Claire E. Swedberg's Books

The Medic

A World War II Story of Imprisonment, Hope, and Survival

By: Claire E. Swedberg

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The Medic

A World War II Story of Imprisonment, Hope, and Survival

By: Claire E. Swedberg

Henry Chamberlain was one of the longest-term prisoners of war in World War II. Taken prisoner in the American surrender at Bataan in April 1942, he remained in Japanese captivity until September 1945. During three and a half years of imprisonment, as a medic he was a unique and unfortunate witness to the horrors and terrors the Japanese inflicted on their prisoners during the Bataan Death March and at the notorious Cabanatuan prison camp, where for two years he tended to the sick and wounded, all too often without medicine. In October 1944 the Japanese put Chamberlain on a “hell ship” to forced labor in sugar cane fields in Formosa (now Taiwan) and again, in January 1945, to a Mitsubishi lead and zinc mine in Japan. U.S. military forces reached the camp in September 1945, liberating Chamberlain and his fellow soldiers. Chamberlain’s is a story of excruciating hardship, abiding endurance, and transcendent courage, and writer Claire Swedberg tells it beautifully, with great style and deep pathos, from Chamberlain’s fraught Depression-era boyhood in Nebraska, through his World War II captivity, to his return to Japan in 2018. Like Adam Makos’s Spearhead and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, this is the account of one man fighting for and with his fellow soldiers against the forces of war in the twentieth-century.

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811769836

ISBN 13

9780811769839

In Enemy Hands

Personal Accounts of Those Taken Prisoner in World War II

By: Claire E. Swedberg

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In Enemy Hands

Personal Accounts of Those Taken Prisoner in World War II

By: Claire E. Swedberg

Personal accounts of those taken prisoner during World War II.

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Page Count

328

Publisher

Stackpole Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811751597

ISBN 13

9780811751599

The Medic

A World War II Story of Imprisonment, Hope, and Survival

By: Claire E. Swedberg

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The Medic

A World War II Story of Imprisonment, Hope, and Survival

By: Claire E. Swedberg

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811769836

ISBN 13

9780811769839

Work Commando 311/I

American Paratroopers Become Forced Laborers for the Nazis

By: Claire E. Swedberg

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Work Commando 311/I

American Paratroopers Become Forced Laborers for the Nazis

By: Claire E. Swedberg

Private Dan Jones was captured by Nazi sergeants in a smoke-filled forest in Holland. He and a small group of American prisoners, mostly paratroopers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne, were taken to the squalid barn loft that was to be their home for the rest of the war. In the Work Commando 311/I, Nazis forced them to work as slave laborers, repairing and maintaining German railroads that had been damaged by Allied bombs. The ill, weary prisoners, once proud members of elite U.S. fighting units, suffered unaccustomed disgrace. Bickering over the meager food supply added to their anxious depression and hopelessness. Tired of the men’s morose outlook and individualistic ways, Herbert Marlowe, their unofficial leader, held a meeting one evening in the barn loft. Marlow explained that their infighting and irritability were not only keeping their spirits low by also amusing the Germans. He encouraged the prisoners to retaliate against their captors in careful, nonthreatening ways. Jones suggested that they work slowly, looking busy while accomplishing little. Then all the men began to contribute schemes to steal bread, turnips, beets, and coal. A glimmer of hope and a feeling of comradeship made their wretched situation more bearable. Soon they were working together to confound the Nazis in every way possible, and some prisoners even attempted escape. Survival was the captives’ goal, and along the way they suffered sadistic guards, hostile civilians, bitter cold, loneliness, malnutrition, and illness. Work Commando 311/I follows their terrible, exciting story—told through the combined recollections of the survivors—from their early combat experiences to the Allied triumph at the end of World War II.

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Page Count

226

Publisher

Stackpole Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811766810

ISBN 13

9780811766814

The Medic

A Story of Imprisonment and Survival in World War II

By: Claire Swedberg

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The Medic

A Story of Imprisonment and Survival in World War II

By: Claire Swedberg

From the Bataan Death March to Japanese prison camp to a "hell ship" and forced labor, American medic Henry Chamberlain survived the horrors of three and a half years of imprisonment during WW II. Claire Swedberg tells his story of excruciating hardship, abiding endurance, and transcendent courage beautifully, with great style and deep pathos.

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Page Count

320

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811739953

ISBN 13

9780811739955

In Enemy Hands

Personal Accounts of Those Taken Prisoner in World War II

By: Claire E. Swedberg

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In Enemy Hands

Personal Accounts of Those Taken Prisoner in World War II

By: Claire E. Swedberg

In early 1942, following a string of successes, the Japanese seized nearly 10,000 American soldiers, among them Pvt. Oscar Smith, on Manila Bay and marched them to a near-certain death through Bataan. A few days later they put Smith to work burying the stacked bodies of his own men. Robert Salmon had already served his time in the military during World War I, fighting for his native England. He was teaching biochemistry to Chinese students in Shanghai when the Japanese arrested him in 1943 and condemned him, with thousands of confused Western missionaries, to spend the remainder of World War II in an abandoned tobacco factory. German soldiers, marching toward what would be known as the Battle of the Bulge, captured Ed Uzemack, a Chicago journalist turned soldier, at an abandoned Luxembourg inn. By cattle car they sent him to a crowded, wind-swept POW camp, once the final internment spot for Jewish concentration camp victims. In 1945 Hermann Pfengle, just fifteen years old, had been released from German military duty and was retreating through Czech farm country when American soldiers seized him and his friends. The Americans--who he had hoped would treat him more humanely than the feared Russians or German SS would--sent him to a camp close to his home, where he languished with thousands of German prisoners behind a wire fence, watching many of them die from hunger, exposure, and dehydration. Helga Wunsch thought she had survived the war when Germany surrendered to the Allies, but she was soon forced to face the new horrors of Soviet occupation in her eastern German town. When she was arrested by the Russians on bogus espionage charges, she was merely a teenage schoolgirl planning for her graduation exams. As a political prisoner, she would spend her next ten years under constant threat of torture, beatings, and starvation. These survivors offer uniquely personal stories in this fascinating narrative of imprisonment during and immediately after World War II. Their gripping accounts weave determination and despair, grief and human, horror and hardship together in a universal tapestry of prison life, revealing details never before told about World War II POWs and the often unspeakable hardships they sustained. Their stories take the reader on an unforgettable journey through history and across the world, from the heinous crimes against prisoners in the Philippines to the little-known and undocumented life within political prisoners in the former East Germany.

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Page Count

308

Publisher

Stackpole Classics

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811737586

ISBN 13

9780811737586

Book's by Claire E. Swedberg

The Medic

The Medic

In Enemy Hands

In Enemy Hands

The Medic

The Medic

Work Commando 311/I

Work Commando 311/I

The Medic

The Medic

In Enemy Hands

In Enemy Hands

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