This edition includes the script of the 1969 documentary, in which Coast confronts Takashi and two other Japanese about conditions on the railway, and also Boulle about the way his book had fictionalised real events, and so cast a shadow over FEPOWs (Far East Prisoners of War). Boulle’s semi-fictional ‘Colonel Nicholson’ – who determines to build a better bridge than the Japanese can to keep his men’s discipline – was in fact a twisted version of the much respected Lt Colonel Toosey. Far from being regarded by his men as ‘Jap-happy’, the latter was regarded as a competent officer, who achieved low death rates by carefully calibrating relations with their captors. FEPOW groups – which in the 1950s met regularly, often performing skits of the Japanese ‘tenko’ or roll-call – felt slighted by the insinuation that they had worked willingly. Men such as Coast feared that the wider public might fail to understand both the extreme brutality and danger of torture and death, and also the variety of humanity and inhumanity amongst guards. Hence, for instance, some of the appendices show Coast and other ex-FEPOWs writing character references in favour of select Japanese who faced War Crimes Trials, while in the documentary he probes the Japanese on their threat to machine gun British officers, should they have refused to work alongside their men.

So this is a re-release of a classic and nuanced captivity story, framed by materials that help us to understand battles over the memory of the railway. In addition, the extra materials give the reader enough of a glimpse of the original author to begin to understand this as one of a number of transformational life stories. Unlike Lomax – for whom the railway’s legacy was decades of nightmares and dangerously embedded anger before final resolution – Coast’s war was the launch pad for an entirely new life. Joining the Army had been his escape route from a stultifying job in banking, and on the railway he combined a love for music with Asian cultures, first discovering Javanese dance and gamelan orchestras. After the war, he would quickly return to Asia, leaving the Foreign Office to help to supply propaganda for Sukarno’s anti-Dutch struggle in Indonesia. He subsequently mounted a tour of Balinese dancers to London and New York, before writing more books, managing well-known performers and making contacts in theatre and television. Hence his ability, in 1969, to persuade the BBC to make a documentary about the railway.

In short, here is a simply told story about captivity. One of many stories about Singapore’s Fall, Changi POW camp, and the 61,809 Allied troops who laboured building the ‘Death Railway’ from Thailand to Burma, with its death rate of twenty per cent. But here too is a rich collection of materials that together provide a window onto the ‘Death Railway’, the experience of brutality and humanity in captivity, and of a personal journey from bank clerk to theatrical agent.

Karl Hack

RAILROAD OF DEATH

An Introduction