Following Japan’s rapid conquest across the Pacific, Glenn Frazier of the U.S. Army was captured by the enemy. Over the next four years he would endure harsh cruelty through starvation, beatings, and the infamous Bataan Death March, igniting within him both a burning hatred and an unbreakable will to survive.
Learn more about Colonel Frazier’s experience in his book “Hell’s Guest”, available at www.colonelfrazier.com
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I was so blessed to have met and spoken with Colonel Frazier! I bought his book "Hell's Guest" and he personally signed it for me. I highly recommend the book!
ReplyDeleteHe also appears in Ken Burns' documentary "The War".
He's a better man then me. I still hate the little sons a bitches.
ReplyDeleteWhy the two atomic weapons have never bothered me. Japs deserved worse.
ReplyDeleteI read King Rat about one of their camps.
ReplyDeleteI'd be pissed too.
Clavell, I've read many of his works. Some a couple times.
DeleteJim Lehrer wrote a novel based upon a random encounter between an American POW of the Japanese and a brutal camp guard years after the war. He wants revenge.
ReplyDeleteIt's called 'The Special Prisoner."
My father told me a story of his time in the ATC Tower in Yokohama back in the early/mid-50s:
ReplyDeleteMy dad was the youngest guy in the group. For some reason they had some Japanese labourors working there and one of them, speaking in Japanese, kept talking sh*t about Americans thinking nobody but his fellow Nips understood him. At length, an older, grizzled American NCO jumped dead in that Nip's face. Speaking fluent Japanese, the NCO cuffed up the Nip, kicked the sh*t out of him, and had him arrested.
As it turned out, the old NCO had been held PoW during WW2 nearby that base and had been forced to dig rocks with his bare hands until his fingers were raw. When he couldn't dig any more, he was savagely beaten almost daily. Guess who had beaten him? That's right; the sh*t talking Nip labouror had been the sadistic guard at his PoW camp. And the old NCO recognized his voice 7 or 8 years later.
The Nip was sent off to "re-education/rehabilitation" which, in those days, equated to a few years of hard labour.
That older NCO told the group that no matter what, he could never forgive the Japanese people for the savagery and cruelty with which they treated everyone who came into their hands. Soldiers and civilians alike were equally cruel to any foreigners that fell into their clutches. Mercy was unknown to them.
In college I had an Econ instructor who made the Bataan march. On the anniversary he spoke about it. Not in gory detail but did comment on those who fell behind and were shot
ReplyDeleteBack in the early 70s, I worked in a hospital. One of the doctors had a stutter. I was told he had been in a Japanese POW camp and had come back with the stutter.
ReplyDeleteMy uncle, Kenneth William Vick, a USAAF airplane mechanic, was taken when the Nips invaded the Philippines. He was shot in the leg and spent his time in Japan, digging coal. For years afterward, when he would light a cigarette, his hands would shake. He had been beaten and tortured. According to my aunt, he did not even eat rice for years afterward. My dad, who was in the USAAF, was a B-17 Bombardier in Europe. After 05/08/1945, he was sent back to B-29 school in San Angelo, TX. That is when the A-bombs were dropped, and he was mustered out. If the A-bombs had not happened, I would not be here writing this now. The Japs got off easy. We should have let Stalin have the whole country.
ReplyDeleteI would not be here if not for the A-bombs. My Dad was a fighter pilot who would've been flying air support for the invasion of Japan. He did not expect to come home.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. After I read accounts of how the Japs treated POWs and pretty much everyone else who was under their authority, I think we should have dropped a third - just because.
ReplyDeleteOrdered a copy of the book. I’ve read some accounts of pow camps in the Philippines so I’m curious to read this book. Can’t think of the name but there’s a book about it Ranger raid on a pow camp to free prisoners before the Japanese massacred them. It switches between the pow’s perspective and the planning and execution of the raid.
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