Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Captured Honor PDF full book. Access full book title Captured Honor by Bob Wodnik. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Bob Wodnik Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
"The time is November 1945, not long after Jack Elkins has returned from a prison camp in Japan to his hometown of Oakesdale, Washington. An autumn evening finds him before a gathering of townspeople clamoring to hear about his experiences. Jack is in turmoil. What they really want, he senses, is nice, neat stories of heroes who beat the odds. They want "blood without spatters" and death with dignity. What can he tell them? Burned forever in his mind are images of Japanese blood staining blue Manila Bay; of maggots assaulting the corpse of a buddy; of prisoner after prisoner relegated to small wooden boxes holding their cremated remains. Jack is unable to talk about what happened during his three years in Japanese prison camps. "There is no middle ground," in his estimation. "You either tell them all or tell them nothing." Standing up to the microphone, he whispers barely ten words to the audience, then sits down - and tries for the next half-century to forget." "It was fifty years before Jack could talk about his experiences as a prisoner of war; and he wasn't alone. In Captured Honor author Bob Wodnik presents the stories of several Pacific Northwest POWs. Yet this book is much more than a series of memoirs. Wodnik opens a variety of windows on World War II. Readers see prison-camp life in unrelenting detail. They glimpse the impact of firebombing on Japanese cities. They hear the difficulties of World War II veterans in adapting to life after the war. In an intriguing counterpoint. Wodnik anchors the entire work in the lobby of the Strand Hotel in downtown Everett, contrasting the horrors of a Japanese prison camp with the quiet life of a bibliophile desk clerk during World War II."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Bob Wodnik Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
"The time is November 1945, not long after Jack Elkins has returned from a prison camp in Japan to his hometown of Oakesdale, Washington. An autumn evening finds him before a gathering of townspeople clamoring to hear about his experiences. Jack is in turmoil. What they really want, he senses, is nice, neat stories of heroes who beat the odds. They want "blood without spatters" and death with dignity. What can he tell them? Burned forever in his mind are images of Japanese blood staining blue Manila Bay; of maggots assaulting the corpse of a buddy; of prisoner after prisoner relegated to small wooden boxes holding their cremated remains. Jack is unable to talk about what happened during his three years in Japanese prison camps. "There is no middle ground," in his estimation. "You either tell them all or tell them nothing." Standing up to the microphone, he whispers barely ten words to the audience, then sits down - and tries for the next half-century to forget." "It was fifty years before Jack could talk about his experiences as a prisoner of war; and he wasn't alone. In Captured Honor author Bob Wodnik presents the stories of several Pacific Northwest POWs. Yet this book is much more than a series of memoirs. Wodnik opens a variety of windows on World War II. Readers see prison-camp life in unrelenting detail. They glimpse the impact of firebombing on Japanese cities. They hear the difficulties of World War II veterans in adapting to life after the war. In an intriguing counterpoint. Wodnik anchors the entire work in the lobby of the Strand Hotel in downtown Everett, contrasting the horrors of a Japanese prison camp with the quiet life of a bibliophile desk clerk during World War II."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Kathleen Kirkpatrick Publisher: ISBN: 9781634991506 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
American Prisoner of War Camps in Washington and Oregon describes the impact of the large number of prisoners of war on the populations of Washington and Oregon, as well as the impact of the people of Washington and Oregon on those imprisoned there. Providing detail on the care and employment of prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention of 1929, the lives of POWs in these states are illustrated, along with the details of camp locations and the deaths and burials that occurred among them. Some prisoner names are included, as well as references to source materials at various repositories. Historical photographs serve to provide depth to the story.
