4-4-43: Lieutenant Colonel William Dyess and the Greatest Story of the War in the Pacific
Directed by John D. Lukacs and Tim Gray. 60 minutes. DVD, 2014. $20.
On the date that serves as this film’s title, 10 American POWs and two Filipino convicts broke out of Davao, a beastly prison plantation the Japanese considered escape-proof. In the only successful, large-scale American POW escape of World War II, they brought back eyewitness accounts of Japanese atrocities, including the Bataan Death March. Dyess then fought against wartime censorship to share his information with the American public. Based on Escape from Davao, John D. Lukacs’s gripping book, this revealing, often wrenching documentary, which Lukacs wrote and produced, features interviews with veterans, period and new footage, and in-depth research; it was shown at the 2014 GI Film Festival.
Originally published in the October 2014 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
