Best Philippines History Books
Here you will get Best Philippines History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
Author: by Hampton Sides
Anchor (May 7, 2002)
English
384 pages
The greatest World War II story never told (Esquire)an enthralling account of the heroic mission to rescue the last survivors of the Bataan Death March. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. Troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March.
A recent prison massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation. In Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp.
Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture. Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.
2. We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan
Author: by Elizabeth Norman
English
384 pages
0812984846
In the fall of 1941, the Philippines was a gardenia-scented paradise for the American Army and Navy nurses stationed there. War was a distant rumor, life a routine of easy shifts and dinners under the stars. On December 8 all that changed, as Japanese bombs began raining down on American bases in Luzon, and this paradise became a fiery hell.
Caught in the raging battle, the nurses set up field hospitals in the jungles of Bataan and the tunnels of Corregidor, where they tended to the most devastating injuries of war, and suffered the terrors of shells and shrapnel. But the worst was yet to come.
After Bataan and Corregidor fell, the nurses were herded into internment camps where they would endure three years of fear, brutality, and starvation. Once liberated, they returned to an America that at first celebrated them, but later refused to honor their leaders with the medals they clearly deserved.
Here, in letters, diaries, and riveting firsthand accounts, is the story of what really happened during those dark days, woven together in a deeply affecting saga of women in war. Praise for We Band of Angels Gripping … A war story in which the main characters never kill one of the enemy, or even shoot at him, but are nevertheless heroes …
3
The Expendable: The true story of Patrol Wing 10, PT Squadron 3, and a Navy Corpsman who refused to surrender when the Philippine Islands fell to Japan
Author: by John Floyd
B08DDJ1MW4
July 25, 2020
English
Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Winner, Nonfiction category, Arizona Authors’ Association 2020 Literary Contest. Amazon #1 Amazon Best Seller in multiple categories.”A riveting page turner. As a retired Navy combat Hospital Corpsman I can appreciate this story from leaving the farm,to Great lakes to corpsman basic to combat.
A fantastic story.” – Don Colling – Amazon ReviewerThe Expendable is a captivating, true story from the opening months of WWII in the Pacific. As smoke billows skyward from Pearl Harbor, Japan throws its full military might against the outnumbered and under-equipped Filipino forces.Hart sends his U.S.
Asiatic Fleet south, to the safety of Allied waters. When the remnants of PBY Patrol Wing 10 depart with the fleet, Charles Beckner, corpsman for Squadron 102, is left behind with no apparent avenue for escape. Under relentless pressure from General Homma’s troops and air forces, the American-Filipino troops retreat to the tip of the Bataan Peninsula.
4. How Asia Works
Author: by Joe Studwell
Grove Press (May 20, 2014)
English
400 pages
Named by Bill Gates as one of his Top 5 Books of the YearAn Economist Best Book of the YearIn the 1980s and 1990s many in the West came to believe in the myth of an East-Asian economic miracle, with countries seen as not just development prodigies but as a unified bloc, culturally and economically similar, and inexorably on the rise.
In How Asia Works, Joe Studwell distills extensive research into the economics of nine countriesJapan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Chinainto an accessible, readable narrative that debunks Western misconceptions, shows what really happened in Asia and why, and for once makes clear why some countries have boomed while others have languished.
Impressive in scope, How Asia Works is essential reading for anyone interested in a region that will shape the future of the world.
5. Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942
Author: by Richard B. Frank
English
768 pages
1324002107
An eye-opening, pathbreaking account of the onset of the Asia-Pacific War, by the acclaimed author of Downfall and Guadalcanal. In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean enclosed half the world’s population, all save a fraction enduring under some form of colonialism.
Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. From just two nation states with real sovereignty, Thailand and Japan, and two with compromised sovereignty, China and Mongolia, the region today encompasses at least nineteen major sovereign nations.
This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly describes in exquisite detail the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. Beginning with China’s long-neglected years of heroic, costly resistance, Tower of Skulls explodes outward to campaigns including Singapore, the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, India, and Burma, as well as across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor.
6. The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Untold Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter and Savior of American POWs
Author: by Robert J. Mrazek
Hachette Books
English
368 pages
“An American hero-long forgotten-finally gets her due in this riveting narrative. You will absolutely love Florence Finch: her grit, her compassion, her fight. This isn’t just history; she is a woman for our times.” -Keith O’Brien, the New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls The riveting story of an unsung World War II hero who saved countless American lives in the Philippines, told by an award-winning military historian.
