Product Description

Part history, part thriller, Now the Hell Will Start tells the astonishing tale of Herman Perry, the soldier who sparked the greatest manhunt of World War II— and who became that war’s unlikeliest folk hero

A true story of murder, love, and headhunters, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of Herman Perry, a budding playboy from the streets of Washington, D.C., who wound up going native in the Indo-Burmese jungle—not because he yearned for adventure, but rather to escape the greatest manhunt conducted by the United States Army during World War II.

An African American G.I. assigned to a segregated labor battalion, Perry was shipped to South Asia in 1943, enduring unspeakable hardships while sailing around the globe. He was one of thousands of black soldiers dispatched to build the Ledo Road, a highway meant to appease China’s conniving dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. Stretching from the thickly forested mountains of northeast India across the tiger-infested vales of Burma, the road was a lethal nightmare, beset by monsoons, malaria, and insects that chewed men’s flesh to pulp.

Perry could not endure the jungle’s brutality, nor the racist treatment meted out by his white officers. He found solace in opium and marijuana, which further warped his fraying psyche. Finally, on March 5, 1944, he broke down—an emotional collapse that ended with him shooting an unarmed white lieutenant.

So began Perry’s flight through the Indo-Burmese wilderness, one of the planet’s most hostile realms. While the military police combed the brothels of Calcutta, Perry trekked through the jungle, eventually stumbling upon a village festooned with polished human skulls. It was here, amid a tribe of elaborately tattooed headhunters, that Herman Perry would find bliss—and would marry the chief ’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

Starting off with nothing more than a ten-word snippet culled from an obscure bibliography, Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry’s ghost—a pursuit that eventually led him to the remotest corners of India and Burma, where drug runners and ethnic militias now hold sway. Along the way, Koerner uncovered the forgotten story of the Ledo Road’s black G.I.s, for whom Jim Crow was as virulent an enemy as the Japanese. Many of these troops revered the elusive Perry as a folk hero—whom they named the Jungle King.

Sweeping from North Carolina’s Depression-era cotton fields all the way to the Himalayas, Now the Hell Will Start is an epic saga of hubris, cruelty, and redemption. Yet it is also an exhilarating thriller, a cat-and-mouse yarn that dazzles and haunts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35662 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Review
“Journalist Koerner recounts an obscure 1944 murder whose story is linked to the building of the Ledo Road, a massive and ultimately useless American project that linked India to Chinese forces. Most African- American soldiers spent WWII doing menial jobs. One man, Herman Perry, was shipped to northeast India to work on the Ledo Road. The labor was backbreaking; with rudimentary living conditions and no access to most recreation facilities, blacks had few pleasures besides drugs. Psychologically fragile, Perry had already been jailed for disobedience when he wandered off, carrying a rifle. When a white lieutenant grabbed it, Perry shot him and ran into the jungle, eventually reaching a village of Naga tribesmen. Pleased by gifts of canned food, they allowed him to stay, and he reinforced this welcome by stealing from the builders’ camp only six miles away. He married a local woman, but after three months, word of his presence filtered out; he was captured by Americans, tried and hung. Koerner’s engrossing story illuminates one of WWII’s fiascos as well as the disgraceful treatment of black soldiers during that era.”
--Publisher’s Weekly

“Compelling niche history about a black soldier who murdered his lieutenant then fled into the Burmese jungle during World War II.
Journalist and first-time author Koerner has unearthed a minor treasure in the criminal records of Herman Perry, a meat cutter drafted in 1943. Since military leaders considered African- Americans unfit for combat, Perry was shipped to India in 1944 to join 15,000 mostly black laborers building the Ledo Road, an immense project extending nearly 500 miles through mountainous jungles to China. Working conditions were nightmarish. The project had low priority, so supplies and food were inadequate, and black troops received the worst. Amenities, R&R facilities and even brothels were off limits. Morale under white officers was terrible. Miserable and depressed, Perry had already served one stockade sentence and found himself threatened with another when, on March 5, 1944, he lost control, murdered an overbearing white officer and fled. Believing that blacks were sexually ravenous, his pursuers focused the subsequent manhunt on brothels in distant Calcutta. Meanwhile, Perry stumbled through the jungle into a village of the Nagas, a primitive tribe of headhunters who occasionally traded with the soldiers. Won over by a few gifts and the supplies he stole from construction sites less than ten miles away, the tribe accepted him. Perry married the chief’s 14-year-old daughter and settled in, but rumors of a Negro living in the jungle eventually filtered out, and a patrol arrested him. Shortly before his death sentence was confirmed, he escaped and spent two months frantically trying to reach his village before being captured and hung. The long description of his trial may offer more information than most readers want, but few will be unmoved by the stinging depiction of Perry struggling to live first in an oppressively racist society, then in an army whose leaders considered him subhuman. Gripping and cringe-inducing.”
--Kirkus>

