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Ghost Soldiers

By hampton sides, by hampton sides read by james naughton, category: 20th century u.s. history | biography & memoir | world war ii military history, category: 20th century u.s. history | biography & memoir | world war ii military history | audiobooks.

May 07, 2002 | ISBN 9780385495653 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780385495653 --> Buy

Sep 17, 2002 | ISBN 9781400033409 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9781400033409 --> Buy

May 15, 2001 | 358 Minutes | ISBN 9780553755077 --> Buy

Sep 05, 2006 | 360 Minutes | ISBN 9780739341766 --> Buy

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May 07, 2002 | ISBN 9780385495653

Sep 17, 2002 | ISBN 9781400033409

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May 15, 2001 | ISBN 9780553755077

358 Minutes

Sep 05, 2006 | ISBN 9780739341766

360 Minutes

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About Ghost Soldiers

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “The greatest World War II story never told” ( Esquire )—an enthralling account of the heroic mission to rescue the last survivors of the Bataan Death March—from the author of Blood and Thunder . On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. A recent prison massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation. In Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp. Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture. Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.

A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners included the last survivors of the Bataan Death March left in the camp, and their extraordinary will to live might soon count for nothing—elsewhere in the Philippines, the Japanese Army had already executed American prisoners as it retreated from the advancing U.S. Army. As the Rangers stealthily moved through enemy-occupied territory, they learned that Cabanatuan had become a major transshipment point for the Japanese retreat, and instead of facing the few dozen prison guards, they could possibly confront as many as 8,000 battle-hardened enemy troops. Hampton Sides’s vivid minute-by-minute narration of the raid and his chronicle of the prisoners’ wrenching experiences are masterful. But Ghost Soldiers is far more than a thrilling battle saga. Hampton Sides explores the mystery of human behavior under extreme duress—the resilience of the prisoners, who defied the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and unspeakable tortures; the violent cultural clashes with Japanese guards and soldiers steeped in the warrior ethic of Bushido; the remarkable heroism of the Rangers and Filipino guerrillas; the complex motivations of the U.S. high command, some of whom could justly be charged with abandoning the men of Bataan in 1942; and the nearly suicidal bravado of several spies, including priests and a cabaret owner, who risked their lives to help the prisoners during their long ordeal. At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark books as Flags of Our Fathers , The Greatest Generation , The Rape of Nanking , and D-Day in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations.

Listen to a sample from Ghost Soldiers

Also by hampton sides.

About Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides is an award-winning editor of Outside and the author of the bestselling histories Hellhound on his Trial, Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, Anne, and their three sons.Hampton Sides is available… More about Hampton Sides

Product Details

Category: 20th century u.s. history | biography & memoir | world war ii military history, category: 20th century u.s. history | biography & memoir | world war ii military history | audiobooks.

Rogue Heroes

The First Wave

Life Undercover

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A Bright Shining Lie

The Best and the Brightest

The Fleet at Flood Tide

Baa Baa Black Sheep

“[Sides] liberates his story from documentary and turns it into epic. . . . More than any monument, Ghost Soldiers is the memorial both prisoners and liberators deserve.” — The Seattle Times “The greatest World War II story never told.” — Esquire “[A] beautiful account of heroism . . . Sure to be a classic.” — Men’s Journal “Riveting and patriotically stirring without ever slipping into mawkishness or sentimentality.” — The New York Times “Thoroughly researched and artfully told. . . . A compelling story filled with colorful characters.” — The San Francisco Chronicle