When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited fifty years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children.
Florence was an unlikely warrior. She relied on her own intelligence and fortitude to survive on her own from the age of seven, facing bigotry as a mixed-race mestiza with the dual heritage of her American serviceman father and Filipina mother.
7. No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War
Author: by Hiroo Onoda
English
224 pages
1557506639
In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.
This first-person account of those years of evading capture and trying to stay alive is filled with drama, tension, and excitement. Readers learn about Onoda’s early life, his training as an intelligence officer, and his final assignment to the Philippine island of Lubang.
When American forces take over the island, he retreats into the mountains and life becomes a constant battle against the elements as well as the enemy. The description of his selfless dedication to a cause allows us a rare glimpse of the invincible spirit of the human being, and his ingenuity in adapting to primitive surroundings is a commentary on man’s resourcefulness.
8. Saipan: The Battle That Doomed Japan in World War II
Author: by James H. Hallas
Stackpole Books
English
592 pages
The story of the Battle of Saipan has it all. Marines at war: on Pacific beaches, in hellish volcanic landscapes in places like Purple Heart Ridge, Death Valley, and Hell’s Pocket, under a commander known as Howlin’ Mad. Naval combat: carriers battling carriers from afar, fighters downing Japanese aircraft, submarines sinking carriers.
Marine-army rivalry. Fanatical Japanese defense and resistance. A turning point of the Pacific War. James Hallas reconstructs the full panorama of Saipan in a way that no recent chronicler of the battle has done. In its comprehensiveness, attention to detail, scope of research, and ultimate focus on the men who fought and won the battle on the beaches and at and above the sea, it rivals Richard Frank’s modern classic Guadalcanal.
This is the definitive military history of the Battle of Saipan.
9. In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century
Author: by Sebastian Strangio
English
360 pages
0300234031
A timely look at the impact of China’s booming emergence on the countries of Southeast AsiaAn expert and lucid synthesis of the historical context and recent developments of Southeast Asia’s rich and complex relations with Beijing. John Reed, Financial Times Today, Southeast Asia stands uniquely exposed to the waxing power of the new China.
Three of its nations border China and five are directly impacted by its claims over the South China Sea. All dwell in the lengthening shadow of its influence: economic, political, military, and cultural. As China seeks to restore its former status as Asia’s preeminent power, the countries of Southeast Asia face an increasingly stark choice: flourish within Beijing’s orbit or languish outside of it.
Meanwhile, as rival powers including the United States take concerted action to curb Chinese ambitions, the region has emerged as an arena of heated strategic competition. Drawing on more than a decade of on-the-ground experience, Sebastian Strangio explores the impacts of China’s rise on Southeast Asia, the varied ways in which the countries of the region are responding, and what it might mean for the future balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
10. History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos
Author: by Luis H. Francia
Harry N. Abrams
English
368 pages
From ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation and beyond, A History of the Philippines recasts various Philippine narratives with an eye for the layers of colonial and post-colonial history that have created this diverse and fascinating population.
A History of the Philippines begins with the pre-Westernized Philippines in the 16th century and continues through the 1899 Philippine-American War, the nation’s relationship with the United States’ controlling presence, culminating with its independence in 1946 and two ongoing insurgencies, one Islamic and one Communist.Luis H.
Francia creates an illuminating portrait that offers the reader valuable insights into the heart and soul of the modern Filipino, laying bare the multicultural, multiracial society of contemporary times.
11. The Battle for Leyte Gulf: The Incredible Story of World War II's Largest Naval Battle
Author: by C. Vann Woodward
Skyhorse
English
242 pages
New York Times Best Seller! So soundly documented that it is hard to see how anyone, ever, will be able to improve on it. New York TimesPulitzer-Prize-winner and bestselling author C. Vann Woodward recreates the gripping account of the battle for Leyte Gulfthe greatest naval battle of World War II and the largest engagement ever fought on the high seas.
For the Japanese, it represented their supreme effort; they committed to action virtually every operational fighting ship on the lists of the Imperial Navy, including two powerful new battleships of the Yamato class. It also ended in their greatest defeatand a tremendous victory for the United States Navy.
