Thorndike Press large print popular and narrative nonfiction.

April 1942, Luzon, the Philippines -- Benny -- Helen -- Bill -- Cabanatuan, Spring 1942 -- White House Map Room, April 1942 -- This force is bound for Tokyo -- Barton, 1930-1941 -- The perils of escape and a little baseball -- A brother's burden: the search -- Midway -- Under siege: JN-25 -- To Davao: en avant! -- And then there was one: USS Enterprise versus Japan -- The other war: Army-Navy football -- Happy days at the penal colony -- Winter's grief -- Escape: crime and punishment -- Farewell to the White House -- A tale of atrocities -- August 1943: allied war summit, Quebec, Canada -- Revenge on the innocent and a covert plan -- Secrets inside the oxygen tent -- Hero of Bataan versus the War Department -- Bad tidings -- Politics in Brisbane -- Proceed to Kwajalein -- The best-laid plans -- Initiation at Saipan -- Decampment -- September 1944, lilac hedges -- Hopes dashed -- Setbacks -- Through a prism: MacArthur's return -- What Benny knew -- The Oryoko Maru -- End game in the Pacific -- A sailor's nightmare -- In the end, a question of casualties and sea power -- No peace at lilac hedges -- Final hours -- Epilogue

They are three brothers, all Navy men, who end up coincidentally and extraordinarily at the epicenter of three of the war's most crucial moments. Bill is picked by Roosevelt to run his first Map Room in Washington. Benny is the gunnery and anti-aircraft officer on the USS Enterprise, one of the only carriers to escape Pearl Harbor and by the end of 1942 the last one left in the Pacific to defend against the Japanese. Barton, the youngest and least distinguished of the three, is shuffled off to the Navy Supply Corps because his mother wants him out of harm's way. But this protection plan backfires when Barton is sent to the Philippines and listed as missing-in-action after a Japanese attack. Now it is up to Bill and Benny to find and rescue him. Based on ten years of research drawn from archives around the world, interviews with fellow shipmates and POWs, and primary sources including diaries, unpublished memoirs, and letters half-forgotten in basements, The Jersey Brothers is a story of agony and triumph -- from the home front to Roosevelt's White House, and Pearl Harbor to Midway and Bataan. It is the story of an ordinary young man who shows extraordinary courage as the Japanese do everything short of killing him. And it is, above all, a story of brotherly love: of three men finding their loyalty to each other tested under the tortures of war -- and knowing that their success or failure to save their youngest brother will shape their family forever