Bataan finally fell. In a military sense the big news meant that 150,000-200,000 Jap fighters were now released, to be used on other fronts. But that was not the fact that struck home to the U.S. Not until the last burned-out man put down his rifle on the soil of a Bataan that was now Japanese did Americans learn their lesson.
Bataan taught the U.S. a thing it had forgotten: pride of arms, pride in what the young men could do when tested.
Bataan taught America a humiliating thing, too: that U.S. soldiers could be beaten, could be taught the fullest ignominy of unconditional surrender. And they could be given this lesson by the funny, myopic, bucktoothed, bandylegged, pint-sized Jap—who, it suddenly appeared, was taut-muscled, courageous, vastly menacing.
The Jap had not changed. He was the same fellow who ran the curio shop in Rockefeller Center, or fished off California's coast. What had changed was a U.S. state of mind almost as old as the Republic. Before Pearl Harbor there was only one world to U.S. citizens. The world, the only world that Americans believed in or cared about, was the U.S. The rest of mankind was in an American sense, unreal. The American might-and did-throng the tourist spots like London and Paris, "discover" Bali or the Dalmatian Coast, but he could never quite believe that these outlandish foreign parts could have a real connection with his world.
The Jap lived in the U.S. and worked against it, but his image was even mistier than the forms of the white men of Europe. Even after he had smashed at Pearl Harbor, his true form did not emerge. Americans did not yet believe what Pearl Harbor and Wake and Guam told them. They did not believe it because these first reverses of the war had a newsreel quality of unreality.
Bataan's end was different. Here was no blow that could be repaired in a navy yard. With Bataan went 36,000 or more courageous U.S. soldiers-heroes, three out of four of whom were sons of the Philippines. They had been worn to hollow shadows of men by 15 days of smashing by the finest troops of the Son of Heaven. Because the U.S. had been well satisfied with the world it lived in, had pinched its boundless flood of pennies and sat alone, those U.S. soldiers had stumbled ragged, sleepless and half-starved through the last days of the most humiliating defeat in U.S. history. In no previous battle had so many U.S. fighting men gone down before a foreign enemy, and seldom had any beaten U.S. soldiers been in such pitiable condition-believing until the last hour of destruction that their country could and surely would send them aid.
The U.S. had known the end was near. But it had not and could not, beforehand, taste the taste and smell the smell of crashing defeat.
The end was slow and agonizing and struck home the harder because Lieut. General Jonathan M. Wainwright's communiques were terse and professional. For 15 days the Jap struck at Bataan with everything he had. Dive-bombers blew great craters in forward positions. Artillery roared endlessly day & night; the nervous chatter of Jap machine guns rattled until it rasped men's nerves like a file. The Jap even struck again at the hospital, scattered the wounded like straws.