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Hampton SidesGhost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1: “Blood Brothers”
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary
On April 10, 1942, the Japanese troops marched the captive Americans and Filipinos along the East Road. The Japanese had confiscated everything that they could from the POWs. One guard sliced off a finger from an American POW to get a ring from his swollen finger that could not be removed. The POWs were dehydrated. The Japanese guards taunted them by stopping them next to a freshwater spring and not allowing them to drink. One man jumped in and was promptly decapitated.
In the early days of the march, “the guards were not gratuitously cruel” (107). They, too, were worn out by the Battle of Bataan and many Japanese soldiers were teenage peasants. However, the Japanese expected the POWs to march quickly to meet their deadline, regardless of their ability to do so (108). Gradually, they grew more irate and violent. Sometimes they disemboweled the slow walkers with their blades. Some were punished for having “made in Japan” items from before the war rather than trophies. According to some estimates, 5,000 Filipinos and 750 Americans died from the elements, exhaustion, or murder. In general, the Japanese looked down on the Americans not just as victors, but also “for holding out so long” in Bataan, and because “surrender was beneath the dignity of a true soldier” (109).
The Americans included Abie Abraham, a Syrian American from a poor family in western Pennsylvania, a staff sergeant of the First Battalion in the 31st Infantry. He joined the army in 1932 and had three children with his wife, Nancy. Abraham was known for his perseverance and excelled at boxing. He expected his time in the Philippines to be “a carefree tour of duty,” but then the war came (113). Another American POW, Bertram Bank of Alabama, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had joined the 27th Bomb Group of the Army Air Corps, arriving in the Philippines in the autumn of 1941. To survive in Bataan, “Garbage Mouth” Bank ate just about anything (126). On rare occasions, the Japanese guards allowed the POWs to accept food from the Filipino villages they passed. For a portion of the trip, the POWs were crammed into a hot train where many got sick along the way. The POWs, like many soldiers, engaged in killing during combat, so it was not the violent treatment, but their inability to respond to it, that made them feel helpless.
However, the Bataan Death March “was not a premeditated atrocity,” but rather a combination of incompetence and piecemeal brutality (117). General Homma “remained oblivious to the enormity of the disaster” (120). The Japanese side underestimated the number of POWs by 60,000 men, along with their poor health. Instead of changing the logistics, they proceeded with the original plan to meet the deadline with disastrous results. The Japanese army itself was “expected to forage and steal,” and now they had to feed 78,000 POWs (120). Nor did they use American vehicles to transport the POWs as General King suggested. In part, due to the American oil embargo and subsequent oil scarcity, the Japanese “remained, to a great extent, a foot army” in contrast to the mechanized US troops (118). They were skilled marchers and expected the wounded and sick POWs to keep up.
The racial animus between the sides also played a role. Furthermore, the strict hierarchy and the “psychology of top-down violence” in the Japanese army tempted the lower-ranking soldiers in charge of the POWs to resort to corporal punishment (119). In addition, the in-fighting between Homma and General Hajime Sugiyama, the Army chief of Staff, complicated matters, as the latter saw the former as insufficiently aggressive. Also, “a Rasputin-like character,” Masanobu Tsuji, had a “mysterious power” in the army far beyond his rank (121). He was suspected of making anonymous phone calls to different commanders, pretending to be coming from Homma’s headquarters with a kill-all order. Some followed through without verification.
Arriving at Camp O’Donnell, the POWs were housed in quarters meant for a much smaller number of prisoners. They were overseen by Captain Yoshio Tsuneyoshi. The camp was unhygienic and marked by deprivation. The prisoners faced starvation and diseases like dysentery, beriberi, and malaria. Others were “beaten to death, shot, beheaded, bayonetted” (139). The seriously ill POWs stayed in St. Peter’s Ward because they were not expected to survive. The overall “death toll at Camp O’Donnell was catastrophic”—one out of 10 (137). The dead were buried in unmarked graves. For this reason, burials were “the main focus and organizing principle of the camp” (138). On one occasion, Edward Thomas miraculously escaped death in a malaria delirium as he ran toward the barbed wire fence. He did not get shot and was able to return safely.
Book 1, Chapter 4 Summary
The Rangers pressed on through a maze-like field of cogon grass on the night of January 29, 1945. The Filipino guerillas were superstitious about cogon fields at night, believing they may be haunted, since their culture mixed devout Catholicism with local folklore. The fact that they came across several dead birds that inexplicably dropped out of the sky did not help matters, as the Filipinos interpreted the event as a bad omen. They arrived at Balincarin village by morning, just a few weeks after the village “suffered a bloody reprisal from the Japanese Army” after being suspected of concealing guerillas (146). This was the first time the villagers encountered US troops in person since the Battle of Bataan.
Mucci and Prince learned that the locals—and “every village in this part of Nueva Ecija”—were already aware of their secret plan, which complicated matters (149). The friendly Filipino villagers supported Americans but were also talkative. The Americans were concerned that the Japanese would massacre the remaining POWs should they learn of their plan. Mucci decided to let the men rest in the village, and Captain Prince—whose feet were covered in bloody blisters—was happy to do so. 25-year-old Prince, a Princeton graduate who had never seen combat up close, was the one responsible for the rescue plan inside the camp.
Tom Rounsaville and Bill Nellist, two Alamo Scouts created by General Krueger, were tasked with gathering intelligence about the Cabanatuan camp. The Scouts studied the camp perimeter and created preliminary sketches. However, specific information about the camp layout, the numbers of Japanese troops, and heavy machinery was still in development. For this reason, the “paucity of intelligence infuriated the colonel” (157). There was also the close presence of the Japanese Imperial Army (156). For instance, the Dokuho 359 Battalion of Tomeo Oyabu camped out a mere mile outside the camp.
