Customer Reviews

With Only the Will to Live: Accounts of Americans in Japanese Prison Camps 1941-1945

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The researchers who conducted the interviews for this project have done very critical work that may be better appreciated in the decades to come. Most of the men who survived the Japanese POW camps have since died, and the opportunity to obtain first-hand accounts diminishes greatly as time goes by.

All aspects of POW life are presented in a carefully edited compilation of interviews with over 100 former prisoners. It is a tough, but necessary, read that overwhelms one with the senselessness of Japanese brutality. I don't think that a better account could possibly exist and I wish that this was required reading for any history curriculum covering the war.

Since the 1980's it has become far more popular among some in America to criticize the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war rather than the true barbarity of the Japanese. A book such as this, relying on first-hand accounts as it does, may curb the revisionists for at least a few more years.

Excellent acccount to events after the Japanese invasion. One man quoted is my father's best friend. We have heard him recount many years of suffering while in captivity. Happily he is still alive today.