"Based on real history and alternating between three perspectives, When We Had Wings tells an amazingly moving story of heroic service, perseverance in the darkest of days, and the hope of the human spirit"-- The Philippines, 1941. When U.S. Navy nurse Eleanor Lindstrom, U.S. Army nurse Penny Franklin, and Filipina nurse Lita Capel forge a friendship at the Army Navy Club in Manila, they believe they are living a paradise assignment. As the beauty...

From the critically acclaimed author whom The Wall Street Journal called "a first-class historian," here is a riveting account of one of the most spectacular rescue operations in history. On January 30, 1945, American troops staged a successful raid on Cabanatuan, a notorious Japanese POW camp where thousands of prisoners had been tortured and died. Based on interviews with the heroes who survived the raid, this book brings to life in electrifying...

Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan, Lester Tenney was one of the very few who would survive the legendary Death March and three and a half years in Japanese prison camps. With an understanding of human nature, a sense of humor, sharp thinking, and fierce determination, Tenney endured the rest of the war as a slave laborer in Japanese prison camps. My Hitch in Hell is an inspiring survivor's epic about the triumph of human will despite...

"In the winter of 1941, as Japanese bombs began to fall on Luzon, American Army and Navy nurses stationed in the Philippines suddenly found themselves caught in a fiery hell of war. Undaunted, they did everything in their power to aid the soldiers, setting up much needed field hospitals in the jungles of Bataan and the tunnels of Corregidor, where they tended to the most devastating injuries of war amidst the raining shells and shrapnel. But the worst...

"Valor is the magnificent story of a genuine American hero who survived the fall of the Philippines and brutal captivity under the Japanese, from New York Times bestselling author Dan Hampton. Lieutenant William Frederick "Bill" Harris was 25 years old when captured by Japanese forces during the Battle of Corregidor in May 1942. This son of a decorated Marine general escaped from hell on earth by swimming eight hours through a shark-infested bay;...

For the first four months of 1942, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was America's first major land battle of World War II, the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history.The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book....

"This little-known WWII story introduces a renegade pilot whose personal mission to rescue his family from a POW camp changed modern air warfare forever. December 1941: Manila is invaded, and US citizen and Philippine Airlines manager, Pappy Gunn, is ordered to fly key military command out of the country, leaving his family at home. So Gunn was miles away when the Japanese captured his wife and children, placing them in an internment camp where they...

"Joe Johnson Jr. ran away from home at the age of 12, hopping a freight train at the height of the Great Depression. Two years later, he managed to talk his way into the U.S. Army. Seeking freedom and adventure, he was sent to the Philippines. After a misstep with a teenage prostitute, he vowed to right the wrongs he'd done and help the girl have a better life. Yet when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, his hopes of being with the girl had...

"When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited fifty years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children. Florence was an unlikely warrior....