All that remains now of Nogoochi’s Kanburi Camp is a young jungle of castor-oil bushes and a rapidly falling in and disappearing bund. Nothing else at all – not even the Camp gate-posts. In Chungkai it is the same story, but a young village exists where the huts used to be, while the papaya trees in the old Officers’ Gardens are now over twenty feet high and border a prosperous row of village houses. Kanburi itself and old friends in it seem exactly as before.

I think it will be a very long time indeed before the inhabitants of that part of Siam forget our forced intrusion upon them.

John Coast

INTRODUCTION

This book is the personal narrative of a Subaltern taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore, and released on August 16th, 1945, at Kanchanaburi, in Thailand.

It is a very nearly completely true book. Though I have tried deliberately to remain as objective as possible, I do claim that readers of this story may genuinely feel that they in part understand the unique and amazing years we Far Eastern prisoners had to endure.

Though the names of all the Allied characters have been invented, and though I have sometimes rolled a few of them up together and typified them as one man, every single Japanese in this book is called by his right name and is very much a real person.

Various apologies are necessary.

I apologise to the Other Ranks. They had a worse time than the Officers and I very much hope that some of them will write a history from their viewpoint. Though always sympathetic to, and aware of the O.R.s’ more wretched position, this book can but remain the work of a Subaltern and an individualist.

I have tried to check the details of every story here related. I am certain about nearly all of them, and if little points in some of them are wrong, the main ideas or outlines remain true or typical.

Lastly, there will be many saying: ‘Well, we never thought John Coast would let them continue to get away with it. Why! he doesn’t even mention the story of the Baby Bear and the Chungkai Hospital Accounts!’ To them I can only reply: ‘Gentlemen, to my relief, I’m not a Public Prosecutor!’

John Coast

PART ONE: SINGAPORE

PART ONE

SINGAPORE

CHAPTER 1

FEBRUARY 15th, 1942, and a black pall of smoke covers the whole island of Singapore. Three main, dense, black columns from burning oil unite to form an almost solid layer of thick, acrid smoke, that stretches from the Naval Base in the north of the island, to the rubber dumps of the Bukit Timah Road in the centre, to the Go-Downs by the Empire Docks in the south. At last a silence has fallen on the desolated twenty by fifteen miles that comprise Singapore Island, a silence broken only by the sputtering of flames and the occasional delayed explosion of ammunition.