How is that a story of such magnitude can remain so obscure in popular culture?
Well, in general I think it’s true that events in the Pacific have gotten short shrift in our national literature, relative to the European theater. More specifically, one of the reasons, I think, is that in order to tell the stirring story of the liberation attempt you also have to tell the story of these prisoners, who they were and where they came from. They weren’t just any Americans; they were a subset of a subset of misfortune, “an elite of the damned,” as I call them in the book. This “back-story” is uncomfortable to tell, not only because of its undeniably gruesome aspects, but also because it implies, in a sense, a national betrayal. We let these men down. We put them in a place where they couldn’t defend themselves. We promised them ammunition and medicine and supplies which never arrived. We left them stranded on this little finger of jungle 7,000 miles from home, their backs against the sea. And that was only the beginning. In the prison camps, these men suffered enough for
