Free Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman

Platoon moved up Route 3, close to the town of Agoo, a short distance from the shores of Lingayen Gulf. The Americans rode to battle in M3 “light” tanks, thinly armored vehicles with a small single-shot cannon and an air-cooled machine gun, a cranky and sometimes unreliable weapon. The M3’s turret was tall, giving the vehicle a high profile, an easy and inviting target, and its armor was thin and presented a flat instead of an angled surface to deflect incoming rounds.
    Morin’s platoon rolled forward unprotected. The Philippine infantry had fled south, and American units were regrouping or engaging other enemy spearheads. Morin looked on his mission as a kind of “last-ditch effort” to stem the Japanese advance onto the central plain—five tanks against a battalion, perhaps even a regiment of the enemy.
    â€œWe have to hold them, drive them out, drive them back or destroy them,” the lieutenant told his men.
    The column moved slowly down the road. Agoo was just ahead, a mile or so. The sun was shining and a breeze was blowing in from the gulf. Tanks and men moved forward in a miasma of road dust, exhaust fumes, and fear. Then all at once the enemy found them.
    Shells slammed into the American column and “ripped through” the tanks “like a knife through butter.” In the fusillade, Morin’s lead tank lost its front hatch, exposing the men inside to rifle and machine-gun fire. 23
    Morin jumped down from his turret and tried to refit the hatch, but now the tank was ablaze, engulfed in searing flames and choking black smoke. Morin ordered his men to dismount and, hoping for rescue, looked anxiously over his shoulder for the rest of the column.
    The other tanks had also been hit and had turned and were starting to withdraw. No way to reach them now. Morin and his crew were alone on the road. And in an instant the enemy was upon them.
    Four Japanese tanks trained their cannon and machine guns on the Americans now standing on the road in front of their disabled and burning machine. The lieutenant looked at the enemy guns, looked at his men, put his hands up.
    In that moment he felt disgrace rather than fear. He had surrendered—in all likelihood the first American taken prisoner in the Philippines in World War II—and he could not shake a captive’s sense of shame. 24
    The Japanese rushed forward and forced the Americans to their knees, then they put pistols to the prisoners’ heads. Kneeling there, Ben Morin looked for mercy in the eyes of the man pointing a gun at him. Finding none, he started to pray. 25
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    Hail Mary, full of grace
    The Lord is with thee . . .
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    BY THE END of December 22, the first day of the invasion, MacArthur’s army was fighting a tactical withdrawal, a “retreat” by any other name. He had set a skeleton army of native reservists in front of 43,000 invaders, many of them seasoned by four years of war in China. Now he was falling back, back through the divides in the mountains, back down the dusty roads and dirt trails of the central plain, back to one defensive line after another, until there was no place left to fall back to, no place but the peninsula of Bataan.
    The withdrawal had been planned well in advance, a complement to the old War Plan Orange, a plan MacArthur had originally rejected. He was back-pedaling before Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Imperial Army. Now came a second enemy landing, this one at Lamon Bay in southeastern Luzon. The Lamon force was pushing north, the Lingayen force south. The general’s grand scheme to defend the entire archipelago had left him between two pincers, and each claw had the same objective: close on the capital, catch MacArthur in the middle, and crush him. A textbook trap, as old as organized warfare.
    The way out of the trap was textbook as well. On December 22, as the Japanese were wading ashore, MacArthur cabled the War