THE National Archive now has online the stories more than 80,000 prisoners of war wrote about their experiences in some of most hated prisoner of war (PoW) camps in Europe and Asia during World War II, among them notorious places like Colditz and the Stalag camps.
But when it comes to the unimaginable excesses of human depravity then this book, by the Times journalist Brian MacArthur, is a grim and compelling savage saga of the worst atrocities you can ever imagine, the raw stuff of nightmares.
MacArthur, who lives in Islington, has produced it with the aid of the personal diaries of more than 150 PoWs – some accounts surviving in beer bottles buried in graves – to mark the 60th anniversary on August 15 of VJ (Victory over Japan) Day. He spent three-and-a-half years putting the tale of terror together, visiting Thailand, Singapore and Australia, interviewing some of the now aged survivors.
It’s hardly a time to celebrate when you consider than 20 per cent of the prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity, compared with just four per cent of those imprisoned by the Germans, and that 12,000 of them alone died building the 258-mile long Burma to Thailand railway, along with 100,000 unknown native labourers.
Yet while books and films galore have portrayed the war in Europe – and still do so – another vital reason for MacArthur’s book is that the appalling story of the war in the Pacific has been forgotten, almost ignored.
“There is only one memorable film about the war in the Far East – The Bridge on the River Kwai – and its central theme – a British officer connives with the Japanese to thwart the blowing up of the bridge – is fiction, not fact,” writes MacArthur.
So you will be astonished to read the real, complex and harrowing story of the two bridges over the River Kwai, and then hear of the British officer Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey, a truly remarkable man and lost hero amazingly able to shame his captors, and on whom the film role played by Alec Guinness was fallaciously based.
Nevertheless, as MacArthur points out: “This is not a story of unremitting cruelty. Not all of the Japanese and Korean guards in the camps were brutal, and not all the camps were hells on earth.”
Despite that, it is the courage, the cunning, inspired ingenuity and ability to deceive, and, above all, the abiding faith and will to survive so much unmitigated misery that makes the book a worthy tribute to both the many who died and the relatively few survivors.
MacArthur, surprisingly, did not becoming depressed by his discoveries of how so many pitifully emaciated, sick, diseased and starving prisoners overcame their brutal experiences through comradeship, compassion and courage.
Perhaps the worst incident he records is at Sandakan, in Borneo, where prisoners of war built a military airport in 1942/43. Only six men out of 2,240 survived the last 11 months. Then there are the 5,000 American prisoners who died on what came to be known as the ‘hellships’, some actually killing each other when they became so desperate for food and water.
Why did it happen? Was one reason the fact that the Japanese forces going to war were armed with a manual which declared: ‘Just read this and the war is won.’?
And it added: “When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with his father’s murderer. Here, before you, is the man whose death will lighten your heart.”
It was the Australian PoWs, fitter than the working class boys from Britain, who adapted better to the harsh conditions. At Sonkurai, where 3,400 British and 3,600 Australians faced the ordeal of building the Burma to Thailand railway, the book records that some of the British soldiers practically walked to their cremation pyres.
“They stopped eating, laid down and refused to live,” says MacArthur.
MacArthur sees all sides in his impressive ability to grapple with a subject so moving that it finally transcends the sheer waste of life, cruelty and abuse. “I hope the book tells the story of the genuine triumph of the human spirit,” he told me.
There is, of course, an awful, sickening significance to it. And that has to be that it will never happen again.