Download or read book Death and Deprivation on the Forgotten Sumatra Railway written by James H. Banton and published by Pen & Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Henry Banton was born in Burton on Trent in 1920. He worked as a driver of a steam locomotive used to used to transport beer and supplies to breweries around the town. When war broke out Jim joined the RAF, eventually becoming a Leading Aircraftsman as part of the RAF's ground crew. During this time Jim had met the love of his life Dorothy Mason. Jim didn't know that when he left Gladstone Dock in Liverpool he would not see home or his family including Dorothy for another four and a half years. Eventually posted to the Far East he was captured by the Japanese in the hills on the island of Java. Used as slave labour, starved, beaten and witnessing death on a daily basis he was later put to work on the building of the Sumatra Railway. The Far East Prisoners of war became known as the Forgotten Army, however there has been little reference paid to the Sumatra Railway compared with other theatres of WW2. With this in mind the prisoners who worked on the Sumatra Railway could be considered to be the 'Forgotten of the Forgotten Army'. In August 1945 the world celebrated victory in Europe, however for the FEPOW's the war dragged on. As parts of the world were trying to return to normality Jim and his colleagues were being made to dig their own graves in the Sumatra jungle. The FEPOW's lives hung in the balance as orders had been issued to murder all POW's should mainland Japan be invaded by the Allies. This book is Jim's story and it is hoped it will also be a reminder not only of the sacrifice of the Forgotten Army but also highlight the suffering of the 'Forgotten of the Forgotten Army' - The Sumatra Railway POW's.
Download or read book Death and Deprivation on the Forgotten Sumatra Railway written by James H. Banton and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Henry Banton was born in Burton on Trent in 1920. He worked as a driver of a steam locomotive used to transport beer and supplies to breweries around the town. When war broke out Jim joined the RAF, eventually becoming a Leading Aircraftsman as part of the RAF’s ground crew. During this time Jim had met the love of his life Dorothy Mason. Jim didn't know that when he left Gladstone Dock in Liverpool he would not see home or his family including Dorothy for another four and a half years. Eventually posted to the Far East he was captured by the Japanese in the hills on the island of Java. Used as slave labour, starved, beaten and witnessing death on a daily basis he was later put to work on the building of the Sumatra Railway. The Far East Prisoners of war became known as the Forgotten Army, however there has been little reference paid to the Sumatra Railway compared with other theatres of WW2. With this in mind the prisoners who worked on the Sumatra Railway could be considered to be the ‘Forgotten of the Forgotten Army’. In August 1945 the world celebrated victory in Europe, however for the FEPOW’s the war dragged on. As parts of the world were trying to return to normality Jim and his colleagues were being made to dig their own graves in the Sumatra jungle. The FEPOW’s lives hung in the balance as orders had been issued to murder all POW’s should mainland Japan be invaded by the Allies. This book is Jim’s story and it is hoped it will also be a reminder not only of the sacrifice of the Forgotten Army but also highlight the suffering of the ‘Forgotten of the Forgotten Army’ – The Sumatra Railway POW’s.
Download or read book Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway written by Lizzie Oliver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway is the first book to detail the experiences of British former prisoners of war (POWs) who were forced to construct a railway across Sumatra during the Japanese occupation. It is also the first study to be undertaken of the life-writing of POWs held captive by the Japanese during the Second World War, and the transgenerational responses in Britain to this period of captivity. This book brings to light previously unpublished materials, including: · Exceptionally rare and detailed diaries, notebooks and letters from the railway · Memoirs from Sumatra, including detailed recollections and post-war statements written by key personnel on the railway, such as Medical Officers and interpreters · Remarkable original artwork created by POWs on Sumatra · Contemporaneous photographs taken inside the camps Employing theories of life-writing, memory and war representation, including transgenerational transmission, Lizzie Oliver focuses particularly on what these documents can tell us about how former POWs tried to share, preserve and make sense of their experiences. It is a wholly original study that is of great value to Second World War scholars and anyone interested in 20th-century Southeast Asian history or war and memory.
Download or read book Captured written by Brenda M. Tranter and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2022-08-03 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australian Lieutenant, A.E. Tranter, from Heathcote, Victoria, (Australia) spends time in Malaya training young soldiers during the waiting period prior to WW2 in Asia. He survives the battle against the Japanese in Muar and the fall of Singapore, before escaping by boat to the wilds of Sumatra. However, his luck fails and he becomes one of the thousands of prisoners of war in the slave labour camps in Sumatra. He writes a tender book for his little daughter which he manages to keep hidden from the guards throughout his ordeal. Remarkably the book is all about the pleasant and beautiful things he has seen and learned in his enforced travel, even if witnessed from the heat and stench of locked box cars “ ... in spite of the discomfort , we saw much that was interesting and beautiful”. Despite this long ordeal, his writing conveys a message of tolerance, understanding and responsibility. Tranter is amongst those put to work building a road through the jungle in Atjeh, then later, the second death railway - the Pakenbaroe/Moeara Railway, ironically completed on the day WW2 ended; never used and now forgotten in Australia by all but a few. Here the Japanese and Koreans’ treatment of the prisoners becomes increasingly brutal with death and disease common, especially amongst “ the Romushas” - Asian enforced labourers - 80 000 of whom die. Meanwhile his little daughter is growing up in his hometown, under her mother’s care, both unaware of her father’s whereabouts.
