Customer Reviews

The Hotel Tacloban

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As an historian who had devoted some 15,000 hours researching and documention the Pacific POWs, I can say, unequivacably, the the story is PURE fiction.
Valentine conflates numerous actual events to this make believe story about a POW. No record exists, any where, that his father was on such a patrol, that such a POW camp existed or that any of the named POWs existed.

It is a good "yarn" but don't ever call it history. It demeans tha valor and honor of thousand of American and allied POWS who suffered and died for your freedom. To even infer it is true is disgraceful

Until recently, I thought that this book could be safely ignored as a pathetic, misleading blot on the broad canvas of POW history.

As other reviewers have noted, the Publisher (Angus & Robertson) has added a disclaimer that, "...it has not been possible to prove that the events did occur". Actually, A&R only added this inadequate note (in small type) after an eminent Australian history professor warned them that the book was packed with historical errors and was undoubtedly fiction.

However, right now in 2008, one can see many Internet sites where Douglas Valentine is still presenting his Tacloban fiction as if it was history. Even more worryingly, these websites are being used to vilify the record of a genuine Prisoner of War, presidential candidate John McCain. In response, I'd like Amazon readers to be clear on how much of "Hotel Tacloban" they should accept as historical truth. The answer is ZERO percent.

I'm an Australian. I've worked in the Philippines and personally hiked in the battlefields of New Guinea that Valentine purports to describe. I've researched extensively on POW history and I've also had an academic article published in the USA describing the detection of historical fraud. I'm very familiar with the archival material that can be used to check works such as "Hotel Tacloban".

Other reviewers are correct that this book "reads well". - Yes, exactly like polished fictional prose, not oral history! The landscapes described in Northern Papua are quite wrong. The grassy and swampy coastal plains are portrayed as "mountains" with "rainforest". The vicious siege of the Japanese at Buna in November 1942 is described as some sort of minor patrol action. Valentine obviously didn't bother to properly read the history books that he lists in his bibliography, which accurately describe this country and these battles, where the Australian Army and the US Army fought and died. Valentine's laxity is disrespectful in itself.

Valentine describes his father walking for "days" after captivity (but the Japanese pocket was only a few hundred yards deep!) and then being calmly loaded into a Japanese freighter. No Japanese freighters were anywhere near the Buna siege area in November 1942. The Allies dominated the sky. So every aspect of the purported capture and evacuation of Valentine's father is quite impossible.

It just doesn't ring true that Valentine or his father have ever set foot in Papua. (At one point Valentine lets slip that his father's record says he was in the 375th Harbor Craft Company. This unit actually departed the USA in 1944 and briefly transited through Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea before moving to - surprise, surprise - Tacloban in the Philippines, after the US Leyte landings. In 1944, Valentine Snr. would have been at the legal enlistment age of 18, rather than Valentine's implausible "16" in 1942. (The photo of Valentine's dad on the paperback cover of "Hotel Tacloban" shows him in front of a 1944-pattern US tent, but looking fit and still in possession of the front teeth that the Japanese had supposedly knocked out!)

More dire narrative problems emerge when the book re-locates to the purported Tacloban POW camp in the Philippines and its "interesting" Australian occupants. Unfortunately for Valentine, The Australian War Memorial clearly states that no Australian POWs were held in the Philippines! The names of Valentine's key characters *cannot* be found in Australia's Veterans Affairs database. The US NARA database also shows no released US POW named "Douglas VALENTINE", and no US military POWs liberated anywhere on the island of Leyte. There is no evidence that Valentine Snr. ever experienced captivity in the hands of the Japanese at all.

The depictions of the Australians in the POW camp are laughably divorced from reality. Valentine certainly has never lived with any Australians. Instead we get ridiculous sheep-shagging caricatures! The dialogue sounds wrong. The nicknames sound wrong. The descriptions of life in Australia sound dead wrong.

