Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World WarII [Hardcover]

Brendan I. Koerner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1594201730 | ISBN-13: 978-1594201738 | Publication Date: May 29, 2008 | Edition: 1ST

Part history, part thriller, Now the Hell Will Start tells the astonishing tale of Herman Perry, the soldier who sparked the greatest manhunt of World War II— and who became that war’s unlikeliest folk hero

A true story of murder, love, and headhunters, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of Herman Perry, a budding playboy from the streets of Washington, D.C., who wound up going native in the Indo-Burmese jungle—not because he yearned for adventure, but rather to escape the greatest manhunt conducted by the United States Army during World War II.

An African American G.I. assigned to a segregated labor battalion, Perry was shipped to South Asia in 1943, enduring unspeakable hardships while sailing around the globe. He was one of thousands of black soldiers dispatched to build the Ledo Road, a highway meant to appease China’s conniving dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. Stretching from the thickly forested mountains of northeast India across the tiger-infested vales of Burma, the road was a lethal nightmare, beset by monsoons, malaria, and insects that chewed men’s flesh to pulp.

Perry could not endure the jungle’s brutality, nor the racist treatment meted out by his white officers. He found solace in opium and marijuana, which further warped his fraying psyche. Finally, on March 5, 1944, he broke down—an emotional collapse that ended with him shooting an unarmed white lieutenant.

So began Perry’s flight through the Indo-Burmese wilderness, one of the planet’s most hostile realms. While the military police combed the brothels of Calcutta, Perry trekked through the jungle, eventually stumbling upon a village festooned with polished human skulls. It was here, amid a tribe of elaborately tattooed headhunters, that Herman Perry would find bliss—and would marry the chief ’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

Starting off with nothing more than a ten-word snippet culled from an obscure bibliography, Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry’s ghost—a pursuit that eventually led him to the remotest corners of India and Burma, where drug runners and ethnic militias now hold sway. Along the way, Koerner uncovered the forgotten story of the Ledo Road’s black G.I.s, for whom Jim Crow was as virulent an enemy as the Japanese. Many of these troops revered the elusive Perry as a folk hero—whom they named the Jungle King.

Sweeping from North Carolina’s Depression-era cotton fields all the way to the Himalayas, Now the Hell Will Start is an epic saga of hubris, cruelty, and redemption. Yet it is also an exhilarating thriller, a cat-and-mouse yarn that dazzles and haunts.

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1ST edition (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
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #878,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A contributing editor at Wired whose work appears regularly in The New York Times and Slate, Brendan I. Koerner was named one of Columbia Journalism Review's Ten Young Writers on the Rise. Visit him at www.microkhan.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, July 7, 2008

By 

Gary Brumley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World WarII (Hardcover)

I first heard of this book when I read a small blurb about it in Newsweek. Being an armchair World War II historian, I have read many books about the war, but knew very little beyond the basics of the war in the China/India/Burma theater. I was interested to know more. However, the main reason I read this book is because I love a good adventure story, especially a true one. Truth is almost always stranger than fiction, and this book illustrates that perfectly.

The author paints a colorful portrait of Perry, his mind-set, and the colliding factors of war, poverty, crime, and racial discrimination that land Perry in the worst situation possible. Though Perry suffered more than most people could imagine and perhaps was justified in his crime, the author does not paint Perry as a saint. Perry had big problems and made some wrong decisions. The reader is left to wonder how he would react in the same situation.

The other character in this book is the jungle itself. The jungle is so real, so tangible, so deadly that it becomes almost a sentient being. The jungle is unstoppable in its ability to grind machines and equipment to rust and rubble and suck the life out of the men who came to work there. It shows no mercy and exists without pity. Contending with the Japanese was preferrable than contending with the jungle. The author treats the jungle not just as the setting of the story, but as one of the cast.


Make no mistake; this book is the story of a tragedy. Nobody wins, except the jungle.

There were some elements of writing style which bothered me a bit. At times, some of the language seems like it has a bit too much pop culture infused into it. The book doesn't suffer much from it, but it is something that I noticed at times. This was also one of the first military history/adventure books I've read where the author explains in the footnotes what a given weapon is (M1 Garand, for example). I wondered at times if the author was doing that to remind himself, because he didn't come across as a big weapons expert to me. However, after thinking about it, I decided it was good to do that. By including small explanations, the author is recognizing that not everybody who reads his book is a historian or weapons aficionado.

If you have an interest in forgotten stories of World War II, jungle survival, African American history, raw adventure stories, justice gone horribly wrong, or ever imagined quitting your day job and running off to the jungle, you'll like this book.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Victims of Jim Crow, July 31, 2008

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World WarII (Hardcover)

Among the many strange and sad tales of World War II, one of the most peculiar ones is that of Private Herman Perry, who died in the jungles of Burma, one of the Americans sent there for the expensive and doomed Ledo Road that was to link India and China. Perhaps his story has been forgotten because of the futility of that particular expedition; perhaps it was because Perry was executed as a murderer; perhaps it is because his story is part of the shameful Jim Crow attitude of the Army, and of the nation, at that time. Whatever the reason, there are many important aspects of history surrounding Perry's story, and Brendan I. Koerner has done an admirable job covering a previously untold story in _Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II_ (Penguin Press). Although Koerner has written most extensively on technology, he was researching military executions when he came across Perry's story, and became obsessed with telling it. He has produced an insightful book of history, in addition to telling Perry's sad and forgotten tale.

Perry was drafted after Pearl Harbor, but there was a delay in his entry because the Army didn't have enough segregated facilities to train black enlistees. He was one of the fifteen thousand American troops assigned to Burma to build the Ledo Road, whose ostensible purpose was to keep supplies flowing into America's Chinese Allies. Perry and the other soldiers worked sixteen hours a day. They got rations of corned beef and rice, and water with bacteria in it. Most of them got malaria. They fought off leeches and lice. Some were mauled by tigers. Perry's carefree disposition would not last in such an environment. He shot and killed a Lt. Cady when Cady attempted to arrest him, and he fled into the jungle to join a camp of Naga tribesmen, headhunters who had a mistrust of the strange newcomers to their region. When he was caught, he was sentenced to hang, but he escaped, and successfully eluded capture by the Army, tantalizing them with near-misses. His eventual capture was inevitable, and he was driven to the gallows on 15 March 1945. The Army worried that since Perry had symbolized the frustrations of the black soldier, there might be an attempt to attack the convoy, and the officers were told that in such a situation, they were to kill Perry before defending themselves. There was no such attack.

Perry's family in Washington knew little of what was happening to him on the other side of the world. They were bewildered by what they knew of his situation, his trial, and his death. They did not know even where he was buried, but Koerner has played a role last year in bringing Perry's ashes back to his remaining sister. There was a China-Burma-India Veterans Association until attrition closed it in 2005; anyone who served three weeks in the region could join, but not one black was seen at the meetings, for it seems they had no nostalgia for their time there. Perry's story deserves the remembrance in this exciting and illuminating book. He was a clever guy, not a beacon of morality but also not born to be a murderer. Even if his life was not particularly important, his actions played out in a stupid and brutal arena of war, during a time when the Army and American society deliberately and overtly advocated oppression of black Americans. Understanding these times is still important; the crimes here (and they are more than the murder of Lt. Cady) did not have to happen.

11 of 14 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 "*SHAQ*" (Danville, Ca, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World WarII (Hardcover)

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.