Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides Little, Brown, 342pp, £12.99 ISBN 0316858153

Ghost Soldiers is a compelling work of history in microcosm that, while concentrating on the experiences of comparatively few people, never loses sight of the bigger picture - namely, the American war against Japan. While Hollywood, in films such as the wretched Pearl Harbor, insists on telling it how it wasn't, Hampton Sides tells the true story of a daring mission to rescue American and Allied soldiers who had been incarcerated for more than three years behind enemy lines. These men - 500 from an army of 100,000 who had surrendered in April 1942 - endured appalling atrocities: the crushing of ailing prisoners with tanks, random decapitation and the use of exhausted troops for bayonet practice. Many of their comrades had perished during the Bataan Death March that followed their surrender. Sides reminds us how shocking it was for the Americans to witness such indiscriminate cruelty from the Japanese guards without being able to do anything about it.

By the time the marchers reached their first camp, disease and the lack of food and water meant that the few remaining survivors were burying the dead. Over the next years, what was left of the US army in the Philippines was distributed around the new Japanese empire. Some were sent to prison camps, while others were shipped overseas as slave labour. Sides describes one such shipment of prisoners, packed so tightly into the hull of a troopship that hundreds suffocated to death. The ship was then torpedoed, and the survivors were left with the remains of the dead for a further three days.

By the beginning of 1945, with the war coming to an end, the Japanese had begun the systematic annihilation of prisoners. Fearing that the same fate would befall the Cabanatuan camp in the north of the Philippines, the US hatched a plan for a rescue mission, using special forces and Filipino guerrillas. Through a combination of luck, bravery and skill, the mission was a success.

Ghost Soldiers is a remarkable book, not least because Sides's heroes were ordinary conscripts who somehow found the resi-lience to endure unimaginable horrors. The account of the raid itself is the stuff of high adventure, but where Sides excels is in persuading the survivors to recall their experiences in such powerful, candid detail.

James Holland's latest novel is An Almost Perfect Moon (HarperCollins, £5.99)

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