{"product_id":"ghost-soldiers-isbn-9780385495653","title":"Ghost Soldiers","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER •\u003c\/b\u003e “The greatest World War II story never told” (\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e)—an enthralling account of the heroic mission to rescue the last survivors of the Bataan Death March—from the author of \u003ci\u003eBlood and Thunder\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eGhost   Soldiers \u003c\/i\u003eHampton 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, \u003ci\u003eGhost Soldiers\u003c\/i\u003e 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.“[Sides] liberates his story from documentary and turns it into epic. . . . More   than any monument, \u003ci\u003eGhost Soldiers\u003c\/i\u003e is the memorial both prisoners and liberators deserve.”   —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“The greatest World War II story never told.” —\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A]   beautiful account of heroism . . . Sure to be a classic.” —\u003ci\u003eMen’s Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Riveting   and patriotically stirring without ever slipping into mawkishness or sentimentality.”   —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Thoroughly researched and artfully told. . . . A compelling   story filled with colorful characters.” —\u003ci\u003eThe San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003eHAMPTON SIDES is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling histories \u003ci\u003eOn Desperate Ground, In the Kingdom of Ice, Hellhound on his Trail, Blood and Thunder\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eGhost Soldiers\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the PEN USA Award for Nonfiction. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDr. Ralph Emerson Hibbs lay delirious in a ditch at the tattered edge  of the jungle, his teeth clicking with chills. The malarial attack  came over him suddenly, as they always did, the strength dropping  from his legs like an untethered weight. In their thousands the  parasites were reproducing inside him, Plasmodium vivax bursting from  his liver and into his bloodstream. The doctor had nothing with which  to treat himself. He couldn't work, he couldn't think. He had to ride  out the fever as everyone else did, helplessly, shivering in a ditch  by the side of a battle-pocked road. An Army captain and a graduate  of the University of Iowa Medical School, Dr. Hibbs was the surgeon  of the 2nd Battalion of the 31st Infantry Regiment, a man responsible  for the health of some 700 soldiers in the field, but he had no  quinine. On the anopheles-infested peninsula of Bataan at the end of  the first week of April 1942, there was virtually no quinine to be  had.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlong with thousands of other malarial men, Dr. Hibbs had been  walking out of the mountains down the zigzag road toward Mariveles.  In great haste and confusion, the men were stumbling south to escape  the turmoil and the butchery of the front lines, where for the past  week the Japanese onslaught had been merciless. One participant later  described the exodus: \"Thousands poured out of the jungle like small  spring freshets pouring into creeks which in turn poured into a  river.\" As they walked, the soldiers picked their way around bomb  craters and bits of embedded shrapnel. The jungle smoked all about  them. Overturned wrecks of jeeps and half-tracks lay smoldering in  the creeper ferns. The rattan vines were singed, the tree leaves  wormed with bullet holes, the canopy torn open by artillery shells,  letting the late-afternoon sun seep through.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe word had come from somewhere or other that General King would  offer his surrender in the morning. Hibbs reacted to this news with  as much relief as sadness. Everyone knew the situation was hopeless.  \"We were participants in a lousy game,\" Hibbs later wrote. \"We  couldn't live much longer, let alone fight.\" The men were gaunt,  shell-shocked, addled with nerve fatigue. They were so exhausted, as  one soldier put it, \"that even our hair was tired.\" They were  fighting with improvised weapons, living on improvised food. Day by  day the regular had devolved into the irregular. Sailors were serving  as infantryman, firing machine guns fashioned from parts cannibalized  from crashed airplanes. Corned beef had segued to hardtack, and  hardtack to iguana, and iguana to grubs and silkworms. Army  veterinarians who under ordinary circumstances were supposed to care  for the health of the pack mules and horses had instead been  overseeing their slaughter for \"cavalry steak.\" The lines had broken  so many times it was absurd to persist in calling them lines anymore.  The men of Bataan had fallen back to the place where there was no  more back to fall back to. Densely packed with hospital patients,  ammunition dumps, military hardware, and the scattered remnants of  the troops, the southern tip of Bataan had become so crowded,  recalled one American officer, that \"bombers could drop their  payloads at almost any point or place and hit something of military  value.\" Whether one wanted to call it a retrograde maneuver, or a  strategic withdrawal, or some other euphemism for retreat, they  simply had nowhere to go. At their front was the Fourteenth Imperial  Army, at their rear was the South China Sea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd above them, Zeros. For weeks and months, the skies had droned  with Mitsubishi engines. The bombing and strafing runs had been  relentless, chewing up the little nipa huts in the Filipino barrios,  leaving the brown grass fields and canebrakes, especially combustible in the dry season, consumed by enormous fires. Photo Joe, as the  Americans called the enemy surveillance planes, had circled overhead  with impunity, radioing the exact disposition of the Fil-American  forces so the Japanese artillerymen on the ground could rain shells  upon them with deadlier precision. There was even a doddering  surveillance blimp which for some reason the Americans couldn't seem  to bring out of the sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe planes not only dropped bombs, they dropped words. As the battle  dragged on, propaganda sheets had fluttered down from the skies. One  leaflet depicted a voluptuous woman beckoning soldiers to bed down  with her. \"Before the terror comes, let me walk beside you . . . deep  in petaled sleep. Let me, while there is still a time and place. Feel  soft against me and . . . rest your warm hand on my breast.