Sherrie M. Flanders

Undefeated Americans Sherrie M. Flanders

Each person during a lifetime encounters some adverse experience, and each reacts in a different way. Some people ignore what happens, hoping that it will go away. Others hide difficulty inside but dwell on it until it eats them alive. Then, there are those who prefer to talk about hardships or write about them so that those going through similar experiences can take hope or help from what others have suffered.¿Such is the case with Undefeated Americans by Sherrod M. Flanders.¿His three-and-a-half years as a Japanese prisoner-of-war during WorldWar II horrified the new high-school graduate as well as the reader who shares his experience secondhand. This fast-paced memoir takes the reader from Flanders' brief tenure in the Philippines through the Bataan Death March into the Japanese camp where these boys deal with sand fleas and Shakespeare, snow and mud, rice and more rice,and hunger and death. You will both laugh and cry as you watch these children become men, and you will rejoice when they are finally rescued at the end of the war. Although Pvt. Flanders is dead, his story is very much alive and relevant for a nation again under siege.