Dawn’s Early Light (Captivity In Print)
Listening to the Star-Spangled Banner at the ROTC ceremony at Harvard last week, I reflected again on our nation’s choice of a description of armed struggle and resistance for its anthem. Vivid combat imagery, though understated as patriotic messages go. It was there at nightfall, we saw it during the night, by the light of explosions, is it still there? Over the brave, free men who are fighting for this country? That’s all there is to it, from the perspective of an emissary detained by the invading British when he went to seek a doctor’s release. Armed struggle and triumph may not be unique as anthem themes, but I’d guess a description of those events as viewed from captivity probably is.
So what does our adoption of an anthem about armed struggle and captivity say about the American character? A quirk of historical circumstance made Key’s unusual, inspirational perspective available to us. But the symbolism of maintaining hope through darkness works with the American character and American ideals and, raw wartime patriotism aside, may explain not only why the poem and song became wildly popular when it was published less than two weeks after the failed attack on Fort McHenry on 7-8 September 1814, only four days after Key’s release on the 16th, but also why it remained popular for more than a century before it became the national anthem. Here are a couple of books on the subject, about which there seems to be less written than I expected:
Paradoxes of Fame: The Francis Scott Key Story by Sam Meyer
The Star-Spangled Banner: The Making of an American Icon by Lonn Taylor, former Smithsonian curator.
Fausta, Protein Wisdom, Maggie’s Farm, Malkin and HotAir are celebrating Flag Day. Side note, Pirate’s Cove’s got your highly patriotic Flag art, what generations of young American men have fought for. And So It Goes In Shreveport completes the Flag Day-captivity circle with this excerpt from one of the books linked below, Leo Thorsness’s Surviving Hell:
“Mike scrounged a small piece of red roof tile and laboriously ground it into a powder, which mixed with a bit of water, became a faded red or maroon color to make the flag’s stripes. We had gotten a bit of medicine in the last year of our captivity, usually a blue pill of unknown provenance prescribed for afflictions. Mike patiently leached the color out of one of the pills and used it to make a blue square in the upper left of the handkerchief. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread pulled from our single blanket, he stitched little white stars on this field of blue.”
Shreveport notes Mike, whose ation inspired his fellow POWs, was tortured as he knew he would be when his offense was discovered.
The Flag Day timing is coincidental but works. An online review of the new POW-illustrated Bataan book “Tears In The Darkness” linked below fueled these reflections on the national anthem and prompted the following book list on captivity in war.
Accounts of POWs’ journeys through darkness are often less about the torture, deprivation, humiliation, restraint and death they describe than about struggle, resistance, triumph and the consequences of despair in the face of same. Psychological combat in extreme circumstances. This reading list focuses on the specific experience of soldiers in captivity, in their particular circumstances as captured combatants, and will not get into the extensive library of Holocaust memoirs or the experiences of interned Japanese-Americans, for example. As an editorial aside, I’d add that the experiences recounted in the following books contrast sharply with the reports out of Guantanamo, though I don’t doubt that captivity and the relatively mild forms of duress, hardship and deprivation imposed on Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other terrorists has also be trying for them. The historical import of the following accounts aside, in that regard they also have a contemporary lesson, which has been adopted and applied by both sides in the current debate about the treatment of prisoners.
The list starts with one of the best:
Five Years to Freedom by James N. Rowe, is both great war literature and a textbook example of psychological combat and both physical and mental endurance in captivity in Vietnam’s U Minh forest, where Rowe, a Special Forces officer, was held from 1963 to 1968. A common theme of extreme wartime captivity that emerges in his book is those that lack the will to survive will die. Rowe was one of the architects of the US military’s SERE program, and remained in uniform for another 21 years after his escape from the Viet Cong. He he was killed in a targeted hit by 1989 by the New Peoples Army in the Phillippines while serving as a counterinsurgency advisor.
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell. One of the few American combatants to fall into and out of enemy hands with his life in our current wars, this simply told warrior’s tale contains fascinating and complex elements of combat, evasion and some strange gray areas of captivity and deliverance, depictions of events among friendly Pashtuns and the Taliban that Luttrell acknowledges he didn’t fully understand, but which resulted in his survival. At some cost to those who decided to save him.
Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir by John McCain
Surviving Hell: A POW’s Journey by MOH recipient Leo Thorsness.
Escape From Laos by Dieter Dengler. As in Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog’s new war classic about Dengler, a German-born pilot serving in the US Navy, whose A-1 Skyraider was shot down in 1965, played by Christian Bale.
Some classics:
Escape from Colditz: The two classic escape stories: The Colditz story, and Men of Colditz by P.R. Reid
The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill
The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams
The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III: The Full Story of How 76 Allied Officers Carried Out World War II’s Most Remarkable Mass Escape by Tim Carroll
The Longest Tunnel The True Story of World War II’s Great Escape by Alan Burgess
Project Lessons from The Great Escape by Mark Kozak-Holland. From his college-level project-management curriculum based on historical events. Sounds interesting.
Reach for the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader, Legless Ace of the Battle of Britain by Paul Brickhill. Double-amputee Bader’s remarkable story includes his multiple escape attempts. Treated with respect by the Luftwaffe, they threatened to take his legs away if he kept it up, and finally put him in Colditz.
Aircraft Down!: Evading Capture in WWII Europe by Philip D. Caine
Untold Valor: Forgotten Stories of American Bomber Crews over Europe in World War II by Rob Morris
We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth, on Jan Baalsrud’s ill-fated 1943 effort to raise a resistance force in Norway.
On the subject of endurance:
“Tears In The Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath,” by Michael and Elizabeth Norman, is the story of GI/POW artist Ben Steele, a survivor now 91 years old and a professor of art emeritus, illustrated with his recreated sketches from Japanese prison camps, the originals having been lost in the war. Extensively reviewed at the Moderate Voice. An author “op-art” at The New York Times, Memorial of the Mind. Washington Times editorial, Remembering Bataan, Americans Who Know What Torture Really Is. More of the art here. An interview with Steele and more art here.
We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese by Elizabeth Norman
Foo : A Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun : The Secret Prison Diary of Frank ‘Foo’ Fujita by Frank Fujita
Through the Valley of the Kwai by Ernest Gordon
Behind Bamboo: An Inside Story of the Japanese Prison Camps by Rohan Rivett
The War Diaries of “Weary” Dunlop: Java and the Burma-Thailand Railway, 1942-45 by Sir Edward Dunlop
Surrender and Survival The Experience of American POW’s in the Pacific 1941-1945 by E. Bartlett Kerr
Some Survived: An Eyewitness Account of the Bataan Death March and the Men Who Lived Through It by Manny Lawton
Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific by Gavin Daws
Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian’s Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II by Louis Zamperini
We Refused To Die: My time as a prisoner of war in Bataan and Japan, 1942-1945 by Gene S. Jacobsen
Piling on the Japanese Imperial Army, the Viet Cong etal, is easy sport. But what is a book list without some controversy? Andersonville:
John Ransom’s Diary Andersonville by John Ransom
From Ashby To Andersonville: The Civil War Diary And Reminiscences Of Private George A. Hitchcock, 21st Massachusetts Infantry by Ronald Watson
Andersonville: The Last Depot by William Marvel
Ghosts And Shadows of Andersonville: Essays on the Secret Social Histories of America’s Deadliest Prison by Robert Scott Davis
History of Andersonville Prison by Ovid. L Futch
The Andersonville Prison Civil War Crimes Trial by Susan Banfield
The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz by James Madison Page
Andersonvilles Of The North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners by James M. Gillispie
Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History by Alan Huffman
Also long as we’re delving into controversy, here’s Guantanamo:
Inside Gitmo: The True Story Behind the Myths of Guantanamo Bay by Gordon Cucullu. Retired colonel looked it over, judged that while there had been excesses in the early days, it is a well-run military prison.
