Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold

by Peggy Seagrave and Sterling Seagrave

Book Overview

In 1945, US intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844675319
• ISBN13: 9781844675319
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 365 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Critical to understanding post Cold War politics

Absolutely astonishing book - and while one fellow above bashed the supporting references, I note that he didn't delve into the 2 CDs of supporting material (such as scans of maps made by the Japanese military showing where the gold was hidden in the Phillipines & all the boobytraps). A lot of this makes sense, intuitively. For example, where in the heck did Ferdinand & Imelda Marcos get all of that wealth? I've read that they "looted the Phillipine people" - hello? Where did the Phillipine people get billions of dollars (American) to loot in the first place? Secondly, if you read more about how the world's economy was changed fundamentally after World War II, this book provides some missing pieces. It's a brilliant strategy, really - the USA essentially cornering the market on gold, forcing the rest of the world to adopt gold (and pegging it to the dollar) as the new standard, and thus, you are left with (for all practical purposes) endless funds for covert wars against Communist/ leftist regimes. Why people are shocked by this is puzzling. In the 1950's and 1960's it wasn't considered any sort of problem to be meddling in the world's politics; and the history of US involvement repressing elections in Latin America is well documented. And we won't even get into some of the covert actions (like Iran-Contra) that we KNOW about, so an educated student of history has to assume there are far more details than we have even been told. Back to the book, the story about how Nixon eventually surrenders control of the secret gold to the Japanese power structure in exchange for covert funds for his presidential campaign sure sounds like the Nixon we are all familiar with. This is an extraordinary book, one can only wonder how many more details will surface in upcoming years...

astonishing...

I had heard rumors that Allied (primarily American) forces hadoverrun and discovered huge quantities of Nazi, and in thiscase, Japanese seized riches, and had always wanted a documentary of this. Wow--by page 4, even with my preconceived expectations, myjaw had dropped. These events have shaped dramaticallythe world we live in. There is so much unexplained evennow, but this book is a step forward. If power corrupts,and absolute power corrupts absolutely, try power withlimitless funding.

Gold Warriors: Why the POWs in Asia were Betrayed!

In 1947, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered the immediate termination of all investigations of Japanese war crimes and the immediate suspension of the arrest of any suspected war criminals.In June 2000, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) said, "You mean our federal government can just say, 'To hell with you, Bataan Death Marchers, and you people who were mistreated (by the Japanese), we are just going to waive all your rights.'"As disturbing and painful as it may be to read, this is a book all victims of the Japanese, and their next of kins, must read. It's documentation and research is beyond reproach. For many of us, this book will be our 'fall from innocence', if that is still possible. Fred Baldassarre Son of a Bataan Survivor

Earth-Shattering, Faith-Shaking, Well-Documented Deceit

This book is earth-shattering and faith-shaking, a well-documented tale of deceit at the highest levels of the US government. So controversial and potentially explosive are the findings of this book, to wit, that the White House recovered most of the Nazi and Japanese loot and created a secret slush fund for covert political operations world-wide, that the authors go the extra mile and offer, at a nominal price, two CD-ROMS containing 60,000 pages of supporting documentation including the Japanese treasure maps used by the US to recover the gold and other valuables.Major players include Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, both Allen and John Foster Dulles, Douglas MacArthur, John McCloy, and the famous unconventional warrior Edward Lansdale. What we learn from this book is that those writing about "blowback" (the consequences of unwise US actions) have barely scratched the surface. What we learn is that rather than truly seeking to help the Japanese, Chinese, and other looted nations recover in the aftermath of WWII, the most senior leaders of the US government, no doubt with the best of intentions, actually conspired with Nazi bankers and the Japanese imperial family to create a Black Eagle Trust controlled by a very select hand-picked cabal in Washington.Originally used to fight communism, the Black Eagle Trust, according to the authors and as thoroughly documented by the book and the two CD-ROMS (which I am happy to have in hand), quickly became a global slush fund used to bribe national leaders and manipulate elections around the world. This fund remains in existence today, making the Swiss Holocaust funds seem like loose-change. According to the authors, major banks are "addicted" to the funds and would face collapse if public investigations resulted in a forced return of this gold and related certificates to the rightful owners.The authors have produced a magnificent work of both scholarship and investigative journalism. They document the extent of Japanese looting of Korea (beginning in 1895) and China as well as the other countries in the "co-prosperity sphere." They document the manner in which Japan hid most of the gold in the Philippines (some in Indonesia), and were forced to leave it there from 1943 onwards, when US submarine interdiction became too effective to risk shipments homeward.I found the level of detail in this book to be quite gripping. The ingenious nature of the Japanese burial sites, with caverns below the more obvious tunnels, with sea-water protection, with maps created in reverse--and the in-bred cruelty of the Japanese, thinking nothing of burying all of the US and other national slave labor *and the Japanese engineers* alive as the final stage of protecting the looted treasure, leave one stunned.The authors document the central role played by Lansdale in recognizing the opportunity and then briefing MacArthur and then President Truman. According to the authors, the architects of the Black Eagle Trust