Author Q&A

Q: What was the inspiration for writing GHOST SOLDIERS? A: Journalists say that the most interesting stories start locally and that was certainly true in this case. When I moved to New Mexico in the mid 1990s, I kept encountering the word “Bataan.” Everywhere you go in this state you see it: Bataan Memorial Museum, Bataan Avenue, libraries, monuments. There’s even a Bataan Memorial Death March. I wondered what the connection was. More than that, to be perfectly honest, I wondered what Bataan was. I knew it had to do with World War II, but my level of ignorance was appalling. Here was the largest surrender in American history and it was only the vaguest of references for me. Then I learned the New Mexico connection: More people died on the Death March from New Mexico, a tiny place in terms of population, than from any other state. This was because the New Mexico National Guard was federalized shortly before the war, turned into an artillery unit, and sent over to the Philippines. You had thousands of Pueblo Indians, Spanish Americans, and rancher kids—teenagers, really—caught in this epic conflict for which they were woefully unprepared. When I immersed myself in this project, I began with the New Mexicans and gradually worked my way outward. Q: Had you always been interested in World War II? A: Not especially. And in truth, even from the beginning, I never approached this book as a war story. I’m not a war buff, particularly. I’ve always been a great admirer of authors who can write about war in such a way that it rises above the confines of the genre. Great storytellers, in other words, who just happen to write about military situations. I love Shelby Foote, whom I knew as a kid growing up in Memphis. I was greatly influenced by the war correspondent John Hersey, author of Hiroshima , who was a teacher of mine at Yale. I like to think of Ghost Soldiers as primarily an adventure narrative set against the backdrop of war. On another level, it’s a human endurance story. When I began working on this project, I was an editor at Outside magazine. We were publishing great writers like Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, publishing lots of stories about people trapped in these horrific situations in which they were pitted against the elements. We were also covering a good bit of what seemed to me esoteric feats from the outdoor sporting world—you know, people crossing oceans and deserts at great risk to their health and sanity, people pursuing dubious goals and suffering enormous hardships just so they could be “first.” People appeared to be increasingly drawn to a kind of synthetic suffering. With the story of the Bataan Death March, I realized I had what was perhaps the ultimate human endurance story, the ultimate survival tale. And there was nothing synthetic about it. Q: Why do you think this story has been largely forgotten? A: The raid on Cabanatuan grabbed lots of headlines right after it happened, but those headlines were quickly supplanted by other headlines from the war. Iwo Jima. Okinawa. Hiroshima. There was a famous photographer from Life , Carl Mydans, who predicted that the raid on Cabanatuan would become part of the national shorthand of heroic deeds, like the charge of the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. He said with great confidence that “every child in America would learn of the rescue.” But for some reason, Cabanatuan was one of those stories that fell between the cracks. It was unbelievable to me that this event—probably the greatest rescue attempt in American history—was merely an obscure footnote. Here you have the largest American prisoner-of-war camp on foreign soil, composed of survivors of the largest surrender in the annals of our military. By every definition, it seemed like a monumentally huge story. Yet I’d never heard of it. And I think it can be safely said that most Americans have never heard of it. Q: How is that a story of such magnitude can remain so obscure in popular culture? A: Well, in general I think it’s true that events in the Pacific have gotten short shrift in our national literature, relative to the European theater. More specifically, one of the reasons, I think, is that in order to tell the stirring story of the liberation attempt you also have to tell the story of these prisoners, who they were and where they came from. They weren’t just any Americans; they were a subset of a subset of misfortune, “an elite of the damned,” as I call them in the book. This “back-story” is uncomfortable to tell, not only because of its undeniably gruesome aspects, but also because it implies, in a sense, a national betrayal. We let these men down. We put them in a place where they couldn’t defend themselves. We promised them ammunition and medicine and supplies which never arrived. We left them stranded on this little finger of jungle 7,000 miles from home, their backs against the