Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors

New York: Bantam Books - A Division of Random House, Inc., 2007. First Paperback Printing . Trade Paperback. Near Fine. 6 1/4" x 9 1/4. Hood, Susan -. 530 Pages Indexed. Front cover has some very minor edge wear and corners slightly turned up. Illustrated with two center sections of black and white photographs. Renowned as FDR's favorite warship, the heavy cruiser USS Houseton entered the annals of naval legend when she was lost early in the Pacific war. Her cryptic final radio mesage gave no hint of the odds she's faced -- or of the fate of those who lived through her devastating last battlle. Her survivors would soon envy the dead. They were captured and made slaves on Japan's infamous Burma -- Thailand death railway, dubiously memorialized in the The Bridge on the River Kwai. Using journals and letters, rare historical documents, testimony from postwar Japanese war crimes tribunals, and the eyewitness accounts of Houston' survivors, the author has crafted a testament to human valor so riveting and awe-inspiring, it's easy to forget that every word of it is true. They ran a gauntlet through the war's first 84 days that would have been an epic unto itself in any other time. And yet the history books scarcely report it. Contents in Five Chapters: On Asia Station, A Bloodstained Sea, The Emperor's Guests, In the Jungle of the Kwai, Rendezvous with Freedom. Twenty-Four page list of the men of the USS Houston CA-30 and the Lost Battalion killed in action or died in captivity during 1942-1945. Here too, are the unsung warriors who survived one of Waorld War 2's most brutal oreals.