For some reason, it’s a lot easier to find other views:
The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days by Karen J. Greenberg
Guantanamo: What the World Should Know by Michael Ratner
Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power by Joseph Margulies
The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America’s Illegall Prison by Andy Worthington
My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me by Mahvish Khan
Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz
Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar by Moazzam Begg
Related, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib by Philip Gourevitch
Further discussion of related issues:
Terrorism, The Laws Of War, And The Constitution: Debating The Enemy Combatant Cases edited by Peter Berkowitz of George Mason School of Law and the Hoover Institute
The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 by John Yoo
Your wartime captivity reading suggestions in comments, especially accounts of Allied prisoners, including Russians, held by the Germans; Germans and Japanese held by the Allies; and Korean War captivity that are largely absent from the above lists, would be greatly appreciated. We can build this into a new section in the bookshop at right.
MikeHu in comments recommends A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It for the experiences of Americans captured during the Bulge.
Juvat recommends this from an MOH recipient: American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day.
Something different:
Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, World War II, and the Long Journey Home by Gary Moore, documents his father Gene Moore’s brief Brooklyn Dodgers career, morale-boosting military exhibition team service, and subsequent guard duty over the secretly held U-505 crew, whom he taught how to play baseball.
My 3 Years Inside Russia: Based on the True Story of a German Soldier, Taken Prisoner After World War II by the Russians, and Banished to Siberia Comrade X as told to Ken Anderson. This looks odd, not finding anything about it online.
We’ll go out with my own one degree of separation from the horrors of wartime captivity.
My American Boy Scout troop in Thailand in the 1970s often marched sections of the Death Railway along the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi Province. We camped by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, and held brief ceremonies to honor the war dead on the insistence of our U.S. military scoutmasters, who expected proper attire and respectful attitudes. Then we’d wander among the graves, looking at the names, dates and units of the tens of thousands of young Australian, British, Dutch and American soldiers who were executed, beaten, starved and worked to death, or left to die of easily treatable diseases less than 30 years earlier. As many as 200,000 more conscripted native laborers also died. I am not aware that they have marked graves.
In 1997, I was driving up the Southeast Expressway to work in Boston when I passed a car with a USS Houston reunion bumpersticker and a POW license plate. I knew what that meant, and tracked down Preston Clark. I took along Boston Herald photog Kuni Takahashi, who was interested because, as he noted, the Japanese don’t teach that history. Clark, who still had the aluminum pan he had etched the dates and locations of camps along the railway that he was kept in and a hand-stitched loincloth with emblem of rank on the front section, didn’t mind telling me and Kuni all about it:
Decades later, POWs recall evils of war
JULES CRITTENDEN
2 March 1997
Boston Herald
Preston Clark doesn’t think very often about the three years he spent as a prisoner of the Japanese on the River Kwai, of the starvation, disease and labor that killed so many men there.
It was half a century ago and life goes on, Clark explains. But now and then, a haunting dream takes the old Navy commander back to the jungle camps.
“I’m in a building, and outside people are coming and going. Mostly going, and it’s looking bleak. I’m one of the last,” said Clark, 80, of Wenham.
In Hull, retired Navy chief Leo Callahan, 76, wakes up some nights in a cold sweat, panicked by the thought he is still a POW - half-starved, beaten and slaving in a Japanese coal mine.
“You think back and wonder, `How the hell did I ever do that?”‘ Callahan said recently.
Clark and Callahan’s hellish odysseys began 55 years ago yesterday. It was after midnight on March 1, 1942, when the USS Houston took three torpedo hits, rolled on its side and sank off Java.
The heavy cruiser was part of an Allied fleet defending Java that was annihilated in a month of clashes with the Japanese. The Houston and the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth were trying to escape on Feb. 28. Air reports said the coast was clear.
“When we came into the Sunda Strait, there was the entire Japanese fleet,” Callahan said. He was sleeping by his 5-inch gun when the Klaxons woke him that night.
“We were shooting at everything we could see,” said Clark. “A destroyer would come real close in and shine a searchlight on us. Their big ships would lob in shells while our guys tried to shoot out the searchlight.”
“The Jap destroyers came in so close, you could see the men on deck,” Callahan said. “It was a tremendous battle. We threw everything we had at them.”
