The Voice of Bataan

The Battle of Bataan represented the most intense phase of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines during World War II. It began in January 1942, when forces of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy invaded Luzon along with several islands in the Philippine Archipelago after the bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, and culminated in the fall of Bataan on April 9, 1942.

The present volume, which was first published in 1943, is a collection of poetry by Filipino-American novelist and poet Carlos Bulosan, written during the Second World War. It is his tribute to the soldiers who died fighting in the Battle of Bataan.

“Poems of Bataan—of that ‘small island of ashes and dead bodies,’ of the soldiers that resisted to the last man, of the hope of freedom once again. Impassioned lyrical expression of that struggle and the refusal to be conquered”—Kirkus Review