I first encountered the story of George R. Tweed through the movie No Man Is An Island with Jeffrey Hunter that my family and I watch and rewatch all the time. My father let me borrow Robinson Crusoe, USN, which chronicles the true life story of George R. Tweed. Tweed was a U.S Navy radioman who survived 31 months hiding in Japanese-held Guam during World War II, shuffling from jungle, swamp, and fields, to Chamorro home to Chamorro home.Ā
The movie and the memoir are extraordinarily different. The movie is obviously embellished to up the entertainment value, but the real story of George R. Tweed is no less impressive. Just a bit less romantic and action-packed.Ā
Some of the more notable differences: 1) It felt like Tweed in reality was shuffled around a lot more than in the movie, and he only ever traveled around Guam with one fellow American, not the band of five fugitives like they start out in the movie. 2) Jo from the movie is not present in the book unless you count the passing references to a girl named Tonie. Fun fact: I canāt do any impressions, but I can do a mean Jo saying āt-weed.ā 3) Tweed was never sheltered in a leprosy hospital, and no man’s skeleton was shown to the Japanese by the Chamorros and passed off as Tweed.
In fact, I think the only similarities up to the point where he makes it to his ocean-side cave is that an American loses his shoe in a swamp and Tweed writes his forbidden newspaper, the Guam Eagle, for a period of time. But most of the plot points and nearly all the details were entirely fictionalized for the movie.
But as for the memoir itself… The writing of the memoir isnāt anything to write home about. Itās not polished or lyrical, but I think that the story was written by Blake Clark as it was told to him by George R. Tweed, and Clark kept that conversational tone. Regardless, itās super easy to read, and the story itself is a wonderful display of resilience, survival, and loyalty. Even if a lot of the native people who helped Tweed on Guam couldnāt keep a secret, which forced Tweed to move more often than he would have liked to keep his location as concealed as possible, their fierce loyalty in assisting Tweed in the face of certain torture or death was laudable to say the least, and itās heartbreaking what a lot of them suffered on account of it. The Chamorros were the main reason Tweed survived, though Tweed himself was an incredibly resourceful individual. He could repair radios, craft makeshift shelters, build tables and chairs with little tools, make an elaborate alarm system and had the patience of testing it over and over, circulate a forbidden newsletter across Guam, and at one point he even made shoes for the people who were sheltering him.Ā
An incredible true account, and now I have to watch the movie yet again.
