Craig B. Smith is former president of a global engineering, architecture, and construction firm that has been involved in many major public works projects, including the renovation of the Pentagon before and after 9/11. He is the author of How the Great Pyramid Was Built and Extreme Waves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Smith (How the Great Pyramid Was Built) has
collected compelling survival memories by both civilian and
military WWII prisoners. After tape-recording their accounts, he
sought a deeper understanding, and visited the sites of their
harrowing imprisonment to answer the question, "Would I be a
survivor?" He visited camps, battlegrounds, and war memorials, and
he went to Guam, Japan, and the Philippines to retrace routes taken
by prisoners. European expatriates Simon and Lydia Peters, civilian
noncombatants in the Philippines, fled the Japanese and spent the
war surviving in the jungle. Californian Mitzi Takahashi, who
viewed herself as "an ordinary American girl," was forced to join
100,000 other West Coast Japanese at an internment camp. Marine
Garth Dunn recalls the brutality of guards in Japanese prison
camps. Smith recorded "horrors beyond imagining--starvation,
harassment, threats, humiliation, beatings, torture," but his
subjects also spoke of human kindness, sacrifice and friends taking
great risks. These powerful and poignant interviews have been
skillfully edited chronologically to present lives before, during,
and after the war. 15 b&w photos, 4 maps. (May) KIRKUS
REVIEWS
A retired engineer who has taken up writing delivers fascinating
accounts of six Japanese and Americans who passed the war in enemy
hands.
Smith (Lightning: Fire From the Sky, 2008, etc.) delivers
first-person stories of a GI who endured more than three terrible
years as a POW in Japan and a Japanese soldier who spent a more
comfortable time in the United States but felt guilty about
surrendering. Casting his net widely, the author describes an
Russian mining engineer and his wife, hiding and starving in the
occupied Philippines, a Japanese soldier who escaped to the jungle
after the U.S. reconquered Guam in 1944, emerging only in 1960, and
a young Nisei woman, born and raised in Los Angeles, caught up in
the shameful American internment of Japanese Americans after 1941.
Smith pulls no punches portraying the cruelty of the Japanese to
those under their power, but, like many amateur historians and not
a few professionals, he justifies this as a consequence of the
samurai Bushido tradition, which teaches that warriors fight to the
death and that those who surrender are beneath contempt. In fact,
traditional Bushido does not excuse brutality or require warriors
to die except to preserve honor. The Japanese did not abuse
prisoners from the Russo-Japanese war and World War I. Their
suicidal behavior and inhumanity during World War II sprang from a
new policy by 1920s military leaders who believed it would toughen
Japanese soldiers, enabling them to overcome less-determined but
technically advanced Western armies. Readers can take comfort
knowing that all six subjects survived, perhaps the only good news
in these gripping though mostly painful stories about one of the
many grim aspects of WWII. PUB DATE May 2012LIBRARY
JOURNAL
Using hours of interviews, diaries, military records, and onsite
visits, Smith crafts a read-in-one-sitting narrative of six men and
women whose lives were changed by the war in the Pacific: one young
woman of Japanese descent who found herself in an internment camp;
a Japanese sailor who had the misfortune of being the first
American POW; a Japanese soldier who emerged from the jungles of
Guam 15 years after war's end; a European couple in the Philippines
on the run from both the unpredictable cruelty of the Japanese and
Filipino guerrillas; and a marine captured at Guam who spent the
war as a POW in horrific Japanese camps. VERDICT These narratives,
and Smith's interpretive framework, capture the determination and
spirit of their subjects and what they endured to survive and share
their stories. Those interested in the human toll of war will want
to read this book.
Counting the Days tracks six prisoners during the Pacific War.
Craig Smith has conducted in-depth research and interviews to bring
to life their suffering, courage and eventual triumph, creating a
compelling portrait of war's extremes and how these individuals
struggled through the darkness to survive.
James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers,
Flyboys, and The Imperial Cruise
Craig B. Smith takes the reader behind the barbed wire and into the
jungle to expertly chronicle the resourcefulness and the resiliency
of the human spirit through a variety of unique vantage points. As
a result, Counting the Days thoroughly captures the complete
essence of the POW/internee experience during the Pacific war.
John D. Lukacs, author of Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story
of the Most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War
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