Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides: April Book of the Month

[SteveDallas]

Originally posted by wolf
hey, stevedallas, you read this before the rest of us did. Are you going to get in on the commentating?

Ummmm... I dunno.

It was almost 2 years ago when the book first came out, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details. I got it from the library to read again for this, but even though I enjoyed it very much the first time around, I'm having a hard time getting going this time. I'm barely halfway through the first chapter. I dunno why--maybe I'll get going over the weekend.

[wolf]

I found the pacing didn't really settle in until about halfway through ... I had a very slow start (especially having to flip back and forth to figure out the time orientation) but it does pick up.

Of course, you know how it ends, so ...

It will be interesting, though to hear what your opinion on a second read through is, and if your opinion of the book has changed over time.

[Beestie]

I finished it yesterday. I still think the parallel timeline thing was utterly maddening. While everything comes together in the end, its very confusing while one is reading it.

***SPOILER ALERT****

For example, Sides leads up to the raid and took us as far as the Rangers being in the grass 100 yards from the camp. Then, he starts another timeline to discuss when the Japs up and left the compound leaving all the food and resources to the prisoners. Too bad they didn't conduct the raid then, while the camp was unguarded - an irony that Sides never acknowledged. Its still unclear at what stage the raid was in during this time.

In the epilogue, Sides points out that Homma took a bullet by firing squad for the atrocities but fails to mention that the racist bastard who ran camp O'Donnell was allowed to walk in 1951 - a free man with the blood of thousands on his hands. The details are in one of the links I posted earlier.

Another thing that troubled me a little is the numbers. Sides starts out with the surrender of nearly 100,000 soldiers (including 40,000 Fillipinos). Sides ends with a raid freeing ±550 soldiers. Sides discusses attrition of several thousand during the march and several thousand more in camp O'Donnell and Cabanatuan. I never got a sense of the fate of the other ±60,000 -80,000 POWs. Were there only ±550 (non-Fillipinos) left out of the original 100,000?

But, concerns aside, I really enjoyed the book and the story. A very good history lesson for me.

[Clodfobble]

I got the impression (though I can't back it up with references because I turned the book back in to the library) that they were constantly funneled off to mainland Japan or anywhere else hard labor was needed. It seemed to me that Cabanatuan was only a holding pen, where the really sick got dumped.

[mrnoodle]

The confusion arises from the fact that there are two camps referenced in the book. the 80,000 that made the march went, initially, to a place called Camp O'Donnell (a former Philippine training outpost). A median guess is that 750 Americans and 5,000 Filipinos died on the way to O'Donnell - including a mass execution of 350 members of a Filipino army division.

O'Donnell was a staging area of sorts, from which the prisoners were carted off to other places. Most prisoners only stayed there about 50 days. But at one point there were 50,000 prisoners there, and it was designed to house no more than 9,000. The death toll from disease, murder, etc., was incredible: 15,000 Filipinos and 1,500 Americans died in a two month span, and those who remained spent all their time burying the dead. Page 109:

Burial, in fact, was the main focus and organizing principle of the camp...

So many died, that the Japanese realized they needed a better site (pg 133). They chose Cabanatuan, and it became the main prison camp, with others in the area serving as satellites. It was a holding station for slave labor, as others have already mentioned. There were 9,000 American prisoners that went through Cabanatuan (no mention of Filipino population, oddly), a third of which died and were buried outside the fence. Most of the rest were shipped off, and the remainder were too sick to be of any use to anyone. These were the ones rescued by Mucci et al.

So, Cabanatuan wasn't a dumping ground per se, but by the end of the war, only the sickest remained there. The cynic in me says that the rescue was either a result of a conscience attack on the part of Army brass, or a PR event. But I wasn't there, so I don't know.


edited to fix the more obvious grammar screwups

[Torrere]

It felt like I was reading TV.

And I abhorred all of the biographies.

However, I appreciated his recognition of how terrible boredom can become.

[wolf]

I finally saw the movie, The Great Raid, tonight.

Why, oh, why do writers feel the need to screw up a perfectly good adventure with an unrequited love story subplot? Is it solely to employ some secretly required percentage of actresses, or what?