Conduct Under Fire
Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
The fierce, bloody battles of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines are legendary in the annals of World War II. Those who survived faced the horrors of life as prisoners of
the Japanese.
In Conduct Under Fire, John A. Glusman chronicles these events through the eyes of his father, Murray, and three fellow navy doctors captured on Corregidor in May 1942. Here are the dramatic stories of the fall of Bataan, the siege of “the Rock,” and the daily struggles to tend the sick, wounded, and dying during some of the heaviest bombardments of World War II. Here also is the desperate war doctors and corpsmen waged against disease and starvation amid an enemy that viewed surrender as a disgrace. To survive, the POWs functioned as a family. But the ties that bind couldn’t protect them from a ruthless counteroffensive waged by American submarines or from the B-29 raids that burned Japan’s major cities to the ground. Based on extensive interviews with American, British, Australian, and Japanese veterans, as well as diaries, letters, and war crimes testimony, this is a harrowing account of a brutal clash of cultures, of a race war that escalated into total war.
Like Flags of Our Fathers and Ghost Soldiers, Conduct Under Fire is a story of bravery on the battlefield and ingenuity behind barbed wire, one that reveals the long shadow the war cast on the lives of those who fought it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four American doctors were captured by the Japanese when Corregidor surrendered in May 1942. George Ferguson came from Kansas City, Mo., and cleaned beer vats to help pay his way through college. John Bookman was the scion of a New York Jewish family that had been part of America's medical elite for generations. Fred Berley was from Chicago's West Side. Murray Glusman was the son of a New York City pharmacist. John Glusman is his son, and an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Consulting a wide range of archival and printed sources and complementing them with interviews of American, British and Australian survivors of Japanese prison camps, and the guards and administrators who ran them, Glusman has written a compelling account of courage and sacrifice from the perspective of the doctors who sought to keep their fellow captives alive under conditions that amounted to a mass sentence of death. He vividly shows Navy doctors working to exhaustion mending broken bodies, nursing a variety of exotic illnesses, treating spiritual as well as physical pain over three and a half years, deprived of bandages, instruments and the simplest of medicines. Over a third of American POWs held by the Japanese died in captivity. With grace and clarity, Glusman gives a keen sense of loss to that statistic, and a heroic dignity to those who survived a major achievement indeed.
