Your Loving Son, Ty: A World War II Story of Hope and Horror in the Pacific

Madsen "Ty" Cobb Kokjer grew up in a small city in the middle of Nebraska. Halfway through college in 1940, he chose the adventure of becoming an Army Air Corps pilot instead of finishing his studies. This book is the memoir he might have written about the war he so unexpectedly found himself in the midst of. After a year of exhilaration—learning to fly, visiting places he had never been, meeting other young men like himself from all over the country—Ty and his friends arrived in the Philippines days before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Hours after that attack, Japan bombed other U.S. bases in the Pacific, including those near Manila. Ty and other pilots were ready to bomb Japanese ships, but their planes were still on a convoy, many miles away. The pilots became members of the infantry. After four months of battle, the United States surrendered the Philippines, and 78,000 American and Filipino soldiers began the cruel and deadly Bataan Death March. Ty was one of the few to escape. For eight months, Ty and two other American soldiers hid with a Filipino family who housed and fed them at great risk to themselves. During that time, Ty kept a diary, which along with hundreds of letters written by Ty, his parents, and others, tell one young man's World War II story.