The Rangers met another guerilla leader, Juan Pajota. Thirty-year-old Pajota was initially part of the 91st Filipino Infantry when the war began, but was cut off during the Bataan retreat. As a result, he formed his own guerilla group. Here, Pajota could help with 160 unarmed and 90 armed men to support the rescue. He also informed Mucci that much larger numbers of Japanese soldiers arrived in the camp’s vicinity overnight, making the rescue that day a “suicide mission.” Pajota suggested that the remaining prisoners were “the sickest and the weakest,” with the healthier ones shipped to Japan (161). For this reason, the guerilla leader thought that the mission should involve carabao—water buffalo—strong but slow animals that could pull carts with sick prisoners in what would be “medieval transportation” (162). Mucci accepted his timing argument and delayed the mission by 24 hours.
Book 1, Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 reveal one of the key overarching themes in this book: Human Survival in Extreme Conditions. The author discusses this theme primarily from the standpoint of the Bataan Death March and the first days in the POW camp O’Donnell. The purpose of this theme is two-fold. First, it serves as historical documentation of the many horrors of World War II, which occurred on an industrial scale. Second, the theme stresses the physical and psychological resilience required for getting through such an ordeal with an indefinite timeline.
The Bataan Death March resulted in the deaths of several thousand people. At the initial destination, Camp O’Donnell, over 25,000 Filipinos and 1,500 Americans also perished. However, according to Hampton Sides, this event was not a deliberate act of mass slaughter—a “premeditated atrocity”—but a combination of Japanese incompetence and individual acts of violence (117). Despite being unplanned, the mistreatment and killing of POWs repeatedly broke the Geneva Convention.
There were four reasons why the POW march turned into a death march. First, the Japanese grossly underestimated the number of surrendering POWs, along with the need to provide them with basic necessities and shelter. Second, the Japanese overestimated the health status of the surrendering troops after months of malnutrition, illnesses, and combat wounds. The prisoners’ poor physical health meant that they were unable to walk long distances at a fast pace like the Japanese troops. Third was the Japanese adherence to the original transfer plan, refusing to adjust it in any way, including using the American transport offered by General King. This adherence to order for the sake of order is another symptom of the cultural clash described by Hampton Sides earlier. Fourth was General Homma’s oversight, as he “remained oblivious to the enormity of the disaster” (120).
The author deliberately analyzes Homma’s character in detail. He was an Anglophile—a fan of both American and British culture—as well as an English speaker. For this reason, it was “a matter of some irony” that it was Homma who was assigned the attack on the Philippines (81). His own colleagues considered him too soft—a “compassionate general with views that might be described as liberal and internationalist” (79). It was his “deeply introspective” character that made him uninterested in micromanaging his troops, “preferring to delegate all the messy responsibilities and minutiae to subordinates” (81). It was this lack of interest that translated into a disaster of negligence and oversight. At his war crimes trial in 1946, the prosecution could not prove that he ordered the killings or even knew they occurred. Nonetheless, he was executed as the commander under whom his underlings carried out the atrocities (See: Background). The author summarizes the Bataan Death March as the “feeling of absolute impotence in the face of evil” (110).
Second, the author presents human survival in different ways. For example, he discusses the adaptability to eat just about anything in the “Garbage Mouth” description of Bertram Bank. This vignette demonstrates the chronic lack of not only food, but necessary nutrition, during the march and in the POW camps. Caloric and nutritional deficiencies were some of the main contributors to exacerbating illnesses like dysentery that plagued both the march and the camps. The camp featured poor sanitation and cramped conditions. Sides also shows the way different preventable illnesses affected the prisoners. For example, sometimes malaria delirium made patients like Eduard Thomas act in uncontrollable ways, narrowly escaping death by a Japanese bullet.
Overall, the POWs did not know if and when they would be liberated as they watched their comrades die in large numbers—a “catastrophic” death toll at O’Donnell (137). The psychological pressure must have been enormous in a place where the burials of fellow soldiers were the “main focus and organizing principle of the camp” (138). The fact that many of them successfully adjusted to civilian life after the war and went on to have long careers and lives, such as Abie Abrahamson and Colonel Mucci, is a testament to their resilience.
Another important aspect in this section is the camaraderie between the soldiers, as reflected in the title “Blood Brothers.” The overarching concept is the mutual support within the group necessary for basic survival. In the case of the prisoners, camaraderie helped them survive in an extreme situation despite the helplessness of being imprisoned for an indefinite amount of time, with psychological support being no less important than physical help. In the case of the US Rangers and the Filipino guerillas, camaraderie helped them carry out a difficult mission based on group cooperation in which everyone had his own role.
In both cases, group leadership was an important organizing factor. In the POWs’ case, it was the US camp commander Duckworth and the medical staff in whom the Japanese side had a certain level of trust. In the case of the Rangers and the guerillas, it was Colonel Mucci and Captain Robert Prince who kept up morale and organized the mission. The author also uses this theme to “develop the characters”—the real-life participants of the events he describes. Some, like Abie Abrahamson, were of an impoverished immigrant background. When Abrahamson was growing up, he “kept the local doctor’s chickens, set pins at the town bowling alley, and worked in a shirt family” to help his family get by (113). Finding himself in an extreme situation in World War II as an adult, Abrahamson similarly prioritized the needs of his comrades to prevent them from getting harmed by the Japanese guards or simply supported them by word and deed.
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