Customer Reviews

Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, about a subject that many Americans are unaware, is both a personal journey and taut war history. America in the early Forties was still dealing with the depression, and how it would conduct itself, while much of the world was already at war.

This story, not about generals or admirals, is instead a tribute to dedicated, unassuming men caught in the throes of the terrible war that finally found America in 1941.

John Glusman actually writes about four different things: the allure of Asia to these young men, the defeat in the Philippines, their struggles to survive, and finally to recover their lives.

His style is easily readible and compelling.

I have read many books on this topic, and the only one that compares is John Toland's, But Not In Shame.

Please read this book! It is a magnificent work of history, and a moving personal tribute.

Author John A. Glusman has written a masterful book about the horrible conditions Allied POWs faced as prisoners of the Japanese. In particular, this book concentrates on the lives of four American doctors; Lt. George Ferguson, Lt. Fred Berley, Lt. John Jacob Bookman, and Lt. Murray Glusman. All were stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

After enduring the defeat of Bataan, and later Corregidor, some 78,000 American and Filipino POWs were forced to march over seventy miles in what became known as the Bataan Death March. For the next three and a half years, Ferguson, Berley, Bookman, and Glusman were at the mercy of their Japanese captors. Food and water rations were virtually nonexistant, beatings were frequent, and the work was long and hard. The atrocities committed by the Japanese can only be described as barbaric, and the doctors did the best they could to help the sick and wounded with virtually no medical supplies at all.

Eventually, the doctors were loaded aboard Japanese "Hell Ships"; overcrowded freighters converted into ships to carry POWs to mainland Japan. The conditions on the ships were worse than in the camps. Men were placed in vastly overcrowded and stifling holds, given virtually no food or water, and were unable to even lie down due to the crowding. But the greatest fear faced by the POWs was attack by American submarines. Once torpedoed, the Japanese were known to machine gun the surviving POWs in the water. Indeed, George Ferguson died when the ship he was on was torpedoed.

Once in Japan, the remaining three doctors were once again placed in concentration camps where they tended the wounded and sick. But as time wore on, they soon began to see hundreds of American B-29 bombers winging above them. They surmised that the Americans must be close to winning the war. However, they still had to endure the firebomb raids of Kobe and Osaka that virtually destroyed the cities. However, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, the Japanese finally surrendered, and John, Murray, and Fred were finally able to return home.

This is a spectacular book. John Glusman does an excellent job of describing the fall of the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, and the atrocities that the POWs faced at the hands of the Japanese. My favorite part of the book was the extremely vivid description of the firebombing raids on Japan in the spring of 1945. I give this book my highest recommendation. Read and see how four ordinary men from the heartland of the United States managed to survive against a brutal and unforgiving enemy.

I surprised myself in judging this book only average. I started it with the expectation that it would be interesting to know the experience of naval doctors under Japanese captivity. This was the book's purpose as stated by the author.

The author is the son of one naval doctor held in a Philippine POW camp. Unfortunately, the author lost his way in telling what could have been a very interesting story. Of the book's 600 pages, the author gives only about a third of that space to actual mention of the naval doctors. The rest of the book is a recitation of the Pacific war and some Japanese culture. This was not itself uninteresting, or wholly unnecessary (some background info is expected on a story of this type), but I thought the purpose was to tell the story of the author's father and comrades.

The author's purpose may have been explained in the prologue in which he writes that he knew little about the war from his father until later in his life and supposedly until he researched to write this book. However, the author presumes that all of the readers are similarly ignorant of the war's history and require complete background material to understand his father's fate. That is an ill-assumed belief. More problematic is that the experiences of the four doctors became the background because of the overwhelming extra material. Frankly, I tired of it and gave up after nearly 500 pages and when I couldn't remember the names of the four doctors.

The doctors of this story deserved better treatment from the author and the editors. Someone should have taken control. Perhaps a more complete tale of medical personnel will emerge. In the meantime, the reader is advised to consider Clavell's KING RAT for a truthful rendition of a Japanese POW camp as told in novel form.

The title and synopsis of "Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945" led me to beleive that I would read about the in-depth personal experience of four US doctors as P.O.W.s. However, the book does not read like a memior or biography, but rather like any third-person account written by a historian from a distant vantage point.

