On December 13, 1944, POW Estel Myers was herded aboard the Japanese prison ship, the Oryoku Maru, with more than 1,600 other American captives. Almost 1,500 of them would be dead by journey's end. The son of a Kentucky sharecropper family, and an enlistee in the Navy's medical corps, Myers landed in Shanghai shortly before the bombing of Pearl Harbor ignited the war. While Myers and his corpsmen tended to the bloody tide of soldiers pouring into the field hospitals, the Japanese overwhelmed the Pacific islands, capturing 78,000 POWs by April 1942. Fearful of defeat, the Japanese eventually pulled up stakes. After a brutal two-year encampment, Myers and his fellow POWs were forced onto the enemy torture ships bound for Japan. Suffocation, malnutrition, disease, dehydration, infestation, madness, and simple despair claimed the lives of more than three quarters of those who boarded "the beast." Myers survived.

A compelling account of a rarely recorded event in military history, this is more than Estel Myers' true story-Belly of the Beast is an homage to the unfailing courage of men at war, an inspiring chronicle of self-sacrifice and endurance, and a tribute to the power of faith, the strength of the soul, and the triumph of the human spirit.