sea. And that was only the beginning. In the prison camps, these men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes. They endured three years of gratuitous and often surreal mistreatment which, as they’ve come to the end of their lives, they still can’t fully understand. They saw friends beheaded, they slaved and starved, they buried legions of their comrades because their guards denied them even the most basic of medicines. They’re old men now, but sometimes they still wake up in the night, sweaty and scared, tormented by visions. In the end, one of the main reasons this story has been inadequately told is that for decades the men themselves didn’t talk. Many of them never told their stories when they returned home, not even to their own families. For many of the POWs, it has taken fifty years to sift through their experiences and begin to make sense of them. Some felt as though they were branded by a certain shame when they returned to American shores. Shame for having surrendered in the first place, even though they were ordered to do so. Shame for having survived when so many of their friends hadn’t. Shame for having to be walking exhibits of American defeat. So they resumed their lives, burying the past to the extent possible, suffering quietly. Q: Did you see many parallels with the Vietnam generation? A: Absolutely. It’s been said that Bataan was a dress rehearsal for Vietnam. As in Vietnam, the Bataan men found themselves fighting against an extremely foreign enemy in unfamiliar jungles of tropical Asia, waging a battle that was doomed to fail. Many of the syndromes and illnesses that have come to be associated with Vietnam veterans were suffered 25 years earlier by the American captives of the Japanese. Many of the Bataan veterans have been unable to shake their belief that Washington abandoned them. They’re still proud to recite their company slogan: “No Mama, no Papa, no Uncle Sam . . . and nobody gives a damn.” To this day, many Bataan veterans continue to feel a sense of bitterness, and that bitterness has been hard to crack. Q: How did you go about researching the story? A: Fortunately, over time I was able to find a few veterans who would talk to me. Ghost Soldiers turned out to be a collaboration between myself and a good number of these guys. I based the narrative on thousands of pages of archival documents and a good bit of travel in the Philippines and Japan, but mainly this is the veterans’ story. Without their forbearance and cooperation, this book wouldn’t have been possible. They gave freely of their time even though talking with me often necessitated opening old wounds. I relied on their correspondence, their war diaries and personal scrapbooks, their published memoirs or unpublished manuscripts. Throughout the process, I was continually amazed by their honesty and poise under the merciless burden of memory. Spending time with them was, for me, a tremendous honor. So many of them are dying off that once I began my research, I felt a certain sense of urgency to find them and document their stories before time ran out. Not to sound grandiose about it, but my project was informed by some of the same emotions that characterized the Ranger mission fifty-five years earlier—to rescue these men’s stories before it was too late. Q: What were you able to learn about why some survived and others didn’t? A: The most surprising thing to me was that of all the attributes necessary for survival in this situation—courage, tenacity, faith—the most consistently important one was . . . a sense of humor. Really and truly, I think that was the most significant. Some of these guys in my book have a wicked sense of humor. They’re pranksters and clowns. In camp they were always trying to find subversive ways to strike back at their captors, little gags and practical jokes. To be sure, some of it was gallows humor, but it was humor nonetheless. In the book, I do try to focus on these little sparks of spirit. As grim as it was, they found a way to laugh at their situation. And in surprising ways, that’s what got them through this. Q: What is the significance of the title GHOST SOLDIERS? A: Around the Cabanatuan prison camp, the men were always calling themselves “ghosts.” You see it in the songs and poems, in the camp doggerel. It was just an expression—“the ghosts of Bataan”—but it resonated. Not only did these guys look like ghosts after three years of captivity, but they felt as though they’d been forgotten by the land of the living. And by their own country. One can easily make the case that in terms of scope and duration, the ordeal of these men exceeded anything suffered by our armed forces in any other conflict throughout our history. The travails visited upon them were nothing less than Dantean. It was our national nightmare—in other words, our national ghost story. But as with Dante, it’s a ghost story that ends with a glimpse of redemption.