“Now the Hell Will Start is a fascinating, untold story of the Second World War, an incendiary social document, and a thrilling, campfire tale adventure.”
--George Pelecanos

"Now the Hell Will Start is a dazzling look at a heretofore unseen and untold drama of WWII. Koerner takes us inside the Burmese jungle, where tigers and headhunters roam, and into the mind of an American, marooned by injustice, who struggles to survive as a man without a country. As Koerner points out, the hero of his tale, the pursued Herman Perry, may have just been the world's first hippie, certainly a father to Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. Koerner is a startling writer of great humanity and a driving sense of plot, and this tale of survival and race enlarges our sense of American history."
--Doug Stanton, author of In Harm’s Way

"Koerner wandered into the jungles of Burma in search of a fugitive whose name indeed was buried in time. What he has come out with is a first-rate portrait of muscle and bone and soul."
--Charlie LeDuff, author of US Guys

“Brendan Koerner's Now the Hell Will Start rockets you from the WWII jungles of southeast Asia, to the streets of Washington DC, in a meticulously crafted narrative so wild it must be true. With a painstaking eye for detail, and the kind of prose that edges truth into art, Koerner's one of those journalists who nearly makes fiction irrelevant.”
--David Matthews, author of Ace of Spades

About the Author
A contributing editor at Wired whose work appears regularly in The New York Times and Slate, Brendan I. Koerner was named one of Columbia Journalism Review’s Ten Young Writers on the Rise.

Customer Reviews

Revelations
This is a heart breaking tale of injustus occurrring in the armed forces during WW11.Things of which I was only marginally aware as I was only 10 years old at the end of the war. It is well written and well referenced.

Let's hope the hell is over...
The tale of Herman Perry is beyond incredible. The details of his personal journey are thrilling and touching and it is remarkable that the story hasn't been told hundreds of times before. That said, I expect it to be told from now on. (No doubt a movie will be in the making soon - it has all the required elements in abundance.) Koerner manages to make the story into a complete and compelling narrative, no small feat, I think, given the dearth of material available on this matter.

The bigger story surrounding Perry's individual trials, the institutional racism employed throughout the US armed forces throughout World War II, was a real eye-opener for me. The book is filled with details of the humiliation and suffering, both large and small, of black soldiers and officers. It is a wonder, as I believe Koerner himself expresses in the book, that there not greater riots and insurrections beyond those that did occur and were contained; the injustice is gross.

All in all, a thrilling and informative book that I thoroughly enjoyed. If all historical biographies were this pleasant to read my shelves would be full of them. A great book.

a folk hero to African-American engineers
_Now the Hell Will Start_ is ostensibly the story of Herman Perry, an African-American private who murdered a white officer, eluding the Army's search for him for months (even escaping imprisonment) before he was finally caught and executed. Through this story we learn of an oft-neglected theater in World War II, and of the deplorable conditions in which soldiers worked and fought, made worse by a Jim Crow Army. That Perry mentally cracked under such conditions is certainly understandable.

The "Lido Road" was supposed to be a supply line to assist Chinese General Chiang-Kai Shek. At a cost of $164 million (in 1945 dollars - around $1.8 billion today) and an estimated 2 men per mile, it was a boondoggle of the first order. Constructed entirely by hand, men had to contend not only with Japanese booby-traps and monsoon rains that frequently washed away their efforts, but also suffer flash floods, leeches, lice, typhus, malaria, dysentery, and (literally) man-eating tigers.

Added to this was the appalling treatment of African-American soldiers who built the road in a segregated Army that treated German POW's better than Black troops. Koerner makes Perry's case a microcosm for the maltreatment of African-American soldiers, and the regular injustices they faced - for example, while being searched for, Perry (rightly) fears that the MP's will shoot to kill rather than attempt to capture him and take him to trial. Koerner's history of the this part of the war, and of Perry's part in it was excellent.

Perry sought and found refuge among the native Naga in the jungles of Burma, the primary reason the Army couldn't find him. (In accordance with the prejudical racial views of the time that held that African-Americans were lascivious sub-humans, they spent the majority of their time searching for him in brothels in Calcutta.) I was less enthused with his writing of Perry's time on the run - Koerner overly dramatized Perry's time with the Naga, an event that in and of itself was dramatic enough.

It is a well written history: the strategic details between Stilwell, Chaing and Roosevelt contrast powerfully with the suffering and pointless drugery of the enlisted soldiers, their plight compounded by the Army's racial policies. The story of one soldier's experiences - and his resistance, resiliance, strength and brilliance makes for riveting reading. Recommended.