Valley Of The Shadow - Col. Nicoll F. “Nick” Galbraith
Dec 7, 2021 8:18:43 GMT 8
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Post by EXO on Dec 7, 2021 8:18:43 GMT 8
This is a share of an e-mail I received today from Whitney Galbraith.
When, in 2018, I self-published my father's WW II memoir - www.valleyoftheshadowpow.com - I attributed the volume to his fresh, postwar memory together with his voluminous diary collection that he was able to retain and maintain during his three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese. As General Jonathan M. Wainwright's G-4, Logistics, staff officer during the Fall of the Philippines in 1942, he was well positioned to record events including tactical chronologies, orders-of-battle, and the retention of official documents, both American and Japanese, of the entire period from the surrenders at Bataan and Corregidor to the rescue/release of the senior officers at Mukden, Manchuria, by a six-man OSS team and the Russian Red Army, in August, 1945. The documents include Wainwright’s original surrender order of Corregidor. Col. Nicoll F. Galbraith, GSC, US Army, my father, possessed both a penchant for detail, record keeping and for writing that enabled him to amass a broad record of events that no other member of his fellow POWs, in their memoirs, were able to produce. As I have mentioned in my foreword to the above volume and referring to the bibliography therein, Galbraith's diaries involve a substantially larger opus, both chronologically, substantively and psychologically than his fellow diarists.
It is my purpose to offer the texts contained in the majority of his thirteen diaries to the public for historical reference and research of an event - the Fall of the Philippines and ensuing POW chronology - together with the lives of the participant senior officers during their incarceration, a phase of U.S. history and World War II that needs to be retold, expanded and understood by succeeding American generations.
As editor of the texts, I concentrated on mechanically reformatting them for ease of tracking and continuity. As you will see in the attached examples, Galbraith wrote with lead pencil in very tight cursive. He was often required, due to lack of space, to place entries in non-linear fashion. He wrote in consistent short-hand, jottings, "notes" to himself and was informal in his diction, capitalizations and punctuations - none which detract from his archival value. The occasional "/whg" edits, are my own.
More formally, Galbraith was able to record, verbatim, official American and Japanese verbal and written exchanges, for instance various Japanese camp commanders written instructions, speeches and other dialogues. He was methodical and punctilious in recording rosters of American and Allied personnel, both in the various camps and “hell" ships, including his two weeks aboard the Oryoku Maru.
Galbraith was an inveterate writer and would-be author. The diaries are replete with literature, linguistics, languages, oenology, religion, recipes, letters home and other tangental subjects of his interests. The POW camps included Karenko and Shirakawa in Taiwan, Chang Chia Tung and Mukden in Manchuria, and were adjacent to towns where the prisoners had sporadic but controlled access to libraries and news outlets.
If there was one motivation in Galbraith's extensive musings and reflections on POW life, it would be his commitment to his personal dignity and that of his compatriots, with whom he was often quite critical, although verbally restrained to avoid unnecessary confrontations. He comments extensively on the psychologies of his fellow Americans and Japanese "overseers," often offering empathy, or least understanding, of their highly adversarial relations. I have referred to him in my foreword, above, as the camp scold.
Galbraith was referenced in several earlier volumes, including The War in the Pacific/Louis Morton/1978 Reprint, General Wainwright’s Story/1946 and Hero of Bataan/Duane Schultz/1981.
I will look forward to your institution's response to this intense project of mine, which I believe adds immeasurably to our understanding of POW life under the Japanese during World War Two.
With appreciation.
Whitney Galbraith
Colorado Springs