The Road Back: A Pacific POW's Liberation Story

This volume is the commanding saga of a real-life World War II heroine. Dorothy Davis Thompson was born and reared in Shanghai, the daughter of an American businessman and the granddaughter of missionaries. In 1937, she left Shanghai to attend nursing school at Columbia University in New York. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese invaded China, and her family fled to the Philippines. Graduating from Columbia, she rejoined her family in Manila. With the city's fall to the Japanese in 1942, Thompson and her family were taken prisoners and interned in nearby Santo Tomas. There they struggled to survive and to cope with ever-mounting concerns for missing friends and other loved ones, including Thompson's fiance, a captured Philippine Scout officer. Putting her newfound nursing skills to the test, Thompson managed to establish a hospital in the camp. Yet, twenty-two months later, she was herself so very ill that she and her mother were released in a prisoner exchange. Recovering in the United States, Thompson was determined to see her family reunited. With few resources other than her own tenacity, Thompson began her most dramatic journey yet, the return to Santo Tomas for the liberation of the camp.