A family member was in a POW camp in the Philippines during the war, so I read this book with great interest. A fascinating read, and highly recommended. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It was about an interesting historical event that I really didn't know too much about. I would give it 4 stars except that I found the writing a little choppy. But the story itself was fascinating and I learned a few things about WWII that I didn't know. ( )

Bought this book in 2022 purely because I loved the author's book called "On Desperate Ground" and hoped this book would draw me in as much as that one did. I read it during the summer of 2022 and finished it while on my way to exercise NATIVE FURY in Saudi Arabia. It's a good book and does a great job displaying the struggles these POWs went through during WWII that helped put things into perspective for me during an easy exercise in Saudi. I would only recommend this to someone who is very interested in this specific story, one of its characters, or WWII in the Philippines.

**Mom found the hardcover version of this book in 2024 somewhere cheap and bought it for me to replace my paperback version.

In Ghost Soldiers, author Hampton Sides tells not only the story of the rescue of the last prisoners of the Bataan Death March, but of the men involved- the battle for Bataan that was lost by the American's, the surrender, the march itself, and the imprisonment. Sides weaves the story of this epic rescue with an engrossing narrative of how it all came to be. He uses personal accounts as spoken/written by the actual participants to paint a vivid story of three years of hell in this Japanese POW camp. He pulls no punches when it comes to discussing/describing the life of these men.
As you read, you become acquainted with many of the individuals whose lives were irrevocably changed during this time.

Sides tells what is known not only of the POW's, Rangers, and Philippine scouts, but also of some of the Japanese involved, and (for me) he tells the story of a woman I had never heard of- a woman who had the. code name of Side Pockets. Claire Fisher was an American living in Manilla when the Japanese took over. Through a series of events described in the book she became a life saving espionage agent who not only passed information she got from the Japanese to the Americans, but also was able to secret lifesaving food and drugs to the camp for the benefit of the POW's.

This book is a must read for anyone with any interest at all in the Pacific Theater WWII experience. I don't see it as just a story of this one episode but as an overview of what the fighters in the Pacific Theater were against. ( )

A really interesting , if more than a little, disturbing account. War tends to bring out the extremes people are capable of, bith good and bad, and this book illustartes that very clearly ( )