The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. The US army For the next three months, the combined U.S.-Filipino army held out despite a lack of naval and air support. Finally, on April 9, approximately 75,000 troops crippled by starvation and disease, U.S. General Edward King Jr. surrendered.
Company D of the 192nd Tank Battalion, an Army National Guard unit from Harrodsburg, Kentucky was part of the forces who surrendered to the Japanese and were taken on the 90-mile Bataan Death March which was a brutal march with no food and water. As POWs these men provided forced labor for Japanese companies. Of the 66 young men who were part of Company D, 37 returned after the war.
Iris Chang had just finished her book Chinese in America which her publisher had asked her to write. There was some criticism that she was not a scholar of Chinese American history and there were so many other books written by people in the discipline. In addition, it certainly did not sell as well as the Rape of Nanking. So despite the impact that writing such books had on her personally, she went back to writing about another war atrocity. She was interviewing members of Company D at the time of her death.
Iris Chang wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times which sought reparations for the 5,000 servicemen still living who were used as slave labor by the Japanese for companies such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Nippon Steel. This was in the aftermath of 9/11 where Japan was a prominent member of the Coalition of the Willing. Three ambassadors for Japan rebutted her piece. One reader responded if we asked for reparations for our soldiers then Japan could ask for reparations for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.