34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The life and thoughts of a WWII prisoner of war., May 4, 1997
By A Customer
The captive narrative is a standby in American literature. Every war has produced a crop of such memoirs, and the most remarkable thing about them as a group is there essential sameness. Whether the teller is an woman abducted by Indians in colonial days or a aviator shot down over Vietnam, the experience of captivity is singular.
It is also a difficult genre to present well. Nothing much happens to the POW. A day-by day recitation of starvation and waiting does little to engage the reader. And since most POWs were not writers in their previous life, they lack the kind of literary skill necessary to make a the story live.
That is what makes Agnes Keith's 1947 "Three Came Home" so rich. Keith was a writer before her internment by the Japanese in 1942, and used her skill to present an heartbreaking but ultimately affirming narrative of life inside a jungle prison camp.
Agnes Newton Keith came to British Borneo in 1934 as a new bride. Harry Keith was Director of Agriculture for the colony, charged with making trees grow "where before there were none." They settled in Sandakan, North Borneo, where Agnes translated her love of writing into an award-winning book, "Land Below the Winds." In 1940, she gave birth to a son, named George.
George was not yet walking when war clouds began to gather over Borneo. By late 1941, the Japanese were threatening the invasion of the entire South Pacific. Talk in Sandakan revolved around the likelihood of the Government evacuating all European women and children. Agnes, like many other women, decided to stay with her husband.
Invasion came on January 19, 1942. For the next 4 1/2 months, the 80 European residents of Sandakan lived under virtual house arrest. Agnes suffered a miscarriage under the strain. On May 12, they received orders to be ready to move within the hour, They were permitted one suitcase each. Husbands were separated from their wives and children. By nightfall, Agnes and George were dumped into a leaky old Quarantine Station on Berhala Island. They would not be free again until September, 1945.
While there were countless examples of selflessness, captivity did not bring out the best in all people. Some hoarded food and medicine; others told guards about smuggling operations in exchange for favors. Tempers flared, and pre-war civility fell away. Keith recalled one women telling her: "I hate your guts Agnes, and I'm going to tell you so. Although I'd like to be nice to you, just to keep out of that damned book of yours."
And Agnes was writing a book, at great peril. For the next 4 years, she wrote in microscopic letters on any blank scrap of paper she could find. These notes were then hidden in old bottles, in George's toys, sewn into the linings of their clothes. "Land Below the Wind" had been widely read in Japan before the war, so the Camp Authority frequently searched her belongings for these notes. They never found them.
This running diary chronicled her stay at Berhala and their removal to the much larger Batu Lintang complex in Kuching, where she would spend the balance of the war. As with any prison narrative, food was the dominant theme. The standard ration for POWs was rice gruel, rolls, and tea. They did not always get this, and it was never enough. Eggs and bananas were rare treats. This meager diet was supplemented with pickings from the soldiers' garbage, wild greens, snails, snakes, and whatever else could be scrounged. In four years, they received one Red Cross shipment. Each of the 46 Americans was given one box. These had to be divided among 280 hungry prisoners.
Two groups within the prison kept Agnes going. First were Batu Lintang's 46 children. George and the others literally grew up within the compound. Hunger and exposure was the only life they remembered. They were tough because they had to be, but they were also generous, cheerful, and uncomplaining. At the beginning, Agnes and the other young mothers committed themselves to doing whatever it took to keep their children alive. In the end, Agnes mused, "perhaps they brought us through alive."
The children, and the nuns. More than half the 280 women at Batu Lintang were Dutch or English sisters. To Agnes, a non-Catholic, these women were awe-inspiring. "...I met nuns as women, and sisters, and mothers, and hard workers, and my friends. Here I met them as people who sang, and laughed, and made joke and had fun." Inside prison walls, the sisters held Mass and celebrated holy days. "They prayed for peace, believed it would come; set dates, and hours and deadlines for it--and when it didn't come they said "Thy will be done," and prayed again."
