News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Ghost Soldiers: Review

Date: July 21, 2001

"New book about WWII atrocities offered to Japan
By Philip Barbara

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Japan has an opportunity to dispel recent complaints that it has whitewashed accounts of atrocities committed by its troops during World War Two, this time by supporting the publication of a best-selling book about the savage treatment of U.S. prisoners.

"Ghost Soldiers," by author Hampton Sides, tells of a spectacular rescue by U.S. Army rangers of 513 sickly prisoners from a camp in the Philippines before they could be killed by a back-pedaling, enraged Japanese army.

It is a well-documented account of three years of the POWs' will to survive torture, jungle disease, starvation, squalor and feelings of abandonment. As the plot unfolds, Sides builds narrative tension by shifting between scenes of the unknowing prisoners to the rangers creeping through tall grass toward a synchronized, explosive break-in.

The lightning raid succeeded brilliantly, with the loss of only two of the 151 rangers and no prisoners.

Within three weeks of publication the book shot to No. 2 on The New York Times bestseller list and remains near the top. It also quickly received publishing rights in Germany, Italy, Korea and the United Kingdom.

But in Japan, where it is being reviewed by several publishers, it has been rejected by one that said -- in an elliptical way, according to Sides -- that it sensed an uncertain market for the book.

Sides is confident another firm will print it.

"I think it's important for the book to be published in Japan, and I think it will, though it may not be widely read," he said in an interview. "It's a cruel and gruesome book and the Japanese don't look particularly good ... so as popular entertainment I don't think it will sell in huge numbers. But maybe I'm wrong."

There is a very public tug-of-war in Japan today between intellectuals and internationalists who want Japan to own up to savage incidents by its army, and nationalists and bureaucrats who seek to protect the national psyche, and especially schoolchildren, from bruising revelations.

SANITIZED VERSION OF HISTORY

In early July, Japan refused to revise a history textbook that the South Korean and Chinese governments said whitewashed Tokyo's wartime atrocities. And in the Japanese version of the Walt Disney Co. film "Pearl Harbor," racial epithets and quotes by U.S. soldiers deemed too cocky for the war's losers were deleted.

In 1997, Iris Chang's acclaimed book "The Rape of Nanking," a scathing account of the Imperial Japanese Army's invasion of China in 1937, did not appear in Japan. A prospective publisher there requested several changes but Chang declined to make them.

Chang, who praises "Ghost Soldiers" on the dust jacket, told Reuters that Japanese publishers are intimidated from releasing critical books.

"I think the right-wing assaults on the Japanese publishing houses have sent a chill across the entire industry," she said in an e-mail exchange, noting a May 1999 incident in which a fanatic wielding a baseball bat trashed the offices of a publisher who had printed the diary of a Japanese veteran of the Nanking massacre.

As 'Ghost Soldiers' shows, massacres occurred in the Philippines, too. The book graphically details how in December 1944, the Japanese ordered 150 Americans at a small POW camp into cramped air raid pits, sloshed aviation fuel into the pits and set the huddled men ablaze. Those who staggered out were bayoneted, beheaded or shot.

Still, several escaped, and when details of the atrocity reached U.S Army intelligence, a secret raid was mounted to rescue prisoners at Cabanatuan, the largest camp ever established for U.S. POWs on foreign soil.

The 513 prisoners at Cabanatuan were the last of the 22,000 Americans who had surrendered -- along with 70,000 Filipino troops -- three years earlier after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. Many of the 513 had been on the infamous Bataan death march in 1942, when 750 Americans died from starvation, disease or outright murder while tramping 75 miles (120 km) to captivity.

THE JAPANESE WAR MACHINE

Of those 22,000 Americans POWs, 10,650 were dead three years later. At Cabanatuan were the dregs of the prison population, too sick and weak to be shipped to Japan or elsewhere in the empire to work as stevedores or coal miners.

In addition to telling of the inhumane treatment, Sides fair-mindedly explores the Japanese mentality that led to such cruelty.

In Japan, he explains, a soldier who surrendered lost all honor and shamed his family, and this belief underpinned the brutal treatment of Allied prisoners, who too were seen to be without honor. And in the Japanese Army, beatings were a method of discipline, and when the lowliest enlisted man suddenly found himself a superior among helpless prisoners, the temptation to brutalize them proved irresistible.

These atrocities occurred despite instructions from Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma, the Japanese officer in charge of The Philippines, tohandle the Americans and Filipino captives "with a friendly spirit" in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Yet Homma was convicted and executed as "The Beast of Bataan" after the war for his army's butchery.

Sides spent several days as the guest in Japan of Masahiko Homma, the general's son, reading the general's war correspondence and journal. He feels ambivalent, he said, about the general's guilt.

"I'm fascinated by his character and the tragic quality to his life," Sides said. "He was the most liberal of generals in command, spoke fluent English, traveled the world, attended Oxford. He thought the Japanese course was madness. But he was a proud soldier, well trained, and wasn't going to shirk his duty.

"In a strict sense he had responsibility for his men. If he didn't know what was happening, he should have known," Sides continued."He was surrounded by aides who could have told him how the march had degenerated into chaos and the conditions at the camps. Villains don't come in tidy packages."

It was another Japanese officer, Col. Masanobu Tsuji, who urged his men to deal with the POWs severely, even fanatically, Sides learned. A dark figure historians say seemed to appear wherever atrocities occurred in Asia, Tsuji eluded the war crimes trial, he said.

Sides' two years of research included diaries, memoirs and repeated interviews. He spent nearly four months in Japan and a monthin the Philippines.

"I ran into three opinions in Japan: There is a left wing that flails itself over how much wrong they did and how much compensation they owe," he said. "There is the right wing -- perhaps more aggressive -- that claims there was no rape of Nanking and denies the so-called Death march and that Asia is rightfully theirs. ... In between are those of the postwar generation who are genuinely curious about what happened."

The heroes of "Ghost Soldiers" are the Army rangers who pulled off the rescue. So swiftly were the Japanese guards cut down that several prisoners, after three years of subservient, wasting captivity, thought the raid was a murderous Japanese ploy.

Sides spoke with numerous survivors of Cabanatuan.

"They told me of hardships I can't even fathom. They saw defeat in combat. They saw the worst of human nature embodied in the Japanese brutality and the dog-eat-dog prison camp mentality perpetrated in the name of survival. Despite living with this knowledge all these years they spoke with dignity.""