibility of monitoring the initial phase of recovery.The measurements in the dusk altitudes of 500–1000 km indicate a distincttrough in electron concentration and also a trough of light ions under relatively quiet, as well as under disturbed, conditions. The position of the equatorial edge of these troughs and the position of electron temperature peaks enable us to judge whether a plasmaspheric bulge has formed, and whether an inner plasmapause exists.     

Whistling the Death March? Listening in to the Acoustics of Ludwig Leichhardt's Australian Exploration

Scholars considering the acoustics of exploration have focused on how explorers heard Australian space in terms of silence, to argue this silenced Indigenous presence, or that stillness, was incongruous with how a place to be colonised should sound. I focus on the acoustically attuned Ludwig Leichhardt, a science-poet indebted to the Enlightenment, but also engaged with the German Romantic legacy. The manifold acoustic dimensions of expeditioning – including music – were important to him in different ways. The acoustic world could be assayed and harnessed in ways that were often consistent with colonialism. But there was also something fugitive about acoustics. They could mark a site for emotional engagement with place, and sometimes embryonic cross-cultural dialogue. Yet the possibilities were not always heard and, in line with Romanticism, the acoustic could drag down expeditioners’ spirits just as it could buoy them up. It could baffle or be a site for Indigenous resistance.     

Professor R.N. Dandekar March 17, 1909–December 11, 2001

Indo-Iranian Journal -     

25 April 1994 – 17 March 2011: symbolic dates of the past and Italy's transition

The twenty-year political period on which this paper focuses opened and closed with two highly symbolic commemorations. On 25 April 1994, just a few weeks after the electoral victory of the political alliance led by Silvio Berlusiconi (Pole of Liberty), more than 500,000 people took to the streets to commemorate the anti-Fascist foundations of the post-war Italian Republic: this was a timely reaction that ran counter to the climate of disaffection that since the 1980s had marked the annual celebrations of the Liberation. The second commemoration was on the night of 11 March 2011, when thousands of citizens took part in the ‘All Night Tricolor’ parties that marked the start of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification. The scale of popular participation was in part a response to President Ciampi's commitment to re-launching a sense of ‘civil religion’, to the variety of ways in which the event was turned into a spectacle and the work of the organizing committee. But it also reflected the ways in which the significance of the commemoration of the distant founding of the Kingdom of Italy was considered to be ‘above’ (even ‘anti’) party politics. Both commemorations were rooted deeply in Italian history but took place in very different institutional circumstances: this essays compares the two commemorations and how they illustrate the changing political cultures in the time of the Italian transition.     

Anschluss: The Chamberlain Government and the First Test of Appeasement,February–March 1938

The union of Austria and Germany in March 1938 - the Anschluss - forced by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany with the acquiescence of Italy was the first test of the appeasement strategy of the Neville Chamberlain government. Austro-German Anschluss did not occur unexpectedly: after Habsburg collapse in 1918, it had been desired by pan-Germans in Austria and Germany but denied by the Paris Peace Settlement; its possibility arose a couple of times in the early 1930s; and by 1937, the majority of Austrians seemed willing to unite with their Nazi neighbour. Even before Chamberlain became Premier in May 1937 and changed the strategic basis of British foreign policy, the Foreign Office and other ministries wrestled over whether to thwart Anschluss and, until 1937, worked to keep the two German-speaking Powers apart. After Chamberlain took power, the willingness to oppose abated as Hitler's pan-German solution spoke to both national self-determination and Austrian ambivalence about independence. Chamberlain's government submitted expecting that they might use the absorption of Austria as a means to divide Nazi Germany from Fascist Italy. ‘Good relations’ with the dictators existed as a cardinal element of Chamberlain's brand of appeasement.     

Midday recovery of the polar cap absorption of 19–21 March 1990: a case study

The effect of the midday recovery of absorption (MDR) during the polar cap absorption (PCA) of 19–21 March 1990 is investigated using data from 25 riometer stations in both hemispheres. The measured variations of absorption are compared with those calculated from a model. Three main aspects are considered:

• 1.(1) The solar and geophysical conditions under which the effect appears,
• 2.(2) The essential morphological features of the phenomenon,
• 3.(3) The relative contributions of (a) diurnal variations in the geomagnetic cut-off energy and (b) an anisotropic pitch-angle distribution of the solar protons to the development of the MDR.

The principal morphological features of the MDR effect are found to be as follows:

• 1.(a) the width of the area affected by MDR is about 10° of invariant latitude,
• 2.(b) there are two regions, respectively below and above 65° latitude, in which the MDR properties are different,
• 3.(c) the maximum duration of the MDR effect is about 12 h,
• 4.(d) there are distinct geomagnetic conjugucy effects in MDR.

There are solid reasons to suggest that the MDR at latitude 65–70° is due to the combined influence of a diurnal variation of geomagnetic rigidity, and the pitch-angle anisotropy of the solar protons. The MDR at lower latitudes (Λ = 60–65°) seems to be produced primarily by diurnal variations of the cut-off rigidity.