I'm a big World War II history buff, both of my grandfathers served -- one in the Army Air Corps, the other in the Marines -- and I must confess that one of the major holes in my pretty extensive reading was the Bataan Death March and the Japanese occupation of the Phillippines. "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides was one of the books that the recent film "The Great Raid" was based upon. The movie, as I've mentioned before, was excellent. As is often true, the book is better.

Sides goes back and forth between the Army Rangers and the U.S. military's preparations for the rescue of the American POWs at Cabanatuan and the prisoners' years in the camp. The movie stayed relatively true to the book, but Sides provides details that were likely left out of the book because they just wouldn't be believable. For example, the Rangers had a difficult time getting the POWs to leave.

For prisoners who could see, the Rangers looked exceedingly strange. They wore unfamiliar uniforms, carried unfamiliar guns. To starved men, the strapping soldiers looked impossibly huge, even menacing. Ralph Rodriguez was thoroughly frightened by the first Ranger he encountered. "This guy looked like a giant. I thought, what kind of a man is this? He had guns everywhere. Big hands. He could have been a man from Mars. He yelled out, 'Any more Americans?' I was trembling when I raised my hand -- 'Here!' "

Even when the fear of a massacre had passed, even when most of the prisoners understood that the Rangers were Americans come to liberate them, many were still curiously reluctant to go. They seemed suspicious of their good fortune. They couldn't shed the dour pessimism of captivity long enough to understand that captivity was over. Or perhaps on some half-conscious level, they still found it hard to transgress the order of the Japanese, the only authority they'd known for three years.

Some of the POWs appeared almost ungrateful at first. John Cook, wearing only a G-string and high-top leather shoes, practically interrogated his liberator. "I said, 'Hey, who in the hell are you?' The guy had the funniest uniform on, with a funny-looking cap, and he was carrying something that looked like a grease gun, like he was going to grease up a car. He said, 'We're Yanks. Get your ass out the main gate.' This guy is trying to save my life and I'm sitting there carrying on an argument with him. I said, 'No Yank ever wore a uniform like that.' He said, 'The hell we don't!' "

And Americans weren't the only prisoners at the camp, there were British and Dutch and a smattering of others there too. One Brit, who was completely deaf, even got left behind. He was suffering from a bad case of amoebic dysentery and apparently fell asleep on the latrine throughout the entire gunfight. When he woke up, he made his way back to his mat and fell asleep. He didn't notice the chaos of the firefight and escape until he awoke the next morning. He left the camp and was picked up by Filipino guerillas who had come looking for him.

The book is a great read about a relatively little-known part of World War II. I encourage you to pick up a copy -- once you start reading you'll find it is tough to put down.