mshawpyle's Full Review: Bob Wodnik - Captured Honor: Pow Survival in the P...
Journalism, said Kipling (who certainly knew whereof he spoke), is ‘history in a hurry.’ Some journalists have written narratives that have become useful sources for the historian; but not a few journalists have been historians in sober fact, and vice versa. Sir John Keegan was a Defence Correspondent in his time; Kipling himself wrote that volume of the Regimental History for his son’s unit – the Irish Guards – that covered the Great War, in which the young John Kipling was killed; and there is always, of course, Winston.
Bob Wodnik, formerly of the Everett (Washington) Herald, has now made his debut as a writer of history with Captured Honor: POW Survival in the Philippines and Japan. And an impressive maiden effort it is, fit to share the shelf with Fahey’s Pacific War Diary and Red Allen’s memoir of Bataan and after.
This quietly well-written work, deceptively free of apparent emotion, is of great power after all, relentlessly examining the ways in which war, like a Carthaginian idol, demands the blood sacrifice of a nation’s sons. Death is ever present, all manner of death, whether on the line or in grinding, bitter captivity. Yet there is no question but that Mr Jefferson had the right of it: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Mr Wodnik’s account of the experiences of eight American POWs held by the Japanese needs no declamatory rhetoric to point its moral and adorn its tale: the incidents alone suffice to show how very necessary it was that the aggressors and the dictators be resisted, then as ever, then as now, at any cost.
And cost, of course, there was. As I have written elsewhere, there is no such thing as a ‘clean death in battle.’ Men do not fall in neat, cinematographic wise, as the movies would have you believe. Their blood and entrails are shredded and spattered, their very teeth and bones made shrapnel to wound their comrades, rather; they die, not cleanly, but miserably and horribly, more meanly even than beasts in an abattoir, in agony and fear amidst their own voided wastes. That is war. That is what war is. And that is the war Mr Wodnik’s subjects knew, and survived. That is the war that Jack Elkins knew, and Henry Chamberlain, and Fran Agnes, and Odas Greer, and Galen Martin. And Roy Wederbrook of Texas, who didn’t make it. And all the rest whose names must never be allowed to be forgotten.
Costs there were. For if there is no such thing as a ‘clean death in battle,’ even death in battle could be preferable to the horrors of captivity in the hands of such a foe as the Imperial Japanese forces. It was the Japanese belief that surrender demeaned the surrendering force, showed the vanquished to be dishonored, and justified their being treated vilely and in defiance of all of Japan’s solemn undertakings under international law. Of course, what distinguishes those entitled to the honored name of soldiers from a mere armed and criminal mob is rather precisely the soldier’s adherence to law and treaty, discipline and good order, and the laws of war, and it was the Japanese who dishonored themselves throughout the Twenties, Thirties, and early Forties, for which they paid only in part at Sugamo and the PTO tribunals, and for which the Japanese establishment has yet fully to accept blame and make amends; and no one can read of what was meted out to the Americans who are Mr Wodnik’s subjects without horror and righteous indignation. There are those in the world today who – to quote Patrick Henry – may profit by the example.
It is no wonder that Mr Wodnik’s subjects were long silent regarding their experiences, and that in many cases it is in this work that their experiences are recalled and published for the first time.
Just as affecting is Mr Wodnik’s equally spare and laconic account of life on the home front, centering upon the evocative figure of a shy, 4-F hotel clerk, a bibliophile and compulsive letter-writer named Ed Fox, in Everett, Washington, and upon the characters who passed through the Strand Hotel, a place that could have sheltered scores of Jim Thompson’s noir grifters. This was the old Pacific Northwest, before Starbucks and anti-globalization protestors, but clearly ancestral to them, with its Wobblies and ‘progressives’ and Soviet agents in every other cannery and longshoreman’s union, its descendants of New England-born pioneers who didn’t believe in ‘pie in the sky when you die’ but had an abiding conviction of the sanctity of Clarence Darrow and the resurrection of the deathless Joe Hill. People who held Guthrie and his sacred guitar as their messiah. But it was also, under the pressure of war, America, for good and ill, tensely awaiting the Japanese and rounding up all the Nisei in sight, hoarding cigarettes and tearing up its most cherished belongings for scrap drives, b-tching about rationing and buying war bonds. The America that had scraped through the Depression, just barely, only to find itself in a world war. The America that sent its sons to that war, sons of the whole country from Corpus Christi to Puget Sound, from Salem to Salem, from San Diego to Savannah. The America that paid these costs, in blood and agony, death and imprisonment, slaughter and maltreatment, bullets and bombs and maggots in the prison rice ration, and long years of private hell and horror for not a few of those who returned. The Pacific war, a war without mercy, driven by a special hatred, was peculiarly cruel even by comparison to the ETO.
And Mr Wodnik handles all his matter deftly, letting the raw horrors speak the more evocatively because they speak for themselves without authorial interference or cheerleading, letting the pathos of Ed Fox’s home front stand on its own without melodramatics. Like any history, this work is of course limited by the iron law of the availability of source material, and its emphases, affected by its sources, cannot be taken as universal; but it is a compelling history of defeat and survival and eventual victory, however one defines victory amidst such grim carnage, and I commend it unreservedly to you all, especially on this holiday weekend.
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