Horror Trek: A True Story of Bataan, The Death March and Three and One-Half Years in Japanese Prison Camps [Signed and Inscribed]

Item Details

Dayton, Horstman, 1948, Hardcover

First Edition, Very Good in a Very Good lightly worn dust jacket.

8vo., 233 pp. Illustrated. Foreword by G.G. Harrison, Rear Admiral USNR, Retired. First edition, first printing. Inscribed by the author on the front endpaper. Scarce: WorldCat lists only three institutional holdings, at DEFRA (London), the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and the American College of Greece.

Levering's scarce first-person account of surviving the fall of Bataan, the Death March, and three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines — one of the earliest published survivor narratives of the Pacific theater's most notorious atrocity, appearing just three years after the war's end while memories, and grievances, were still raw. Levering's prose sits at the intersection of sober survival memoir and the pulpy, sensationalized adventure writing that captivated postwar American readers eager to confront the unimaginable at a safe remove.

Issued by a small regional press in Dayton, Ohio, the book never had wide distribution and has always been a difficult title to find, particularly complete with its bold, period-styled dust jacket. Institutional holdings are vanishingly rare — WorldCat records only three copies worldwide, none in the United States — which underscores just how limited surviving copies of any kind are, let alone one in this condition.

This copy carries an added layer of importance: an inscription from Levering himself on the front endpaper, personalizing a book that was already a scarce survival of independent postwar publishing. For collectors of Pacific War POW narratives, this is a rare chance at both the title and a genuine author association in one lot.

Very Good with light handling appropriate for age in a Very Good, lightly edge worn dust jacket.

Item #1112202510