But in the fierce, hourlong firefight, they were outgunned. The Perth sank first and then the Houston. Capt. Albert Rooks, who went down with the ship, had time to reverse course, bringing his men closer to Java for the long swim ashore.
“She took her time going down, like she was giving us a chance to get off,” Callahan said. “I just walked right down the side of the ship and dove in.”
“In the water it was nice and warm,” said Clark. “I saw the loom of a mountain ahead, and swam for that.”
He swam for nine hours. Callahan swam for 30. Of 1,064 men on board, 368 made it ashore.
From the beach, Clark’s captors made him haul a supply cart for two days without food or water. Drinking from ditches, he caught dysentery and kept it for three years. His bare feet became a mass of blisters.
Crammed into makeshift prisons, Clark and Callahan got their first taste of POW rations - moldy, maggot-filled rice.
“As the months went by, you could see your muscles waste away,” Clark said. “The Japanese had a Herculean problem. They never expected to get so many prisoners. They got 80,000 on Singapore alone. They were overwhelmed. And beside that, they didn’t give a damn.”
The POWs learned to expect frequent, irrational beatings.
“The Japanese Army was run on beatings. As near as I could tell, the only reason for advancement was to reduce the number of people over your head who were entitled to beat you,” Clark said. “POWs were at the bottom of the heap. It didn’t matter what your rank was, everyone got bashed.”
Most of the Houston crew was soon shipped north to Burma. Callahan, sick with malaria, was kept back in Java.
With 61,000 other British, Australian and Dutch POWs in Burma and Thailand, Clark led crews that moved dirt, broke rock and built bridges on the 150-mile Death Railroad.
They lived in muddy camps along the line the Japanese needed to supply their army in Burma. They died of beriberi, cholera and tropical ulcers - virulent infections that set into any scratch. With no medical supplies, POW medics used sharpened spoons to scoop out the rotten flesh while the patient was held down.
Before it was over, 15,000 POWs were dead, one in four.
“They sent men out to work who were obviously unfit,” Clark said. “Men died like flies.”
In Java, Callahan spent two years as a dockworker before he was packed on a ship to Japan.
“(American) subs were following us the whole way. We could hear the calls to action stations on the Jap destroyers around us,” he said. One night, a POW on deck asked to trade places with Callahan in the hold.
“So he went down and I went topside,” Callahan said. That night, “A Jap destroyer went up. A terrific explosion. In the water, we could see the phosphorescent trails of three torpedoes headed for us. The ship went down in minutes. No one escaped from down below.”
He swam for 20 hours before a Japanese ship picked him up.
“They marched us down the streets of Nagasaki to a Mitsubishi shipyard. These days, whenever I see that Mitsubishi symbol on a car, I want to run into it,” Callahan said.
In early 1945, after eight months in the shipyard, he was sent north to work in a mine. It saved him from the atom bomb.
“We didn’t know that. We thought, `Coal mines will kill you.”‘ Callahan said. He carried shrapnel in his face for two years after a mine explosion. But he knew the war was ending when he saw the sky fill with B-29 bombers.
“One day we woke up, and the Jap guards were gone. But nobody came for us,” he said. The POWs headed for Nagasaki.
“You never saw anything like the devastation. It was just blown away,” he said. Doctors later found radiation in his blood, and he has had several tumors removed. But he said, “If it wasn’t for the atom bomb, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have lasted another year.”
The war ended for Clark in a Bangkok warehouse. He remembers Thai women bringing roast pork to the skeletal POWs.
“We’d eat it, get sick, eat some more,” he said. “I’ll never forget the taste of that pork.”
Both men stayed in the Navy after the war and made repeated trips to Japan. Clark remembers coming ashore at Yokohama in 1950. An old man bowed to him.
“It was something that had never happened to me,” Clark said. “The Japanese were kind and respectful. It was very different than it had been for me.”
