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In 1939, a year before the draft was instituted in the United States, a twenty-year-old Connecticut native, Sigfried Schreiner, enlisted with friends from high school to serve in the Army Air Force. They were seeking adventure more than anything else. An imminent war in the Pacific was far from their thoughts. That changed in frightening ways on December 7, 1941. What followed was a costly four-month fight to hold the Japanese invaders back, the surrender of American and Filipino forces in April, 1942, the infamous Bataan Death March and, for Siggy Schreiner, more than three years as a slave laborer in a POW camp in Manchuria.
An American at War is his nephew's account of Siggy Schreiner's experiences on Bataan and as a POW, a chronicle based on a diary Siggy kept while a prisoner and a journal in which he recorded his memories in harrowing detail while recuperating at a V.A. hospital in 1946. Many WW II veterans were reluctant to talk to their families about their wartime experiences.As Loughery writes at the conclusion of the book, "Too many vital recollections of distressing events are often lost with the passage of time. All of the men and women who served this country in a just cause deserve better than silence and oblivion."
John Loughery is the author of five award-winning and New York Times Notable Books, including Alias S.S. Van Dine (winner of an Edgar Award), John Sloan: Painter and Rebel (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography), The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities, A Twentieth-Century History (winner of a Lambda Award), Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America (winner of the Lehman Prize from the New York Academy of History), and most recently Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century.