Author Essay

Not long ago, author Hampton Sides accompanied Bataan survivors and their families on a tour back to the Philippines. They visited the battlegrounds and landmarks of their three years of captivity under the Japanese. Here you can listen to audio clips of Hampton Sides and the POWs and their families on their emotional journey.

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Ghost Soldiers

62 pages • 2 hours read

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

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Summary and Study Guide

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission  by American journalist and historian Hampton Sides tells the story of a daring rescue raid on the Japanese-controlled Cabanatuan Allied prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines at the end of World War II. 121 US Rangers, Alamo Scouts , and hundreds of armed and unarmed Filipino guerillas successfully rescued over 500 remaining POWs on January 30, 1945. The book details the stories of the American POWs losing the Battle of Bataan, surviving the Bataan Death March in April 1942, and the extreme circumstances of the almost-three years of captivity at Cabanatuan.

At the same time, the author reveals the plan and execution of the rescue raid led by Colonel Henry Mucci and Captain Robert Prince and the guerilla leaders, Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson . The rescue was necessitated by humanitarian, rather than strategic, reasons, such as the massacre of American POWs in Palawan a month prior. The 2005 Hollywood film, The Great Raid , was partially based on this book. Ghost Soldiers also covers the story of Claire Phillips , the subject of the 1951 film I Was an American Spy.

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Content Warning : The source text deals constantly with acts of violence, deprivation, psychological and physical torture, and other war crimes.

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Ghost Soldiers follows the format of narrative history with two alternating, parallel “plots” that collide at the end of the book. The first narrative features the stories of Allied (primarily, American) prisoners of war—soldiers and civilians—in the Philippines during World War II. It covers the period of approximately three years between the American loss in the Battle of Bataan in the spring of 1942 and the POW liberation in January 1945.

The second narrative is the rescue raid carried out by American Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and the Filipino guerillas in January 1945. Due to the difference in time scales, the latter narrative is more detailed and, at times, told in a minute-by-minute fashion. The author also develops a “subplot” featuring Claire Phillips, an American spy in the Philippines. The rescue mission is so successful that it takes only 30 minutes, with two Rangers killed in action and two POW deaths from failing health.

The book is based on accepted World War II historiography as well as Hampton Sides’s own interviews of the participants. In addition to oral history, the author uses archival documents, prisoner memoirs, army records, and transcripts of other interviews. Considering the age of the veterans at the time of writing, preserving their memory of the war was one of the key tasks for the author.

The author focuses on several overarching themes, including Human Survival in Extreme Conditions , camaraderie among the POWs and the soldiers, the complex relationship between the Japanese, Americans, and Filipinos during World War II, and the social organization in the POW camps. These themes allow Sides to enhance the reader’s understanding beyond a simple narrative. Ghost Soldiers also periodically provides the necessary background historical information to situate the participant biographies and smaller-scale events in question.

Notably, the rescue of Cabanatuan POWs was a dangerous and successful humanitarian mission. However, it was not the only impressive feat either for the Americans or the Allies at large during World War II, as the subtitle suggests. For example, the raid on Los Baños in the Philippines a month later is another successful example. Nonetheless, Ghost Soldiers is an important contribution to the popular narrative history of World War II in the Asia-Pacific theater.

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Ghost Soldiers

The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission

by Hampton Sides

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Book summary.

Utterly compelling and impressively detailed - dramatically recounts the story behind the Bataan Death March and the realities of survival in a Japanese prison camp. A true-to-life narrative as intelligently orchestrated and satisfying as the raid that ultimately liberated these men."

A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners included the last survivors of the Bataan Death March left in the camp, and their extraordinary will to live might soon count for nothing--elsewhere in the Philippines, the Japanese Army had already executed American prisoners as it retreated from the advancing U.S. Army. As the Rangers stealthily moved through enemy-occupied territory, they learned that Cabanatuan had become a major transshipment point for the Japanese retreat, and instead of facing the few dozen prison guards, they could possibly confront as many as 8,000 battle-hardened enemy troops. Hampton Sides' vivid minute-by-minute narration of the raid and his chronicle of the prisoners' wrenching experiences are masterful. But Ghost Soldiers is far more than a thrilling battle saga. Hampton Sides explores the mystery of human behavior under extreme duress--the resilience of the prisoners, who defied the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and unspeakable tortures; the violent cultural clashes with Japanese guards and soldiers steeped in the warrior ethic of Bushido; the remarkable heroism of the Rangers and Filipino guerrillas; the complex motivations of the U.S. high command, some of whom could justly be charged with abandoning the men of Bataan in 1942; and the nearly suicidal bravado of several spies, including priests and a cabaret owner, who risked their lives to help the prisoners during their long ordeal. At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark books as Flags of Our Fathers, The Greatest Generation, The Rape of Nanking, and D-Day in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations.

