This is a touching and sometimes humorous story of an American family’s survival in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Eleven-year-old Peter Wygle's story and his father's diary create a poignant adventure that reads like a novel. This is a compelling story of the struggle to survive when the enemies were not only the Japanese, but also some fellow prisoners.
Many Allied POWs in the Pacific theater of World War II suffered terribly. But abuse wasn't a matter of Japanese policy, as is commonly assumed. Sarah Kovner shows poorly trained guards and rogue commanders inflicted the most horrific damage. Camps close to centers of imperial power tended to be less violent, and many POWs died from friendly fire.
During World War II the Japanese imprisoned more American civilians at Manila's Santo Tomas prison camp than anywhere else, along with British and other nationalities. Placing the camp's story in the wider history of the Pacific war, this book tells how the camp went through a drastic change, from good conditions in the early days to impending mass starvation, before its dramatic rescue by U.S. Army "flying columns." Interned as a small boy with his mother and older sister, the author shows the many ways in which the camp's internees handled imprisonment--and their liberation afterwards. Using a wealth of Santo Tomas memoirs and diaries, plus interviews with other ex-internees and veteran army liberators, he reveals how children reinvented their own society, while adults coped with crowded dormitories, evaded sex restrictions, smuggled in food, and through a strong internee government, dealt with their Japanese overlords. The text explores the attitudes and behavior of Japanese officials, ranging from sadistic cruelty to humane cooperation, and asks philosophical questions about atrocity and moral responsibility.
"The time is November 1945, not long after Jack Elkins has returned from a prison camp in Japan to his hometown of Oakesdale, Washington. An autumn evening finds him before a gathering of townspeople clamoring to hear about his experiences. Jack is in turmoil. What they really want, he senses, is nice, neat stories of heroes who beat the odds. They want "blood without spatters" and death with dignity. What can he tell them? Burned forever in his mind are images of Japanese blood staining blue Manila Bay; of maggots assaulting the corpse of a buddy; of prisoner after prisoner relegated to small wooden boxes holding their cremated remains. Jack is unable to talk about what happened during his three years in Japanese prison camps. "There is no middle ground," in his estimation. "You either tell them all or tell them nothing." Standing up to the microphone, he whispers barely ten words to the audience, then sits down - and tries for the next half-century to forget." "It was fifty years before Jack could talk about his experiences as a prisoner of war; and he wasn't alone. In Captured Honor author Bob Wodnik presents the stories of several Pacific Northwest POWs. Yet this book is much more than a series of memoirs. Wodnik opens a variety of windows on World War II. Readers see prison-camp life in unrelenting detail. They glimpse the impact of firebombing on Japanese cities. They hear the difficulties of World War II veterans in adapting to life after the war. In an intriguing counterpoint. Wodnik anchors the entire work in the lobby of the Strand Hotel in downtown Everett, contrasting the horrors of a Japanese prison camp with the quiet life of a bibliophile desk clerk during World War II."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
How do you survive with your beaten starved and humiliated as a prisoner of war in a camp on the Thai Burma Railway? 'You stick together. That's what you do, ' says David Digger Barrett. 'You scam, lie, steal, cheat and hate the bastards with as much energy is you love and protect your mates.' David 'Digger' Barrett was given his nickname at an early age by his father. It was prophetic: as an eighteen-year-old looking for fun and adventure, he enlisted as a private and served in World War II. After surviving the Malayan campaign, he would spend over three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. It would take Digger more than fifty years to rid his mind of the hate he had for the guards of the Imperial Japanese Army. His story of courage, mateship and survival takes him from the prison camps of Thailand and Burma to the fight for reparations for all Australian POWs of the Japanese.
He lied about his age to enlist. Now he'll have to lie about everything else to survive! Survive the war. Outlast the enemy. Stay alive. That's what Henry Forrest has to do. When he lies about his age to join the Marines, Henry never imagines he'll face anything worse than his own father's cruelty. But his unit is shipped off to the Philippines, where the heat is unbearable, the conditions are brutal, and Henry's dreams of careless adventuring are completely dashed.Then the Japanese invade the islands, and US forces there surrender. As a prisoner of war, Henry faces one horror after another. Yet among his fellow captives, he finds kindness, respect, even brotherhood. A glimmer of light in the darkness. And he'll need to hold tight to the hope they offer if he wants to win the fight for his country, his freedom . . . and his life. Michael P. Spradlin's latest novel tenderly explores the harsh realities of the Bataan Death March and captivity on the Pacific front during World War II.
A unique and heartbreaking memoir of a child's imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp during World War II.1942: It was towards the middle of the year when my friends started disappearing...'On the island of Java, the stirrings of the Second World War in Europe and the angry-looking man called Hitler seem a million miles away from Norwegian-born Lise and her siblings. Then one day, her friends and neighbours start to disappear, and she begins to realise that they are not safe after all.Through ten-year-old eyes, Lise tells of her family's two-year imprisonment in POW camps and the brutal treatment received at the hands of their Japanese captors. For respite from the rat-infested floor of their shelter they adopt a blue door, which sits on concrete posts in the ground. They live on it during the day as young Lise plots ways to protect her family from disease, starvation and the desperate behaviour of fellow prisoners. This is a little girl's heartbreaking tale of survival.'A devastating portrayal of a child's loss of innocence to humiliating cruelty' Observer* The Blue Door is published in paperback as The Little Captive.
Frank Grady's remarkable account of his years as a prisoner-of-war - his capture, his interrogations, his labor, his survival strategies - offers a riveting portrayal of the heroic efforts required to outlast a hellish war. As head of the U.S. Army's cryptography department in the Philippines handling all incoming and outgoing messages for generals Douglas MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright, Grady was of special interest to the Japanese when captured in the spring of 1942. His memoir describes his first months as a POW in the infamous Cabanatuan camp and his subsequent transfer to Japan, where he attempted to outwit his interrogators about American cryptographic techniques. This book is more than the story of one man's survival. It is a moving account of wartime conditions that brought out the best and the worst in the prisoners, guards, and Japanese civilians. Grady perceptively depicts the uglier dimensions of human nature - betrayal, cowardice, greed, and wanton viciousness - but also celebrates the tenacity, intelligence, compassion, and determined good spirits that kept him and hundreds of other American prisoners alive in spite of severe malnourishment. From a murderous camp commander who was tried and hanged after the war to a kind civilian woman, Grady came into direct contact with far more Japanese than did most POWs, and he relates these encounters in detail. One of few Americans who saw Tokyo after the firebombing of March 1945, he also offers a personal glimpse of the destruction of the city. An unusual climax to the memoir comes when his own camp, near the port town of Kamaishi, is unknowingly destroyed by the U.S. Navy.
Apocalypse Undone recounts Preston Hubbard's four-and-a-half year odyssey from a young, idealistic CCC worker to a much older, troubled man full of contempt for war and those who make it. He survived the Bataan Death March; imprisonment at Camp O'Donnell, where the death rate exceded 400 a day; a jungle work detail on Tayabas Isthmus; the starvation diet of Manila's Bilibid Prison; a 17 day voyage to Japan on a Hell Ship; and a Japanese POW camp bombed by American planes.
