Tucky Jo and Little Heart by Patricia Polacco

In this picture book for older readers, Patricia Polacco tells the story of Johnnie Wallen, a Kentucky boy who manages to get his parents to say he is older than 15 years, allowing him to enlist in the army and fight in WWII.

After basic training, Johnnie is assigned to the Sixth Infantry, Company G, Twentieth Division and sent to the Pacific theater.  On the ship, Johnnie is called "the kid from Kentucky" by everyone because of his youth.  But the kid from Kentucky was an crack shooter by age 10, and now the army trains him as a marksman and for heavy ordnance (explosives).  In now time, Johnnie earns the nickname the Kentucky Kid after proving himself quite adapt at going into the jungle to seek and destroy machine gun nests.

The Kentucky Kid's unit soon finds themselves on Luzon, an island in the Philippines, where they need to level the land to bivouac and to build an airstrip.  It is a hot job in a jungle infested with biting insects, and after a while, Johnnie is covered with bug bites.  Looking for water to cool his bites, he discovers a small native village where women are trying to catch fish with their bare hands.

There, he meets a little girl who shows him how to treat his bug bites with the leaves of a local plant.  Grateful for the relief and the friendly gesture, Johnny repays the young girl's kindness with the chocolate bar from his K-rations, tells her his name was Kentucky Jon, which immediately becomes Tucky Jo when she repeats it, and he begins calling her Little Heart because of a heart shaped birthmark on her arm.

That night, Tucky Jo whittsd a little hinged doll to give to Little Heart, which delights her.  Then, one day when she didn't show up, Tucky Jo goes to find her in her village.  There, her grandfather, who does speak English,explains that she hasn't spoken since she saw the Japanese kill her mother and take away her father and brother.

And, he goes on to explain, the Japanese took all the young men, all the food and all the fishing lines and nets.  As a result, the people in the village are starving.  Well, Tucky Jo is a doer and in no time, the people in Little Heart's village have all the fish they could eat and preserve - how?  You'll have to read the story to find that out.

When Tucky Jo learns his unit is leaving and will be bombing the jungle, he convinces his sergeant to let him evacuate the village first, which  is very successful.  But when the truck with Little Heart pulls away, it is the late time Tucky Jo sees his little friend.  Or is it?

After the war, Johnnie goes home, a highly decorated soldier, marries his sweetheart and raises a family.  As he gets older, and his health fails, he needs to be hospitalized.  Johnnie's nurse is very kind, so kind that he begins to wonder, especially after he sees the small heart shaped birthmark on her arm.  Could it be...?

According to her Author's Note, Patricia Polacco writes that the story of Tucky Jo and Little Heart was inspired by listening to WWII veterans talking about their experiences in the Pacific Theater and is based on the story that Johnnie Wallen related to her.  Of course, there is some poetic license, but the reader will have to figure that out for themselves.

Palacco has created as story about friendship, kindness,and  ingenuity, while at the same time showing the terrible impact that war has on children.  Little Heart has clearly been traumatized by what she had witnessed, compounded by a state of starvation, but Polacco has portrayed these things in such a way that they won't traumatize the reader, but will evoke feelings of empathy for Little Heart.

And there are the signature Polacco illustrations done in color pencil and markers.  The illustrations capture Little Heart's vulneribility and her fragile state, and Tucky Jo's youth and enthusiasm, and his innate kindness that shines in his eyes.

Tucky Jo and Little Heart  is an ideal book for introducing young readers to the war in the Pacific, or for any one interested veteran stories that come out of WWII..

This book is recommended for readers age 7+
This book was borrowed from the NYPL

Johnny Wallen passed away on January 9, 2010.  If you would like to know more about decorated hero of WWII, you can read his daughter's tribute to her father HERE 

Hunt for the Bamboo Rat by Graham Salsibury

Zenji Watanabe is 17 years old in the summer of 1941, a Nesei born on Honolulu to Japanese parents.  Naturally, he is fluent in both Japanese and English.  He has also just graduated from high school and is thinking about studying Buddhism in Japan, Meanwhile, he was working to help support his family - mother, older brother Henry, younger sister Aiko, father deceased.

All that changes when Zenji's JROTC commanding officer Colonel Blake shows up at his house one day.  He wants Zenji to be interviewed and tested, but for what?  To travel to the Philippines to translate some documents from Japanese to English.

But when Zenji arrives in Manila, he is instructed to stay at the Momo, a hotel where Japanese businessmen like staying, to befriend them and keep his ears and eyes open.  He is given the key to a mail box that he is required to check twice a day to be use for leaving and receiving information and instructions.  Zenji is also given  a contact person, Colonel Jake Olsten, head of G2, the Military Intelligence Service, and even a code name - the Bamboo Rat.

In December 1941, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific begins.  It isn't long before the Americans are forced to withdraw from Manila.  Zenji chooses to remain, giving his seat on the last plane out to another Japanese American with a family.  Not long after that, he is taken prisoner by the Japanese, who torture and threaten him trying to make him admit he is the Bamboo Rat, and considering him a traitor to his county - Japan.

Eventually, the Japanese give up and Zenji is sent to work as a houseboy/translator for the more humane Colonel Fujimoto.  Fujimoto seems to forget that Zenji is a prisoner of war, and begins to trust him more and more.

