Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides: April Book of the Month
 

Here it is, the first Book of the Month!


I have my copy ordered, do you?


If anyone is going to post a message with spoilers, mention it first please!

Some folks mentioned the idea of waiting until everyone has finished reading the book before allowing discussions. I think we would lose too much momentum that way. Just everyone be considerate of those that might not be as far into the book as you are, don't spoil the suprises. If this way doesn't work this month, we can change things for next month.

(Buy the way, the Allies win WWII.)

Wooooo Hoooooo!! Just went to the library and found an unabridged audioCasette copy!! I'm in the car for over an hour a day and I listen to audio books as an alternative to right wing koolaid so this is going to work out great!

I floated the idea of waiting until month two to discuss book one but hereby withdraw the suggestion. But, I think the Spoiler warning is a good idea.

Thank goodness it ended up Ghost Soldiers. I ordered from amazon.com used before the official close of voting. Hopefully will receive sometime today.

(and I'm already mulling my potential picks, although I don't know where I'll fall in the rotation. I'm pretty sure on two of the three, still trying to settle on a third choice. And you may end up being surprised at what I offer ...)

yeah, what about that, slarti? what was the rest of the list. you DID pick the whoel order didn;t you? You wouldn't have been so lazy as to JUST pick the first chooser, would you?

please post the entire list in the initial thread.


Or were you just going to go in the order that the final list of participants was in, begining with mr noodle?

:D

What I was thinking was to have a drawing every month, just to keep a little excitement. It would stink for me to know right now that I was due to pick books some time in 2006. This way, everyone can hope it will be themselves doing the choosing next month, and everyone is equally likely to come up for next month. And if you don't get chosen next month, you can always hope for the following month.

But okay, if I get enough votes to post a whole list, I'll go and roll it up and post the results.

Please post opinions in the other thread, let's keep this one for Ghost

Yeah I have some good ideas for picks too! Now, to narrow them down....

I like the pick every month idea ... that does sound fun, not knowing ...

just so long as people that have already picked are removed from the remaining pool.

Don't worry, no repeats until everyone has a turn

I love it so far. But why were the Phillipine islands such a hotly contested battle ground to begin with?

I haven't gotten the book yet, and outside of the Manhattan Project, my primary interest in WWII was the european theater, but I'm guessing that there was high strategic importance as far as being able to place airbases and naval supply stations in the Phillipines.

I do know, for example, that the longest runway in the Pacific Theater was on Tinian Island ... in the Marianas island chain, which is to the East of the Philippines.

You can command a lot of Pacific real estate if you hold the Phillipines.

So, Friday night (Sat morn) around 2:00 am I'm channel surfing before crashing and on the History Channel is a show about crucial Japanese battles of WWII and damned if they don't do a whole show about the the very subject of the book. There was so much footage of battles/soldiers, the landscape and even McArthur. I had read a good size chunk of the book by last night and it was so cool to see actual footage of the people and events!! I think I'll be checking in on the History Channel more often.

I read about this annual event memorializing the Death March in the local paper in NM last week.

I believe that the control of the Philippines meant that you controlled a large supply of the oil that made the Japanese airplanes fly.

I go to sleep to the History Channel a lot. I just wish they didn't switch over to infomercials at around 3 or 4AM ... it is VERY annoying to try to drift off to sleep to be jarred awake by that freak Billy Mayes and his latest "Oxy Clean" miracle.

Bastards.

If they could enthuse somewhat more quietly, perhaps??

Couple maps and a pic to add some dimension to the story.

http://www.folkways.org/Roundup/2002...lder/pict2.jpg

http://www.sfps.k12.nm.us/academy/bataan/philmap.jpg


http://www.sfps.k12.nm.us/academy/bataan/batmap.jpg

Mine still hasn't arrived from amazon used. :( hopefully will before the end of the week ... if not, I'll contact the vendor. And cry.

Before I post my review of the book (I bought it at a local used bookstore a week ago and started it this morning), what were the rules for making posts about the book?



I do have a question for the readers, however:

The Rangers want to rescue 500 prisoners who are physically ruined and drag them 30 miles to Guimba. Is the way that they do it something that can be figured out by page 112?

It's not like it's a twist that was impossible to think of, although I don't recall it being hinted at in any way before they figure out what they're going to do. (I haven't finished the book, but I'm most of the way through--got to start reading almost immediately because I'm a big fan of the public library.)

If you pm me what you guess, I'll tell you if you're right.

Another question... I know its not the main focus of the book but is the author giving MacArthur a pass in this book? It seems like I read that he didn't implement the standing plan to retreat into Bataan properly, using the prepositioned supplies etc.. and there's the whole thing about getting caught with his planes down after Pearl Harbor... There are reasons why the prisoners were hung out to dry, you'd think it'd be a big part of the story.

Arrived the other day, and I'm rapidly making my way through.

It's not a subject I'd read much on before (of course I'd heard of the Death March, but didn't know much about it).

I am interested in the way that the book is constructed, as in the way the story is presented ... I found it a bit disorienting at first, though.

Originally posted by wolf It's very disorienting to me so I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one. Seems the author keeps bouncing around between 1942 and 1945 and from one thread to another without much warning. Miss one sentence and your lost for 20 pages.

Things seem to be settling down, tho.

I have a huge question about the story but I'm going to wait to see if the book answers it first.

I found the mother lode of pictures about this event including pictures of General King, Homma and the Commandant of Camp O'Donnel (name slipped my mind). The link is here

It gets a bit better as you approach the point of "impact." Keep going.

I would have appreciated time references at the beginning of each chapter a LOT.

Clodfobble: It's definitely not a twist, but I didn't like the way that the author presented the plan. I thought that I could have come up with it if I'd been trying to anticipate how it would all be done, and, since I found references to it, I wondered if someone else would be able to.

I thought that I could have come up with it if I'd been trying to anticipate how it would all be done,

You mean, if you were there at the time, or if you'd been trying to figure it out as you began reading the book?

If I'd been trying to figure it out as I was reading the book.

And, hopefully, if I'd been there, too.

It might be biased because I had been reading about the Korean and Vietnam wars immediately previous to reading this book.

Just finished it today.

My favorite chapter by far was the one where they discussed the rare wacktacular diseases the prisoners would occasionally suffer from. Stuff like that fascinates me.

In looking at the pictures, I noticed that Sides, in his book, does not have a lot to say about non-American prisoners ... he does mention some European prisoners, but there was absolutely nothing about Filipinos captured by the Japanese.

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

I think there's a reluctance to pin blame on any one person. MacArthur was no more to blame than Roosevelt, who was no more to blame than the persisting notion among soldiers that the Phillipines as some kind of tropical safe haven. Pg. 38 -- When Homma sent the whole friggin army in after them, they were totally unprepared, from the foot soldier up to the commander in chief. MacArthur was a blowhard, but he felt terrible about what had happened on Bataan. (Pg. 327 has him visiting the survivors and weeping. Hibbs is quoted as saying, "I wondered whether the general's visit was a guilt trip, but his grief could not have been more genuine."
I don't think anyone really has a good cubbyhole to place MacArthur in yet. He's the central heroic figure of the Pacific War, but he was deficient in many respects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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

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.

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?