“War is hell,” U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman said late in life. He had proved it in 1864, laying waste to a swath of Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah, helping to shorten and win the Civil War. War became more hellish in the 20th century, proven very specifically by the Japanese Imperial Army’s treatment of allied prisoners of war in the Bataan Death March after the Philippines fell in 1942.

Yet men do remain humane and compassionate through unimaginable deprivation and the hell of being a prisoner of war and a slave laborer in a mine in Japan. Henry Chamberlain probably surviv...