By late 1944, it's clear the Japanese are losing the war in the Pacific.  They decide to evacuate Manila and go to Baguio.  Even though food is in short supply, Zenji starts to put some aside for the day he may be able to escape into the jungle and wait for the war to end.

But of course, the best laid plans don't always work out the way we would like them to and that is true for Zenji.  Will he ever make it back to Honolulu and his family?

WOW! Graham Salisbury can really write an action-packed, exciting and suspenseful novel.  Salisbury was born and raised in Hawaii, so he gives his books a sense of place that pulsating with life.  Not many authors explore the Japanese American in Hawaii experience during World War II and not many people realize that they were never, for the most part, interned in camps the way the Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians on the west coast of the US and Canada were.  And although Hawaii was only an American territory until it became a state in 1959, if you were born there, you had American citizenship, just like Zenji continuously tells his Japanese captors throughout Hunt for the Bamboo Rat.

At first, I thought Zenji was too gentle, too innocent and too trusting for the kind of work he was recruited to do, which amounted to the dangerous job of spying.  But he proved to be a strong, tough character even while he retained those his aspects of his nature.  Ironically, part of his survival as a spy and a POW is based in what his Japanese Buddhist priests had taught him before the war.

One of the nice elements that Salisbury included are the little poems Zenji's mother wrote.  Devising a form of her own, and written in Kanji, it is her way of expressing her feelings.  They are scattered throughout the book.  Zenji receives one in the mail just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and keeps it with him as long as he can, deriving comfort from it.

Like the first novel I read by Salisbury, Eyes of the Emperor, one kept me reading straight through until I finished it.  It is the fourth novel in his Prisoners of the Empire series, and it is a well-crafted, well-researched story, but it is a stand alone novel.  Zenji's story is based on the real wartime experiences of Richard Motoso Sakakida.

True to form, Salisbury brings in a lot of history, along with real people and events, but be careful, fact and fiction are seamlessly woven together.  He also includes the tension between the Filipino people and the Japanese after the Philippines are occupied by the Japanese and the cruel treatment of the Filipino people.   And included is the tension between Chinese and Japanese in Hawaii because of the Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians in 1937/38.

All of this gives Hunt for the Bamboo Rat a feeling of authenticity.  There is some violence and reading the about Zenji's torture isn't easy, so it may not appeal to the faint at heart.

Hunt for the Bamboo Rat is historical fiction that will definetely appeal to readers, whether or not they particularly enjoy WWII fiction. And be sure to look at the Author's Note, the Glossary and additional Resources at the end of the novel.

This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was purchased for my personal library

Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific by Mary Cronk Farrell

We all know about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, "a date that will live in infamy."  But how many know that only 9 hours later, the Japanese launched an attack on American bases in the Philippines?  The fact is that most of us don't really know as much about the Pacific front as we do the European front.

Likewise, most of us don't know that when American forces were forced to surrender and the troops who had not been killed were taken prisoner, among the POWs were approximately 100 military nurses, both Army and Naval.

Mary Cronk Farrell's Pure Grit is the story of how those nurses not only survived, but also how they continued to care for the sick and wounded with dwindling medical supplies and food.  When the women had first come to the Philippines, their workload in the base hospitals was light, only 4 hours a day because of the heat and humidity, and their spare time was filled with dancing, golfing, tennis, swimming and even a little romance for some.  Living a resort-like life, no one was expecting the war to come their way.  As one nurse, Peggy Nash, said: "I had no idea there was going to be a war...That's how naive I was." (pg 16)

When US troops retreated to Bataan, 25 nurses were sent there to care for the wounded, but they first had to set up a makeshift hospital.  In no time, the wards were overflowing.  From January 1941 until their liberation in 1945, these brave nurses continued to care for the sick and wounded under continuously deteriorating conditions, practicing what Farrell calls "Make-Do Medicine" (Chapter 6)

Over the course of those three years, the nurses lost weight because of the starvation-level rations they were given. some developed beriberi, others dengue fever and/or bouts of malaria and tuberculosis.  Even after they returned to the US, many suffered from untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, untreated because Farrell writes,  understanding of PTSD was two wars and generations away.

And sadly, it wasn't until most of the nurses had passed away that any real recognition of they had experienced and the nearly miraculous care they gave to their patients under such terrible conditions was acknowledged.

Pure Grit is a well researched and very readable history of these courageous women.  Some of their individual stories are sandwiched into the narrative of what happened in the Philippines, giving it all a very intimate feeling.  That feeling is enhanced by all the private photos, newspaper clippings, diaries, and other primary source documents Farrell included to round out the lives of those admirable nurses who served so bravely.  

Besides a history of the survival of the nurses held POW by the Japanese, there is also a useful glossary, a list of all the nurses serving when the Japanese invaded, a select timeline pertaining mostly to the events affecting the Philippines, extensive Endnotes, a nice bibliography, and websites where the curious can find more information.

War books are not always easy to read, but Pure Grit is an exception to the rule and a wonderful addition to any Women's History library.  And it will be available just in time for Women's History Month which is in March.

Full Disclosure:  I have a soft spot in my heart for women who became nurses during WWII - which is exactly what my mom did.

This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was an E-ARC received from NetGalley

Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific will be released February 25, 2014.

Why not take a moment to view the book trailer: