Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "It is best to use discretion when confronting an emotionally shattered man, especially if he's holding a semiautomatic rifle..." (more)
Key Phrases: forward policy, olive drab fatigues, black engineers, Ledo Road, African American, West Point (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Segregation is the context for Koerner’s biography of Herman Perry, and the Burma theater of World War II is the stage. Shipped to Asia with thousands of black American draftees to build the Ledo Road, Perry generated considerable documentation in his short life, and Koerner fully capitalizes on it. Producing a riveting personal drama, Koerner glimpses Perry’s essentially ebullient personality forming in the Jim Crow world but rebelling against its army version on the other side of the world. Not glossing over Perry’s transgressions of military discipline, one of which was a capital offense at the tragic heart of the narrative, Koerner solidly anchors them in their emotionally stressful context of miserable road construction in a pestilent jungle amid contemptuous treatment from some white officers. There were two extraordinary consequences of Perry’s central misdeed: his court-martial, whose procedures Koerner critiques, and beforehand, Perry’s escape and year-long survival in the Burmese wilds as an adoptive member of the Naga people. With arresting pacing and empathy for its participants, Koerner’s skillful rendering of the Perry saga exerts certain appeal for the WWII audience. --Gilbert Taylor

Review

“Journalist Koerner recounts an obscure 1944 murder whose story is linked to the building of the Ledo Road, a massive and ultimately useless American project that linked India to Chinese forces. Most African- American soldiers spent WWII doing menial jobs. One man, Herman Perry, was shipped to northeast India to work on the Ledo Road. The labor was backbreaking; with rudimentary living conditions and no access to most recreation facilities, blacks had few pleasures besides drugs. Psychologically fragile, Perry had already been jailed for disobedience when he wandered off, carrying a rifle. When a white lieutenant grabbed it, Perry shot him and ran into the jungle, eventually reaching a village of Naga tribesmen. Pleased by gifts of canned food, they allowed him to stay, and he reinforced this welcome by stealing from the builders’ camp only six miles away. He married a local woman, but after three months, word of his presence filtered out; he was captured by Americans, tried and hung. Koerner’s engrossing story illuminates one of WWII’s fiascos as well as the disgraceful treatment of black soldiers during that era.”
--Publisher’s Weekly

“Compelling niche history about a black soldier who murdered his lieutenant then fled into the Burmese jungle during World War II.
Journalist and first-time author Koerner has unearthed a minor treasure in the criminal records of Herman Perry, a meat cutter drafted in 1943. Since military leaders considered African- Americans unfit for combat, Perry was shipped to India in 1944 to join 15,000 mostly black laborers building the Ledo Road, an immense project extending nearly 500 miles through mountainous jungles to China. Working conditions were nightmarish. The project had low priority, so supplies and food were inadequate, and black troops received the worst. Amenities, R&R facilities and even brothels were off limits. Morale under white officers was terrible. Miserable and depressed, Perry had already served one stockade sentence and found himself threatened with another when, on March 5, 1944, he lost control, murdered an overbearing white officer and fled. Believing that blacks were sexually ravenous, his pursuers focused the subsequent manhunt on brothels in distant Calcutta. Meanwhile, Perry stumbled through the jungle into a village of the Nagas, a primitive tribe of headhunters who occasionally traded with the soldiers. Won over by a few gifts and the supplies he stole from construction sites less than ten miles away, the tribe accepted him. Perry married the chief’s 14-year-old daughter and settled in, but rumors of a Negro living in the jungle eventually filtered out, and a patrol arrested him. Shortly before his death sentence was confirmed, he escaped and spent two months frantically trying to reach his village before being captured and hung. The long description of his trial may offer more information than most readers want, but few will be unmoved by the stinging depiction of Perry struggling to live first in an oppressively racist society, then in an army whose leaders considered him subhuman. Gripping and cringe-inducing.”
--Kirkus>

“Now the Hell Will Start is a fascinating, untold story of the Second World War, an incendiary social document, and a thrilling, campfire tale adventure.”
--George Pelecanos

"Now the Hell Will Start is a dazzling look at a heretofore unseen and untold drama of WWII. Koerner takes us inside the Burmese jungle, where tigers and headhunters roam, and into the mind of an American, marooned by injustice, who struggles to survive as a man without a country. As Koerner points out, the hero of his tale, the pursued Herman Perry, may have just been the world's first hippie, certainly a father to Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. Koerner is a startling writer of great humanity and a driving sense of plot, and this tale of survival and race enlarges our sense of American history."
--Doug Stanton, author of In Harm’s Way

