This reviewer, himself a survivor of the sequence of events about which this account is written, found it intensely difficult, in the interest of brevity, to quantify his overall thoughts on the subject matter.   It is awkward to try to read and applaud the printed word at the same time.

It is an almost incomprehensible revelation of what happened to the approximately 50,000 soldiers, sailors and marines comprising the American garrison in the Philippines at the outbreak of WW2.   After months of fighting, exhausted and unable to be reinforced by an unprepared America, the units were finally surrendered by the commanding general to the Japanese.

The reader is treated to a surgeon-like dissection of the many layers of complexities evolving from 3 1/4 years of trauma, turmoil and bloodshed induced by the violent clash of three different cultures; the Japanese as the victor, the Americans and Filipinos the vanquished.   The writer deserves great credit for the manner in which he brings the reader along in addressing the never-bridged chasm of difference existing between the Americans who saw eventual surrender as, perhaps, something less than honorable and the Japanese to whom surrender was an exact antithesis to it's culture.   The consequence was that of reducing prisoners-of-war to a state of something to be despised.

Reluctant to stop, this reviewer feels compelled to say that, though daunting by it's length, the compilation is supremely rewarding at it's climax.   He didn't "break-up" until thirteen pages from the end  (the first time)  and again at the very end.

We Americans should be gratified that Mr. Heisinger pursued his noble cause because it turns-out, in the effort, we are all the beneficiarie of the rich treasures he discovered and brought to the surface, at the dredging of that "foul, putrid swamp's sixty years of stagnation".

Warren Jorgenson
Ex-marine and ex-p.o.w.