Captured Honor: Pow Survival in the Philippines and Japan

by Bob Wodnik

List Price: $19.95 Price: $13.97

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.45 x 9.00 x 6.12
• Publisher: Washington State Univ Pr; (June 2003)
• ISBN: 0874222605
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: 683,552

Reviews

Splendid reporting, 60 years after, April 26, 2003.  Captured Honor is a beautifully written book that presents with unsentimental empathy the stories of nine Americans who fought on Bataan and Corregidor. It juxtaposes these stories with an account of what was happening on the home scene -- specifically, in Everett, Washington, a town busy with war work -- as recorded in the diaries of a bookish hotel clerk. The juxtaposition works; it offers relief, and with these stories, I needed it.

Recently I learned much about the POW experience on the Bataan death march, on the "hell ships" and in the camps in the Philippines and Japan when I found a privately published 1959 novel written by a survivor. To me the other book was fantastical, so hard to believe that I started reading other veterans' narratives in an effort to make sense of it. Now Wodnik's nonfiction account has confirmed just about everything in it.

I think Captured Honor is an essential contribution to the history of the Pacific war -- and that Wodnik must be a gifted interviewer; these are often horrific, unglamorous memories that might have remained unrecorded. Time is running out for gathering these kinds of oral histories. But as hard as it is to read them, I am grateful for this book. - Reviewed by  patricia a welch from seattle, wa