Bio
Bruce Henderson is the author of more than thirty nonfiction books, including a #1 New York Times bestseller that was made into a highly-rated television miniseries. His books have been published in twenty countries.
He won the tenth annual Gilder Lehrman Military History award in recognition of the best English language book published in 2022 in the field of American military history for his latest book, Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II. It is a gripping true tale of courage and adventure—the saga of the Japanese American U.S. soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater against Japan, their ancestral homeland, even as their families back home in America were being rounded up and held behind barbed wire in government internment camps.
His previous book, the New York Times bestseller Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler , is the little-known saga of the young German Jews dubbed “The Ritchie Boys,” whose families sent them out of Nazi Germany to safety in America, and who returned as soldiers to Europe at enormous personal risk as members of an elite U.S. Army unit to play a key role in the Allied victory.
Bruce is the author of Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II, which tells the incredible survival story of more than 2,000 civilian prisoners of war held in the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II — and of the elite 11th Airborne Division’s heart-pounding mission to rescue these beleaguered men, women and children from deep inside enemy territory in a deadly race against the clock.
Bruce’s earlier titles include:
Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War , the story of legendary Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, with whom Bruce served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger during the Vietnam War. Hero Found was a national bestseller. This story was made into the feature film “Rescue Dawn” by director Werner Herzog, and a documentary, “Little Dieter Needs to Fly.”
The #1 New York Times bestseller And the Sea Will Tell , a powerful and unforgettable true crime story about a sailing couple who mysteriously disappeared on a deserted Pacific atoll, and the investigation and murder trials that followed. The book, co-authored by famed Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, was adapted for a CBS miniseries.
Down to the Sea: An Epic Story of Naval Disaster and Heroism in World War II, an action-packed true story of the ships and sailors of Admiral Halsey’s 3rd Fleet in the Pacific.
Two critically-acclaimed Arctic adventure titles. True North: Cook, Peary and the Race to the Pole is about one of the most enduring and vitriolic fueds in the history of exploration, one that would cause a bitter divide in the international scientific community and lead to the ruin of one of the claimants and the discrediting of the other. Fatal North: Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition has been hailed by Library Journal as: “A factual historical mystery written by a gifted storyteller.”
Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer recently debuted as eBook and trade paperback a decade after its original publication.
A former newspaper reporter, magazine editor, private investigator and field producer for television news, Bruce has taught reporting and writing courses at Stanford University and USC School of Journalism. A member of The Authors Guild, he lives outside San Francisco, California.
Bruce aboard USS Ranger off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin
