The Hotel Tacloban

by Douglas Valentine

Book by Valentine, Douglas

Genres: History, World War II

175 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1984

About the author

Douglas Valentine is the author of four books of historical nonfiction: The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs, and The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA. He is the author of the novel TDY, and a book of poems, A Crow's Dream. He is also the editor of the poetry anthology With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014). He lives with his wife, Alice, in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[David Jabaley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard read because it’s a true story and frightening in many aspects. But this story needed to be told.

[Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very strange book. It purports to be about the experience of a US army private who was captured by the Japanese in New Guinea and somewhat miraculously taken all the way to a POW camp in the Philippines, where he spent the rest of the war under trying circumstances. Yet the text has been written by the man's son, presumably as he recounted it, and it veers back and forth between being a not very believable fictionalized account and a totally intimate and almost obviously believable account filled with numerous excruciating details. The early New Guinea section I thought poorly written, yet the writing improved unaccountably as the book progressed and the voice of the person whose story this purports to be suddenly sounded quite real.

But the really strange thing is, and this is very much part of the plot (although I am not really giving anything away, but I suppose I should say "spoiler"), that the POW camp in question seems to have entirely disappeared from the historical record. I googled away for several hours and could find nothing to indicate that there had ever been a camp nicknamed the Hotel Tacloban near the town of that name on Leyte. By the way, the book is probably worth more than three stars in a review, but a) there are much better accounts of the Japanese POW camp experience out there and b) it is not without the realm of possibility that the story has been made up out of whole cloth. But there is a healthy ring of truth to much of what is recorded here and it is a quick and easy (sic) read...

[Fern Henley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy read of hard facts

Men in my middle class mostly southern family go to war frequently. I worked in a VA hospital and now distribute petitions to let our governmental reps know we want a global community of sovereign nation states and we need to join BRICS and reinstate Glass-Steagall standards of banking immediately. The book is needed by citizens as the ones written by later soldiers of war such as Oliver Stone.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prison Camp experience

Information for this short book was provided by the author’s dad. While this second hand information is probably true, verification of the information is not possible. I suspect some of the facts might have been embellished. If this was in any way the case, it doesn’t not negate that being a POW was a most horrible experience and, without a doubt, the author’s father was an American hero.

The treatment of the POW by our military officers certainly needs/needed to be investigated .

[Apteryx · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been described as an embroidered memoir - but it is still a good yarn - albeit not a history.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is obviously a work of fiction, not fact.