Customer Reviews

The Ghost That Died at Sunda Strait (Bluejacket Books)

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A superbly written account of the epic final missions of the USS Houston in East Asia in 1941-1942. The author was a scout plane pilot for the cruiser and was well positioned to be the chronicler and witness of his shipmates' sacrifice. He is personally authoratative on much not found in other books. Fortunately for us, he is a very good writer as well (or had a damned good ghost!). The author makes a convincing case for the Japanese having suffered much more damage at the hands of Houston and Perth than admitted or widely understood. The appendix should at least be reviewed to get a measure of the survivorship rate in Japanese POW camps. This is reference/ primary source material as well as a page-turnin' naval tale...quite an achievement.

i purchased this book because my uncle was on the uss houston and survived 3 1/2 years in a japanese prison camp. part of my uncles experience was on 3 pages of the book which was fantastic and hard to believe all they went through. this book was written by a guy who went through the same things the other 284 survivors did. would recommend to any that are interested in WW11 history.

If you don't have this book in your library, you have a major gap in your World War II collection. It covers a period of the war that has been largely forgotten. There are plenty of books concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor and then there seems to be a Black Hole until the Battle of Midway. With the exception of Wake Island, it appears that there is not much interest in the period when America wasn't doing as well. This book does a fine job of describing how American servicemen adapted to a very fluid situation in which we didn't have the upper hand, but were struggling to merely survive. To have this book written by a man who actually lived through these events is a definite bonus, it would be a great read even without that.

I got the book because my previous neighbor Fred Howard was on the ship when it went down and I wanted to have details of the ship and survivers.