Christmas morning in Escondido, after five hours in the car from Lake Arrowhead with my parents arguing about money and directions and whose fault the lateness was. I was seventeen and hiding from the family in a room full of my grandmother’s UFO magazines.
The house went quiet and I followed the only sound in it to the kitchen. My grandfather was already deep into Christmas dinner. Standing straight as an arrow, dicing onions for stuffing, knives sharp, board clean, ingredients laid out and the whole meal timed. At seventeen I had no idea what that precision was or where a man learns it.
Then he glanced over, made that sharp sound through his teeth that grated on the rest of the family, and asked whether I wanted to know about the war. Frank Hoeffer II survived Shanghai, the fall of the Philippines, the march to Manila, a hell ship, and years in Japanese prison camps at Osaka and Matsumoto. He wrote all of it down after the war. He was my grandfather, and those were the stories nobody else in the family had asked for.
This is the book I’m proudest of having finished, and the one I’d have been most ashamed to leave in a drawer. My grandfather handed me something the rest of the family walked out of the room to avoid, and for a long time I didn’t do right by it. Getting his own words into print, with his anger intact, felt like paying back a debt I’d carried since that folding chair.
How did the conversations with Frank Hoeffer start?
He asked me.
He was already deep into Christmas dinner when I came into the kitchen. Standing straight as an arrow, dicing onions for stuffing, knives sharp, board clean, ingredients laid out and the whole meal timed. At seventeen I had no idea what that precision was or where a man learns it.
Then he glanced over, made that sound with his teeth, and said: you want to know about the war? The stories came in pieces across those Christmas visits while I sat on an uncomfortable folding chair. Other family members complained about his moods and stayed out of the room.
These were the stories nobody else had asked for. It was the inheritance nobody else had wanted.
It still bothers me how close the telling came to disappearing. The family treated his moods as the problem and stayed in the other room, and if a teenager hadn’t followed the sound into the kitchen, nobody would have heard those stories from the man himself.
The book on this: Behind the Wire is the true story of Frank Hoeffer II, told from the journal he wrote after surviving Shanghai, the march to Manila, a hell ship, and the camps at Osaka and Matsumoto.
Where did the journal come from?
He wrote it himself after the war, and I recovered it later. That’s the spine of the book. I built the memoir from his own written account, supplemented by what he told me directly and by informal interviews with the family. I haven’t changed any of the names. The timing was closer than I understood at the time. Alzheimer’s took both the stories and the man who could tell them. For those few Christmases his mind was still sharp enough to hand all of it to a teenager on a folding chair.
Why did Behind the Wire take so long to publish?
Because life intervened, and then it sat. I started it young, off the journal and the conversations, and then decades of everything else happened. Careers, moves, an entire working life in technology.
I have AuADHD, and one of the ways that shows up is a pile of half-finished books. Not abandoned. Started properly, worked on seriously, and then left at eighty percent when something else took the attention. When I decided to close out my loose ends as a writer, this was one of the first I went back to. It had waited longer than anything else and it was the one that mattered most.
I regret how long it sat. A book like this owes something to the man in it, and every year it waited at eighty percent was a year his story stayed in a box when it should have been in front of readers.
What did Frank Hoeffer survive?
Three years and four months, and each stage was a separate ordeal.
He was nineteen when it started, still carrying farm weight, broad but soft. Then Shanghai, the fall of the Philippines, Corregidor burning behind him, and the march to Manila, where Filipino civilians tried to help the prisoners and were struck down for it.
Then a hell ship. Men shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee below deck with barely room to breathe, everybody aboard knowing what these transports were. Crews packing them tight enough that men suffocated. Unmarked transports bombed by American planes. Ships going down with all hands. Nine more men buried at sea on one leg of the voyage.
The hell ships are the part of this history that makes me angriest. Men were packed below deck until some of them suffocated, on unmarked transports that American pilots had no way to recognize, and the people who loaded those holds knew exactly what they were doing.
Then Osaka, then Matsumoto. The first camp commander took a little graft, looked the other way where he could, and let them have Sundays. The second was terror to every sick and crippled man in the camp.
Why does Behind the Wire dwell on Frank Hoeffer’s cooking?
Because his cooking was the war, running in reverse. He always made too much. He watched everybody’s plate to be sure they ate. He couldn’t let anybody leave his table hungry, and it took me several conversations to understand why a man would cook with that kind of intensity. He had been starved nearly to death for three years and four months.
The abundance of every meal was a quiet rebellion against something he’d carried for forty years without discussing it. That’s why the book opens in a kitchen. Everything he couldn’t say was in the amount of food on the table.
How were the Behind the Wire interviews conducted?
In pieces, across several Christmases, on an uncomfortable folding chair.
The stories came as fragments. Sometimes prompted by a question, sometimes emerging out of a long silence. He’d stop mid-sentence to make that noise with his teeth, straighten a posture that was already perfect, and then carry on with some detail about Shanghai or Manila or a place I’d never heard of.
A seventeen-year-old doesn’t know which fragments matter. I wrote down what I could and understood most of it much later. That’s one reason the journal he left behind is the spine of the book instead of my memory of the conversations.
The right call was trusting the journal over my own memory. A teenager’s notes would have given readers my version of his war, and he’d already written his own.
The timing was closer than I knew. Alzheimer’s eventually took both the stories and the man who could tell them. For those few Christmases his mind was sharp enough to hand all of it to a teenager, and the rest of the family was in another room complaining about his moods.
Why does Behind the Wire keep Frank’s hatred of his captors?
Because he earned it and it belongs in the record.
His years in captivity were brutal and his words carry the anger that came out of them. That hatred toward his Japanese captors appears in these pages without adjustment.
Softening it would have produced a more comfortable book and a false one. What a man felt about the people who starved and beat him is part of what happened to him, and editing it out is a way of editing him out.
The book carries a content warning for wartime violence, torture, starvation, disease, and death, because all of that is in it.
What does the cooking mean in Behind the Wire?
It’s the whole man in one habit.
He couldn’t let anybody leave his table hungry. Not as a courtesy. As something closer to a requirement, and it took several conversations before I understood why a person would cook with that kind of fierce intensity. This was a man who had been starved nearly to death.
That’s where the book starts, and it’s why the prologue is set in a kitchen instead of on a battlefield. Feeding people was kindness for him, and sometimes it was also the only way he had left to say something.
What kind of detail did Frank record?
The administrative kind. That’s what makes it unbearable. A guard came through the barracks one morning and reported that four men had tried to escape toward Manila and had been caught. He delivered it the way you’d report the weather, flat, no inflection, and then told the prisoners to assemble in the compound. They knew what they were assembling for.
Elsewhere he records the supply arrangements with the same evenness. Sugar arrived once a month and the guards took a portion. They helped themselves to the fish and the vegetables and nothing could be done about it. After six months some of the men were skin and bones. The bunks, he records, were infested with bed bugs and rat fleas. He records Doctor Jackson, a Royal Navy surgeon serving as the prisoners’ doctor, working day and night with almost no medicine or equipment and doing wonderful work anyway.
He kept a ledger and left the lament to others, and that restraint is why the journal works as a book. He tells you what the ration was and lets you do the arithmetic. I think that flat accounting is more damning than any speech about cruelty he could have written, and I’d put it up against any war memoir on the shelf.
