Gavan Daws combined ten years of documentary research and hundreds of interviews with POWs on three continents to write this shattering re-creation of the experience of Allied POWs of World War II in the Pacific – Australian, British, American, and Dutch. The Japanese army took over 140,000 military prisoners, and one in four died at the hands of their captors.
Drawing directly on the vivid memories of survivors, Daws brings the reader heartbreakingly close to the atrocities of the Burma-Siam railway and the Bataan death march, the horrors of Japanese medical experiments, the struggles of POWs to stay alive and remain human, the permanent scars that the survivors carry, and the incomprehensible refusal of their own governments to support their attempts to get an apology from Japan.
Daws' account, which was neither researched nor written under military auspices, is the humanly indispensable reverse side of official history. This book is his 'best effort to tell a story conspicuously absent from the official histories of both sides, missing in action, so to speak: the truth of life according to the POW.' In this, he has succeeded masterfully.
