Tours Philippines - They Fought Alone (Classics of World War II: Secret War Series)

Griffin knew Fertig at Fort Bragg, which is where Fertig helped found the Special Warfare School and, interestingly, where Fertig's great-grandson, Dave Hudson, wrote his review of the Keats book. Griffin stated that Fertig's lack of promotion to general-officer rank, after commanding 30,000 guerrillas--the equivalent of an Army Corps, was one of the great travesties of justice perpetrated by a jealous MacArthur staff after the war.

Having known a by-then grandfatherly Colonel Fertig in the early 1960s when he was at the Colorado School of Mines, I would agree with Griffin's assessment. Wendell Fertig was one of a very select group of real heroes, not the instant, media-manufactured, post-9/11 kind.

I hope Hollywood and Brad Pitt can bring Colonel Fertig some very belated, posthumous justice, although I am not optimistic based on Keats' and Griffin's lack of success. However, the two authors must be given considerable credit for keeping this remarkable story alive for 40 years from the publication of "They Fought Alone" and 60 years after the actual events so that Hollywood could finally "discover" it.