‘Sat 4th March [1944]: Remainder of 11 Group down from up-country. Yoop [Joop Nittel] here. Hope to get discussion circle working with Yoop, Coast, Sully, Fowler and JAR [James A Richardson]. Read Coast’s “Book on Captivity, Part II” [and in a handwritten note added to the typed manuscript and obviously not part of the text of the original diary] (I helped J.C. [John Coast] in editing MS)’ (Richardson IWM, Documents. 1705: 62).

It is impossible now to see how much influence Richardson may have had on the style of John’s eventual reconstructed book, but Richardson’s dairies serve as a reminder that Railroad is an epic built on discussions and events chewed over, analysed and reconstructed in the camps well before John shared them with the wider world.

Railroad is also the story of the frustration of young and relatively young officers with the older officers around them. John’s response to the question #6 from the MI9 questionnaire giving to liberated prisoners about their incarceration—‘Have you any other matter of any kind which you wish to bring to notice?’—is revealing:

‘Yes. It is a great mistake to allow Commanding Officers to lead fighting units in war time who are too old & incapable of fulfilling their duties in many cases. Over and over again Junior Officers are disappointed at lack of support and inefficient handling of the Japanese due to the fact that many of the Senior Officers saw themselves as detached from those who had to work, & were themselves too old to bear any useful part’ (National Archives WO344/369/2).

Arguably, John’s apparent dislike of older authority figures may have been precipitated by his rather fraught relationship with his elitist and somewhat disappointed father. However, Railroad is full of examples of John and his fellow junior officers’ resentment of older senior officers, who they saw as incompetent or hypocritical. John’s feelings on this matter were far from unique as can be seen in similar substantiated complaints made in Richardson’s diary, and in the appendices to this book dealing with practical examples relating to radios and escape attempts.

In more than one of the letters sent to John after the war by his fellow young officers from the camps this feeling of anger towards senior officers remains. However, it would be unfair to say that this is the whole of the picture. John and his fellow junior officers did admire those senior officers who in their judgement could and did protect their men from the Japanese. In John’s view, such men included Lt Colonels ‘Champagne’ Toosey at Kamburi and Owtram at Chungkai, to name just two.

Although it is true to say that in subsequent years at least two of John’s contemporaries remarked that they would in some ways like— in a sense that may seem difficult for anyone brought up with a knowledge of this period to accept—to return to the ‘freedom to think’ of the camps once the railway had been built, it must not be forgotten that Railroad is in part a gripping and authoritative account of war crimes committed between 1942 to 1945.