From Publishers Weekly
Tenney here recounts his experiences as a GI during the fall of the Philippines in 1941, his participation in the Bataan death march and his three-year ordeal in Camp 17, the harshest POW camp in Japan. He witnessed devastating atrocities, including serial slaughter that was a kind of athletic exercise for the guards. Soon after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, he was set free; his wanderings about the countryside and interactions with Japanese civilians and leaderless soldiers form the most interesting sections of this engrossing book. Tenney suffered unexpected heartbreak when, upon being reunited with his family, he learned that his wife, believing him killed in action, had remarried. He also experienced depression based largely on his image of himself as one of "the losers who had surrendered" in the Philippines. In 1988, he revisited Japan and found that his psychic war wounds were beginning to heal. For all the suffering he witnessed and endured, Tenney's memoir is remarkably upbeat. He is a retired professor of finance at Arizona State University. Photos. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan, Lester Tenney was one of the very few who would survive the legendary Death March and three and a half years in Japanese prison camps. On the march, Tenney witnessed fellow POWs die by the hundreds from thirst, wounds, disease, or savage mistreatment at the hands of brutal Japanese guards. With a keen understanding of human nature, a sense of humor, the ability to think on his feet, and most of all a fierce determination to see his family again, Tenney endured the rest of the war as a slave laborer in miserable Japanese prison camps. My Hitch in Hell is an inspiring survivor's epic about the triumph of human will despite unimaginable suffering.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan, Lester Tenney was one of the very few who would survive the legendary Death March and three and a half years in Japanese prison camps. On the march, Tenney witnessed fellow POWs die by the hundreds from thirst, wounds, disease, or savage mistreatment at the hands of brutal Japanese guards. With a keen understanding of human nature, a sense of humor, the ability to think on his feet, and most of all a fierce determination to see his family again, Tenney endured the rest of the war as a slave laborer in miserable Japanese prison camps. My Hitch in Hell is an inspiring survivor's epic about the triumph of human will despite unimaginable suffering.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly