The Hotel Tacloban (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A very true book and a story well told, chilling in its accumulation." -- The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"After the dust settles, The Hotel Tacloban will be there. It sheds light on these dark times. Read it." -- Thomas D'Evelyn, The Christian Science Monitor, September 26, 1984

"It is an easily read book, and a strong human document." -- Casey O'Malley, Best Sellers, the Monthly Book Review, Volume 44, Number 9, December 1984.

"Not just a searing picture of life in a terrible POW camp, this is also a significant historical document." -- Publishers Weekly, PW Forecasts, 27 July 1984.

"Searing." -- Robert Taylor, the Boston Sunday Globe, October 14, 1984.

"This is a very true book and a story well told...chilling in its accumulation." -- James Kaufmann, The Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1984.

"This vivid and compelling narrative...cries out for film treatment." -- Leslie Hanscom, Newsday, September 30, 1984.

"Very dramatic...compelling." -- Allison Knopf, The New York Times, September 30, 1985.

Product Description

In this extraordinary story of World War II, the author's father, who enlisted in the army at age 16, describes the experiences that would affect the course of his life. Douglas Valentine tells of his capture by the Japanese in the fetid jungle of New Guinea, as well as his internment with Australian and British prisoners-of-war in the Hotel Tacloban — a place where no mercy was shown or expected, and from which few came home alive. A celebration of camaraderie and a testament to "the soldier's faith", this is a story of murder, mutiny and an incredible military cover-up.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc (August 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595007856
• ISBN-13: 978-0595007851
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,147,502 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Absolute FICTION, June 20, 2008

By	Roger Mansell (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Insult to Genuine ex-POWs, June 20, 2008

By	James Oglethorpe - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hotel with one guest, March 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Hotel Tacloban (Hardcover)

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.