Although my father was only four years old when the Japanese Army invaded his island in the Philippines in 1942, he remembers well their occupying presence over the ensuing three years.

For instance, there were village roundups in which an informant wearing a bag over his head would point out to his Japanese masters members of the resistance. The accused were then taken away, never to be seen again. When his school was converted into a local headquarters, my father sneaked onto the grounds, peered through a classroom window, and saw a Japanese interrogator wacking a guerrilla insurgent on the back with a two-by-four until he vomited blood.

Of course, that wasn't the worst of it. In the spring of 1942, on the main island of Luzon, facing unbeatable odds and with no relief in sight, General Edward P. King surrendered a force of 76,000 Americans and Filipinos to the Japanese Imperial Army--the largest surrender by an American general in history. The prisoners were then instructed to march toward a rail station where they would be transported to a prisoner-of-war camp. Little did the captives realize their journey would become a nightmarish 66-mile hike known as the Bataan Death March.