The Last Ring Home: A POWs Lasting Legacy of Courage Love and Honor in World War II

About this book

The Last Ring Home has been officially announced as winner of the Book Excellence Award 2018 in the category of Biography. Traveling forty thousand miles and inspiring love and despair in equal measure Lt. Minter Dials lost Annapolis ring altered the lives of manynot just those who gazed upon its blue stone. The subject of an award-winning documentary film that was broadcast nationally on PBS and History Channel (ANZ) The Last Ring Home is a spellbinding account of one mans obsession with a family mysteryand the product of decades of research and inquiries. The book relates author Minter Dials pursuit of the true story of his namesake his late grandfather Lt. Minter Dial USN a celebrated war hero whose suffering and trauma nearly buried his memory forever. A prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor Lt. Dial discovered the cruelest meaning of the Bushido code. Moments before he was killed he gave his treasured Naval Academy ring to a friend. In the ensuing chaos it disappeared. Armed with a passion for history and a desire to uncover his grandfathers legacy Dials epic quest for the ring transports him to prisoner-of-war memorials and ex-POW conventions military and press archives and the homes of those affected by the Second World War across the world. Sweeping as far back as the American Civil War The Last Ring Home combines rigorous research with more than one hundred interviews with experts survivors and descendants of the Greatest Generation to tell the powerful story of American prisoners of war in the Pacific.