With only the will to live: accounts of Americans in Japanese prison camps, 1941-1945

Abstract

Of the 25,000 Americans held prisoner in the Pacific during World War II, over 40 percent died in captivity. Only those with luck and a tremendous will to live ever made it home. Surprisingly, however, no book has yet tried to convey, in the survivors' own words, the full range of what these servicemen went through. But now their astonishing stories are finally told in With Only the Will to Live: Accounts of Americans in Japanese Prison Camps, 1941-1945. Historians Robert S. La Forte, Ronald E. Marcello, and Richard L. Himmel have selected the accounts of 52 individuals from interviews with well over 150 survivors. Telling of their surprise at losing to the enemy, brutal treatment by guards, constant battles with hunger and disease, use as slave labor, and unflagging refusal to give in, the men who were there paint a vivid picture of every stage of their ordeal. And, unlike memoirs by single individuals, the numerous accounts in With Only the Will to Live together give a view of many different camps and kinds of treatment the thousands of POWs were subjected to. From the jungles of Burma to the coal mines of Nagasaki, from rice patties in the Philippines to air raids in Kawasaki, With Only the Will to Live conveys the wide variety of experiences the American prisoners endured. Their understated heroism, and the shocking conditions that tested it, is now fully recorded in a volume that will thrill history buffs with its immediacy and inspire all readers with its demonstration of what the human spirit can conquer.