The book is about some men who had flown PBY No. 08233 which went down during an attack on a Japanese installation. The men who survived were captured by the Japanese. The Japanese were particularly angry with U.S. airmen since there often wasn't much they could do to stop the constant attacks on their positions after the Japanese own aerial abilities had been reduced considerably. So they tended to take that anger out on any airmen they captured, often torturing them and killing them. The book goes into detail explaining what PBYs were and what their role in the war was, then it goes into biographies of each of the men on this particular flight. He points out that 3% of the American POWs taken by the Axis powers in Europe died in captivity, but 37% of those taken by the Japanese died in captivity, over twelve times as many.

He then goes into executions and mistreatment of American POWs by the Japanese in various places in the Pacific theater.

This particular PBY crashed and two of the men were killed in that crash, but that still left nine survivors. They were captured and taken to a place called Kendari and were put into the Tokkei Tai prison compound.

A message was sent by a Japanese admiral in late November of 1944 that was an order to kill prisoners at the prison. The deaths of each of the airmen is then discussed along with the trials afterwards of a couple of the men responsible for their deaths.

It's books like this that show just how barbarous some of the Japanese military were during the war.

This book has a special place in my library and my heart, as a dear first cousin, Jake Nilva, was among the eleven Naval airmen captured by the Japanese and later killed, who are the subjects of this story. The foreword was eloquently written by Robert W. Love, Jr. of the United States Naval Academy. This book of WWII history was diligently researched and written by Michael J. Goodwin, the only child of any of them.

All five of my male cousins went to war. Jake was the only one who did not return. I was eleven years old when the family learned of our loss and his mother, my aunt, changed forever in her abject grief.

Although history has made more bearable the facts of the horrid testimony of human against human that war provides, and I bear no personal ill will toward those long gone, the book gave me great emotional pause and made me wonder, especially in view of today's rising tide of hatred, what have we learned?