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:43 am on Friday, June 12, 2009
13 Responses to “Dawn’s Early Light (Captivity In Print)”
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June 12th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Jules - Wow, Thank you for that long list, and for posting your 1997 story on USS Houston survivors Clark and Callahan. What an amazing survivors they were (? are?). The PC headline the Herald put on the story, “Decades later, POWs recall evils of war” doesn’t do his story justice at all (my try: “Decades later, POW’s recall evils of Japanese Empire”). I hope Clark and Callahan had peace and respect in their later lives - they truly deserved it.
To add to your list, Gerald Astor’s “A Blood-Dimmed Tide” has a lot on the experiences of American 106th Infantry and others captured during the Bulge, in German POW camps at the end of the war. Like many ship-bound prisoners of the Rising sun who faced death by American torpedoes, Bulge prisoners packed like sardines into rail cars faced death by fighter bombers ranging over the Reich, as well as the usual SS/Nazi depravities.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Thanks, Mike. Re the headline, dunno, it may just be that “Japanese Empire” was too long. It happens. Great book suggestion, I’ll add that.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I’d also like to recommend “American Patriot, The life and wars of George Day” . Medal of Honor Winner and John McCain’s cell mate in Hanoi.
June 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
If only there were a way to shove this ugly reality into the faces of the cowardly, politically-correct lint-balls who currently dominate our airways and print media. This world would be a far safer place.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Dad told me there was very little chance of escaping from the ball turret of a B-24, and there wasn’t much point in doing so. It was so tight that you could not wear the parachute harness, let alone the parachute itself. If you lived long enough to retract the turret, climb out, put on the harness and chute, scamper along the catwalk by the bomb bay, and exit through the rear of the plane, you were still pretty much screwed if you were over Japanese territory when you bailed out. It was a very powerful incentive to do one’s job well: if you could not shoot down the Japanese fighters, you had better at least spoil their aim. It was your best chance of showing up to breakfast the next morning.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Thanks, Mitch. If you haven’t yet, you want to read Wings of Morning by Thomas Childers. Detailed and beautifully written history of a B-24 crew, all but two killed, including Childers’ uncle, in the last American bomber to be shot down over Europe in 1945. Includes a survivor’s description of the difficulties of getting out of a falling aircraft, as well as the initial experience of capture.
Speaking of bomber crews, RAF air gunner PGEA Brown, the sole survivor of the RAAF Wellington bomber in which my uncle, RAAF Flt Sgt. Philip Crittenden, was killed in 1941, reportedly was part of the support crew for the Great Escape. Brown, a tailgunner, apparently had the ability to turn his turret to an extreme angle and get out the exposed back. The other five did not get out, and are buried next to each other in a World War I cemetery in Charleroi, Belgium, the town where Napoleon was captured during the disordered retreat from Waterloo. Brown landed in a tree and was turned over to the Germans by one of the Belgian farmers who had found him and cut him down. He had a leg injury from the crash and was not approved to go by the Escape Committee but sewed costumes, according to information passed on by Brown’s grandson.
June 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Jules,
My father has borne a life-long distaste for any and all things Japanese. He was an independent-duty Pharmacist’s Mate attached to Marines in the Pacific. He was part of the Marine unit that rescued Bishop Arkfelt and a number of Catholic Nuns in New Guinea from Japanese captivity. His comments about the way they lived and the treatment they were subject to would seem beyond belief if it weren’t so well documented. The Bishop used to be an occasional guest at my family’s home when I was young. Prior to this, he had been stationed in Australia, where he met the young lady from the Tweed River District who would be my mother. She was a teletype operator at McArthur’s HQ.
Later my father was sent to suplement the medical detail on an LST during the Leyte Invasion, then went stateside to the Naval Hospital in Philly till the end of the war. Afterward, he was shipped to Japan to help escort repatriated American POW’s back home. The images he gave of those men, and the sad stories of some still dying on the way home were what finally formed his personal opinions. At 90 years of age, he still carries a grudge.
Thanks for your writing, Jules. It’s always a pleasure to read.
respects,
June 14th, 2009 at 7:57 am
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June 14th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
This is a GREAT reference list! I’ve read a few of them but not nearly enough! Thanks for putting this together.
June 14th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden has a big roundup [...]
June 14th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement has many wonderful links and [...]
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