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

• 4.4 • 105 Ratings

Publisher Description

A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners included the last survivors of the Bataan Death March left in the camp, and their extraordinary will to live might soon count for nothing—elsewhere in the Philippines, the Japanese Army had already executed American prisoners as it retreated from the advancing U.S. Army. As the Rangers stealthily moved through enemy-occupied territory, they learned that Cabanatuan had become a major transshipment point for the Japanese retreat, and instead of facing the few dozen prison guards, they could possibly confront as many as 8,000 battle-hardened enemy troops. Hampton Sides's vivid minute-by-minute narration of the raid and his chronicle of the prisoners' wrenching experiences are masterful. But Ghost Soldiers is far more than a thrilling battle saga. Hampton Sides explores the mystery of human behavior under extreme duress—the resilience of the prisoners, who defied the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and unspeakable tortures; the violent cultural clashes with Japanese guards and soldiers steeped in the warrior ethic of Bushido; the remarkable heroism of the Rangers and Filipino guerrillas; the complex motivations of the U.S. high command, some of whom could justly be charged with abandoning the men of Bataan in 1942; and the nearly suicidal bravado of several spies, including priests and a cabaret owner, who risked their lives to help the prisoners during their long ordeal. At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark books as Flags of Our Fathers , The Greatest Generation , The Rape of Nanking , and D-Day in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations.

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Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission Audible Audiobook – Abridged

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A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. 

On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite US Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners included the last survivors of the Bataan Death March left in the camp, and their extraordinary will to live might soon count for nothing - elsewhere in the Philippines, the Japanese Army had already executed American prisoners as it retreated from the advancing US Army. As the Rangers stealthily moved through enemy-occupied territory, they learned that Cabanatuan had become a major transshipment point for the Japanese retreat, and instead of facing the few dozen prison guards, they could possibly confront as many as 8,000 battle-hardened enemy troops.  

Hampton Sides' vivid minute-by-minute narration of the raid and his chronicle of the prisoners' wrenching experiences are masterful. But Ghost Soldiers is far more than a thrilling battle saga. Hampton Sides explores the mystery of human behavior under extreme duress - the resilience of the prisoners, who defied the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and unspeakable tortures; the violent cultural clashes with Japanese guards and soldiers steeped in the warrior ethic of Bushido; the remarkable heroism of the Rangers and Filipino guerrillas; the complex motivations of the US high command, some of whom could justly be charged with abandoning the men of Bataan in 1942; and the nearly suicidal bravado of several spies, including priests and a cabaret owner, who risked their lives to help the prisoners during their long ordeal.

At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark books as Flags of Our Fathers , The Greatest Generation , The Rape of Nanking , and D-Day in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations. 

• Listening Length 5 hours and 57 minutes
• Author Hampton Sides
• Narrator James Naughton
• Audible release date May 3, 2001
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• ASIN B00005KA54
• Version Abridged
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Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission Summary & Study Guide

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission Summary & Study Guide Description

In 1942, following the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese assaulted the Philippine islands and ultimately captured them. This action resulted in many prisoners of war as the American Navy was unable to evacuate most soldiers. Many thousands of prisoners were interred in the Cabanatuan Camp where they languished without medicine, adequate food, or other supplies. In 1945, American forces were recapturing Luzon. Fearing the Japanese would massacre the approximately 500 surviving prisoners of war at Cabanatuan, a rescue mission was successfully carried out.

