Book Review: Ghost Soldiers/Sides (2001)

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission, Hampton Sides. 2001. Trade softcover. 344pp. Anchor Books.

This excellent piece of work is one of the books that was the source for the movie, The Great Raid (2005) with Benjamin Bratt, telling the story of a little-known event during World War II that deserves remembering.

Naturally, Hollywood changed the story although, as it usually does, it did manage to retain the spirit of what happened in January 1945 on the main island of Luzon in the Philippines. The Filipino guerrilla Ebong Joson was even played by his own grandson.

US Army Rangers, with scant time for preparation, attacked a camp holding Americans  in the middle of the night, killed the guards, and rescued the POW's, survivors of what they called The Hike, and what the world called the Bataan Death March. It was an incredible accomplishment, fully described in Sides' excellent book.

The target was Cabanatuan (pron. cabana-twahn), a central prisoner of war camp the Japanese used as their main staging area in the camp system. By the time of the raid by US Army Rangers and Filipino guerrillas, the thousands of POW's had been trimmed to 500 due to the shipment of those in the best condition to Japan for slave labor. Those that remained were the sickest and, they knew better than anyone, the most expendable.

Sides tells his story by bringing together two separate story lines with the the POW origins and the story of the Rangers setting out on their mission. It is the Ranger experience leading up to the attack that is the most accurately retold in the movie. Not surprisingly, composite characters are used and events compressed in telling the story of the POW's and the underground support system that tried to get them food, clothing, and medicine.

Among memorable passages is the way the released POW's and the Rangers regarded each other as heroic, the POW's for the deliberate starvation, the torture, and the brutal executions they'd experienced and the Rangers for their rescue against incredible odds where the only thing on their side was surprise.

If you want to know what actually happened and if your curiosity is aroused to the point that you want to know what the movie changed and left out, you really need to read this book. You will not waste your time and what these guys did bears remembering.