Some Survived
New York: Warner Books, 1989. First Warner Books Printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. xxi, [1], 295, [3] pages. Maps. Appendices (includes a list of the 1,607 American prisoners aboard the Hell Ships of whom less than 400 survived. Index. Introduction by John Toland. The author survived the Bataan Death March, twenty-eight months of slave labor in the Philippines, and transport to Japan aboard the infamous "hell-ships." Manny Lawton was a twenty-three-year-old Army captain on April 8, 1942, when orders came to surrender to the Japanese forces invading the Philippine Islands. The next day, he and his fellow American and Filipino prisoners set out on the infamous Bataan Death March--a forced six-day, sixty-mile trek under a broiling tropical sun during which approximately eleven thousand men died or were bayoneted, clubbed, or shot to death. Yet terrible as the Death March was, for Manny Lawton and his comrades it was only the beginning. When the war ended in August 1945, it is estimated that some 57 percent of the American troops who had surrendered on Bataan had perished. This is the story of how men can suffer even the most desperate conditions and, in their will to retain their humanity, triumph over adversity. Some Survived is a harrowing, poignant, and inspiring tale that lifts the heart. More