"Koerner wandered into the jungles of Burma in search of a fugitive whose name indeed was buried in time. What he has come out with is a first-rate portrait of muscle and bone and soul."
--Charlie LeDuff, author of US Guys

“Brendan Koerner's Now the Hell Will Start rockets you from the WWII jungles of southeast Asia, to the streets of Washington DC, in a meticulously crafted narrative so wild it must be true. With a painstaking eye for detail, and the kind of prose that edges truth into art, Koerner's one of those journalists who nearly makes fiction irrelevant.”
--David Matthews, author of Ace of Spades

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (May 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594201730
• ISBN-13: 978-1594201738
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #237,157 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "LIEUTENANT, DON'T COME UP ON ME!", June 23, 2008

By	Rick Shaq Goldstein "Rick Shaq Goldstein" (Danville, Ca, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This story of the life and death of Herman Perry plays out mainly on the stage of World War II. The author recounts Perry's life from the cotton fields of North Carolina to Washington D.C. to the searing hot, disease infected jungles of South Asia. Perry a drug-addled African American soldier, shoots and kills an unarmed white United States Lieutenant named Harold Cady, and flees into the untamed jungles that are inhabited by tigers, head-hunters, leeches, and armies of malaria carrying mosquitoes among other things. Perry becomes the object of the greatest manhunt of World War II.

The reader is told of this murderous crime on the first and second page of the book, so you are not kept in suspense very long as to the felonious offense the protagonist commits. From there the author spends the next one-hundred-forty-one laborious pages getting you to the point in time portrayed on the first two pages. That is not to say those pages don't have many historically interesting facts imbedded in them, they do... but the seemingly endless trip from New York to Asia via troop ship and railroad, seems like they'll never end. With endless detail of the close quarters, dank circumstance, and very little daylight, makes the reader get seasick and claustrophobic.

One point is made powerfully clear, and that is the hate and prejudice in the world during World War II. Of course it goes unsaid that there is still too much in today's world, but sometimes we need a reminder that racial, religious, and ethnic hatred is not solely indigenous to America. During the time period covered in this book, there was segregation in America, there were SIX-MILLION-JEWS being systematically executed in Europe, and "the Japanese were trained to view their Chinese foes as less than fully human, the victorious Japanese, dutifully obeyed their commanders' "Three Alls Policy": kill all, burn all, loot all. In Nanjing, Japanese soldiers raped upward of TWENTY-THOUSAND-WOMEN, many of whom were subsequently disemboweled, decapitated, or nailed to walls and left to suffocate." "Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman," one of the participants recalled. "But when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig." "Tens of thousands of men were similarly massacred, often buried alive in mass graves. Some were spared at first, only to be later used for bayonet practice." And of course in Asia there were "coolies" who were less than a step above a slave, receiving pennies a day to work on building a road "stretching from the thickly forested mountains of North East India across the tiger-infested valleys of Burma." The American troops assigned to this job were mostly African Americans. The accepted thinking of America's upper echelons during those days was that African Americans couldn't be trusted in battle for numerous reasons. So, despite being originally assigned to an engineering battalion that was supposed to build airfields, Perry and his mates were relegated to menial labor related to building roads through jungle wilderness. The boredom led to rice beer, marijuana and opium.

On the fateful day that Perry committed murder, he had already missed roll call, missed work, and was suffering from the after effects of his growing addictions. The remainder of the story is about the unbelievable manhunt that literally elevated Herman Perry to an almost mythical figure throughout the military, and especially among other African American soldiers. He not only disappeared into the jungle and evaded capture on numerous occasions, but he wound up befriending the chief of the feared head-hunting Naga's, whose village was adorned with more human skulls than the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center had lights. If that isn't enough, Perry wound up marrying and impregnating the Chief's fourteen-year-old daughter, though he never got to see the birth.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, serious action -- should be a movie!, May 30, 2008

By	Rebecca (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This book is great -- it's got action and adventure, crazy intrigue, fascinating characters, plus is filled with amazing facts about WWII and Burma. I learned so much reading this thing, and had a lot of fun along the way. It's an important story about war, race, American history, and what it means to be human during a time of conflict -- topics everyone should be reading about these days. Highly recommended.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roll out., May 30, 2008

By	Bryan Curtis (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Brendan Koerner is a friend of mine, so you can take this for what it's worth. But I think "Now the Hell Will Start" is fantastic. It is a truly unique book. On the one hand, it's a thriller about a killer who goes on the lam in the Burmese jungle and dodges U.S. Army officers by living among headhunters. (This really happened.) On the other, it's a really rich history--a portrait of World War II and its forgotten backwaters unlike any I'd ever read. Call it a historical thriller. Or maybe a thriller historical. Buy it and experience the greatness yourself.