Download or read book Singapore and the Thailand Burma Railway written by Lt. Colonel Alfred Knights and published by Arena books. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents one of the most vivid descriptions of day-to-day life in a Japanese POW labour camp to have appeared so far. The story follows the experiences of the Norfolk Territorial Regiment from 1942 to 1945, under the command of Lt. Col. Knights, during and after the fall of Singapore. Many will recollect having seen the film, The Bridge on The River Kwai. It tended to fictionalise certain matters of fact. This book, drawn directly from a memoir only recently uncovered, reveals that the Japanese designed railway was successfully completed with the forced labour of Allied troops in conjunction with Chinese and Malay captives. The Royal Norfolks were allocated a section of the line which required excavating deep cuttings in the rock hills parallel with the river. They had their 'own' camp with a Japanese officer in charge. He constantly pressed for quicker progress, and for work to be done by all the prisoners, including those in the camp hospital and their officers, contrary to international law. The Regiment's experiences are reported by Lt. Col. Knights in his book. He gives details of his own and others' sufferings, both those inflicted by their captors and those occurring from tropical diseases and insects, all being worsened by a lack of medicines and food. Some of the local Thais, at great risk to themselves, provided a little of both of those commodities. After the railway was completed, the survivors were marched back into Thailand. There they were required to dig a deep ditch round their camp. It was suspected that this would be their grave when they were shot, if the Japanese decided that they had lost the war. Fortunately the two atomic bombs resulted in the Japanese Emperor himself announcing their surrender, forestalling that action. The final chapters of the book are filled with excitement and tension in the efforts of the British officers to hoodwink their captors.
Download or read book Descent Into Hell written by Peter Brune and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descent into Hell is a scrupulously researched and groundbreaking account of traumatic calamities in Australian history, namely the Malayan Campaign, the fall of Singapore and the subsequent horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway. Unpicking the myths and legends of the war, Peter Brune goes to the heart of the Australian experience.
Download or read book Building the Death Railway written by Robert Sherman La Forte and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1993 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generosity amid the greatest cruelty, Building the Death Railway gives the American perspective on events that shocked the world.
Download or read book Burma Railway Artist written by Jack Bridger Chalker and published by Leo Cooper Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story and pictorial record of the people, places, landscapes and incidents which occurred while the British artist Jack Chalker was a prisoner of the Japanese. A gunner in the Royal Artillery, he spent three and a half years in Singapore and in the Thai-Burma railway camps.
Download or read book Prisoner of Japan written by Sir Harold Atcherley and published by Mereo Books. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the course of the Second World War, more than a quarter of a million European and American soldiers were taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies and the Pacific. They went on to suffer years of deprivation and brutality, most of them failing to survive at all. Harold Atcherley was fortunate enough to be one of the survivors. Throughout his time as a prisoner, from the fall of Singapore on 15th February 1942 until 14th September 1945, he kept a diary, which he was able to bring home with him. This book is based on that diary, along with other diaries and official documents. The original diary can now be viewed at The Imperial War Museum, London. He was fortunate enough to count among his friends and comrades the celebrated artist Ronald Searle, whose drawings have been used to illustrate his text; they give a far better impression of what life was like for a POW of the Japanese than mere words can, though neither words nor pictures could ever convey the appalling stench of disease and death on such a massive scale.
Download or read book One Fourteenth of an Elephant written by Ian Denys Peek and published by Random House. This book was released on 2005 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese and Denys Peek was among the tens of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers and citizens taken prisoner. Eight months later, he and countless other PoWs were packed into steel goods wagons and transported by rail to Slam - their destination the massive construction project that would become infamous as the Burma Thailand Railway. He would spend the next three years in over 15 different work and 'hospital' camps on the railway, stubbornly refusing to give up in a place where over 20,000 prisoners of war (an innumerable slave labourers) met their deaths. Written with clarity, passion and a remarkable eye for detail, Denys Peek's memoir recalls not just the hardships and horrors of the railway, the daily struggle for survival, but also the comradeship, spirit and humour of the men who worked on it. It stands as a haunting, evocative and deeply moving testimony to the suffering of those who lived and died there - a salutary reminder of man's potential for inhumanity to his fellow man.
Download or read book The Thailand Burma Railway 1942 1946 Asian labour written by Paul H. Kratoska and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Thailand Burma Railway 1942 1946 Documents post war accounts maps and photographs written by Paul H. Kratoska and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Survivor on the River Kwai written by Reg Twigg and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survivor on the River Kwai is the heartbreaking story of Reg Twigg, one of the last men standing from a forgotten war. Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be fighting Germans. Instead, he found himself caught up in the worst military defeat in modern British history - the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. What followed were three years of hell, moving from one camp to another along the Kwai river, building the infamous Burma railway for the all-conquering Japanese Imperial Army. Some prisoners coped with the endless brutality of the code of Bushido by turning to God; others clung to whatever was left of the regimental structure. Reg made the deadly jungle, with its malaria, cholera, swollen rivers, lethal snakes and exhausting heat, work for him. With an ingenuity that is astonishing, he trapped and ate lizards, harvested pumpkins from the canteen rubbish heap and with his homemade razor became camp barber. That Reg survived is testimony to his own courage and determination, his will to beat the alien brutality of camp guards who had nothing but contempt for him and his fellow POWs. He was a risk taker whose survival strategies sometimes bordered on genius. Reg's story is unique. Reg Twigg was born at Wigston (Leicester) barracks on 16 December 1913. He was called up to the Leicestershire Regiment in 1940 but instead of fighting Hitler he was sent to the Far East, stationed at Singapore. When captured by the Japanese, he decided he would do everything to survive. After his repatriation from the Far East, Reg returned to Leicester. With his family he returned to Thailand in 2006, and revisited the sites of the POW camps. Reg died in 2013, at the age of ninety-nine, two weeks before the publication of this book.
Download or read book The Naked Island written by Russell Braddon and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The innocence of the young Australian soldiers sent to Malaya during the Second World War to halt the territorial expansion of the Japanese was quickly shattered by defeat and surrender. Russell Braddon, who himself became a prisoner of war, graphically describes the ghastly suffering and wanton neglect of the Allied soldiers in some of the most infamous Japanese POW camps, from Pudu in Malaya to Changi in Singapore. For more than three years he watched as these men were ravaged by disease, tortured, and deprived of their most basic needs. Braddon recounts his horrifying story with barely suppressed rage, but also with enormous admiration for the amazing ingenuity, spirit and determination of the prisoners, who created a semblance of order out of nightmarish chaos. His remarkable book makes grim but compelling reading.
Download or read book Across the Three Pagodas Pass written by 二松慶彦 and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A translation of the only known detailed account of the building of the railway, by a Japanese engineer involved in the construction.
Download or read book The Thailand Burma Railway 1942 1946 Voluntary accounts written by Paul H. Kratoska and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descent into Hell written by Peter Brune and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 1327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'No man has the command of words needed for conveying...the courage and the cowardice; the loyalty and the treachery; the dedication and the dereliction; the strengths and the frailties; the kindness and the brutality; the integrity and depravity; the magnificence and the enormities of men, as revealed by and to those fated to pass through the entrails of hell, in Thailand Burma, during and after the Railway was built.' Descent into Hell is a scrupulously researched and groundbreaking account of one of the most traumatic calamities in Australian history - the Malayan Campaign, the fall of Singapore and the subsequent horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway. Unpicking the myths and legends of the war, Peter Brune goes to the heart of the Australian experience. He describes the shambolic planning by the British in Singapore and the failures and incompetence of some of the Australian command. He debunks the claims about Australian deserters in Singapore, and we learn of the black market in Changi and the beatings, torture and murder on the Thai-Burma Railway. Here too are stories of the war's many heroes and villains: of officers who looked after their men and optimised their chances of survival, and others who looked after themselves at their men's expense; the heroes of battle who became ineffectual and lost in the camps and on the Railway, and the least liked and least respected battlefield officers who came to be great leaders. And then there are countless acts of kindness and decency performed by one POW for another in the most cruel of circumstances. Impressive, compelling and rich in human spirit, Descent into Hell is an unprecedented chronicle by one of Australia's finest military historians.
Download or read book Beyond Surrender written by Joan Beaumont and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the twentieth century 35,000 Australians suffered as prisoners of war in conflicts ranging from World War I to Korea. What was the reality of their captivity? Beyond Surrender presents for the first time the diversity of the Australian 'behind-the-wire' experience, dissecting fact from fiction and myth from reality. Beyond Surrender examines the impact that different types of camps, commandants and locations had on surrender, survival, prison life and the prospects of escape. It considers the attitudes of Australian governments to those who had surrendered, the work of relief agencies and the agony of families waiting at home for their husbands, brothers and fathers to be freed. Covering several conflicts and diverse sites of captivity, Beyond Surrender showcases new research from Kate Ariotti, Joan Beaumont, Lachlan Grant, Jeffrey Grey, Karl James, Jennifer Lawless, Peter Monteath, Melanie Oppenheimer, Aaron Pegram, Lucy Robertson, Seumas Spark and Christina Twomey.
Download or read book War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore written by Karl Hack and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singapore fell to Japan on 15 February 1942. Within days, the Japanese had massacred thousands of Chinese civilians, and taken prisoner more than 100,000 British, Australian and Indian soldiers. A resistance movement formed in Malaya's jungle-covered mountains, but the vast majority could do little other than resign themselves to life under Japanese rule. The Occupation would last three and a half years, until the return of the British in September 1945. How is this period remembered? And how have individuals, communities, and states shaped and reshaped memories in the postwar era? The book response to these questions, presenting answers that use the words of Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians, British and Australians who personally experienced the war years. The authors guide readers through many forms of memory: from the soaring pillars of Singapore's Civilian War Memorial, to traditional Chinese cemeteries in Malaysia; and from families left bereft by Japanese massacres, to the young women who flocked to the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, dreaming of a march on Delhi. This volume provides a forum for previously marginalized and self-censored voices, using the stories they relate to reflect on the nature of conflict and memory. They also offer a deeper understanding of the searing transit from wartime occupation to post-war decolonization and the moulding of postcolonial states and identities.
Download or read book Burma Railway Medicine written by Geoffrey V. Gill and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'Death Railway' was very well named. More correctly called the Burma or Thai-Burma Railway, it was a major project during Allied Far East imprisonment under the Japanese. Over 60,000 prisoners worked on its construction, the majority of whom were British, and some 20 per cent died before release in 1945. Working conditions were appalling, the climate inhospitable, and food supplies grossly inadequate, making the POWs terribly vulnerable to a plethora of tropical infections and syndromes of malnutrition. No medical care was given by their Japanese captors, and it fell to the Allied POW doctors and medical orderlies to treat the sick, which they did with little in the way of medical equipment or drugs.
Download or read book Forgotten Armies written by Christopher Alan Bayly and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
