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Nonfiction The bravest man I ever met THE CASTAWAY’S WAR: One Man’s Battle Against Imperial Japan By Stephen Harding 290 pp. Da Capo Reviewed by Bob Sanchez In the summer of 1943, a 1,000-pound Japanese “Long Lance” torpedo struck the destroyer USS Strong and sent it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. A nearby US warship rescued many of the sailors, but Lieutenant Hugh Miller was not one of them. After going overboard, a nearby depth charge exploded and nearly killed him, but he and three others clung to a floating net that drifted ashore onto Arundel, a small island controlled by the Japanese. The Americans’ odds of survival looked bleak. But that’s the middle of the book. Except for a brief prelude, historian Stephen Harding tells the story chronologically: Hugh Barr Miller Jr. from Tuscaloosa, Alabama learned early life lessons about “the value of self-reliance and ingenuity, of adaptability and dogged determination”; he played in the ...