Some Survive
by Manny Lawton
Category: History

This true account by a WWII veteran taken prisoner by the Japanese “shows that the human spirit can soar like an eagle from the depths of hell on earth” (The Post and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina). Manny Lawton was a twenty-three-year-old army captain on April 8, 1942, when orders to surrender to the Japanese forces invading the Philippines arrived. The next day, he and his fellow American and Filipino prisoners set out on the infamous Bataan Death March—a forced six-day, sixty-mile trek under a broiling tropical sun during which approximately eleven thousand men died or were bayoneted, clubbed, or shot to death by the Japanese. As terrible as the Death March was, for Manny Lawton and his comrades it was only the beginning. When the war ended in August 1945, it is estimated that some fifty-seven percent of the American troops who had surrendered on Bataan had perished. Yet this is not a chronicle of despair. It is, instead, the story of how men can suffer even the most desperate conditions and, in their will to retain their humanity, triumph over appalling adversity. An epic of quiet heroism with an introduction by historian John Toland, Some Survived is a harrowing and inspiring tale—and “an honorable and absorbing testament to the courage of many” (The State).