With Only the Will to Live: Accounts of Americans in Japanese Prison Camps 1941-1945 - Hardcover

A harrowing compilation of accounts from survivors of Japanese POW camps in the eastern Pacific. The editors, who previously collaborated on Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American POWs in Burma (not reviewed), have selected material concerning the trauma of surrender and capture, the physical and psychological conditions suffered by POWs. Some of the oral histories are startling indeed. Desperate for food (it was Japanese policy to provide only daily rice, a spoonful of sugar a week, and virtually nothing else), POWs killed and ate anything they could get their hands on. One prisoner remembers a man riding the back of an enormous monitor lizard, trying desperately to cut its throat as it carried him through the camp. Another recalls throwing water buffaloes over the bridges they were constructing, because the guards would shoot the animals and give the carcasses to the prisoners. For some, though, the war was paradoxically kind. One prisoner at Kanthanaburi in Thailand (close to the infamous River Kwai bridge) remembers: ``That was the land of milk and honey as far as I was concerned.... You could eat all the old fruit you wanted and all the duck eggs you could eat.'' But this is the exception. Most of the stories, in particular those about the Bataan Death March, are horrifying. Resistance and sabotage occurred as well. One man, in symbolic defiance, kept a Marine Corps ring hidden in his rectum for two and a half years. An electrician dropped a live cable into a truck full of Japanese soldiers in metal beds. Others caused minor explosions at the industrial plants where they were forced to work, or sabotaged military vehicles. A grim portrait of brutality, fanaticism, and the cheapness of human life in wartime, etched by people whose voices have been faithfully rendered. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Of the 25,000 Americans held prisoner in the Pacific during World War II, over 40% died in captivity. Only those with luck and a tremendous will to live ever made it home. With Only The Will To Live: Accounts Of Americans In Japanese Prison Camps, 1941-1945 presents the accounts of 52 individuals from interviews with well over 150 survivors. Telling of their surprise at "losing" to the enemy, brutal treatment by guards, constant battles with hunger and disease, use as slave labor, and unflagging refusal to give in, the men who were there paint a vivid picture of every stage of their ordeal. And unlike memoirs by single individuals, the topically arranged accounts in With Only The Will To Live together give a view of the many different locations and kinds of treatment the thousands of POWs were subject to. From the jungles of Burma to the coal mines of Nagasaki, from rice patties in the Philippines to air raids in Kawasaki, With Only The Will To Live conveys the great variety of experiences the many American prisoners underwent. Their understated heroism, and the shocking conditions that tested, will thrill military history buffs with its immediacy and inspiration. . -- Midwest Book Review