"Ordinary People; Extraordinary Lives" chronicles the struggles of Harold Whittington and his brother, Otto, from birth through the Great Depression and on to WW II. Otto joined the Army and subsequently endured the surrender of Bataan and the Bataan Death March. During Otto's 3.5 years as a Japanese POW, he was a slave conscript for building roads in the Philippines. Few POWs survived that duty. Later, after a harrowing trip from the Philippines to Japan on a "Death Ship," Otto was a slave in the Japanese steel mills. Somehow Otto survived two near beheadings, beriberi, malnutrition, malaria, and torture-and twice the steel mills where he labored were targeted for nuclear destruction. Otto could hear the B-29 circling overhead; only the weather spared him. While Otto struggled through severe torture and sickness, Harold joined the Navy and searched for Otto throughout the Pacific theater whenever his supply ship put into port. After the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Otto escaped the POW camp and made his way to a small POW collection point outside Manila. His exit from Japan was also remarkable because the aircraft just ahead of his exploded about 100 feet off the end of the runway. Harold subsequently located his brother in Manila, although, after years of torture, Otto did not recognize him. Harold and Otto returned to the USA after the war. Otto became an attorney and Harold became a professor of sociology at Temple Junior College. The incredible lives of these men, fraught with daunting labor, terror, and pain, serves as a poignant example of why they, and others like them, are called "The Greatest Generation."

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