Book Review: “Ghost Soldiers” by Hampton Sides (2001)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

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The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission

Well, we’re at it again. We’ve agreed upon our top ten selections in this year’s Siblings’ Book Club, and Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides was our first installment. The responses thus far by our nine participants have been very positive, and not surprisingly so. This book is impeccably written. My brother, in fact, places it in his top-5 books of the previous 40, and we’ve read some doozies.

A Brief Summary

This WWII sage spans a period of about four years, from the Bataan Death March in April 1942 to the rescue of Allied POWs from Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines in January 1945. While Part 2 of the book details the events of that rescue, from perspectives both inside and outside the camp, Part 1 expertly lays out the storyline in a captivating back-and-forth manner. Each chapter follows the two key storylines, both of the Captives from 1942-1945 and of the Rescuers in January 1945.

Hampton Sides sets the scene in its palpable misery, as he records the POW’s surrender and subsequent suffering through their Death March, incarceration, beatings, starvation, diseases, transfers, and death. And just when we’re really getting into it and feeling those POW’s pain (and, honestly, starting to hate the Japanese a little bit), the chapters end.

Suspense mounts as the focus then shifts to the Army Rangers under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci and their plans to spring those skeletal POWs from their living Hell. From an outpost 30 miles away, this band of soldiers must hike through the nights and hide through the days, avoiding Japanese patrols and meeting up with Filipino guerillas along the way. Their pace seems slow, simply because of the author’s method—while this rescue attempt outside the Cabanatuan takes the Rangers a matter of days, it’s backdropped by 4 years of misery inside the camp!—yet I thought the tension added a great deal to the story. One member of our club disagreed, though, finding the shifting timelines “a bit confusing” (at least on audiobook).

Apart from that “minor quibble,” I have one of my own. In the Prologue, we watch an entire camp of POWs get wiped out by the Japanese in an act of wholesale murder. Several escape by hiding in the garbage heaps and among the dead bodies. Without having any background to the story, I wasn’t sure what I was reading. Was this the in medias res literary tool that’s telling us the end of the book from the beginning? Need I even read on? Granted, I could have deciphered from the names of the camps on the back cover and in the Prologue that they were different accounts, but honestly, I tend to skip over foreign names when I’m reading unless they’re oft repeated (as Cabanatuan eventually was), so naming them didn’t help me distinguish them in mind. I doubt I’m alone.

Certainly I’m glad that I decided to plug away at the book, despite this initial confusing turnoff. I think Sides would have done well to include a preface by a well-known historian or even a survivor of Cabanatuan, as that might have better set the stage for me. As it was, the book seemed initially disjointed, and unless someone’s prepared for it, they may take it as a turn-off.

A Book of Atrocities and Heroism

This book is intensely emotional—my brother called it both “gut-wrenching” and “tear-jerking”—and the rawness of it reminds me how easily whole people groups could learn to hate each other. Now, I’m speaking only for generations past here when I talk about how racial hatred at the time at least made some sense, in the context. It wasn’t just the Nazis against the Jews and Blacks that epitomized racism during those years. It was the Japanese against everyone…and everyone against the Japanese.

All sides of the war committed their war crimes, I’m sure, dehumanizing the enemy because the world wasn’t watching. But the Japanese ingrained such behavior into their soldiers thinking, included it in their training, honored it, and encouraged it. They raised their race above all others, leaving every other human soul as nothing more than cattle, and often less.

The Japanese overtook my wife’s hometown in the late 1930s, eventually turning it into one of the most inhumane POW camps of WWII (not quite as bad as the Rape of Nanking, but close). Her grandmother had stories of the war and the behavior of the Japanese guards that would make your skin crawl. The POWs in these camps lived in daily, endless fear, not just of starvation and death but of treatment by the Japanese guards that would be far worse. This was life in Cabanatuan.

What gets me most when I read a book like this is how ignorant people can be of man’s innate wickedness. We’re not that far off from seeing similar things occur at the hands of other nationalistic, totalitarian-type regimes. The backstories overshadowed by the Olympics tell us that much, don’t they, with an entire people group being summarily incarcerated, reprogrammed, and sometimes even disappeared? If you look closely enough, you can see shades of the 1930s in our own geopolitical landscape…and who’s to say there isn’t another “Japan” or “Third Reich” out there waiting to replay history all over again?

I’m not fear-mongering, mind you, just being a realist. And as such, I also recognize the countless miracles that took place in this late-war account that turned what could have been yet another tragedy of WII into one of its most resounding successes. You’d have to be pretty cold-hearted to miss them, because Mucci and Prince’s planning and the guerilla cooperation could have taken this crowd only so far. They needed the hand of Providence on them to do what they did, and they got It.

Conclusion

This book was immensely satisfying to read, despite its disturbing matter. We’ve got 4 more WWII-themed books on our Siblings’ Book Club list this year, but I’m not sure any of them will come close to besting this one. We’ll have to wait and see.

©2022 E.T.