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Summary
Summary
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 Âthe 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 couldnÂt protect them from a ruthless counteroffensive waged by American submarines or from the B-29 raids that burned JapanÂs 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 Fathersand Ghost Soldiers, Conduct Under Fireis 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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent, David Black. Author tour; partial BOMC main selection; dual main selection of History Book Club; Literary Guild offering. (On sale May 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Tales of courage, desperation and endurance in some of the worst moments of WWII. Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Glusman concentrates on recounting the wartime experiences of his father and three of his father's fellow Navy doctors, his larger story sprawls across miles of canvas and involves countless players. The elder Glusman and his three comrades were captured in May 1942, after Douglas MacArthur and a handful of senior staff were evacuated in the face of imminent Japanese victory. Glusman junior suggests that MacArthur's abilities as a leader were surely inadequate to the task of defending the Philippines; he had weeks in which to prepare for the seaborne invasion after Pearl Harbor and did nothing useful, and "at the eleventh hour, MacArthur was forced into a devil's bargain by trading a failed military strategy for one that would knowingly sacrifice the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor." In Japanese hands, the doctors found themselves confronted with daily cultural conflicts: whereas the Americans thought of the Japanese as subhuman, the Japanese were certain that as members of the master race they were destined to replace "Anglo-American imperialism with a new world order." Governed by the rules of bushido, or the warrior's way, the Japanese had little sympathy for captives. Yet, as Glusman writes, they had not always fought this way; in the earlier wars of the 20th century, they had treated their prisoners humanely, a practice that apparently ended when Soviets butchered a Japanese garrison in the 1920s. A soldier was not supposed to surrender, and "if a Japanese soldier would choose death over capture, how could he be expected to respect enemy prisoners of war?" The Japanese behaved abominably. But, as Glusman notes, worse lay in store when the doctors were removed to the Japanese mainland, where, "healers in a world of hurt, they were deprived of the very tools they needed most"--and where many of their fellow prisoners would be killed not by their captors but by errant American bombs. A thoughtful, humane meditation on war and family history, full of myth-bursting truths. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Glusman's big, thoroughly absorbing narrative centers on his father and three fellow navy physicians, who spent World War II as Japanese POWs. Refusing to allow a clash of cultures to excuse the Japanese for their largely barbarous treatment of Western POWs, Glusman exposes the horrors of the four doctors' experience in vivid and sometimes sickening detail. He benefits from access to much recent research into racial aspects of the war that generated much of its brutality and incomprehension and led to the total nature of the war, which eventually endangered a good many Allied POWs on Japanese prison ships and in Japan during Allied saturation bombing raids. Dr. Glusman's status as an educated and trained observer also spurred his son's insights, including those offered here on what determined the difference between survival and death among the POWs, and on what decisions led to humane conduct by Japanese guards. A very notable addition to the literature on its harrowing subject. --Roland Green Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Though they came from disparate backgrounds, Murray Glusman (the author's father), John Bookman, George Ferguson, and Fred Berley were all dedicated doctors stationed with the navy in the Philippine Islands just as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted America's engagement in World War II. They were captured at the fall of Corregidor in May 1942 and suffered three horrifying years as prisoners of war in the hands of the Japanese. As first-time author Glusman tells it, this is much more than the story of four POWs; it is the brutal account of the cultural clash between the East and the West. Their captors paid no attention to the Geneva Convention and considered surrender a disgrace. Interviews with veterans from the Australian, British, American, and Japanese forces, coupled with the use of diaries, letters, and war crimes testimony, make this essential for all libraries.-David Lee Poremba, Detroit P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.