There is no "Major R. L. Cumyns" (Valentine's murder victim) buried in any Commonwealth war grave anywhere in the world, let alone the Philippines. If Valentine was going to make up a key character name like this, then he shouldn't have chosen one that's so easy to disprove! (And Cumyns sounds like a caricature straight out of the movie "Bridge on the River Kwai".)

Valentine's description of the POW camp itself is also hokey - the local geography sounds wrong; he gets the wet season five months out in timing; and the buildings are too small, with the wrong construction for a former Philippine Army camp. Also, in contrast to every other POW memoir that I've ever read, "Hotel Tacloban" almost ignores the captors, the Japanese. There is no mention of Japanese-language commands or essential camp procedures such as bowing, which were life-and-death matters for POWs. It's pathetic that Valentine couldn't make a better job of creating a fictional POW camp, when his bibliography lists six excellent POW memoirs. He simply can't have read them..

And don't get me started on "The Enforcer" and his devilish five-minute torture sessions! (On the positive side, the wild inaccuracies of this book at least show that Valentine is not a plagiarist!)

Finally, some choice quotes from Douglas Valentine himself:

"... when I write, it is too hard to write the truth..." Frontispiece quotation page xv.

" ...Fooling an audience into believing the most preposterous, the most blatant of fictions, through an elaborate fabrication of plausible half-truths and downright deceptions, was a Digger's highest level of achievement..." p39.

"... at the risk of being called anti-Asiatic or racist by enlightened people, I must confess that for many years I secretly wished that more bombs had been dropped on Japan..." p69.

Is "The Tacloban Hotel" fiction, history or embroidered memoir? The first page carries a publisher's disclaimer in which it admits "It has not been possible to prove that the events did occur - nor that they did not." Like the X-Files, Elvis sightings and space alien abductions. No one questions the barbaric conditions of Japanese POW camps during World War II or the general savagery of the Japanese toward military and civilian populations. The literature of Japanese brutality is detailed and extensive, from Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" and "Railway Man" by Eric Lomax to labeled fiction like "King Rat" and "The Bridge Over the River Kwai." The Pacific theater in that war was a place marked by a special ruthlessness. It's no accident that one of the most aptly titled histories to bubble out of that cauldron was "War Without Mercy" by John Dower.

Precisely because of this literature "The Hotel Tacloban" comes across like one of those tabloids at the checkout counter. The author, Douglas Valentine Jr., wrote the book "based on the recollections of his father," 40 years later, after receiving psychiatric care. Nothing that happened can be verified because the U.S. government [which couldn't keep the atom bomb secret] conspired to keep this one prisoner's experience secret. The son tells us that his father was a teenage POW who acted as lookout while two Australian prisoners strangled a British army major who was too willing to cooperate with the evil Japanese camp commandant, Capt. Yoshishito. Wasn't that what they were planning to do to Alex Guinness in the movie?

The author's father was the only Yank in the hell hole bitterly dubbed The Tacloban Hotel, which was located near the town of Tacloban on the Philippine island of Leyte. Only one problem: the American army erased all records of the camp. The murdered man? No record. The four brave Aussie's who were beheaded by Samurai sword because the major betrayed them? All expunged by the evil US Army, the same bad guys who freed Valentine and his fellow POWs from their Japanese torturers. That make sense? Everybody was dying in this camp, burials were a daily event. So the major gets buried too, so what? There's more. Valentine Sr. became a POW in 1942 when he was the sole survivor of an infantry patrol in the New Guinea jungles. No witnesses to that except the Japanese who bayoneted everyone but him. Why they spared him? Read the book. But surely there's a unit record of that patrol gone missing. So the vicious Army brass rewrites Valentine's complete military record and destroys all existing records. The world will never know Valentine was a rifleman in the 32nd Division. The record will show he belonged to the 375th Harbor Craft Company. The malaria, dysentery, tropical sores, the teeth kicked out by a Japanese guard? All that is erased. He can have an honorable discharge if he keeps his mouth shut for the rest of his life and agrees never to contact his old Aussie buddies. Otherwise, 25 years in military prison. Why are they doing this to a boy who has suffered so much for his country?

