cover image Counting the Days: 
POWs, Internees, and Stragglers of World War II in the Pacific

Counting the Days: POWs, Internees, and Stragglers of World War II in the Pacific

Craig B. Smith. Smithsonian, $27.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-58834-355-0

Smith (How the Great Pyramid Was Built) has collected compelling survival memories by both civilian and military WWII prisoners. After tape-recording their accounts, he sought a deeper understanding, and visited the sites of their harrowing imprisonment to answer the question, “Would I be a survivor?” He visited camps, battlegrounds, and war memorials, and he went to Guam, Japan, and the Philippines to retrace routes taken by prisoners. European expatriates Simon and Lydia Peters, civilian noncombatants in the Philippines, fled the Japanese and spent the war surviving in the jungle. Californian Mitzi Takahashi, who viewed herself as “an ordinary American girl,” was forced to join 100,000 other West Coast Japanese at an internment camp. Marine Garth Dunn recalls the brutality of guards in Japanese prison camps. Smith recorded “horrors beyond imagining—starvation, harassment, threats, humiliation, beatings, torture,” but his subjects also spoke of human kindness, sacrifice and friends taking great risks. These powerful and poignant interviews have been skillfully edited chronologically to present lives before, during, and after the war. 15 b&w photos, 4 maps. (May)