The Guerrilla and the Hostage

San Antonio, TX: John E. Olson, 1994. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. Very good. [4], 246, [6] pages. Illustrated front cover. Maps. Dust Jacket has some wear and soiling and stiff card cover is unmarked. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads To: Virginia Brown With warmest regards, John E. Olson 5 March, 1998. with additional gift inscription, not from author. John Eric Olson (November 27, 1917 - October 2, 2012) was a U.S. Army Colonel, West Point graduate, and one of the last surviving officers of the Bataan Death March of WWII. He was also a military historian and author, dealing primarily with his experiences as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and in Japan from 1942 to 1945. Olson was assigned to the 57th Infantry Regiment of the Philippine Scouts. The U.S. forces were ordered to surrender in April, 1942. Olson joined more than 9600 U.S. soldiers and nearly 50,000 Filipinos who endured the Bataan Death March. He was imprisoned at Camp O'Donnell where he kept secret records for the prison. Before being transferred to Cabanatuan prison, in June, 1942, he managed to bury all his reports in the nearby jungle. In 1948 he returned, exhumed those records, and nearly four decades later used them to write his history of the camp. After transport to Japan in 1942, Olson was imprisoned at the Osaka Seiko Company steel mill in Osaka where he spent the remainder of the war in forced labor, until being moved to Oeyama before the onset of U.S. bombing raids. Col. Olson served as J-3 advisor in the early 1960s in Vietnam. He retired as a full colonel in 1967. In 2008 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Philippine Scouts Heritage Society. This work is in some respects a roman a clef, a novel drawn from real life. The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war (POW) from the municipalities of Bagac and Mariveles on the Bataan Peninsula to Camp O'Donnell via San Fernando. The transfer began on 9 April 1942 after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II. The total distance marched from Mariveles to San Fernando and from the Capas Train Station to various camps was 65 miles. Sources also report widely differing prisoner of war casualties prior to reaching Camp O'Donnell: from 5,000 to 18,000 Filipino deaths and 500 to 650 American deaths during the march. The march was characterized by severe physical abuse and wanton killings. If an American or Filipino POW was caught on the ground or fell, he would be instantly shot. After the war, the Japanese commander, General Masaharu Homma and two of his officers, Major General Yoshitaka Kawane and Colonel Kurataro Hirano, were tried by United States military commissions for war crimes and sentenced to death on charges of failing to prevent their subordinates from committing atrocities. Homma was executed in 1946, while Kawane and Hirano were executed in 1949.