Download or read book Last Man Out written by H. Robert Charles and published by Motorbooks. This book was released on 2006 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From June 1942 to October 1943, more than 100,000 Allied POWs who had been forced into slave labor by the Japanese died building the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an undertaking immortalized in the film "The Bridge on the River Kwai." One of the few who survived was American Marine H. Robert Charles, who describes the ordeal in vivid and harrowing detail in Last Man Out. The story mixes the unimaginable brutality of the camps with the inspiring courage of the men, including a Dutch Colonial Army doctor whose skill and knowledge of the medicinal value of wild jungle herbs saved the lives of hundreds of his fellow POWs, including the author.
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 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 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 Railroad of Death written by John Coast and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The original, classic account of the "River Kwai" railway
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 Hell under the Rising Sun written by Kelly E. Crager and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late in 1940, the young men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment stepped off the trucks at Camp Bowie in Brownwood, Texas, ready to complete the training they would need for active duty in World War II. Many of them had grown up together in Jacksboro, Texas, and almost all of them were eager to face any challenge. Just over a year later, these carefree young Texans would be confronted by horrors they could never have imagined. The battalion was en route to bolster the Allied defense of the Philippines when they received news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Soon, they found themselves ashore on Java, with orders to assist the Dutch, British, and Australian defense of the island against imminent Japanese invasion. When war came to Java in March 1942, the Japanese forces overwhelmed the numerically inferior Allied defenders in little more than a week. For more than three years, the Texans, along with the sailors and marines who survived the sinking of the USS Houston, were prisoners of the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning in late 1942, these prisoners-of-war were shipped to Burma to accelerate completion of the Burma-Thailand railway. These men labored alongside other Allied prisoners and Asian conscript laborers to build more than 260 miles of railroad for their Japanese taskmasters. They suffered abscessed wounds, near-starvation, daily beatings, and debilitating disease, and 89 of the original 534 Texans taken prisoner died in the infested, malarial jungles. The survivors received a hero’s welcome from Gov. Coke Stevenson, who declared October 29, 1945, as “Lost Battalion Day” when they finally returned to Texas. Kelly E. Crager consulted official documentary sources of the National Archives and the U.S. Army and mined the personal memoirs and oral history interviews of the “Lost Battalion” members. He focuses on the treatment the men received in their captivity and surmises that a main factor in the battalion’s comparatively high survival rate (84 percent of the 2nd Battalion) was the comraderie of the Texans and their commitment to care for each other. This narrative is grueling, yet ultimately inspiring. Hell under the Rising Sun will be a valuable addition to the collections of World War II historians and interested general readers alike.
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 Towards the Setting Sun written by James Bradley and published by Timothy Bradley. This book was released on 1984 with total page 184 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 Life on the Death Railway written by Stuart Young and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2013-08-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a young man Stuart Young endured the horrors of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and survived. Later in life, in graphic detail, he recorded the experience the dreadful conditions, the brutal treatment, the sickness and starvation, the merciless routine of forced labour. Yet he also recorded the comradeship among the prisoners, their compassion and strength, and the pastimes and entertainments that helped them to come through an ordeal that is hard to imagine today. First he was held at the notorious Changi camp in Singapore Island, then in the camps in Thailand that accommodated POWs who were forced to work on the Death Railway. Perhaps the most revealing passages of his memoir recall the daily experience of captivity - the ceaseless battle to survive the backbreaking work, the cruelties of the guards and ever-present threat of disease. His account gives a harrowing insight into the daily reality of captivity and it shows why he was determined to document and make sense of what he and his fellow prisoners suffered.
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 The Narrow Road to the Deep North written by Richard Flanagan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014*** Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncleâe(tm)s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanaganâe(tm)s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one manâe(tm)s reckoning with the truth.
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 Burma Thailand Railway of Death written by E. R. Hall and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Railway Man written by Eric Lomax and published by Charnwood. This book was released on 2014 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, Eric Lomax was forced to work on the notorious Burma-Siam Railway, and was tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio. Left emotionally scarred, and unable to form relationships, Lomax suffered for years - until, with the help of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, he came to terms with what had happened. Almost 50 years after the war his life was changed by the discovery that his interrogator, the Japanese interpreter, was still alive; their reconciliation is the culmination of this extraordinary story.
Download or read book Stolen Years written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
