“In the Story of That Defeat There Is Written in Very Large Letters a Victory”: World War II, the Fall of Bataan, and the Meaning of Surrender in America

On April 9, 1942, American and Filipino forces on Bataan surrendered to the Japanese. One month later the garrison on Corregidor also surrendered. These two losses were part of the string of Allied defeats that marked the first six months after Japan and Germany declared war on the United States. Indeed, the nation’s first few months of combat were the darkest and most uncertain days of the war, but final Allied victory in 1945 has muted the personal, political, and cultural significance of surrender and defeat as significant ordeals for some Americans.

After Congress declared war on Japan in December 1941, President Roosevelt assured the public of its “inevitable triumph,” and they heard him. His administration produced an abundance of patriotic rhetoric assuring the nation it would win the war. Early losses in the war were distressing, to be sure, but in “an American culture of victory,” they were merely temporary setbacks. Defeat is thus not part of America’s grand narrative of World War II, and it is a subject few historians have dealt with when it comes to discussions of how Americans experienced and remembered the war. Reckoning with the legacies of the Bataan defeat helps fill this historiographical gap.

I argue the surrender on Bataan was a defining moment for many Americans, and it shaped both how they experienced and how they remembered the war. Whether or not they knew the men who were taken prisoner on Bataan and Corregidor, all Americans had to come to terms with what surrender meant for American military might, the likelihood of Allied victory in the war, and long-held convictions about the nation’s martial superiority. Furthermore, the nation’s response to the capture and prolonged captivity of its soldiers—approximately 12,000 of them from the Philippines—tells us a great deal about how Americans felt about the status of prisoners of war. Rhetorical and visual renderings of these men show how wartime civilians made room for prisoners of war in their imagination of what American men at war should look like and how they should act.

This poster uses a selection of photographs, editorial cartoons, memorials, monuments, films, art installations, and other forms of media to show what surrender meant to Americans during World War II, and how they continued to grapple with the consequences of defeat in the postwar era. It traces private, public, and official responses to the Bataan campaign and subsequent surrender, and examines where civilian, military, and political reactions either converged or diverged. Importantly, I show that understanding the ways Americans managed defeat, surrender, and captivity gives us a more complete and complex understanding of their experience of World War II.