Subsequent to the overpowering Japanese assault on Luzon, the defending forces retreated to the Bataan peninsula and were then concentrated in a tiny area. Those who could not be evacuated surrendered by order of General King. The Japanese ordered a forced mass evacuation to clear the area for use as an offensive staging area. Under the direction of General Homma, the Japanese conducted a forced march through difficult terrain and weather with insufficient medicine, food, or transport, resulting in massive American and especially Filipino casualties in an event subsequently known as the Bataan Death March. The destination, Camp O'Donnell, proved a breeding ground of disease and many thousands of men who survived the march succumbed in camp.

Several thousand men were later transferred to Cabanatuan Camp, a smaller but still significant prisoner of war camp near Cabanatuan City. The camp served as a source of slave labor for Japanese military construction efforts, and conditions were exceptionally harsh with a correspondingly high mortality rate among the prisoners. When the American forces started to recapture the Philippines in 1945, many Japanese guards responded by massacring the prisoners of war. Fearing such an atrocity at Cabanatuan Camp, the army launched a rescue mission led by Colonel Mucci. The rescue party was composed of about 125 American Rangers and about 175 Filipino guerrillas, and was highly successful—over five hundred prisoners were rescued and approximately 1,000 Japanese combatants were killed. After the rescue, both the rescuers and the rescued were greeted in America as heroes even though the raid was quickly eclipsed by other major wartime developments.

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GHOST SOLDIERS: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission

Hampton sides, ghost soldiers: the forgotten epic story of world war ii. , $24.95 (352pp) isbn 978-0-385-49564-6.

Reviewed on: 03/26/2001

Genre: Nonfiction

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

  by Hampton Sides

Genre: Non-Fiction | Release Year: 2001 | 111,000 words

Language: English

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GHOST SOLDIERS

The forgotten epic story of world war ii’s most dramatic mission.

by Hampton Sides ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2001

Far more worthy than the celebrity-driven narratives of recent seasons, this is an exceptionally valuable addition to the...

An extraordinary tale of bravery under fire and the will to endure.

When the Philippines fell to Japan in 1942, hundreds of the Allied troops who survived the Bataan death march were imprisoned in the jungle camp of Cabanatuan. Some would be tortured, others executed without cause; all suffered starvation and illnesses such as “dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, bacillary dysentery, tertian malaria, cerebral malaria, typhus, typhoid.” For three years, the “ghost soldiers” of Cabanatuan lived in an earthly hell, and they would have remained there longer had an elite group of Rangers fighting with Douglas MacArthur’s invading army not planned and executed a rescue operation of tremendous emotional but doubtful strategic value—and one that could easily have ended in a costly disaster. Led by a young colonel named Henry Mucci (called “Little MacArthur” not only because he smoked a pipe incessantly but also because “he had, like the Supreme Commander, a firm grasp of the theatrics of warfare”), the Rangers penetrated deep within Japanese-controlled territory, mounted an attack on the Japanese troops and tanks surrounding the camp, and led hundreds of Allied prisoners to safety—with thousands of enemy soldiers in hot and vengeful pursuit. Amazingly, the operation cost only a handful of casualties. Justly celebrated in its time (“Every child of coming generations will know of the 6th Rangers, for a prouder story has not been written,” declared one combat correspondent of the rescue), the Cabanatuan rescue has since been all but forgotten. Sides ( Stomping Grounds , 1992) restores the episode to history in a thoroughly researched and reported narrative that is careful in its attention to detail and never short of thrilling.

Pub Date: May 15, 2001

ISBN: 0-385-49564-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001

HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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ISBN: 0385495641

ISBN13: 9780385495646

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission

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Format: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Book Overview

A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners included the last survivors of the Bataan... Read Full Overview

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Search this blog, book review: ghost soldiers: the epic account of world war ii’s greatest rescue mission.

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides

Ghost Soldiers is the first book by historian and author Hampton Sides. Initially published by Doubleday, it’s been available in paperback since 2002. It tells the story of the rescue of American POWs from the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines in January of 1945.