Author: Ulrich A. Straus Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 9780295802558 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
On December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was one of a handful of men selected to skipper midget subs on a suicide mission to breach Pearl Harbor’s defenses. When his equipment malfunctioned, he couldn’t find the entrance to the harbor. He hit several reefs, eventually splitting the sub, and swam to shore some miles from Pearl Harbor. In the early dawn of December 8, he was picked up on the beach by two Japanese American MPs on patrol. Sakamaki became Prisoner No. 1 of the Pacific War. Japan’s no-surrender policy did not permit becoming a POW. Sakamaki and his fellow soldiers and sailors had been indoctrinated to choose between victory and a heroic death. While his comrades had perished, he had survived. By becoming a prisoner of war, Sakamaki believed he had brought shame and dishonor on himself, his family, his community, and his nation, in effect relinquishing his citizenship. Sakamaki fell into despair and, like so many Japanese POWs, begged his captors to kill him. Based on the author’s interviews with dozens of former Japanese POWs along with memoirs only recently coming to light, The Anguish of Surrender tells one of the great unknown stories of World War II. Beginning with an examination of Japan’s prewar ultranationalist climate and the harsh code that precluded the possibility of capture, the author investigates the circumstances of surrender and capture of men like Sakamaki and their experiences in POW camps. Many POWs, ill and starving after days wandering in the jungles or hiding out in caves, were astonished at the superior quality of food and medical treatment they received. Contrary to expectations, most Japanese POWs, psychologically unprepared to deal with interrogations, provided information to their captors. Trained Allied linguists, especially Japanese Americans, learned how to extract intelligence by treating the POWs humanely. Allied intelligence personnel took advantage of lax Japanese security precautions to gain extensive information from captured documents. A few POWs, recognizing Japan’s certain defeat, even assisted the Allied war effort to shorten the war. Far larger numbers staged uprisings in an effort to commit suicide. Most sought to survive, suffered mental anguish, and feared what awaited them in their homeland. These deeply human stories follow Japanese prisoners through their camp experiences to their return to their welcoming families and reintegration into postwar society. These stories are told here for the first time in English.
Author: Tom Wilber Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1583679103 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
A fresh look at the how US troops played a part in the resistance of US troops to the American war in Vietnam Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming-home stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. Looking into the underlying factional divide between pro-war “hardliners” and anti-war “dissidents” among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into the postwar American culture that created the myths of the Hero-POW and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found was surprising: It wasn’t simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers-versus-enlisted-men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their pre-captive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the hardcore hero-holdouts—like John McCain—moved on to careers in politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them, disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary myth-buster, disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI resistance with images of suffering POWs—ennobled victims that serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America’s drift to endless war.
Author: Paul J. Springer Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700617175 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Notwithstanding the long shadows cast by Abu Ghraib and Guantnamo, the United States has been generally humane in the treatment of prisoners of war, reflecting a desire to both respect international law and provide the kind of treatment we would want for our own troops if captured. In this first comprehensive study of the subject in more than half a century, Paul Springer presents an in-depth look at American POW policy and practice from the Revolutionary War to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Springer contends that our nation's creation and application of POW policy has been repeatedly improvised and haphazard, due in part to our military's understandable focus on defeating its enemies on the field of battle, rather than on making arrangements for their detention. That focus, however, has set the conditions for the military's chronic failure to record and learn from both successful and unsuccessful POW practices in previous wars. He also observes that American POW policy since World War II has largely sought to outsource POW operations to allied forces in order to retain American personnel for frontline service-outsourcing that has led to recent scandals. Focusing on each major war in turn, Springer examines the lessons learned and forgotten by American military and political leaders regarding our nation's experience in dealing with foreign POWs. He highlights the indignities of the Civil War, the efforts of the United States and its World War I allies to devise an effective POW policy, the unequal treatment of Japanese prisoners compared with that of German and Italian prisoners during World War II, and the impact of the Geneva Convention on the handling of Korean and Vietnamese captives. In bringing his coverage up to the so-called War on Terror, he also marks the nation's clear departure from previous practice-American treatment of POWs, once deemed exemplary by the Red Cross after Operation Desert Storm, has become controversial throughout the world. America's Captives provides a long-needed overarching framework for this important subject and makes a strong case that we should stop ignoring the lessons of the past and make the disposition of prisoners one of the standard components of our military education and training.
Author: Jack Hamann Publisher: Algonquin Books ISBN: 1565123948 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 391
Book Description
Describes the 1944 lynching murder of an Italian POW at Seattle's Fort Lawton, the international outcry that followed, and the court-martial, the largest of World War II, that accused more than forty African-American soldiers of the crime.
