The Prisoner and the Bomb. [Hardcover]

Laurens. Van Der Post (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: William Morrow (January 1971)
• ISBN-10: 0688023355
• ISBN-13: 978-0688023355
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,750,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My "MOST IMPORTANT BOOK"-all informed persons should read., November 14, 1999

By 

Bruce Ketron ([e-mail]) (Napa, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Prisoner and the Bomb. (Hardcover)

The author was a Japanese Prisoner of War in present day Indonesia. On the anniversary of the droping of the first atom bomb, by chance, he appears at a television interview of a Japanese physician who lost his family in Hiroshima and the interview covers the familiar ground of the intense suffering caused by the atom bombs. The author realizes that there is an untold aspect of the story that, as great as the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, is necessary to be told so the world will not miss the greater lessons of what happened. The first point of this short book is the author's motivation: he is compelled to tell this story to prevent the misrepresentation that many times happens when we try to reduce an epoch event to a single idea. The author, who suffered horribly as POW and witnessed unspeakable horrors, explains how his very surrival depended upon his forgiveness of the Japanese (and their Korean "converts") guards who perpertrated this inhumanity. The message of the book is that the Japanese culture was on a path of distruction that was impacted by the atom bomb in a way that was unforseen and that saved his life and the lives of millions: certainly over 100,000 prisioners of war in Indonesa as well as millions of Japense soldiers and people as well as many others. The book deals not just the character of the Japanese people in that era but has a broader lesson of what forces were at work to mold and then change a national characteristic which has allowed for the emergence of the present Japan The autor, a British army officer, opposed the executions of the Japanese War Criminals and became an advocate for peace and a staunch opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My "MOST IMPORTANT BOOK"-all informed persons should read., November 14, 1999

By 

Bruce Ketron ([e-mail]) (Napa, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Prisoner and the Bomb. (Hardcover)

The author was a Japanese Prisoner of War in present day Indonesia. On the anniversary of the droping of the first atom bomb, by chance, he appears at a television interview of a Japanese physician who lost his family in Hiroshima and the interview covers the familiar ground of the intense suffering caused by the atom bombs. The author realizes that there is an untold aspect of the story that, as great as the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, is necessary to be told so the world will not miss the greater lessons of what happened. The first point of this short book is the author's motivation: he is compelled to tell this story to prevent the misrepresentation that many times happens when we try to reduce an epoch event to a single idea. The author, who suffered horribly as POW and witnessed unspeakable horrors, explains how his very surrival depended upon his forgiveness of the Japanese (and their Korean "converts") guards who perpertrated this inhumanity. The message of the book is that the Japanese culture was on a path of distruction that was impacted by the atom bomb in a way that was unforseen and that saved his life and the lives of millions: certainly over 100,000 prisioners of war in Indonesa as well as millions of Japense soldiers and people as well as many others. The book deals not just the character of the Japanese people in that era but has a broader lesson of what forces were at work to mold and then change a national characteristic which has allowed for the emergence of the present Japan The autor, a British army officer, opposed the executions of the Japanese War Criminals and became an advocate for peace and a staunch opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Prisoners-of-war of the Japanese in Southeast Asia: An oft-overlooked factor in the debate over the dropping of the atomic bombs, January 3, 2010

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prisoner and the Bomb. (Hardcover)

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) is best known for his books on Africa. He should also be known and remembered for THE PRISONER AND THE BOMB. In WWII, van der Post joined the British Army and in 1942 he was transferred to Allied forces in the Dutch East Indies. He was captured by the Japanese in April 1942 and for the next 3+ years he was a prisoner-of-war in various Japanese prison camps on Java.

The central point of this short book is that the atomic bomb, a seemingly supernatural weapon, provided the Japanese a way to save face and to surrender consistent with their highly refined and perverse notion of honor. As a consequence (one among many), hundreds of thousands of prisoners of the Japanese in Southeast Asia (including van der Post) were saved from the apocalyptic massacre that would have occurred upon the Allied invasion of Southeast Asia, scheduled for September 6, 1945.

Van der Post, who between the Wars had spent time in Japan and was more knowledgeable about the Japanese and their culture than most Westerners, writes convincingly about the Japanese "vengeance of history" syndrome and their perverse sense of honor. Based solely on his knowledge of their culture and psychology, he had feared, in the spring of 1945, that the Japanese defeat would entail cataclysmic destruction of both them and all prisoners under their control. Various actions by the Japanese on Java in June and July 1945 tended to confirm those fears, including the consolidation of prisons and concentration of prisoners, which would facilitate a mass slaughter. Finally, van der Post writes about intelligence reports that Field-Marshall Terauchi, the Japanese commander-in-chief in Southeast Asia (and a Japanese aristocrat and fanatical Imperialist), had issued orders to all his subordinates "that, when the Allies began their final assault in Southeast Asia, they were to kill all their prisoners in their camps, military as well as civilian, and fight to the classical Samurai end." That intelligence was confirmed after the War by Allied intelligence personnel who examined records captured at Terauchi's headquarters.

The downside of THE PRISONER AND THE BOMB is that the writing is far too florid. At points during the book I felt that van der Post's imagination had become so fanciful as to diminish the reliability of his account as history. Still, I am persuaded of his central point. The relevance of that point today, of course, is that in the ongoing debates over the necessity and morality of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between 150,000 and 200,000 Japanese civilians, one should not overlook the upwards of 400,000 Europeans in Japanese captivity who very probably would have been massacred in the fall of 1945 had the bombs not been dropped.