62 pages • 2 hours read
Hampton SidesGhost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1: “Blood Brothers”
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
In April 1942, a key World War II battle, the Battle of Bataan in the Bataan Peninsula of the Philippines, then an American colony, was coming to an end. The American troops were slowly losing to the invading Japanese whose “onslaught had been merciless” (50). The Americans ended up in the Bataan Peninsula through gradual withdrawal from other parts of the Philippines, per General Douglas MacArthur’s War Plan Orange. However, the plan was underpinned by the idea of being supplied by the US, which did not happen because “President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater,” sacrificing the Philippines in the process (61). In this context, “MacArthur was both a victim of Roosevelt’s deceit and a purveyor of false hope himself” (62).
The US troops of the 2nd Battalion of the 31st Infantry Regiment in Bataan “knew that the situation was hopeless,” as General Edward King was about to offer surrender (50). The US soldiers were “gaunt, shell-shocked, addled with nerve fatigue” (50). Multiple diseases, from malaria to typhus and dengue fever, ravaged the troops, while there was a lack of basic medicines. The troops were also running out of supplies, so they were forced to eat whatever came their way, like monkeys. Japanese planes over their heads periodically bombed them and disseminated propaganda. Facing surrender, the US troops “had been given the order to ruin their weapons and sabotage any hardware that might prove valuable to the enemy” (57). The soldiers had a negative perception of MacArthur and felt abandoned.
The American surrender was one of the largest in the country’s history: 78,000 US and Filipino soldiers, as well as “some 20,000 Filipino civilians” (58). On April 9, General King—despite lacking army orders to do so—rode toward the Japanese troops to meet with General Masaharu Homma’s representatives to avoid “the greatest slaughter in history” (59). King hoped that the US troops across the water on Corregidor could continue fighting due to their superior supplies and fortifications. The Japanese side, including Colonel Motoo Nakayama, Homma’s senior operations officer, “took a dim view of King’s notion that Bataan should be considered separately from Corregidor” (67). King was also concerned for the safety of his men. He was forced to surrender unconditionally due to having no leverage.
For the soldiers, surrender was never discussed, so those like Edward “Tommie” Thomas “had no protocol to follow” (70). The initial encounter between the US and Japanese troops “would involve an extreme clash of two proud cultures” who knew little about each other (70). This ignorance translated into racial animus. When he surrendered, Thomas was picked up by an English-speaking Japanese lieutenant. The latter took him to be with the rest of the captive Americans. The Japanese played a cruel joke on the Americans, claiming it was revenge for the Quinauan incident where the Americans were the aggressors. The POWs dug a large grave for themselves and were given cigarettes and alcohol only to learn that they were not being executed after all.
General Homma significantly underestimated the number of American and Filipino POWs and overestimated their health status and physical strength (79). He considered marching them to Camp O’Donnell, almost 75 miles north of Bataan Peninsula’s tip. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the Japanese “had been widely praised for treating its prisoners decently” (79). Homma’s “intentions toward his new prisoners seemed compassionate,” but he was absent-minded and “grossly inattentive to the details of his command,” delegating the details to others (81).
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary
In late January 1945, the Rangers were in Calasio, Philippines, back from training in Port Moresby, New Guinea. The Rangers were getting ready to rescue American and Filipino POWs. Liberating these men from Cabanatuan had greater “sentimental allure” than strategic value (85).
Those few who escaped from the Japanese prison camps in the Philippines and made it to Australia publicized the information about the terrible treatment of POWs. The public also learned about the Bataan Death March from the newspapers. Colonel Henry Mucci proposed a rescue mission that was “to defend and avenge in the same act” (85). The men from the 832nd Signal Service Battalion, carrying film and movie cameras, joined the 121 Rangers on the planned rescue mission, which was Mucci’s PR concept. Mucci was “the field leader” (93). The Rangers also included Captain Robert Prince as the rescue’s planner.
At this time, the Japanese army, led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita, experienced “Bataan in reverse” (88). A quarter of a million Japanese troops could not surrender, so they went to the jungles in the north of Luzon Island in a coordinated withdrawal maneuver. To control the retreat, Yamashita sought to “concentrate troops” in a few key places, including Cabanatuan. The latter was an important town of 50,000 in the Nueva Ecija province of the Philippines. At this time, 7,000 Japanese troops were near Cabanatuan.
The Rangers had 30 miles to cover to the prison camp from the drop-off point. The Rangers took with them two days‘ worth of food supplies as they headed out with two Filipino guerillas as guides. The secret nature of the mission meant that the Rangers could not only be attacked by the Japanese, but also by their own, such as the US fighter pilots. They wore no helmets to avoid making noise, but also carried guns and ammunition, which meant they could not be completely silent.
Along the way, the Rangers met up with other Filipino guerillas, many of whom were barefoot and unarmed (98). Led by Captain Eduardo Joson, a man in his mid-thirties, the two groups met at their rendezvous point in Lobong. The guerillas were key to the mission. They had also spent decades under American colonial rule, which had begun with a prolonged Philippine-American war that killed an estimated 200,000 Filipinos. The Filipinos seemed to believe that rule under the Americans was more humane than that under the Japanese.
