Author: Hale Bradt
Publisher: Van Dorn Books – 1,112 pages
Book Review by: Paiso Jamakar
This three-part saga of a family that went through a harrowing World War II experience – as the patriarch fought the dreaded Japanese soldiers in the islands of the Pacific – is not only a moving and heart-rending one, but demonstrates their great courage and sacrifice.
It is the heroic story of Wilber Bradt and his courageous wife Norma as told by their son Hale. The work consists of three volumes. Book 1 is Citizen Solder, Book 2 is Combat & New Life, and Book 3 is Victory & Homecoming.
The narratives were woven together from about 700 letters containing great detail, sent by Wilber from U.S. Army war scenes in New Guinea, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands to his family back home. The three books of this trilogy not only contain copies of letters and envelopes, and telegrams from Wilber, but also charts and maps of the areas where the battles were fought, newspaper headlines, and numerous photos at various stages of the family’s life.
All together these materials enable the reader to live through this tragic war, feel the sorrows and triumphs of this family, and conclude that never again should the world experience a human tragedy of such massive proportions.
No review can ever convey to you, or evoke in you, the emotions that arise within you when you are reading the various episodes of the family’s experiences, even as they have been written on a deeply personal level by a member of that family. But we here below give you a sort of scope of the various parts of this story by listing the Parts of each of the three books in this trilogy:
- Book 1 – Citizen Soldier
- Part I. Farm to academia
- Part II. Army camps
- Part III. Voyages to war
- Holding the front
- Book 2 – Combat & New Life
- Part I. Jungle combat
- Part II. Interlude 1983, Japan and Solomon Islands
- Part III. Ondonga palm grove
- Part IV. Western civilization at last
- Part V. Interlude 1984, New Zealand
- Book 3 – Victory & Homecoming
- Part I. Combat, New Guinea
- Part II. Final battles, Luzon
- Part III. Interlude 1983, Luzon
- Part IV. Japan and Home
- Part V. Epilogue
This is a unique epic of monumental scale about an American soldier’s fight in battles in various parts of Oceania during the Second World War, and intricately pieced together by his son. I highly recommend that readers get a copy, not just to know a single family’s story, but to know on a broader scale, how American soldiers go and fight on foreign shores, and sometimes die in the struggle against aggression, occupation, subjugation, and suppression of freedom.
Hale Bradt, PhD is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a faculty member of its Department of Physics from 1961 to 2001. After getting an AB degree with a major in music from Princeton University in 1952, he went to study physics. After getting his physics degree from MIT, he became an instructor there in 1961, an assistant professor in 1963, associate professor in 1968, and full professor in 1972.
Bradt founded MIT’s sounding rocket program in x-ray astronomy in 1967, was a co-investigator on the MIT SAS-3 mission that launched in 1975, was a co-principal investigator on the Heat Energy Astronomy Observatory, or HEAO in 1977. He was principal investigator of the All-Sky Monitor (ASM) instrument on the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explore (RXTE) which began in 1995 and was operating until 2010.
Bradt’s work has long been directed towards the determination of X-ray source positions and the follow-up studies of the objects identified. With students and associates, he has carried out studies with RXTE of the unusual neutron-star binary Cir X-1, of gamma ray bursts, and of the behavior of transient X-ray sources.
He is the author of two books: Astronomy Methods (2004) and Astrophysics Processes (2008), both by Cambridge University Press, and numerous articles for conferences and journals. He and his wife Dorothy have two grown daughters and live in Salem, Massachusetts.
