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For more than three years, Jonathan Wainwright believed his country could remember him as the general who surrendered Corregidor.When he emerged from captivity in August 1945, he was so thin and aged that Douglas MacArthur was shocked to see him.But the United States did not receive him as a defeated man.They received him as a hero.Wainwright had been left in command of the American and Filipino forces in 1942, after MacArthur left the Philippines on presidential orders. The resistance eventually coalesced around Corregidor, a fortified island at the entrance to Manila Bay.On May 6, 1942, with insufficient food, thousands of exhausted men, and facing a superior Japanese force, Wainwright accepted surrender.Then another war began.The war of captivity.He was held in prisoner-of-war camps in the Philippines, Formosa, and Manchuria. He suffered hunger, disease, humiliation, and years of isolation.By 1945, he weighed much less than before the war. His hair had turned white, and his body bore the marks of more than three years as a prisoner.He also carried another worry.He believed that upon returning to the United States, he might be accused of cowardice for surrendering.While Wainwright remained in captivity, the war ended.On August 16, 1945, just one day after the Japanese announcement of surrender, six members of the OSS parachuted near Mukden, Manchuria.Their mission was to find and protect Allied prisoners before the situation spiraled out of control.Among the men they sought were some of the most important captured officers of the war.Wainwright.The British officer Arthur Percival, who had surrendered Singapore.Edward King, captured in Bataan. And other high-ranking Allied commanders.On August 19, members of the mission reached the camp where Wainwright was being held.For many prisoners, it was then that the news became completely real:the war was over.It still took days for them to leave.Communications were unreliable, Soviet forces were advancing through Manchuria, and evacuating hundreds of weakened men proved far more complicated than expected.Finally, Wainwright left China.And something happened that must have seemed impossible to him during his years of imprisonment.On September 2, 1945, he was on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.MacArthur signed Japan's formal surrender in front of him.Wainwright remained behind the man who had been his commander when the Philippines fell.Afterward, he returned to the United States.On September 10, President Harry Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor. Shortly afterward, he also received his fourth general's star.For three years, Wainwright had imagined that Corregidor's surrender would define his name.When he finally returned home, he discovered that his country had remembered something else:that he had stood by his men when there was almost nothing left to fight with.