The Last Ring Home

Traveling forty thousand miles and inspiring love and despair in equal measure, Lt. Minter Dial’s lost Annapolis ring altered the lives of many―not just those who gazed upon its blue stone.

The subject of an award-winning documentary film that was broadcast nationally on PBS and History Channel (ANZ), The Last Ring Home is a spellbinding account of one man’s obsession with a family mystery―and the product of decades of research and inquiries. The book relates author Minter Dial’s pursuit of the true story of his namesake, his late grandfather Lt. Minter Dial, USN, a celebrated war hero whose suffering and trauma nearly buried his memory forever.

A prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, Lt. Dial discovered the cruelest meaning of the Bushido code. Moments before he was killed, he gave his treasured Naval Academy ring to a friend. In the ensuing chaos, it disappeared.

Armed with a passion for history and a desire to uncover his grandfather’s legacy, Dial’s epic quest for the ring transports him to prisoner-of-war memorials and ex-POW conventions, military and press archives, and the homes of those affected by the Second World War across the world.

Sweeping as far back as the American Civil War, The Last Ring Home combines rigorous research with more than one hundred interviews with experts, survivors, and descendants of the Greatest Generation to tell the powerful story of American prisoners of war in the Pacific.

The book won the Book Excellence Award 2018. The film was selected at seven film festivals and won ten awards, including Best Documentary Film, Best Short Film and Best Foreign Film at the Charleston International Film Festival.