Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

The story of Herman Perry's crime, his escape into the near gulag conditions on the Ledo Road into Burmese Jungle and the ensuing manhunt, all set against the backdrop of the Southeast Asian front in World War II, and the racism of the US Amy and American society has no real heros, and no real villains; only men trapped by circumstance, struggling against hellish odds and inhuman deprivation. This would seem to be ingredients for a preachy, dense sermon. But somehow, Koerner turns one man's forgotten story in a forgotten front into a richly detailed page turner full of insights and cunning observations about the human condition.

I'm very tired of redemptive liberalism, black ideology, and reparations politics. You're american or you're not.
HAVING said that, this is a terrific book about a truly sad set of circumstances and a truly tragic life, true racism, not the politically convenient variety, and the amazing resourcefulness displayed by Herman Perry. Heart breaking. I inadvertently picked this up on a cruise and it was riveting. Very highly recommended.

I read this book as the last in a 3 part series of history books about the Asia/Pacific Theater of WWII. I started with "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, then I read "Retribution" by Max Hastings, which is probably the most thorough book you'll ever find about the last 12 months of the War in the Pacific (and disputes the figures of Chang's work, interestingly enough). Finally, I saved this book "Now the Hell Will Start" for very last, since I knew it would be a more personal tale about a very small and insignificant aspect of the greater War in the Pacific.

Initially, I was not enthusiastic about this book...I kinda thought that this would be, at best, a light read about some minor incident in a backwater theater of operations during WWII. Boy was I surprised. Though I knew about The Burma Road in the air AND the Ledo Road on the ground from other history books, I could not have prepared myself for the horrifying story of what it was like to actually work on the Ledo Road for our guys. I did not know that it was mostly built on the backs of Afr. Am. troops, along with a native slave workforce, toiling away in what was (and still is) an insurmountable region...A land that time forgot. In fact, if you are looking for an example of mankind's hubris in regards to Mother Nature, this is the perfect tale for you. And yet, in the overall scheme of things, the Ledo Road was a complete waste of time! Koerner does a very good job of telling the backstory about the reasons why the Ledo Road was created, and how it ended up being a worthless commitment made by the U.S. to China in the hopes of getting Chiang Kai Shek and his nationalist govt. to help fight Japan.

Dropped into this world is Herman Perry...an Afr. Am. soldier that has to experience not only the worst that Mother Nature has to offer, but also has to endure continued segregation and discrimination along with many non-white "engineers" assigned to building this road to no-where. It's amazing that more black soldiers didn't snap under the kind of pressure Perry experienced...in fact, about the only issue I might have with this book is how it glosses over the psychological affects of racism and discrimination. But that would be a book unto itself, and Koerner may have deliberately avoided that topic on purpose to keep the narrative from getting stale or sidetracked too long.

Koerner is not a military history writer or author...but by not being an expert on WWII history and militaria, Koerner is able to give a freshness to Perry's story that anyboby can appreciate, whether you love military history or not. He's able to give a sense of immediacy that many writers fail to do when attempting to tell personal histories about WWII (e.g. Flags of Our Fathers, Ghost Soldiers, etc.), a problem which typically leads me to not finishing a book due to a lack of interest. That's never an issue with Koerner's work.

It's an entralling story that anyone can enjoy, and I highly recommend this book!

S. T. Chisam, Jr. says:
Ledo Road Legend "Now the Hell Will Start"
Brendan Koerner has done a great service to the black troops who served in the China-Burma India theater during WWII. His meticulous research has provided an accurate and gripping recounting of the life of Herman Perry, a black soldier who murdered a white officer and led his pursuers on a desperate and riveting chase. He has done a marvelous job of melding Perry's story into a history of the building of the Ledo Road and the war to reclaim Burma from the Japanese. His efforts have captured the true conditions endured by American troops in this far-off and nearly forgotten theater of war, the very essence of what it was like to live in that miserable climate. I can attest to his accuracy because I was there as a member of the 502nd. Military Police battallion, working as a motorcycle rider and truck driver. I hasten to add that our Headquarters Company was not connected with running the infamous Ledo stockade and as soon as the road was pushed into Shingbwiyang we were relocated there.
Koerner has a great gift for storytelling, his book reads fast and you won't be able to put it down.

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.

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.

This book managed to be both a great chase story and a fascinating look at African American soldiers assigned to build the Ledo Road in India, a little know part of World War II history. Great details and a gripping read.