The Japanese did not treat the women as badly as male POWs. Men could be killed on a whim. With the women, the guards usually contented themselves with a slap across the face. Far more frightening was the idea of sexual assault. One night late in the war, Agnes was assaulted by a guard. When she reported this attempted rape, the commandant ordered her to withdraw the charge. Falsely accusing a Japanese soldier was a death-penalty offense. Agnes refused to recant. She was promptly and severely beaten. Ultimately, the commandant decided to drop the matter, but the female prisoners suffered several weeks of reprisals from angry guards in the weeks following the incident.
Completely isolated from the outside world, the POWs did not know when or if help was coming. On August 18, 1945, they received a leaflet drop saying that the British Army was on the way. It was three more weeks of agonized waiting, but the camps were eventually liberated on September 11, 1945. Agnes and George were reunited with Harry, and within a week they were on a transport ship to the United States.
"Three Came Home" is a powerful narrative. Keith did not shy away from sensitive issues; she did not try to hide her anger at having a section of her life stolen from her. One caution: some modern readers may find her use of racial slurs offensive. Put in the context of the easygoing racism of the era and the indignities suffered in captivity, her derogatory comments on the Japanese become understandable, if not excusable. In any case, "Three Came Home" is a moving look at a dark chapter in the Pacific War.
Settled in the States, Agnes finally told Harry about her experiences. "One anticipates a some emotion from a man when telling home that his wife has been attacked, kicked and beaten," she wrote. "Subconsciously, I think I expected a little melodrama." Instead, Harry was quiet and sad, but showed little other reaction. That was a prisoners' life, gender notwithstanding. "I saw," she concluded, "that we had come far from our old concepts of honor and disgrace. In war, we women must fight with all ourselves."
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful, December 8, 2005
This book contains the wartime memoirs of Agnes Keith. In 1939, Keith published a book "Land Beneath the Wind," describing her life as the wife of a British colonial official in Northern Borneo. She and her husband Harry were on home leave in North America in 1939 when she finished writing the book. However, Harry was called back early to Borneo from his leave because of the war clouds on the horizon. Agnes, who was pregnant, soon followed, and several months later, gave birth to their son George in Sandakan. Although there had been talk of evacuating women and children from colonial outposts in the Pacific, no orders came through for evacuation before the Japanese invasion, and Agnes refused to leave Harry behind voluntarily. Thus, when the Japanese arrived, all three Keiths were still in Sandakan, and were soon interned in prisoners' camps for the duration of the war. In this book, Keith recounts the stories of how she, George, and Harry survived life in the camps. Her tale was so remarkable that it was made into a movie shortly after the war.
Readers of Keith's earlier book will be stunned at the change in tone of her writing. In Land Beneath the Wind, Keith writes with an airy, scattered-brained style, almost as if she were afraid that otherwise, she would be taken too seriously. Indeed, it was perhaps her humor itself that made her first book popular. But the light tone is gone completely from this book. The nightmare of the prison camps, where random beatings were a certainty, but food was often unattainable, and hygiene nonexistent, took away her carefree nature and matured her overnight beyond her years. For more than three years, she struggled daily to find any kind of food for George, from wormy rice to just plain worms. This woman of colonial privilege traded family heirloom jewelry for a chicken, and learned to hoard night soil for use as fertilizer.
From the start, the Japanese camp leader recognized her as a special prisoner, because he had read Land Beneath the Wind. He required her to keep a journal of her camp adventures for future publication to show how "humane" the Japanese treatment of prisoners had been. So every day, after she completed her required prison work, she had to write for this commander about how wonderful camp life was. When that was finished, she secretly wrote up notes describing what life was really like, and hid them in cans buried under their huts or in the latrines. The most amazing part of her experience is not only that she and George and Harry survived at all, but that through it all, she managed to come away from the camps without blind hatred for the Japanese. She recognized that some of the prison guards were evil, but that many couldn't help but obey their superiors. The years of captivity for the Keiths robbed them of their youth, their health, and the better part of George's childhood, but Agnes finds fault not with Japanese people, but rather with the idea of war itself.
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