Now The Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II
New York: Penguin Books, 2008. First edition. Hardcover. Hardcover. Fine in fine dust jacket. First edition, first printing. 386 pp. The ashtonishing tale of Herman Perry, the soldier who sparked the greatest manhunt of World War II--and who became the war's unlikliest folk hero. Perry was an African American GI from Washington D.C., asigned to a segregated labor battalion, and shipped to the South Asia in 1943. Beset by emotional issues brought on not only by the brutal conditions in northeast India and Burma, where his battalion was assigned to build the Ledo Road (a hignway meant to appease China's Chaing Kai-shek) as well from the racist treatment from white officers, Perry found solace in opium and marijuana and eventually broke down in March, 1944, an episode that ended with his shooting an unarmed white lieutenant. Perry fled through the Indo-Burmese jungle with the military police combing Calcutta; he stumbled upon a village of headhunters among whom he settled, finding some peace and even marrying the tribal chief's daughter. Author Koerner, more than half a century later and starting with noting more than a 10-word entry in an obscure bibliography, chased Perry's ghost into the most remote corners of India and Burma, discovering along the way the story of the Ledo Road's Black GIs, many of whom revered the elusive soldier whom they dubbed the Jungle King, a folk hero. Fine / fine. Item #E27081
ISBN: 9781594201738
Price: $12.50