This story is so full of holes you'd have to be brain dead not to wonder what really happened. The son should write that story.

The Hotel Tacloban
I began to become a bit suspicious even as I read the Preface, but read the book because I have an interest in Prisoner-of-War camps. The events leading up to the rescue of Doug Valentine, Sr. didn't do much to calm those suspicions and neither did the epilogue. Because of this unease, I decided to do a bit of research on the camp (it, apparently, never existed) and on Doug Valentine, Jr., the real author of the book (I'd say novel). He is a virulent hater of the Army, the Vietnam War, Senator John McCain, etc. Now, one could suppose that this is because of the "mistreatment" of his father by the Army following his supposed rescue from Tacloban, except the camp never existed, according to any records I have uncovered. While I agree, as a 33-year veteran of the Army, that the Army is capable of agregious behavior, at times, there is simply no support for the story that Douglas Valentine, Jr. has woven. If it were non-fiction, it would be worth the read, but as a piece of fiction, it is not. One of his main themes is the "class system"(officers versus enlisted personnel) in the Army during World War II and now. While, again, I will admit that a few bad apples certainly existed and exist, this was and is the exception and not the rule. Perhaps someone can tell me what Douglas Valentine, Jr. has against the Army (or perhaps officers) that forced him and continues to force him to react so viciously.

The Hotel Tacloban is a fascinating read. The book flows well, reads easily, and keeps pulling you along to the next chapter - a marvelous peice of literary craftsmanship. The only downside is the nagging thought that it might just be a made-up story.

That would be easy to accept if the author said outright that it was fiction. It would also be easy to accept if we had independent confirmation of the events. What is hard to accept is that the story has the ring of authnticity - we do know that many things just like this happened - and the author claims that it is true, but we have no way of proving or disproving those assertions.

A war veteran myself, I can testify that things like the events related in this book are unfortunatly normal occurences in many circles throughout the world, even today. Further, the types of actions purported to have been carried out by the US Army at the end of the book have in fact been done before, another well-documented fact. More importantly, perhaps, is this - the words of the author ring with the tone of truth. A wise VA counselor once remarked to me, when we were discussing whether or not specific events had occured to a mutual aquaintance, that even if we could never establish the exact sequence or total sum of events, it was obvious that SOMETHING had happened to him. I get the same feeling from this book. Whether it is the story given here or something else entirely, there seems to be some dark chapter in the life of the man protrayed. Thus, while I will never quote from this book as history, I believe that it does bequeth an adequate portrayal of what life was like for some people during the war. I look at it more as historical novel than historical fact, which allows me great luxury in finding a place for it in my library.

Read it for what it is, though we can never know for sure. Is it eyewitness to history, a fascinatingly and cunningly crafted fictional masterpiece, or the dark broodings of a man with deep psychological problems of some sort? It is a remarkable example of whichever one of those it is, and it is also a reminder (no matter what the truth is) of the dark side of the largest war ever fought on this planet.

To be honest, Hotel Tacloban does not pose as truth as long as you first read the "Publisher's note" hidden in tiny print in the introductory pages. If you just sail in and read it as an attempt to tell the truth then if you are me you do not twig to what is going on until the end, when the US Army somehow destroys forever all proof that the Japanese POW camp in which the author''s father was allegedly kept (along with 100 others) ever existed. Pure garbage. It is disturbing that a book like this can go out masquerading as truth ....it is only when you finish the book and then you go back to the front and carefully analyse the back of the cover etc that you realise you have been had, but that everyone has covered their backs.

Amazon.com is wrong when it says my book is out of print and that a picture of the dust jacket is not available. The Hotel Tacloban is published by iUniverse.com as an Author's Guild Backinprint book. You can get it by going to my website and clicking on the dust jacket for the Hotel Tacloban, which will take you directly to iUniverse.com, where you can order the book.

Valentine shares with the world his father's tragedy--being in the wrong place at the wrong time, one might say. But he was doing what he thought was right--patriotically defending his country--in the jungle highlands of Papua New Guinea in WWII.Captured by the Japanese, his life spared apparently by his irreverent (unauthorized) sewing of another unit's patch on his uniform (the enemy thought he was an intelligence officer), he ended up the only U.S.soldier amidst Australian and British prisoners in a POW camp on Leyte. The story chronicles his struggle for survival, under terribly inhumane conditions, and the treachery of the POW's ranking officer, a British major. The Major's squealling to the Japanese commander about an escape by Aussies led to their immediate capture and beheading, and to Valentine's father acting to avenge their deaths--and to have nightmares for the rest of his life for his role in the assassination of the cowardly Brit Major. I have read another reader's skeptical review about this--that, horrors, the U.S. government might shred Valentine's fathers personnel file to try to hide the events in the POW camp--named Hotel Tacloban by the inmates. Get real buddy! We now are learning about the tragic events in Korea at No Gun Ri, where GIs machine gunned civilians. The dirty realities in our wars -- that the big honchos in authority in the government -- would rather hide, are thank goodness, being brought to the light of day by authors like Valentine, and Carroll Case (The Slaughter, 1998, isbn 0-9666499-0-7) and Bob King (Spooky 8, 1999, isbn 0-312-20579-1). My only concern is that, as a historian, there are no footnotes.

> > The Hotel Tacloban is a book I came to read after unknowingly reading
some of
> > Valentine's previous articles on the web, and then knowingly being
exposed to
> > an interview with him on Black Op Radio, not long after this government
> > unveiled Operation TIPS as a Homeland Security agency program, that
would help
> > helpful U.S. residents turn in their neighbors.
> > His appearance on the internet radio show pointed out the similiarity of
TIPS
> > to HIPS, the
> > "other way of saying" abbreviation for the genocidal program from the
60's and
> > 70's, in Viet Nam, called overall, Operation Phoenix, a program executed
by
> > the cia to root out Civilian dissenters, so that they could be
interrogated,
> > i.e. tortured & hideously executed under the umbrella consolidation of
25 or
> > more intellegence agencies called Phoenix.
> > The suggestion that Phoenix is a grandfather/mentor to Homeland
Security, and
> > a harbinger of things to come for the american citizen is more than a
> > possibility with a high probability .
> > "You have relatives in the homeland?"
> > The Hotel Tacloban is the beginning, a visit to the innocence of an
underage
> > soldier in ww2, (Valentine's father) and his encounter of the forces of
> > respect for military rank and where the beginnings of where real evil
takes
> > us.
> > A story that will stay with me for the rest of my conscious life. Honest
and
> > shocking.

The Hotel Tacloban is a book I came to read after unknowingly reading some of Valentine's previous articles on the web, and then knowingly being exposed to an interview with him on Black Op Radio, not long after this government unveiled Operation TIPS as a Homeland Security agency program, that would help helpful U.S. residents turn in their neighbors.
His appearance on the internet radio show pointed out the similiarity of TIPS to HIPS, the
"other way of saying" abbreviation for the genocidal program from the 60's and 70's, in Viet Nam, called overall, Operation Phoenix, a program executed by the cia to root out Civilian dissenters, so that they could be interrogated, i.e. tortured & hideously executed under the umbrella consolidation of 25 or more intellegence agencies called Phoenix.
The suggestion that Phoenix is a grandfather/mentor to Homeland Security, and a harbinger of things to come for the american citizen is more than a possibility with a high probability .
"You have relatives in the homeland?"
The Hotel Tacloban is the beginning, a visit to the innocence of an underage soldier in ww2, (Valentine's father) and his encounter of the forces of respect for military rank and where the beginnings of real evil takes us.
A story that will stay with me for the rest of my conscious life. Honest and shocking.
An emotional timebomb ... an appropriate introduction to Douglas Valentines thoughts & writings.