By Al R. Young announcements (updated 2017 January 20)
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guidelines for requests to copy or publish historical documents and other items (updated 2017 January 20)

contacting the archives (updated 2017 January 20)... Read more »

Tags: 2017, BenHaven Archives, My Fathers Captivity, Overview

By Al R. Young... Read more »

Tags: My Father’s Captivity, 2012, My Fathers Captivity, Overview

By Al R. Young This book is destined to become the classic POW story. If you want one of the five best books ever written about the POWs, this has to top your list. . . . It is a literary gem that places you not just on the scene but in the soul of a POW.  It is that rare book that I know I will re-read again and again.
- R. Mansell

I sat down and spent four hours straight reading it-- it's truly a wonderful job.  You have a gift.
- F. Carney

I love it.  It is the best and most beautifully written WWII memoir I have ever read... Read more »

Tags: My Father’s Captivity, 2012, My Fathers Captivity

By Al R. Young
It is the essence of captivity to isolate, torment, cripple, and destroy; not just for a time, but for as long as life endures.  The aftershocks of captivity can reverberate for generations.
When my father was liberated from a Japanese POW camp at the end of World War II, he weighed about 90 lb.—scrawny for any man, but skeletal for someone 6 ft. 3 in. tall.  But his weight was only a physical shadow of what had happened to him for 39 months of a cruel captivity consisting of two hellship voyages; a submarine attack; physical, mental and emotional starvation; innumerable beatings; forced labor; disease; psychological abuse; isolation; and six months of Allied bombing raids that devastated Tokyo, obliterated his prison camp, and killed many of his comrades... Read more »

Tags: 2012, My Fathers Captivity

By Al R. Young  The story told in My Father's Captivity begins with these words, which set forth the theme of the whole:Every story in this world is part of another story.  Before the beginning, it was decreed that it should be so by Him to whom all words and worlds belong.  If a story be true and truly told, no matter how small it is it will be like that story, greatest of all, of which it is a part.  There is but One Word in this world by which all other words are judged, One Story by which are measured all the rest... Read more »

Tags: 2012, My Fathers Captivity