Download or read book The Sumatra Railroad written by H. Hovinga and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the gripping historical tragedy of the 220 km railroad that bored its way through the hot, humid Sumatran jungle during World War II. The railway was commissioned by Japan and built with the blood and tears of Allied prisoners of war and press-ganged Javanese romushas. Henk Hovinga interviewed nearly one hundred former railroad workers and did painstaking archival research. The result is a moving book, richly illustrated with numerous authentic drawings of life in the internment camps, charts and photographs. The original Dutch version of The Sumatra Railroad has become the standard work on the crime of the Japanese railroad construction in Indonesia. Unfortunately this indescribable human catastrophe has always been overshadowed by the drama of the notorious Birma Railroad. This work is first and foremost a posthumous tribute to the thousands of slave workers who lost their lives for the Pakan Baroe Railroad. At the same time, it is a homage to the survivors, for whom the war traumas would never end.
Download or read book Traces of War written by Jan Banning and published by Trolley Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dutch photographer Jan Banning has interviewed and photographed 24 of the survivors of the Burma and Sumatra railways. The haunting images in this book show them as they worked, naked from the waist up. The words elicit, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, the misery of their constant understanding of death.
Download or read book Railroad of Death written by John Coast and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Thousand Cups of Rice written by Kyle Thompson and published by Eakin Press. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are only a few remaining skeletons after the invasion of East Asia for the past few centuries, and are pitiful victims. We will build the railroad if we have to {build} it over the white man's body. If you want anything, you will have to come through me. . . . and there will be many of you who will not see your homes again. Work cheerfully at my command. -Lt. Col. Y. Nagatomo, Chief, No. 3 Branch, Thailand POW Administration, Nippon Expeditionary Force With these words, thousands of Allied prisoners were sentenced to their deaths on the "Burma-Siam Death Railway." Among the victims were Texans of the 2nd Battalion 131st Field Artillery, and survivors of the sunken USS Houston. In 1939, while the Great Depression still loomed over the country, Kyle Thompson enlisted in the Texas National Guard at Wichita Falls, Texas. Thompson was only sixteen years old, and his mother had signed papers listing his age as eighteen so that he could join the military and draw the few dollars paid monthly to guardsmen. After Nazi Germany overran most of Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Congress in 1940 to mobilize U.S. forces. Along with thirty thousand other members of the 36th Division, Thompson's unit was inducted into the regular army and sent to Camp Bowie in Brownwood, Texas, for intensive training. Thompson was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 131st field artillery. The 2nd Battalion was deployed to the Netherland East Indies on January 11, 1942, the same day Japanese forces began their invasion of the island. After three months of intense fighting, the 2nd Battalion surrendered to the Japanese. It became known as the "Lost Battalion" due to its location being unknown throughout the remainder of World War II. Moved to various prisoner of war camps throughout Southeast Asia, the "Lost Battalion" endured severe brutality, starvation, and disease. In 1943 they were moved to Burma, where they worked on what became known as the Japanese "Railroad of Death," which led to the death of 70,000 Allied prisoners and was the basis for the movie, The Bridge Over the River Kwai. In A Thousand Cups of Rice, Thompson recounts how he and the other prisoners survived their inhumane treatment and years of hard labor with little food and scarce medical treatment. All told, Thompson spent six years in the U.S. Army, four of them overseas in the southeast Asian theater of war.
Download or read book The History of Sumatra written by William Marsden and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-16 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The History of Sumatra" (Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And / Manners Of The Native Inhabitants) by William Marsden. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Download or read book World War II and Southeast Asia written by Gregg Huff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From December 1941, Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labour accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. In this ground-breaking new study, Gregg Huff provides the first comprehensive account of the economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation. Drawing on materials from 25 archives over three continents, his economic, social and historical analysis presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War.
Download or read book Killing Hope written by William Blum and published by . This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Killing Hope, William Blum, author of the bestselling Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, provides a devastating and comprehensive account of America's covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and - in this updated edition - beyond. Is the United States, as it likes to claim, a global force for democracy? Killing Hope shows the answer to this question to be a resounding 'no'.
Download or read book New Amsterdam Gazette written by Morris Coster and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Camp Life Is Paradise for Freddy written by Fred Lanzing and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Children see and hear what is there; adults see and hear what they are expected to and mainly remember what they think they ought to remember,” David Lowenthal wrote in The Past Is a Foreign Country. It is on this fraught foundation that Fred Lanzing builds this memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists in the East Indies during the World War II. When published in the Netherlands in 2007, the book triggered controversy, if not vitriol, for Lanzing’s assertion that his time in the camp was not the compendium of horrors commonly associated with the Dutch internment experience. Despite the angry reception, Lanzing’s account corresponds more closely with the scant historical record than do most camp memoirs. In this way, Lanzing’s work is a substantial addition to ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful—if contentious—contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography and to the legacies of the past. Lanzing relates an aspect of the war in the Pacific seldom discussed outside the Netherlands and, by focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, expands our understanding of World War II in general. His compact, beautifully detailed account will be accessible to undergraduate students and a general readership and, together with the introduction by William H. Frederick, is a significant contribution to literature on World War II, the Dutch colonial experience, the history of childhood, and Southeast Asian history.
Download or read book American Railroad Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1835 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Japan Weekly Mail written by and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 1464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Malay Archipelago written by Alfred Russel Wallace and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Commercial Financial Chronicle and Hunt s Merchants Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 1656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