Features a new introduction by Evan Thomas, author of Sea of Thunder. Thomas writes: His elegant prose and arch wit are superbly matched to the challenge of making sense of this immense and notoriously chaotic naval battle. Woodward always told his students that history must be understood first as a story.
In these pages, he proves it.
12. Indestructible: One Man's Rescue Mission That Changed the Course of WWII
Author: by John R Bruning
Hachette Books
English
560 pages
In this remarkable WWII story by New York Times bestselling author John R. Bruning, a renegade American pilot fights against all odds to rescue his family – imprisoned by the Japanese-and revolutionizes modern warfare along the way. From the knife fights and smuggling runs of his youth to his fiery days as a pioneering naval aviator, Paul Irving “Pappy” Gunn played by his own set of rules and always survived on his wits and fists.
But when he fell for a conservative Southern belle, her love transformed him from a wild and reckless airman to a cunning entrepreneur whose homespun engineering brilliance helped launch one of the first airlines in Asia. Pappy was drafted into MacArthur’s air force when war came to the Philippines; and while he carried out a top-secret mission to Australia, the Japanese seized his family.
Separated from his beloved wife, Polly, and their four children, Pappy reverted to his lawless ways. He carried out rescue missions with an almost suicidal desperation. Even after he was shot down twice and forced to withdraw to Australia, he waged a one-man war against his many enemies – including the American high command and the Japanese-and fought to return to the Philippines to find his family.
13. Return to Victory: MacArthur's Epic Liberation of the Philippines
Author: by James P. Duffy
English
352 pages
0306921928
General Douglas MacArthur’s bloody campaign to defeat die-hard Japanese forces and liberate the Philippines I shall return, General Douglas MacArthur promised the Filipino people following the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines in spring 1942. The people there believed MacArthur’s vowand even Americans were stirred by his dramatic pledge.
Now, two and half years later, MacArthur was ready to fulfill his promise-the liberation of the Philippines was about to begin. It would not be an easy campaign. The more than 7,000 islands of the Philippine archipelago were the key to taking down the Japanese Empireand the Imperial forces were prepared to sacrifice every man and every ship to prevent MacArthur from regaining control of them.
Covering both the strategic and tactical aspects of the campaign through the participation of its soldiers, sailors, and airmen, as well as its commanders, James P. Duffy leads readers through a vivid account of the nearly year-long, bloody campaign to defeat over a quarter million die-hard Japanese defenders in the Pacific theater.
14. Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila
Author: by James M. Scott
English
672 pages
0393357562
Casemate (July 20, 2020)
July 20, 2020
Price:
$13.49
as of Jul 13, 2021
(7:54 pm)
Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, George Cooper was one of the few surviving veteran pilots who saw action over such fearsome targets as Rabaul and Wewak. Not just another flag-waving story of air combat, Jayhawk describes the war as it really wasa conflict with far-reaching tentacles that gripped and tore at not only the combatants, but also their families, friends and the way they lived their lives.
Stout examines the story of Cooper’s growing up in gentle and idyllic pre-war Manila and how he grew to be the man he was. Stout reviews Cooper’s journey to the United States and his unlikely entry into the United States Army Air Forces.
Trained as a B-25 pilot, Cooper was assigned to the iconic 345th Bomb Group and flew strafing missions that shredded the enemy, but likewise put himself and his comrades in grave danger. A husband and father, Cooper was pulled two ways by the call of duty and his obligation to his wife and daughter.
And always on his mind was the family he left behind in the Philippines who were in thrall to the Japanese.
16. An Illustrated History of the Philippines
Author: by Ray Canoy
John Beaufoy Publishing
English
244 pages
Beginning with a definition of who the people of The Philippines are, this fully illustrated history then tracks back to describe the prehistory of the country through to 1500 AD. The next two chapters chart the colonial experiences under Spain (15001896), then the first republic and the subsequent defeat by the United States (18601910).
Following this are chapters on the Japanese occupation and the third republic (19101972). Next comes a description of the Marcos dictatorship and its consequences (19701986) and the book ends with a look at the fifth republic and the future of the country.
Ray Canoy’s authoritative text describes the history of The Philippines from pre-history to the present day.
