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Surviving The Sword: Prisoners Of The Japanese 1942-45

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To read Brian MacArthur's book is to get a glimpse into hell. There was one chapter in fact I couldn't even read, and how often does that happen. That's the story of the North Borneo camp Sandakan where thousands of Australian prisoners of war were kept for years while they completed work on an airfield (slave labor), and then, when their work was done, they were systematically starved to death by their Japanese captors, in the waning months of World War II. Only six men survived. The book makes you wonder about what happens during war and how do the people in power lose all their humanity and show such inventive cruelty to their captives?

It wasn't only the guards and camp commandants... Each camp had its own collaborators, and some of the black marketers were as nasty and brutal as the Japanese. And then there were the captured Koreans or Thais who, forced to act as guards by the Japanese, rivalled their own captors in cruel games perhaps believing that, if they were more sadistic towards the British and Australian prisoners, they might curry favor with those above them. One thinks of Hannah Arendt's argument about the banality of evil, and wonders how one would have held up oneself under such horrific conditions. Well, I would have died within a few days I'm sure. And maybe conditions in US prisons are just as dehumanizing, ands the picture is too global to see it, but something about the particular set of circumstances in Singapore, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia that staggers the imagination. Based on the contemporary diaries of more than 150 prisoners, diaries kept in secret, some of them buried and re-buried after each entry made, SURVIVING THE SWORD reconstructs a world of contradictions, a world in which cruelty was matched by compassion, infighting by camaraderie, people hurting each other by people helping each other, ignorance by ingenuity. I liked the story of the Rolex firm, after the war, examining a watch that kept perfect time despite having all its parts redone carved out of bamboo by resourceful prisoners with a magnifying glass. And the story of how one remarkable doctor found a way to grow yeast, to save the eyesight of hundreds of suffering prisoners, is the stuff heroic movies are made of.

But don't mention movies to author Brian MacArthur or he'll sit you down and tell you at length about what a bad movie THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVE KWAI was with its Alec Guinness character a libel on the great man the part was modelled on. He estimates that 27 percent of Fepows (Far East Prisoners of War) died in camp, compared to somewhere between 4 and 6 percent of their counterparts held by the Germans or Italians. The figures speak for themselves, but he is an eloquent spokesman as well.