During Japan's invasion of the Philippines in 1942, Capt. Henry Lassiter (Lee Bowman), Sgt. Bill Dane (Robert Taylor) and a diverse group of American soldiers are chosen to blow up a bridge on the Bataan peninsula and keep the Japanese from rebuilding it.
Since it was basically a tale of defeat, the nervous producers emphasized heroism, but later, under criticism of fabricating the facts with mechanically packed incidents, MGM was forced to acknowledge "some melodramatic flaws and technical mistakes."
