Young, Donald J. 1930-

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YOUNG, Donald J. 1930-

PERSONAL: Born 1930.

ADDRESSES: Office—Fort MacArthur Military Museum Association, 3601 Gaffey Street, P.O. Box 27777, San Pedro, CA 90731.

CAREER: Military writer. Director of Fort MacArthur Military Museum, San Pedro, CA.

WRITINGS:

The Lion's Share, Avranches (Aptos, CA), 1990.

December 1941: America's First Twenty-five Days at War, Pictorial Histories (Missoula, MT), 1992.

The Battle of Bataan: A History of the Ninety-Day Siege and Eventual Surrender of 75,000 Filipino and United States Troops to the Japanese in World War II, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 1992.

First Twenty-four Hours of War in the Pacific, Burd Street Press (Shippensburg, PA), 1998.

SIDELIGHTS:

Donald J. Young has written accounts of World War II that put major events under a magnifying glass. In The Battle of Bataan: A History of the Ninety-Day Siege and Eventual Surrender of 75,000 Filipino and United States Troops to the Japanese in World War II, he reexamines the Allied defense of the Bataan peninsula from December 1941 to April 1942. His analysis in the First Twenty-four Hours of War in the Pacific is limited, chronologically and geographically, to show how the events of December 7, 1941, were linked to early Japanese domination in the Pacific theater.

The defeat of U.S.-Filipino troops at Bataan was the largest surrender in U.S. military history and a terrible chapter in the country's military annals. The Allied troops on Bataan outnumbered their Japanese attackers but were unprepared and unequipped to protect their position. The Filipinos who made up three-quarters of the forces often had less than a month's training; and they were then asked to fight with inadequate supplies of ammunition, fuel, and machinery. During the course of fighting these soldiers also faced terrible conditions that led to diseases such as dysentery and malaria, as well as starvation.

The Battle of Bataan reveals that U.S. accounts of the battle have underemphasized the courage, ingenuity, and suffering of the Filipino army in the desperate months on Bataan. Young provides information gathered during twelve years of research, including interviews with Ambrosio Pena, a retired chief historian for the Philippine Army. The account also includes fifty photographs, twenty-nine hand-drawn maps, and a poem by Lt. Henry G. Lee, who died on a Japanese prison ship.

Young's work was welcomed for its thoroughness and insight. In the Military Review, W. D. Bushnell, a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, called it "a remarkably comprehensive and evenhanded history." Bushnell commended the book as "The complete story of a terrible battle filled with astonishing human suffering and sacrifice. Young brings the heroes and cowards, victory and despair, sacrifice and escape to life with stark clarity and vivid description." Library Journal's Michael Coleman wrote that the account "brings together all facets of the story."

In a review for Choice, C. J. Weeks offered a different view of the book. The reviewer agreed that Young does a good job of showing the parts played by the Filipino army and the U.S. military, but felt that there are important omissions. Weeks suggested that the Japanese side of the story is missing and that a tactical focus avoids the question "How could such a disaster have been permitted to occur and who was responsible for it?"

In First Twenty-four Hours of War in the Pacific Young takes a narrower focus, reviewing the events of December 7, 1941, except for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This includes happenings in Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Washington, D.C., that show how the Japanese quickly established air superiority in the Pacific due to strength and luck. The greatest emphasis is placed on the ruin of American air forces in the Philippines within hours of receiving reports on Pearl Harbor. Booklist's Roland Green explained that such information would "rate only cursory mention in larger works" and that First Twenty-four Hours of War in the Pacific "remedies the oversimplification of other accounts." A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that "concentration on a single theater diminishes reader confusion." The book was further described as "a narrative that successfully walks the edge of entropy, while the limited focus also offers case studies in the fog and friction of modern conflict."