Phillipine Prison Break -- Review of 'Ghost Soldiers'

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides

From Goodreads:
"On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. A recent prison massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation."

As WWII non-fiction goes, this book went by pretty quickly. I had read some in passing about the Cabanatuan camp rescue, but I had the relative roles of the Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and partisans a bit muddled in my head. I'm glad the Fillipino guerillas got enough billing in here, such indigenous forces have a tendency to be forgotten by later story-tellers. I was a little surprised to come across the Alamo Scouts in the middle of the book with little earlier discussion of the unit or the massively important recon work they had already done.

The structure of alternating chapters between the Ranger's mission and the travails of the "Bastards of Bataan" works better than I would have thought. The details of life in Cabanatuan and other camps are pretty harrowing. That said, parts of me kept comparing these accounts to accounts from other camp complexes of the time...the life of an American in a Japanese POW camp was a vacation next to the Holocaust, or the Gulag. For the Chinese of cities like Nanking, the mere idea that the Japanese took prisoners would seem absurd.

Am I belittling these men their their travails? I don't mean to. I'm just trying to remind myself that Americans aren't anything astoundingly special that we should face this sort of abuse less than anyone else.

The single best aspect of Sides story is how well he captures the voices of the men involved. Especially when the prisoners speak, I can feel many of the same cadences and turns of phrase that my maternal grandfather used in some of his more unguarded and effusive moments. I can very much imagine him there among Bob Body and Dr. Hibbs and the other men instead of (relatively) safe as crew on a troopship out at sea.

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A Japanese POW's Pictoral Diary

A friend alerted me to this little treasure trove. It is very well presented collection of drawings made by a Japanese Air Corps soldier during his time as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union at the end of WWII.

It amazed me how positive this artist seemed to remain throughout the time he spent in Russia. The drawings feel more like those of the American Bill Mauldin than a soldier from a defeated empire.

P.O. Box 1142, WWII Interrogators Speak

There was a very nice little article in the Washington Post this past weekend about a group of veterans sharing their war-time stories with the American public. There have been many such articles, especially since Ken Burns turned such reminiscences into a 14-hour documentary.

But this group of men was a little different. These 80-90 year-olds were the US Army's professional interrogators in WWII. They worked at a facility known only by its mailing address, P.O. Box 1142, and tucked into Virginia's Fort Hunt, along the Potomac River near Washington, DC. Here, the interrogators questioned Nazi scientists, U-boat men, officers, and leaders. Holding cells were bugged, and, in violation of the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross was not told of their location until they were transferred to a normal POW camp.

However, these veterans never committed the sort of physical and mental abuse now being meted out at Gitmo and CIA "black sites". Instead they often found that games of chess or even steak dinners did more to loosen the lips of their German captives. Many of these veterans made clear while they were being honored by the Army and the National Park Service for their war-time service, they did not approve of the move that America has made towards the new 'harsh interrogation' techniques that in the 1940's were more often found in the hands of the Gestapo than in the US Army.