Inoh appears reticent and nervous when John asks whether the Japanese would have respected the POWs more if they had been ‘heroes’ and had risked being shot by defying their captors and refusing to work—a scene recalled in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Inoh replies that the POWs had not in fact been shot, that it was just a threat, and that any subordination would have more likely resulted in a beating instead; John responds that ‘we were convinced that had we not started work then those machine guns would fire on us.’ This view is corroborated in the documentary by Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Ernest Knights (‘Colonel Day’), who states that officers agreed to work alongside the Other Ranks as they ‘should share in their troubles . . . [though] by doing so we had been guilty of aiding the enemy’ (See Knights (2013)). In the voice-over, John explains that it took the officers ‘three gallant minutes before we decided we would work’. As Colonel Toosey and the other commanding officers had understood, these compromises were a matter of survival.

John goes on to question why the health of the POWs was allowed to deteriorate so much and so rapidly, resulting in a very weakened state. ‘Why did the Japanese, if they wanted a labour force, not keep us healthy?’ he asks to camera. Inoh’s response to this very pragmatic questioning is that there was enough food and that ‘the health of the POWs was quite good’, which John wryly describes as ‘a different definition of good health’. He took further issue with the scenes in the Bridge over the River Kwai film where a British medical officer sent sick men out to work. Dr Hugh de Wardener (‘Ginger de Huguenot’), being interviewed in a London hospital, replies that this never happened, and that a medical officer’s job was to negotiate and protect sick men from being forced out to work.