Conduct Under Fire
Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945
The fierce, bloody battles of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines are legendary in the annals of World War II. Those who survived faced the horrors of life as prisoners of the Japanese.
In Conduct Under Fire, John A. Glusman chronicles these events through the eyes of his father, Murray, and three fellow navy doctors captured on Corregidor in May 1942. Here are the dramatic stories of the fall of Bataan, the siege of "the Rock," and the daily struggles to tend the sick, wounded, and dying during some of the heaviest bombardments of World War II. Here also is the desperate war doctors and corpsmen waged against disease and starvation amid an enemy that viewed surrender as a disgrace. To survive, the POWs functioned as a family. But the ties that bind couldn’t protect them from a ruthless counteroffensive waged by American submarines or from the B-29 raids that burned Japan’s major cities to the ground. Based on extensive interviews with American, British, Australian, and Japanese veterans, as well as diaries, letters, and war crimes testimony, this is a harrowing account of a brutal clash of cultures, of a race war that escalated into total war.
Like Flags of Our Fathers and Ghost Soldiers, Conduct Under Fire is a story of bravery on the battlefield and ingenuity behind barbed wire, one that reveals the long shadow the war cast on the lives of those who fought it.
A partial Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
A dual Main Selection of the History Book Club
A Selection of the Literary Guild
Murray Glusman after the war in the winter of 1945-46.
Murray Glusman outside Bilibid Prison on a return trip to the Philippines nearly sixty years after the end of World War II.
Interview
Operating in War's Theater
Publishers Weekly Talks with John Glusman
May 9, 2005
Your father was one of four doctors in a Philippine POW camp. Along with those of the others, how did you decide to tell his story?
I was approaching the age of 30 and my father had a mild heart attack, and I remember accompanying him to the hospital thinking, I don't know this man very well. He was nearly 30 when he returned from the war, so I began to think about him as a young man and realized that he rarely spoke about his POW experiences at all. I published an essay about it then, around 1990. I was encouraged to develop it into a book; I said I had no interest in that whatsoever. But in the fall of 2000, my father was invited back to the Philippines, back to Corregidor, and I asked if I could accompany him.
Did the book change your relationship?
It did. My father died this past January at the age of 90, but he had read the book in its entirety. We developed a very, very close relationship as a result of it because I was uncovering stories in some cases that he hadn't thought about, addressed or recalled in decades. In some cases it involved tracking down people whom he hadn't known in 60 years. He was a very tough reader. He initially didn't think I should write the book at all—he said, "We did nothing extraordinary; we lived in extraordinary times."
So do you think that Conduct raises issues that apply to conflicts generally?
I absolutely do. How we behave in wartime. How one treats, for example, prisoners of war. Conduct under fire in terms of a clash of cultures. The Pacific War was very much a clash of cultures, very much a race war. These men were not just prisoners of war; they were doctors who were caring for other people, so their conduct had to be exemplary. Was it always? No. But they worked extremely well together and were extremely competent—they did the best they could under horrific conditions. They were very lucky to survive, and in fact one of them didn't.
You're a veteran editor, but this is your first book. How do you feel?
As anxious as any first-time novelist, which amuses me vastly—but it doesn't help me get over it.
—Michael Scharf