They Fought Alone

When the American forces in the Philippines surrendered in May 1942, a mining engineer named Wendell Fertig chose to take his chances in the jungle. What happened to him during nearly three years behind enemy lines is the amazing story that John Keats tells in They Fought Alone.
With the aid of a handful of Americans who also refused to surrender, Fertig led thousands of Filipinos in a seemingly hopeless war against the Japanese. They made bullets from curtain rods; telegraph wire from iron fence. They fought off sickness, despair and rebellion within their own forces. Their homemade communications were MacArthur's eyes and ears in the Philippines. When the Americans finally returned to Mindanao, they found Fertig virtually in control of one of the world's largest islands, commanding an army of 35,000 men, and bringing a measure of hope to a beleaguered people. John Keats, who also served in the Philippines, captures all the pain, brutality, and courage of this incredible drama. They Fought Alone is a testament to the ingenuity and sheer guts of an authentic American hero.

John Keats was an English poet from the second generation of Romantic poets. He was born on October 31, 1795, and died on February 23, 1821. When he died at age 25, he had been writing poems for less than four years. During his life, people didn't care much about his works, but after he died, his fame grew quickly. By the end of the century, he was included in the canon of English literature. He had a big impact on many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1888 called one of his odes "one of the final masterpieces." Jorge Luis Borges said that his first meeting with Keats was something he would remember for the rest of his life. Keats' style, especially in the series of odes, was "heavily loaded with sensualities." Like most Romantics, he used images from nature to show how strong his feelings were. His poems and letters, like "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Sleep and Poetry," and "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," are still some of the most popular and studied pieces of English literature today.