Conduct under fire : four American doctors and their fight for life as prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945 / by John Glusman ; maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

New York : Viking, 2005. First Edition. Hardcover. An exceptional copy; fine in an equally fine dw. Particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. Literally as new.; 8vo 8"" - 9"" tall; 588 pages; Description: xviii, 588 p. : ill. , maps ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [555]-569) and index. Subjects: United States --Navy --Medical personnel --Biography --World War, 1939-1945 --Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 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 “the 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 couldn't protect them from a ruthless counteroffensive waged by American submarines or from the B-29 raids that burned Japan's 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 Fathers and Ghost Soldiers, Conduct Under Fire is 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.