\" More  recently the propaganda had turned from a tone of clumsy prurience to  one of dark ultimatum.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBataan is about to be swept away. Hopes for the arrival of  reinforcements are quite in vain. If you continue to resist, the  Japanese forces will by every possible means destroy and annihilate  your forces relentlessly to the last man. Further resistance is  completely useless. You, dear soldiers, give up your arms and stop  resistance at once.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCommander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Forces\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet for the men of Bataan, disease was the real enemy, killing them  and sapping their morale with even greater efficacy than the  Fourteenth Army. Old diseases that modern medicine had long since  learned how to treat. Diseases of vitamin dearth, diseases of bad  hygiene, diseases of jungle rot, diseases of sexual promiscuity, and,  of course, the vector-borne diseases of the Asian tropics. Their  bodies coursed with every worm and pathogen a hot jungle can visit  upon a starved and weakened constitution-dengue fever, amebic  dysentery, bacillary dysentery, tertian malaria, cerebral malaria,  typhus, typhoid. The field hospitals were rife with gas gangrene,  spreading from wound to wound to wound. The men's joints ached with  the various odd swellings of incipient beriberi, an illness of  vitamin B deficiency which, as one soldier described the condition,  left the legs feeling \"watery and pump[ing] with pains\" and made the  racing heart \"thump like a tractor engine bogged in a swamp.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWorking at the front lines with the 31st Infantry, Dr. Hibbs had seen  all of these conditions, and many others of even greater exoticism,  but increasingly he'd found it impossible to treat the sufferers. It  was a medical defeat. The hospitals overflowed to the point that the  nurses were setting up outdoor wards among the gnarled folds and  aerial roots of ancient banyan trees.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf all the various units and outfits spread over Bataan, the 31st had  seen a disproportionate share of sickness and death, especially in  the last few weeks of the siege. Not only were its men in the thick  of battle, but they generally ate less well than supply units  situated closer to the quartermaster. It is an old hard fact of war  that rations mysteriously shrink as they make their way to the front.  And so the proud 31st, which before the war had been known as the  Thirsty-first for its reputed drinking prowess, then came to be known  as the Hungry-first, the most starved of all the American units on  Bataan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring the last few weeks of the fighting, the bloodshed had been  horrific. Dr. Hibbs's memory of the last battles was a blur of  despair and carnage. One morning Hibbs had found himself holding a  leg whose owner could not be located. On another day, he had treated  a kid with a ghastly shrapnel wound to the head, a wound large enough  so that gray matter was protruding from his skull. Hibbs had declared  the young soldier a goner, but then he had miraculously rallied, only  to lapse into a coma. The battle raged so intensely that the whole  unit was forced to pull back, but the medics had no litters or ambulances with which to transport casualties. Hibbs never forgot the  sight of the blood-smeared boy dangling over the shoulders of the  medics like a sodden rag doll as they retreated into the jungle. They  would set the kid down on the ground and resume the fight, then pick  him up and withdraw again, then set him down and fight some more.  This went on all day, with the boy becoming like a terrible mascot of  the retreat. It hardly seemed worth the effort; the boy's brains were  pushing out of his head, the color had washed from his face, his  pulse was barely there-yet he kept on breathing. For Hibbs, the scene  was a metaphor for what the fighting on Bataan had become, a heroic  struggle to prolong a hopeless cause.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt night, when the fighting subsided, a lieutenant named Henry Lee  would dash off lines of poetry from his foxhole. Universally beloved  by members of the Philippine Division Headquarters Company, Lee was  from Pasadena, California, and had been educated at Pomona College,  where he first cultivated his literary aspirations. On Bataan he  fought with the elite Filipino soldiers known as the Philippine  Scouts. Whenever he wasn't holding a gun, he could usually be found  with a pen in his hand. There was one snippet of Lee's verse that  especially caught the spirit of the last weeks. Entitled \"Prayer  Before Battle,\" it was written as an homage to Mars.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDrained of faith\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI kneel and hail thee as my Lord\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI ask not life\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThou need not swerve the bullet\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI ask but strength to ride the wave\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand one thing more-\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eteach me to hate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDefeat had come slowly, steadily, over a period of four months. As in  all great sieges, the fall of Bataan was not so much an emphatic  decision of arms as it was an epic drawdown marked by increments of  physical, spiritual, and material depletion. As John Hersey wrote at  the time, the truth had come to the men of Bataan \"in mean little  doses.