Surviving the Rising Sun is the story of an American family in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation in World War II. The author was a teenage girl when she was interned in Santo Tomas Prison Camp for over three years, along with her parents, grandmother, and uncle. After Liberation, her grandmother was awarded the Medal of Freedom for her work in aiding the military prisoners in other camps in the Manila area. This book includes diary entries, letters, notes, newspaper articles and over one hundred pictures.
This comprehensive volume provides a wealth of information with annotated listings of more than 3,500 titles--a broad sampling of books on the war years 1939-1945. Includes both fiction and nonfiction works about all aspects of the war. Professional resources for educators aligned to the educational standards for social studies; technical references; periodicals and electronic resources; a directory of WWII museums, memorials, and other institutions; and topics for exploration complement this excellent library and classroom resource.
The year was 1898 and army private Patrick Henry Frank was in New Orleans awaiting transport to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War. A change in orders and Private Frank was instead going to the Philippines. Admiral Dewey had stunningly defeated the Spanish navy at Manila Bay, but President McKinley wanted boots on the ground. Patrick Henry Frank's country was seeking its manifest destiny further west than America had ever moved. Through a riveting narrative history, author John Russell Frank chronicles the events of his family's half-century on America's frontier in the Philippineswar, adventure, colonialism, the heartbreaking deaths of family members, businesses ravaged by WW II, and internment in brutal Japanese prison camps. It is an epic story about his familys triumph and tragedy in a strange land, a story of how they came to absorb and become a part of another culture. The narrative flows from a substantial amount of intimate archival material: historically rich letters, war diaries, photographs, memoirs, and oral and video histories from the familys experiences in the Philippines. He shares a way of life and a time-period unknown or forgotten by the present generationpivotal years of America's past. In the process, the author discovers his own roots.
There have been countless books about the sub-human brutality of the Japanese to their prisoners-of-war, nearly all of which have been written by Soldiers. There have been few, if any, books which describe what it is like for a woman and her teenage daughter to find themselves suddenly swept in the holocaust of the war in the Pacific. For this reason the story if Isla Corfield is of exceptional interest. Captured by the japanese when the evacuee ship from Shanghai was diverted to the Philippines, Mrs Corfield and her daughter Gill found themselves interned with 3,500 other men, women and children at Santo Tomas, Manila's erstwhile University. The extraordinary way of life which evolved within the camp becomes gradually understandable as each person's character is related to the situation in which they find themselves: and gradually, as the entrepreneurs get into their stride, there emerge in microcosm all the 'amenities' of life 'outside the wire'- from restaurants to brothels. In 1944 the Corfields are moved to Los Baanos, a new camp in the country, where conditions are appalling and many die of starvation. But at last rescue comes at the hands of the U.S 11th Airborne Division in the form of a combined air/sea/land rescue operation of split-second efficiency, and the 2000 survivors are literally snatched from the jaws of death. This is the first time that a detailed account of this remarkable operation has been published. Celia Lucas has used the 36 exercise books which Isla Corfield risked death to keep to tell this very remarkable story of a mother and daughter who managed to preserve their sanity, their standards and their sense of humour when the world around them suddenly went mad.
During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines at the end of World War II, several thousand American civilians were rounded up and imprisoned in a prison camp. This is the story of how a young family survived three years as POWs in Manila.
A gripping memoir documenting one couple’s experience being imprisoned by the Japanese on a Philippine college campus during World War II. This is a gripping eyewitness account of internment during World War II in the Philippines. Van Sickle and her husband, Charles, were among a group of foreigners who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trapped in Manila after its surrender to the Japanese in 1942, they were incarcerated in the vast forty-eight-acre campus of Santo Tomás University, the only place in the city large enough to accommodate all the prisoners. The university grounds were enclosed on three sides by high concrete walls and iron bars; Santo Tomás turned out to be “a made-to-order concentration camp.” Every day spent on this seventeenth-century campus was a struggle for survival. Van Sickle offers a fascinating, detailed, and insightful account of life at Santo Tomás. The prisoners—5,000 at the outset—were thrown on their own resources for food and the simplest types of comfort. The internment camp became a kind of school of human relations: additional curricula forced upon the prisoners, the author says good-humoredly, were Entomology, the science of bed bugs; Structural Engineering, the art of sleeping on a cot; Chemistry, or washing clothes; Philosophy, or waiting in line; Industrial Engineering, opening a can; Physical Education, or the missing drink. As they suffered together, the internees managed to form a community of sorts that sustained them until their liberation in February, 1945. Van Sickle’s story is unique and personal narrative, and her retelling of the camp’s liberation is dramatic and powerful. Praise for The Iron Gates of Santo Tomas “Involving memoir of a woman caught with her husband behind enemy lines after the fall of Manila in WW II. . . . A valuable addition to the history of WW II.” —Kirkus Reviews “The story is unique and fascinating to read. . . . A well-written memoir.” —Library Journal
More than five thousand American civilian men, women, and children living in the Philippines during World War II were confined to internment camps following Japan's late December 1941 victories in Manila. Captured tells the story of daily life in five different camps--the crowded housing, mounting familial and international tensions, heavy labor, and increasingly severe malnourishment that made the internees' rescue a race with starvation. Frances B. Cogan explores the events behind this nearly four-year captivity, explaining how and why this little-known internment occurred. A thorough historical account, the book addresses several controversial issues about the internment, including Japanese intentions toward their prisoners and the U.S. State Department's role in allowing the presence of American civilians in the Philippines during wartime. Supported by diaries, memoirs, war crimes transcripts, Japanese soldiers' accounts, medical data, and many other sources, Captured presents a detailed and moving chronicle of the internees' efforts to survive. Cogan compares living conditions within the internment camps with life in POW camps and with the living conditions of Japanese soldiers late in the war. An afterword discusses the experiences of internment survivors after the war, combining medical and legal statistics with personal anecdotes to create a testament to the thousands of Americans whose captivity haunted them long after the war ended.