Author: Robert K. Sutton Publisher: Casemate ISBN: 1612009883 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
“A fascinating account” of the secret Virginia facility code-named PO Box 1142, where the US gathered intelligence and interrogated German prisoners (Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International). About fifteen miles south of Washington, DC, Fort Hunt, Virginia is a green open space enjoyed by residents. But not so long ago, it was the site of one of the highest-level clandestine operations of World War II. Shortly after the US entered the war, the military realized it had to work on exploiting any advantages it might gain on the Axis Powers. One part of this endeavor was to establish a secret facility not too close to—but also not too far from—the Pentagon, which would interrogate and eavesdrop on the highest-level Nazi prisoners and also translate and analyze captured German war documents. That complex was established at Fort Hunt, known by the code name: PO Box 1142. The American servicemen who did the interrogating and translating were young, bright, hardworking, and absolutely dedicated to their work. Many of them were Jews who’d escaped Nazi Germany as children—some had come to America with their parents, others had escaped alone, but their experiences, and what they’d been forced to leave behind, meant they had personal motivation to do whatever they could to defeat Nazi Germany. They were perfect for the difficult and complex job at hand. They never used corporal punishment in interrogations of German soldiers but developed and deployed dozens of tricks to gain information. The Allies won the war against Hitler for a host of reasons, discussed in hundreds of volumes. This is the first book to describe the intelligence operations at PO Box 1142 and their part in that success. It will never be known how many American lives were spared, or whether the war ended sooner with the programs at Fort Hunt, but it’s doubtless that they made a difference—and gave the young Jewish men stationed there the chance to combat the evil that had befallen them and their families. “Fills a gap in World War II intelligence history by documenting the origins of a number of European Theater intelligence successes thanks to the work of Ft. Hunt interrogators.” —Studies in Intelligence Includes photographs
Author: Bill Hendon Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0312385382 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 607
Book Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An Enormous Crime is nothing less than shocking. Based on thousands of pages of public and previously classified documents, it makes an utterly convincing case that when the American government withdrew its forces from Vietnam, it knowingly abandoned hundreds of POWs to their fate. The product of twenty-five years of research by former Congressman Bill Hendon and attorney Elizabeth A. Stewart, this book brilliantly reveals the reasons why these American soldiers and airmen were held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973, what these brave men have endured, and how administration after administration of their own government has turned its back on them. This authoritative exposé is based on open-source documents and reports, and thousands of declassified intelligence reports and satellite imagery, as well as author interviews and personal experience. An Enormous Crime is a singular work, telling a story unlike any other in our history: ugly, harrowing, and true.
Author: Ray Vohden Publisher: AuthorHouse ISBN: 9781477260470 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 451
Book Description
On 12 February 1973, after nearly eight years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, I became a free man. Although I still had to serve a couple of years at stateside hospitals to salvage a badly wounded leg, my new quarters seemed princely compared to my squalid prison cells. Furloughed from the Navy hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and facing a long, solitary drive to my parents home in New Jersey, I decided to bring a tape recorder along and recount my experiences while the memories were still fresh. Maybe someday I would write a book. I knew I had a unique vantage point and a story to tell. As the fourth U.S. pilot shot down in North Vietnam, I was one of the oldest of the old-timers among the POWs. During my captivity, the number of Americans killed in the war grew from sixty to nearly sixty thousand, and the treatment of POWs shifted from neglectful to brutal to halfway humane. Moreover, of the nearly six hundred Americans held prisoner in North Vietnam, I may have had the widest range of experiences.
Author: Edwin G. Burrows Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0786727047 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons -- more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed -- those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence -- and how much we have forgotten.
Author: Bob Wodnik
Author: Bob Wodnik
Author: Kathleen Kirkpatrick
Author: Ulrich A. Straus
Author: Tom Wilber
Author: Paul J. Springer
Author: Jack Hamann
Author: Robert K. Sutton
Author: Bill Hendon
Author: Ray Vohden
Author: Edwin G. Burrows