At night, Mucci ordered the men to crawl across a field toward a highway from Cabanatuan City, leapfrog across it, then run across the field. However, the men encountered a Japanese tank on the bridge on the road. The men had to quietly crawl by using a ravine, then under a bridge, to bypass the Japanese. The Rangers succeeded in doing so.
Book 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first two chapters reveal the structure of Ghost Soldiers. Hampton Sides uses parallel narratives which alternate by chapter. The first narrative traces the lives of primarily American soldiers during the Battle of Bataan, the Death March, and their captivity in the O’Donnell and Cabanatuan POW camps starting in the spring of 1942. The second narrative discusses the rescue mission carried out by the US Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Filipino guerillas. There are many reasons for selecting this format.
First, the author uses the narrative history format focused on ordinary people involved in extraordinary historic events, and selected individual biographies such as that of Colonel Mucci and Doctor Ralph Emerson Hibbs. War history and important personalities, like General MacArthur, by and large, remain in the background, with ordinary people taking precedence. Second, by using two parallel narratives, the author can provide a broader view of the situation from the standpoint of both the rescued and the rescuers. By learning about the inhumane conditions in which the POWs lived in Cabanatuan for years, the reader gains an understanding of why the rescue was necessary from a humanitarian standpoint even if it was not of strategic importance. Third, the author engages in what would be character development in fictional literature (here, in non-fiction) by using this approach. Fourth, each of the two narratives operates using a different time scale: The POWs’ story covers approximately three years between losing the Battle of Bataan and liberation in January 1945; the second narrative is a minute-by-minute retelling of the rescue raid on the camp in the final days of January 1945.
By the end of the book, the two narratives converge as the featured participants meet. The two different time scales are used to build up the suspense about the raid. They may also rely on the available documentation. For instance, the raid was well-documented by even inviting professional war correspondents. In contrast, the POW stories rely on oral history (i.e., participant interviews) and surviving documents retrieved from the camp.
In the first two chapters, the author also initiates rising action toward the end of the book, culminating in the camp raid and a positive outcome for the POWs, specifically, and World War II in general. For this reason, the first two chapters mirror each other. The first describes the slow American defeat in the Battle of Bataan in April 1942 and the Japanese victory. In contrast, the second focuses on the path to the US victory in the Asia-Pacific theater in 1945. Thus, the author describes the situation in the Philippines in early 1945 as “Bataan in reverse” for the Japanese (88).
The emotional tone changes throughout the book to match this approach. In the beginning, the US soldiers, many Filipinos, and even General MacArthur felt abandoned by the US because the European war theater was the priority: “By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines” (61). In contrast, toward the end, even some of the POWs learned bits and pieces of information about the US progress in the war and personally saw increased air force activity in the sky, which gave them hope.
The interactions between the American and Japanese troops and the local Filipinos are another important aspect of the book, as discussed in Colonialism and World War II: The Japanese, Americans, and Filipinos theme. Unlike simpler wars taking place between two sides on the territory of one of the sides, World War II in the Asia-Pacific Theater took place on the territories of third parties: the Japanese and the American Empires (Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, et al). Thus, learning about the complex relationship between the two warring sides and the colonized people enhances the reader’s understanding of the historical events in question. The author discusses “an extreme clash of two proud cultures” (70) between the losing Americans and the victorious Japanese in 1942, which exacerbated the relations between the Japanese soldiers and the Allied POWs during the Bataan Death March and beyond (70). However, the author does not examine in detail the history of “Yellow Peril” propaganda, societal racial prejudice, and anti-Asian legal framework, such as the 1924 anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act, which negatively affected Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the US since the late 19th century. These circumstances provided an additional dimension to the expected hostilities between the two warring sides.
In turn, the Japanese subscribed to their own form of paternalism in Asia. They euphemistically referred to their empire as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and used the “Asia for the Asiatics” slogan to counter Western imperialism with their own counterpart (216). Even the military organization differed: the US Army was largely mechanized, whereas the Japanese relied more heavily on their infantry, in part, due to the US oil embargo. Furthermore, for the Japanese, surrender was shameful: Some relied on ritual suicide, seppuku (hara-kiri) to avoid surrendering. Thus, the American mass surrender after the Battle of Bataan was incomprehensible to the Japanese.
It is this clash that, in part, contributed to what turned into an avoidable Bataan Death March. Amidst this difficult context of war and racial prejudice were the Filipinos, who “repeatedly seemed to bear the brunt of other people’s arguments” (99). In the early 1900s, there was a brutal war and prolonged insurgency between the colonizer, the US, and the colonized, the Filipinos. In the interwar period, the US treated the Filipinos paternalistically, believing them incapable of governing themselves. However, during World War II, many Filipinos found themselves on the US side, supporting American troops with their own guerilla warfare. In cities, however, there were some Filipino collaborators who opposed the US. Others yet opposed both the Japanese and the US, seeking complete independence instead. Overall, these ethnocultural and sociopolitical complexities underscore the tragedy of World War II.
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