Ghost Soldieers: The Forgotten Epic Story of WWII's Most Dramatic Mission by Hampton Sides

This is not a spy story; rather it recounts the liberation of the POW camp near the city of Cabanatuan in the Philippines in October 1945.  I finished the book with tears in my eyes and found it difficult to fall asleep last night as I dwelled on the horrors of the camp, the diseases, the starvation, the abuse.  This enemy seemed multiples crueler than those I read about in Germany camps, granted there was not any gas chamber, medical experimentation.  Still I marveled at the human spirit of those who managed to "live" through it and again respected, in awe, of the 6th Ranger Battalion who set them free.

Not to preview too much what I hope to write about my year's adventure into spy world, but I was seeking better to understand how someone possessed the heroism to serve his county in that capacity and to also look into the dark motives of those who spy into the USA.  There is a lot to admire across the agencies, across time, across the globe.  Their souls possess the epitome of patriotism.

So, too, do our armed forces and I was glad to divert into the documentation of this adventure.

Ne'er the less, a spy does pop up on page 183.  "High Pockets," her undercover nom de guerre, was very cleverly "under" as it came from her modus operandi of storing information in her bra.  Operating a cabaret in Manila, the Club Tsubaki, she was known as Clara Fuentes.  She was not a Philippine national nor of Italian extraction as she claimed; she was Claire Phillips, an American from Portland, Oregon.  Encouraged by a soldier in the 31st Infantry into espionage, she opened this club through which Japanese generals, admirals, submarine captains, merchant marine skippers and zaibatsu businessmen passed.  With pseudo-amorous words and plenty of alcohol, she cajoled them to divulge troop movements and conditions of roads and bridges, including discovering that Japanese troops were being transported in vessels marked with a Red Cross for neutrality.

I'm being to conclude that my discovery into spy craft was a search for heroes.

A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe America's Most Important Spy in WWII by Lucas Delattre

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