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  • Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945
  • Roger Daniels
John A. Glusman . Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945. New York: Viking, 2005. xviii + 588 pp. Ill. $U.S. 29.95, $Can. 42.00 (0-670-03408-8).

This is the story of a quartet of young American physicians who accept naval commissions in the months before Pearl Harbor, are assigned to the Far East, and [End Page 478] wind up in the Philippines, becoming prisoners of war when American forces capitulate. Three of the four survived their captivity. John Glusman, a chief editor of a New York publishing house, is the son of one of the survivors; he had the experience of visiting some of the sites of captivity with his eighty-year-old father. As has been the case since the first of the Pacific War captivity narratives appeared in 1944,1 the story is dominated by the savage brutality, torture, and, occasionally, mass murder that were characteristic of imperial Japan's treatment of its military prisoners in what has been characterized as a "war without mercy." In addition, some of what the Japanese authorities called medical treatment was bizarre, and some Japanese doctors were a disgrace to their profession—but a few did what they could to ameliorate the situation. One of the latter is memorialized here.

The well-crafted narratives about the four captive doctors are interesting and well worth reading. Particularly fascinating is the sheer bravado shown by two of them at the very end of the war. By that time they had been shipped to a camp in Japan outside Kobe, where most prisoners were forced to work in Japanese factories. Conditions for their patients were so desperate that, in the period between Japan's surrender and the actual arrival of American forces, the doctors boldly managed to get on a train to Yokohama and to alert American officials about the plight of their fellow prisoners. They then went to Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel and demanded—and actually received—accommodations; when presented with a bill on checking out, they simply charged it to the U.S. Navy.

The author has done a prodigious amount of research—his bibliography runs to fifteen closely printed pages—and has overburdened the narrative with almost a pocket history of the Pacific War, and more. The detailed descriptions of the fighting on Bataan and the siege of Corregidor, in which the doctors participated, are justified, as are the useful maps provided. But too much of the text—such as two separate, multipaged accounts of the battle for Okinawa—is misplaced and a burden to the informed reader, while being too brief to be of much use to the uninformed one.

Because one of the four doctors was lost at sea when the Japanese ship transporting him from captivity in the Philippines to captivity in Japan was sunk by an American submarine, the author has delved deeply into the sad story of death from what is usually called "friendly fire." It is now clear that many thousands of American and Allied POWs—including some who had labored on what we call "The Bridge on the River Kwai"—were killed in the closing phases of the war when Japan, desperate for labor, transported as many POWs as possible back to its home islands from its shrinking empire. Glusman is understandably outraged by the American military authorities' evident lack of concern even when they had information about this process. But the real culprit was the Japanese government, which deliberately put these men, often locked below decks, into harm's way—just as the British government was guilty of shipping Italian and German civilian [End Page 479] internees to Canada, hundreds of whom were killed when the ships transporting them were sunk by German submarines.

Roger Daniels
University of Cincinnati (emeritus)

Footnotes

1. William E. Dyess, The Dyess Story (New York: Putnam, 1944).

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