This ranks with the greatest survival stories that I have read. Conner was a green Lieutenant when he was sent to the Philippines in November, 1941. Trained as a radio operator with no combat training, he decided when the American military surrendered to the Japanese, that he would hide in the jungle and try to carry on the fight. This is his story of searching for food, hiding from the Japanese, over coming malaria and other tropical diseases more than once, and making friends with the various native groups that inhabited the jungle.

Eventually, with the aid of other American evaders, he organized the various local groups into a guerrilla army that spied on the Japanese and harassed them whenever an opportunity presented itself. That they were able to do so for over four years makes this an amazing story.

Author, Bob Welch, includes a description of the huge amount of research that went into this book. Conner, who died in 1983, left huge amounts of written material as he had planned to write his own version of these events plus Welch interviewed surviving Americans and Filipinos who were there with Conner in the Philippines.

Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken is in the same category as this volume when it comes to chronicling man's will to overcome.

For another memoir of American soldiers fighting the Japanese in the jungles of the Philippines after the surrender, search out John Keats' They Fought Alone. ( )