That is not to say that "Conduct Under Fire" is a bad book, but the fact that the title men are hardly mentioned throughout the greater part of the book is a serious flaw. John Glusman does provide the reader with background information of the four doctors, one of which is father, Murray Glusman. Unfortunately, the details of the doctor's personal experiences were infrequent once the book covered the time frame of World War II. In fact, I could not help but wonder if the author's research into his father's time as P.O.W. was limited to rummaging through sparse stash of old letters and a fireside chat with his old man. Glusman (the author) does record the harsh condition of Japanese P.O.W. camps for American troops based on the writings of others, but the reader is left to assume that the doctors' tenure as P.O.W.s was identical to that experienced by thousands of other American P.O.W.s. While it the suffering they endured at the hands of Japanese was certainly horrific and they deserve our respect, "Conduct Under Fire" lacks a unique element that could have distinguished it from numerous of other P.O.W. books.

If you are simply looking for an account of Japanese prisoner camps or even of the struggle against Imperial Japan, then "Conduct Under Fire" is worth the time. Glusman does give remarkable detail to the pre-war climate in the Phillipines and Shanghai, the seige of Bataan and Corrigedor, the American submarine campaign that strangled Japanese shipping, and the B-29 raids that led to massive firebombings and yes, the atomic bombs.

Although "Conduct Under Fire" promised to deliver an account of the war through the eyes of the author's father and three other doctors, the reader is left with text that could have been placed by a historian far removed from the horror.

One of the doctors in this book, Fred Berley, is married to my first cousin. He is now 92 years old, drives up to New England every year, writes to me on his computer, and is a great dinner companion.

He has a zest for life that his experiences as a prisoner of war under the Japanese surely contributed. He appreciates and enjoys every moment of every day.

The publisher's comments about Fred, only mention that he was from the west side of Chicago. True. We were all from the west side of Chicago. Patriotic Italians from immigrant stock.

Fred graduated from Northwestern Medical School in 1938. After he came back from the war in September,1945, he married my cousin the following year, June, 1946. They were stationed in Pensacola, and later Jacksonville. Fred retired from the military in 1959 and went into private practice as a surgeon.

Mr.& Mrs.Berley live comfortably in Jacksonville, and I was recently their guest at the beach, where we talked into the wee hours of days gone by. I couldn't help but give Fred a big kiss in thanks for what he, and the courageous men like him, endured to keep America free. God bless. Read the book. It's fascinating.

Conduct Under Fire is the story of four navy doctors and their travails during WWII in the pacific theater. What distinguishes this story is that the foursome were captured by the Japanese during the capitulation of the Phillipines and became Prisoners of War. While telling this story as the background, the book also addresses a whole host of other issues which in my opinion really detracts from the impact of the book.

The book is divided into roughly three sections. The first 200 pages or so describe the battles for Bataan and Corregidor as well as how the doctors got to be there in the first place. There are poignant moments like the description that has one of them slated to return to the U.S. on 8th December 1941 having finished his duty, only to be stopped by the attack on Pearl Harbor - that same doctor is the only one of the four to die.

The second section of about 200 pages describes their lives in the POW camps in all their wretched details. The four who are the subjects of the story were all lucky enough to have been transferred from Bataan to Corregidor just before Bataan fell, and so they missed the infamous "Bataan Death March", but they have a harrowing tale to tell nonetheless. Living in the Japanese POW camps was a daily struggle against hunger and the wanton cruelty of the Japanese. During their time in the Phillipines, the doctors served their patients as best they could in a prison in Manila, then became "regular" POWs on a farm, and finally were shipped to Japan on unmarked freighters that were frequently targeted by U.S. submarines. The Japanese provided no medicines to the doctors to help them and surgery was frequently conducted without anesthesia and with only pen knives, scissors, or toe clippers.

The third part of the book is the last 150 pages and focuses on the situation in Japan. Once the three surviving doctors arrive in Japan they are assigned to a series of camps with continuously deteriorating conditions. They end up in Kobe to witness and participate in the incendiary bombing campaign that U.S. bombers unleashed on Japan. Finally, they are released and the book concludes in very briefly describing their lives after they are released from Japan.

The amount of detail in this book is incredible. It could only have come from the kind of knowledge that was seared into people who have experienced it, and indeed, it is written by the son of one of the doctors who are the subjects of the book. At times, the level of information threatens to overwhelm the reader as the author describes the various diseases that the men were subjected to and the symptoms and effects of those diseases. In addition, the author does not stint in describing the cruelty of most of the Japanese prison guards and the various punishments and beatings that the prisoners underwent while there.

Unfortunately, the author went too far in some cases. One of his assumptions is that the people reading this book have no knowledge of what went on during that era and so he stuffs the book full of information about the military situation and the various generals and admirals that were involved. He takes particular aim at Douglas MacArthur and paints him in a very unfavorable light in both the Phillipines at the beginning of the war and in Tokyo at the end. Clearly he does not see MacArthur as having contributed anything except MacArthur's own self promotion to the war.

Additonally, the author decides to throw in a lot of background information about various people and places that are briefly mentioned in the book. So, we learn the backgrounds and see events also from the point of view of others. The problem with this is that it only contributes a huge amount of new names and places that appear for a few pages and then disappear without really adding anything to the story. At several points through the book I almost lost track of who were the subjects of this book! Much of this additional research was probably valuable to the author to place things in context, but it is totally unnecessary to the telling of the story.

Towards the end of the book, the author decides to drive home even more strongly the point that war is a terrible thing and that war brings on much suffering. This is borne out by his detailed descriptions of just how much the Japanese civilians suffered during the incendiary bombing campaign and culminating in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same level of detail that went into his descriptions of the diarhea suffered by POWs in Manila is now provided on how people died by Napalm in Tokyo. The amount of space devoted to such details is equivalent to the amount of space devoted to the story of the four subjects.

The excessive and unnecessary detail, and the insistence on presenting a "balanced" view of war's horribleness, as well as the loss of focus on the main subject of the story led me to downgrade this book to a 4 star. Nonetheless, this is a very powerful and emotionally riveting tale.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author not only told the story of his father, and the 3 other doctors, but also included experiences of other POW's. Some reviews have indicated this was distracting or confusing. I feel that each man's experience, even if not totally relevant to the main storyline, is important and needs to be told. For most of these men, this book is the only documentation of what they experienced. This is a story that needs to be told over and over. Cudos
to Glusman for an excellent book!!

That is the only reason I knock a star off this review. If you think, from the title, you are going to read about the trials and tribulations of four doctors you are wrong. This book instead has an incredibly detailed and well written scope throughout that focuses on so many individuals it was hard to keep track of who was who. The author, the son of one of the four doctors mentioned in the books title, is himself from some kind of medical background as he seems to have an intimate knowledge of medicine, it comes through in his graphic descriptions. The four doctors mentioned in the title are hard to remember by name and you wonder who they even are for the first 250 pages of this fast moving 500 page book.

The upside is that so much detail gives the reader a first person perspective at times, and you are thankful that someone has remembered the stories, the names, the details surrounding the horror all these brave men had to not only endure but survive to wars end. Many of those mentioned in the book do not. The hell ships were true targets of death. The details on the personal lives and daily routines of the many soldiers (and the author spends a considerable portion of this book, the first 1/3, concentrating on life before captivity for many of these men) is nice when you find some of the more riveting sections of the book described, like allied bombings of neighboring towns to the POW camps, some of the various medical maladies and the torture of surviving deadly sea passages on hell ships, which the author mentioned saw 19,000 POWs die from U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft sinking these human cargo containers, literally bulging with POWS crammed into ship holds like boxes, without food or water, being transported to similarly hellish fates throughout Asia.


If you want greater details on POW's in Japanese captitivity let me recommend "Prisoners of the Japanese" by Gavan Daws, who the author lists in his extensive bibliography.

I have to commend the author for writing a book which is a great tribute to his father.

Conduct under Fire was a hard book to get into. First of the book could easily be divided right in half with half reading as a narrative memoir of the 4 main doctors that the author tries to center the book around and the second half being a straight text book about WWII. This book is also poorly written in parts where the misuse of pronouns leaves the reader wondering who the author is writing about and the poor editing of the book has the author discussing the same topics over and over, i.e. cold feet. The slow moving narrative memoir section of the book had me forgetting who the doctors where and doesn't have the doctors being detailed where not taken prisoner until about 200 pages in. The author also needlessly inserts the names of soldiers and doctors into the narrative without the need to do so, except to be able to reference where he got the information that he is quoting.

On the positive side the text book side of the book is really through and a well written history of climate in Asia leading up to the war, WWII, and the treatment of POWs by the Japanese. The plight of the doctors is also an intriguing storyline which would make a great movie.

When I picked this book from the bookstore self, I had no idea that it held the answers to understanding not only what happened to my father(a Navy dentist) on Corregidor and inside the Japanese POW camps, but also how horrific the entire war in the Pacific was. Mr. Glusman leaves no stone unturned in telling the reader the amazing and frightening events these men experienced. The suffering they endured and the sacrifices they made seem uncomprehensible, but it really did happen and we cannot forget that fact. Mr. Glusman's research was thorough and his storytelling spellbinding. Not only do we learn the facts, we are also led on the emotional journeys of the POW's, the Japanese, and ourselves. Thank you, Mr. Glusman. Now I better understand the demons who haunted my father and why war should only be a last resort.