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From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Book Review: Ghost Soldiers

Date: June 01, 2001

"World War II Deliverance 'Ghost Soldiers:
The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission'
by Hampton Sides

Reviewed by Stanley Weintraub Sunday, May 27, 2001; Page BW05

GHOST SOLDIERS The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission By Hampton Sides Doubleday. 342 pp. $24.95

Early in 1945, as American troops landed on Luzon, 513 prisoners of war, mostly survivors of the infamous Bataan death march, remained in the miserable Cabanatuan camp northeast of Manila. In 1942 there had been 12,000. Many had died of malnutrition and maltreatment; others had been transferred to smaller camps in the Philippines or -- if somehow still able-bodied -- hauled to Japan for slave labor on the docks or in the mines. (Although Hampton Sides fails to mention their mass tragedy, thousands so shipped died even before they could be worked to death. Prowling American subs, unaware of the human cargo, sank the transports en route -- a horrific case of friendly fire.)

To their Japanese captors, POWs belonged to the contemptible undead. Their own troops knew never to surrender. Few did. Death guaranteed them the Bushido equivalent of Valhalla; surrender abandoned them to shame and dishonor at home. Anything, then, wrought upon abject prisoners, from beheading to burning alive, was outside Japanese ethics. For the Americans (and a few British and Dutch) at Cabanatuan, the return of MacArthur's troops, as prisoners learned from an improvised radio concealed in a canteen, could lead to their massacre rather than to liberation.

Weak and ill, the prisoners languished as self-described "ghosts" while American forces moving south from the Lingayen Gulf -- the familiar invasion route the Japanese had used in December 1941 -- improvised a rescue that had to work before the Japanese imposed their own solution. How the operation proceeded forms the core narrative of Ghost Soldiers, into which Hampton Sides, a journalist based in New Mexico, interleaves accounts of how the POWs got there and how they survived into 1945.

Sympathizing with the bitterness that the prisoners must have felt over the long, hopeless months of their abandonment early in the war, Sides accuses Roosevelt of "deceit" in declaring, as the Philippines tottered, that "every ship at our disposal is bringing to the southwest Pacific the forces which will ultimately smash the invader." Yet any map and dictionary would show that FDR used precise language. The "histrionic" MacArthur, whose bungling had exacerbated the defeat, ultimately returned via the southwest Pacific, island-hopping to Luzon. "Go to Manila," was his demand in January 1945. "Go around them, go through them, but go to Manila."

Sides describes the commando exploit that retrieved the POWs at Cabanatuan stirringly if extravagantly, heightening suspense with delaying flashbacks -- although, as in a grand opera plot, the outcome is no surprise. No one conceded the operation any strategic value. The Japanese were retreating north to hold out as long as they could, and Cabanatuan, only 30 miles distant, was certain to be evacuated. The issue was the lives of scarecrow men whose fate left Americans with a large dose of guilt that would increase if they were murdered.

Impatient for an outsized mission was Lt. Col. Henry Mucci of the 6th Ranger Battalion, Gen. Walter Krueger's pick for the assignment -- a tough, cocky West Pointer his men called "Little MacArthur." As with all assignments dependent on timing, his heroics needed a lot of luck. His 320 men were fanatically loyal, and, luckily, there were two eager guerrilla outfits holed up near Cabanatuan.

Little went wrong. Only two prisoners and two Rangers died. (To reveal more would be unreasonable.) Even MacArthur materialized briefly early in February -- the raid was on Jan. 30, 1945 -- to award medals to everyone.

Often told in the graphic words of the rescuers and the survivors, Ghost Soldiers might have gained additional authenticity with more from them. Sides is addicted to cliché ("to say the least"), to unfortunate locutions ("terrible debacle," "Fisher's prognosis was desperately serious") and to Technicolor writing (skies "clotted in reds and tangerines"). There are also other excesses. Whether the episode has been forgotten, or was the war's most dramatic mission, both announced in the overheated subtitle, is subject to doubt, as is the claim that it was the largest prisoner rescue in the war. Three weeks later, on Feb. 23, 1945, troops of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, augmented by elements of the 11th Airborne Division, jumped behind enemy lines to free 2,122 American and Allied POWs and internees in the Los Baños camp east of Manila.

Forgotten? The title of a book by Forrest Bryant Johnson, Hour of Redemption: The Ranger Raid on Cabanatuan (1978), even uses a word employed in the new book's close -- "redemption." Also, Arthur Arnold published Deliverance at Los Baños in 1985 and E.M. Flanagan Angels at Dawn: The Los Baños Raid in 1987. William B. Breuer's The Great Raid on Cabanatuan: Rescuing the Doomed Ghosts of Bataan and Corregidor came out as recently as 1994. While the moving rescue story still has enough power to carry the reader by its own momentum, the mixture seems much the same as before. ï

Stanley Weintraub's book "MacArthur's War" has just been reissued in paperback.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company"