I shall preface my remarks by describing Valley of the Shadow by describing the work as a discovery delayed by six decades. My father, Col. Nicoll F. Galbraith, known as “Nick,” was a senior staff officer of General Jonathan Wainwright during the fall of the Philippines in 1942. He played a critical role in the surrender process of Corregidor in May, 1942, having been sent to the boondocks of Luzon to locate a fellow field commander still at large. The success of that mission, involving the American and Japanese flags on the book cover, was essential in avoiding the annihilation of the 14,000 Americans on Corregidor. Imagine the moment when Japanese tanks were about to nose into the Malinta tunnel on Corregidor. The surrender of Corregidor, which followed the surrender of the main American and Philippine forces a month earlier on the Bataan Peninsula, was the precursor of American POW stories that emerged.

Several senior American staff officers, including Galbraith’s, were able to retain extensive diaries during their three-and-a-half years of incarceration at various prison camps.

Several of these diary collections have been published as direct transcriptions and are quite informative of the daily lives of the POWs. These diary accounts are chronological in format and are very informative of prisoner conditions and lives in various Japanese prison camps. Valley of the Shadow, transcribed from over one thousand handwritten flimsies that have sat for decades on Galbraith family shelves, treats these experiences more thematically, in third-person narrative form, enabling Galbraith to offer a psychological, emotional, and moral matrix to help the reader interpret the challenges and personal behaviors of incarcerated American prisoners who suddenly had been deprived of their normal social and physical lives as officers, colleagues, husbands, and fathers. Colonel Galbraith, exercising a more literary bent, describes his own and his prison mates’ struggle to maintain their personal dignity and relationships.

Perhaps a primary audience for Valley of the Shadow would include members of the psychological and sociological professions, as it delves deeply, and with a good deal of cynicism, into the psychological and moral responses of senior American officers, generals and colonels, in times of extreme deprivation at various prison camps.

To a modern audience, his accounts of personal behaviors and attitudes of his fellow officers often reflect the adolescent and ridiculous behavior of television’s MASH characters! His diplomatic constraints were energetically abandoned in August 1945 as revealed in Appendix 11.

Back to the flags, for a moment. In August of 1945, following the two atomic bombs and Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast of surrender a six-man OSS team was dispatched to jump in at Galbraith’s final prison camp in Mukden, Manchuria, the purpose of which was to ensure the POWs safety in the face of possible annihilation by Japanese prisoner commanders who were not prepared to surrender. This episode was termed Cardinal Mission whose main purpose was to find General Wainwright and it was the ability of the OSS team, and specific member of that team, to enable Wainwright to join his American colleagues on the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor.

Now, the OSS team was followed for two or three days by the Russian Red Army who had just entered the Asian war. The chronology of events now were harrowing, to say the least, but ended up with a highly emotional release of the POWs by a Russian general declaring them now FREE and handing the POWs the weapons previously carried by the Japanese guards.

But now back to the flags. Galbraith was able to retain them all during his prison years and when now free at last, he pulled the American flag out, draped it on his cot for all of his prison mates to see. Imagine the moment. The flags, shown on the book cover, became bookends to Galbraith’s wartime ordeal, first at the American surrender of Corregidor and second at the Japanese surrender in Mukden.