The Aggie tradition of Muster stretches back to the earliest days of the college. But an extraordinary Muster took place during World War II that would change and further hallow the service thereafter. In the spring of 1942, with Japanese forces poised to overrun the Allies on the Philippine island of Corregidor, Maj. Thomas Dooley, class of 1935, and Maj. Gen. George F. Moore, class of 1908, compiled a list of twenty-five other Aggies under their command, which constituted a “roll call” in the midst of the bombardment. Dooley later told a journalist about the list, and the resulting article spread rapidly throughout the United States, forever connecting Dooley to this enduring Aggie tradition. The breadth of Dooley’s wartime experiences, however, goes far beyond this single Muster. On the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dooley began the first of six handwritten journals—more than 500 pages—that he continued to update throughout the war. As aide-de-camp to Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, the new commander of the Allied forces after Gen. Douglas MacArthur was ordered to Australia, Dooley had regular contact with various commanders and headquarters throughout Bataan and Corregidor. His journals reveal the inside story of the battles of Bataan and Corregidor and with it the capture, imprisonment, and struggle for survival of tens of thousands of American prisoners of war. Dooley’s journals—dutifully maintained even as he was a prisoner—are at once witty, articulate, stark, and often reflective. Dooley died in 2006, and his journals now reside in the Texas A&M University archives. Jerry C. Cooper has painstakingly transcribed, edited, and annotated these remarkable documents, shedding new light on daily life in the storied history of the war in the Pacific.

A wholesome war story to stir up the patriot in all of us.

Follow the men who fought America's first battle in World War II--their will, their resolve, the odds against them, their surrender, the Death March, their imprisonment, and the few who escaped to continue the fight.After the destruction of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. Army on Bataan was forced to surrender to the Japanese and70,000 American and Filipino soldiers became Prisoners of War. Over the next three years, almost two-thirds of them would die in Japanese custody. However, a few hundred Americans refused to surrender, evaded the Japanese Army, and slipped into the jungle to hide and await the return of General MacArthur. Some joined Filipino guerrilla bands hoping to help the war effort during the months they would wait. But months turned into years, and there was no sign of General MacArthur or his army. At home in the United States their families waited for them, not knowing if their men were dead or alive. Bataan Diary is the remarkable true chronicle of the American prisoners, evaders and guerrillas, trapped in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation.

A volume on the liberation of the Philippines that concentrates on events from July 1944 through March 1945.

Like many other young American men during the depression-era 1930s, Gene Boyt entered Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Later, after receiving an ROTC commission in the Army Engineers and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Missouri School of Mines, Boyt joined the Allied forces in the Pacific Theater. While building runways and infrastructure in the Philippines in 1941, Boyt enjoyed the regal life of an American officer stationed in a tropical paradise--but not for long. When the United States surrendered the Philippines to Japan in April 1942, Boyt became a prisoner of war, suffering unthinkable deprivation and brutality at the hands of the ruthless Japanese guards. One of the last accounts to come from a Bataan survivor, Boyt’s story details the infamous Bataan Death March and his subsequent forty-two months in Japanese internment camps. In this fast-paced narrative, Boyt’s voice conveys the quiet courage of the generation of men who fought and won history’s greatest armed conflict.

This major new work about World War II exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate. "Tears in the Darkness" makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides.

Focuses on America's first engagement in WWII. Unpublished letters, written and oral testimony of over 350 veterans restores these gruelling months into a historical record.

This epic story recounts the exceptional valor and endurance of American troops that battled Japanese forces in the Philippines during World War II. Bill Sloan, “a master of the combat narrative” (Dallas Morning News), tells the story of the outnumbered American soldiers and airmen who stood against invading Japanese forces in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II, and continued to resist through three harrowing years as POWs. For four months they fought toe to toe against overwhelming enemy numbers—and forced the Japanese to pay a heavy cost in blood. After the surrender came the infamous Bataan Death March, where up to eighteen thousand American and Filipino prisoners died as they marched sixty-five miles under the most hellish conditions imaginable. Interwoven throughout this gripping narrative are the harrowing personal experiences of dozens of American soldiers, airmen, and Marines, based on exclusive interviews with more than thirty survivors. Undefeated chronicles one of the great sagas of World War II—and celebrates a resounding triumph of the human spirit.

A forgotten account, written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which vividly portrays the valor, sacrifice, suffering, and liberation of the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor through the eyes of one survivor. The personal memoir of Colonel David L. Hardee, first drafted at sea from April-May 1945 following his liberation from Japanese captivity, is a thorough treatment of his time in the Philippines. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Captured in April 1942 after the American surrender on Bataan, Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps. A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan in 1944, making him one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war. As a primary account written almost immediately after his liberation, Hardee’s memoir is fresh, vivid, and devoid of decades of faded memories or contemporary influences associated with memoirs written years after an experience. This once-forgotten memoir has been carefully edited, illustrated and annotated to unlock the true depths of Hardee’s experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War.