Bilibid Diary - The Secret Notebooks of Thomas Hayes, POW, the Phillipines, 1942-43

Edited by A.B. Feuer

Published by Archon Books in 1987, 248 pages. Hardback with Dust Jacket (WSOU3)

The author was a prisoner of the Japanese during part of the Second World War, and was held in Bilibid Prison in Manila from July 1942 to December 1944, and this book is his account of those dark days. It presents a matter-of-fact portrait of the deprivation and chaos surrounding the transient population of Bilibid prison, which was a clearinghouse for all the prison camps in the Philippines. An unlike many other prison accounts from the Second World War, this book does not emphasise the cruelty of the captors and the courage of the imprisoned. The author tried to present the world he lived in as accurately as possible, and while he had no love for the Japanese, in whose hands he ultimately died, neither did he for those Americans whose integrity evaporated in the face of hardship

The condition of the book is generally good. The dust jacket has some minor scuffs and blemishes, and some light nibbling and a couple of small tears along the edges, but the black cover boards are clean and tidy, the spine is intact, and all pages are clean & bright, intact, unblemished and tightly bound.