The Story of One POW’s Working on the Railway of Death
American Sailor Howard Brooks survived the Battle of the Sundra Strait only to slave away in the Burmese jungles as a prisoner of the Japanese.
When Howard Brooks joined the United States Navy in 1939, the 20-year-old farm boy from Tennessee had no idea that he was going to experience one of the most harrowing adventures of World War II. In the early months of the war, Brooks and his fellow crewmen aboard USS
Houston fought heroically against overwhelming odds, only to have their ship blown out from under them at the Battle of the Sunda Strait in February 1942. But the battle, horrific as it was, marked the beginning, not the end, of their ordeal.