Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

3.5 stars

Close to the end of WWII, there were American (and a few other nationalities) prisoners of war being held by the Japanese in the Philippines. When one POW camp was brutally massacred, the American Rangers decided to go in to rescue the POWs at another one before the same thing could happen there. This book goes back and forth between the POWs: how they came to be in the camp and their life there leading up to the rescue and the rescuers and their dangerous mission to get them out. In the end, they saved over 500 POWs, many who were sick.

This was good. I found the POWs story more interesting than the rescuers, though there were still portions of both that held my interest. The book started with a “bang”, describing the other POW camp and how almost all of them were murdered except for a very few who managed to escape. Then, it switched to the story at hand, going back and forth. It did pick up in the last half to third of the book, as the rescue was about to happen, and as it happened. ( )

I was listening to "Weekend Edition" on NPR and heard an interesting interview with Hampton Sides, the author of this book about a raid by U.S. Army Rangers and Philippine guerrillas to free Allied POWs from a Japanese prison camp in the waning days of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Later that day, I bought the only copy in the Waldenbooks in a nearby mall and, appropriately enough, read it over Memorial Day weekend.

This book is a vivid reminder that war is Hell (in case one needed a reminder of that). The accounts of the carnage on both sides were difficult for me to handle. At the same time, the book reminds us that there are those who are willing to lay down their lives in an effort to save their brothers in arms. ( )

This is my third Hampton Sides book, and in my humble opinion, no one writes better nonfiction than Sides does. His research is thorough, and his use of the language is masterful.
If you are like President Trump, and you think that American POWs are not heroes (“I like people who weren’t captured”), don’t bother reading this book. If, however, you revere the men and women who served this country and sacrificed years of their lives, often with brutal and severe mistreatment, this book will give you a graphic idea of what it is like to be a prisoner of war. This is the story of the American soldiers who after the Bataan Death March ended up in the Cabanatuan camp in the Philippines. The Japanese treatment of American soldiers is legendary, but this book will bring those war crimes to such a graphic and realistic level that it is almost impossible to read without frequent breaks. The heroes of this story, in addition to the POWs, are the members of the 6th Ranger Battalion and the Filipino guerrillas, who risked their lives and the lives of their families to help the rangers free the POWs. If you think you’ve read everything there is to read about the war in the Pacific, you haven’t unless you’ve read Hampton Sides’ “Ghost Soldiers.” It’s a difficult book to read, but it’s an important book in our nation’s history. ( )

A well written and to the point (as in not trying to deal with all of the Pacific War) account of a prison camp in the Philippines and the rescue of its captives late in the war. ( )

My father helped to bury the soldiers whose massacre is described in the first chapter. They uncovered the mass grace the Japanese had left them in, identified them and reburied them. ( )