\" Hibbs had begun his tour of Philippine duty with a sunny  nonchalance, even as the threat of war loomed. Manila was considered  the easiest post in the Army, the \"Pearl of the Orient,\" where  officers lazed away the heat of the day and danced away the nights  dressed in natty sharkskin suits, drinking gin and tonics and San  Miguel beer at the Jai Alai Club. Hibbs had had a love affair with a  Manila society girl named Pilar Campos, a beautiful young mestiza who  was the daughter of the president of the Bank of the Philippine  Islands. \"Neither of us,\" Hibbs wrote, \"sought help in finding the  moral path.\" In late November, less than two weeks before the first  Zeros came to attack Luzon, Hibbs had written a chipper note to his  parents back in Oskaloosa, Iowa. \"Things are peaceful here,\" he wrote.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLife in the Orient is easygoing with emphasis on the mañana and  siesta ethic. With the tremendous military buildup here, a Jap attack  seems unlikely. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone to  England. There's nothing going to happen here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLove, Ralph\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy January, Hibbs recognized how misplaced his insouciance was, but  he tried to put the best face on the situation. An optimist by  nature, he endeavored to look for hope in the shadows, to ascribe the  non-arrival of promised arms and medicines to honest mistakes that  could be easily redeemed. A slender, bespectacled man with some of  the bearing and affable features of the young Jimmy Stewart, Hibbs  kept his sense of humor no matter how grim things got, his eyes  always lit with a suggestion of mischief. In February, Hibbs sent  another letter to his folks, which proved to be his last  communication from Bataan-a letter notable for its facade of good  cheer where plainly none existed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLife is not too bad. I have a bamboo bed, a blanket, plenty of water,  a few too many mosquitoes. The food is fair-carabao, monkey, and  occasionally mule. Everyone is content and in fairly good health. No  need to worry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe have plenty of room in which to maneuver and fight and we have  plenty of it left in us. Turn the calf out to pasture. I'll be  delayed a while.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRalph\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe letter ran prominently, and without a hint of irony, in the Des  Moines Register under the headline \"Things Are Not Too Bad.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn truth, Hibbs had found monkey to be considerably less than fair.  The meat was unappetizing in hue and appearance, and if one had to  clean and prepare the animal, consuming it made one feel rather like  a cannibal. Hibbs later wrote, \"After chewing on a piece it seemed to  increase in size, requiring resting of the masseter muscle. Most  monkey meat got placed back in our mess kits pretty much  undisturbed.\" As trying as monkey was, the menu on Bataan grew  progressively stranger. Meals consisted of cats, slugs, rats, various  dried insects, and the meat and eggs of python. Some Filipinos were  known to eat dogs; the bow-hunting Igorot tribesmen who'd been  brought in to teach the soldiers jungle survival skills were  especially fond of a dish that might be described as hound haggis.  \"It was a custom to eat the stomach of a dog that had been gorged  with rice before sacrificing it,\" Hibbs remembered. \"The warm rice  mixed with the mucus of the stomach was supposedly a delicacy.\"On the  evening of April 8, 1942, \"things\" were most assuredly bad for Dr.  Hibbs. As he sat shivering in the ditch, half lost in the throes of  his fever, the vast volcanic jungle clinked and snapped and exploded  with the sounds of an army deliberately destroying itself. With  surrender imminent, the men had been given the order to ruin their  weapons and sabotage any hardware that might prove valuable to the  enemy. Men were firing their last rounds of ammunition into the air,  detonating their grenades, covering their gun emplacements with  brush, dismantling their rifles and mortars and artillery pieces part  by part and scattering the miscellaneous components into the jungle.  Troops were pouring sand into the gas tanks of jeeps and armored  vehicles, or pulling the drain plugs from the oil pans while the  engines were left running. On the labyrinthine network of tiny trails  that spread like capillaries over the southern tip of Bataan, the  soldiers were not so much casting down their weapons as they were  obliterating them, in preparation for General King's expected  announcement of capitulation.Suddenly the night erupted in a series  of explosions that Hibbs described as \"apocalyptic.\" He was hearing,  and feeling, the dying gasp of the U.S. Army Forces of the Far East:  The demolition squads were blowing up the last of the big American  ammunition dumps to keep them from falling into Japanese hands. For a  time that evening, the southern tip of Bataan took on the sheen of  day, and one could limn the complex outline of the peninsula, with  its deep ravines and extinct volcanoes, its innumerable points and  promontories fingering out into the sea. The mighty island fortress  of Corregidor could be seen shimmering in Manila Bay. Cringing in his  ditch, Dr. Hibbs tried to shield himself from the rain of dirt and  rocks and shell fragments that fell out from the explosions. The  dumps contained several million dollars' worth of explosives-hundreds  of thousands of rounds of small-arms ammunition and artillery shells.  The detonations of TNT were unimaginably powerful, and they more than  aroused Hibbs from his febrile stupor. \"It was the biggest fireworks  display I'd ever seen, even bigger than the Iowa State Fair,\" Hibbs  said. \"With each blast, my body would bounce clear into the air.\"","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44886170730725,"sku":"NP9780385495653","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385495653.jpg?v=1767728044","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/ghost-soldiers-isbn-9780385495653","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}