When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1942 it was then an American Commonwealth on the path to independence. The invasion forced the largest surrender in American history. Once under Japanese occupation after the Battle of Bataan, between 60,000 and 80,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were forcibly marched some 65 miles to Camp O’Donnell - the infamous Bataan Death March. During the march the Japanese engaged in severe physical torture and random killings of the prisoners. It’s estimated that between 5000 and 18000 Filipinos, and 500 to 650 American soldiers died. Hundreds of the Allied troops who survived the march were housed in the POW camp in Cabanatuan. 

Their treatment at the camp did not improve. Some prisoners were tortured, and others executed without cause. Food and clothing were meagerly provided, and sanitary conditions were poor. Disease became rampant and led to many hundreds of deaths. 

The war began to turn in October 1944, with the American forces under General MacArthur retaking the Philippine island of Leyte after the largest naval battle in history. This caused the Japanese to take as many able bodied POWs as possible from Cabanatuan, to be transported back to Japan where they were used as slave labor in factories producing war materiel.

The camp at Cabanatuan, which had at its peak held some 8000 prisoners, held only around 500 Allied POWs, mostly Americans, by January of 1945. They were the sickest and weakest of those who had survived the Bataan Death March and what came after. American forces were pushing ever closer to Cabanatuan. The American command was aware of the camp, and they feared that the retreating Japanese would murder all the remaining prisoners. Their fear was not unfounded, as they had learned that exactly that fate had already been meted out by the Japanese at another prison camp on the island of Palawan in December.

On January 30th a combined force of Filipino guerilla fighters, US Army Rangers and Alamo Scouts, under the command of Lt. Col. Henry Mucci staged a prison break. Operating behind enemy lines, they surprised and overwhelmed the Japanese and freed the POWs. The prisoners were successfully transported back to the US front lines, and many later safely returned to the US aboard a Navy transport ship, which was itself a target of the Japanese forces.

Sides’ account of all of this is thoroughly researched and reported. It’s a well done book that illuminates a part of the history of World War II that, until his book, had not received much attention since the war concluded. Sides contacted many of the POWs and worked with them to gather information and put the story together. There is an interesting Q&A with the author on the Powell’s Books site that tells how he became interested in telling the story. 

The book received the 2002 PEN USA non-fiction award, and led to more than one television documentary. It is the partial basis for the 2005 film The Great Raid (which unfortunately was a box office bomb). 

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Recommended to anyone with interest in the history of World War II.

Personal Reading Note:

I have a paperback copy of this book on my TBR pile back home in Michigan, but since we are traveling in Australia now, and I couldn’t pack too many books, I decided to borrow an ebook copy from my local library back home to read on my Kindle here. I love the Libby app, which made this possible, and I love the fact that my small town library is able to leverage its library partnerships to offer a huge selection of books and magazines digitally. You are missing out if you are a book lover who isn’t using Libby. 

[Other than being a big fan of libraries, I have no partnership with my local library, it’s partnerships, nor with Libby, and no one is compensating me to tell you that I love the Libby app.] 

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[F.R.E.E D.O.W.N.L.O.A.D R.E.A.D] Ghost Soldiers The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission Full Pages

[PDF] Download Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission Ebook | READ ONLINE PDF File => https://bestebook.site/?book=038549565X Download Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission read ebook Online PDF EPUB KINDLE Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission download ebook PDF EPUB book in english language [DOWNLOAD] Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission in format PDF Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission download free of book in format PDF #book #readonline #ebook #pdf #kindle #epub

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[F.R.E.E D.O.W.N.L.O.A.D R.E.A.D] Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World

War II's Greatest Rescue Mission Full Pages

[F.R.E.E D.O.W.N.L.O.A.D R.E.A.D] Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest

Rescue Mission Full Pages

D.O.W.N.L.O.A.D

R.E.A.D] Ghost

Soldiers: The Epic

Account of World War

II's Greatest Rescue

Mission Full Pages

Description

On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the

Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish

camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. A recent prison

massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and

left little time to plan the complex operation. In Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides vividly re-creates

this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of

the prisoners and their lives in the camp. Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive,

defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture.

Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable

mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and selfsacrifice

amid the most trying conditions. “[Sides] liberates his story from documentary and

turns it into epic. . . . More than any monument, Ghost Soldiers is the memorial both prisoners and

liberators deserve.― —The Seattle Times“The greatest World War II story never told.―

—Esquire“[A] beautiful account of heroism . . . Sure to be a classic.― —Menâ€s

Journal“Riveting and patriotically stirring without ever slipping into mawkishness or

sentimentality.― —The New York Times“Thoroughly researched and artfully told. . . . A

compelling story filled with colorful characters.― —The San Francisco Chronicle See all Editorial

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Allen Cheng

Ghost soldiers book summary, by hampton sides.

Want to learn the ideas in Ghost Soldiers better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides here.

Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.

Video Summaries of Ghost Soldiers

We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Ghost Soldiers, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Hampton Sides.

1-Page Summary of Ghost Soldiers

Overall summary.

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission (2001) is a historical nonfiction book by Hampton Sides. It tells the story of a group of soldiers sent to rescue prisoners from behind enemy lines in the Philippines during World War II. With so many lives at stake, this mission takes on even greater importance when another camp is destroyed and more POWs are killed.

The book starts with a survivor of the massacre telling his story. He was one of the people who escaped from a bomb shelter that had been set on fire by Japanese soldiers. Only eleven out of thirty-odd escapees survived to tell their stories, which were different from what the Japanese told about how they died in an air raid. After this incident, Americans turned their attention to Cabanatuan camp and its 500 prisoners living there in horrible conditions. If such a thing happened at one prison camp, it could happen again; thus, Major Lapham was worried that if Japanese believed an invasion was imminent, they would kill all prisoners—and themselves—to avoid capture by Americans. Colonel Mucci is chosen for this rescue mission because he has experience working with guerilla fighters (the local Filipino army).

The Philippines were lost to the Japanese after General Edward King surrendered. The conditions in Bataan were terrible, with hospitals operating beyond capacity and rampant disease, dwindling rations, almost no medicine left, and little hope of help from the United States. President Roosevelt preferred to concentrate more on Europe instead of Asia. MacArthur was stunned into days-long silence before he rallied (only to be transferred to Australia). General King had no choice but surrender because there was no support or provisions for his troops at Bataan. When he surrendered, there was confusion in the ranks as to how they would proceed. Some soldiers joined guerillas while others escaped by boat during that time period; however most inhabitants knew they would be captives once captured by the Japanese army and didn’t know what that would look like or what would happen next. The march towards prisoner of war camps awaiting those who survived capture was long and brutal with some not being able to keep up being bayonetted along the way if unable to continue walking since they wanted prisoners alive so badly at first until later when things changed when it became a death march for many due lack of food water and medical care once reaching their destination camp where things got worse without any food water or medical care available only beatings torture starvation forced labor sexual abuse rape murder executions dog attacks poor sanitary conditions unsanitary living quarters unhygienic toilets bad air inadequate ventilation rat infestation vermin presence insects roaches fleas bedbugs lice ticks scorpions mosquitoes flies gnats etc…

Although the prisoners were not able to escape, they found allies in Manila. One woman, Claire Phillips (a.k.a Clara Fuentes and High Pockets), was an American spy who passed information about Japanese officers visiting Club Tsubaki to them. She also smuggled food and medicine into the camp for a brief period of time in January when their usual guards left them alone at Camp O’Donnell. The prisoners raided the food supplies during that time and had improved health after two weeks of eating well, although it didn’t last long as new regiments came through with little interference from the Japanese guards by mid-January until early February when fear returned that all would be executed by then end of January or soon thereafter since they believed that America’s military wasn’t coming back to rescue them anytime soon.

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