Any on Brin-L?
I'm interesting in getting recommendations of good books to read about the Pacific War from all perspectives. ------ Since my grandmother died several weeks ago, I've been learning new things about my grandfather, Capt. Julian Oliver Long, US Army Medical Corps. I always knew that he was captured in the Pacific during WW2 and died on a Japanese ship torpedoed by an American sub. Beyond that, my family never spoke about it much. My father, who never knew his father, never broached the subject, and I've always been too timid to ask him questions. My grandmother was fond of recalling her husband in the pre WW2 days: he was a "country doctor" in the classic sense, a travelling physician employed by the government who went from town to town and settlement to settlement in a wide-ranging area around Albequerque, New Mexico, delivering lots of babies and healing the sick and wounded. But she never spoke about the war, and it's always been clear that she never truly recovered from her loss. We were always too timid to ask her too many questions for fear of exacerbating old wounds. Since her death, however, I've learned that she kept a cache of letters. Letters written by Julian in the time leading up to Pearl Harbor and the seige of the Phillipines. Letters documenting Grandma's attempts to find out what happened to him after the war. Letters from Julian's friends and acquaintences giving what little they know, including a few testimonials about how Julian continued to practice his craft under the most brutal circumstances. A letter from a brigadier-general's office asking Grandma to cover a $100 check that Julian wrote to a Filipina woman in return for her smuggling medical supplies into Camp O'Donnell. A letter saying that Julian continued to try to smuggle food and medicine to fellow prisoners despite enduring beatings and solitary confinements from his captors. A letter from a man who says he would have died from pneumonia if Julian hadn't litterally forced him to keep fighting the disease after other doctors had given up hope (this happened before Pearl Harbor). It's interesting that the letters are voluminous and unceasing, written constantly from the time of Julian's enlistment until Pearl harbor, a period of between 1 and 1.5 years. They stop abruply at Pearl Harbor, and from then until 1945 all we have are a half-dozen Red Cross postcards, form letters, really, on which the Japanese allowed prisoners to type checkboxes denoting their health and treatment. From reading the postcards, and from what I've read of Japanese treatment of POWs during WW2, I'm pretty sure everything on those cards is a lie. Whether the lie is being told by the guards or the prisoner I can't tell. It's interesting how you can't really miss somebody you don't know. It's interesting that you can take for granted that a subject you've never explored is closed. It's interesting how a paper bag of letters and newpaper clippings can conjure suddenly into existance a man you can't help but love dearly and can't help but lose with fierce grief that emerges seeminly from nowhere. (One wonders how much of this is due to one's imagination and sense of the dramatic; I'm perfectly aware that the way I'm writing now is due mostly to the latter.) I'm fascinated by the fact that my grandmother did not share these letters with her two sons, except on one condition: graduation from college. Thus my uncle has read them, and I believe that my father still has not. (My uncle washed out of the Marines but had an academic and artistic career. My father dropped out of college and joined the Army at just the right time to miss both the Korean and Vietnam wars.) I haven't read *all* the letters yet, but I've skimmed them enough to get the gist. I'm not sure yet whether Julian was captured at Bataan or Corregidor or some lesser-known Philipines post. Thus I'm not 100% sure he was in the Bataan death march (it's my understanding that some historical accounts are confused on just who did and didn't participate in that march). I am sure that he was in Camp O'Donnell for a while, then in Japan for a long time. I'm 99.9% sure he was on the _Arisan Maru_ when, the war nearly over, it was torpedoed by an American submarine, killing about 1800 POWs. (The Japanese did not mark prisoner transports as such.) There's one letter, written by Grandma after the war was over, that breaks my heart. She still hasn't heard definitively of Julian's fate, so she writes in care of the US Army to her husband that she is still looking for him. The letter was returned to sender, but in it she quotes a love-poem by Elizabeth Browning and states that she knows, in her heart, that he is still alive. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
