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New Book: Captive Fathers, Captive Children

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“Captive Fathers, Captive Children: Legacies of the War in the Far East”

By Dr Terry Smyth

Defeated and disorientated in the heat and humidity of Java, my father, Edwin Smyth, was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army. It was the spring of 1942, and he was to spend the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war, including three years in Japan enslaved as a coal miner. Until his death in 1995 he remained greatly troubled by his memories, and his traumatic wartime experiences had a profound effect on me and on the wider family.

While a young child, I also often felt ‘defeated and disorientated’, by the atmosphere in the home. As the years rolled on, I continued to wonder why seven decades after the war so many of us remained fascinated by our fathers’ experiences of captivity and why we invested countless hours and days researching the facts and attending remembrance events. I was desperate to know how my childhood experiences compared with those of other sons and daughters of Far East POWs, and in what ways our memories of childhood had shaped our later lives. (Some questions don’t go away do they, even after decades and decades?)

After retiring from full-time employment in 2003, I began to read through my father’s papers. This reading, together with burgeoning online resources, were the triggers for my wife and I to travel to Japan in 2010 where we were able to visit the site of my father’s incarceration (Hiroshima 6b camp, near Mine City). At that point, I had to make a decision: either I would have to commit to taking this research further, or accept that I had gone as far as I could.

Faced with this fork in the road, curiosity won the day, and I decided to tackle the question head on. In October 2013, I started a full time PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, graduating in the summer of 2017 just days after my 70th birthday.

During my research, I had contact with almost one hundred children of FEPOWs from all corners of the British Isles (and a few overseas), and undertook lengthy interviews with forty. As expected, these conversations were wide-ranging, challenging and emotionally demanding, made more so by the fact that they covered several decades of lived experience. Without exception, each interview offered new insights and fresh understandings, and I am exceedingly grateful to every participant for their trust and openness.

In June 2020, I signed a book contract with Bloomsbury Academic, one of the UK’s leading publishers. The book is part of their ‘New Directions in Social and Cultural History’ series, and sets out the results of my research into the life time consequences of having a FEPOW father. It aims to show how memory and trauma became ‘worked into’ the psychic, social and cultural lives of the children, how individual lives are touched by global events. Every family was affected in one way or another by the father’s FEPOW trauma, and I have not shied away from discussing and analysing the more troubling aspects of the children’s experiences, my own included. Taken together, these examples provide incontrovertible evidence of the incredible strength, resilience and courage of the participants in this research.

Cover: “Captive Fathers, Captive Children:
Legacies of the War in the Far East”

The seven chapters that comprise ‘Captive Fathers, Captive Children’ are as follows:

  1. Life in captivity
  2. Bringing war into the home
  3. Remembering and commemorating
  4. Finding meaning in memories
  5. Home as a site of remembrance
  6. The search for military family histories
  7. Place and pilgrimage

Sir Tim Hitchens, British Ambassador to Japan from 2012 to 2017, was kind enough to write the Foreword.

Although the book has been published by Bloomsbury Academic, wherever possible I have written it to appeal to a wider audience, most importantly the families of FEPOWs, as well as to those scholars and others interested in methodology, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of war more generally.

To date, the book has been published in digital and hardback versions, and the paperback will appear in July 2023. You can find further details on the Bloomsbury website.

Dr Terry Smyth is a Community Fellow in the Department of History at the Univeristy of Essex. You can view his profile here.

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New Book: Tigers in Captivity

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By Ken Hewitt

Tigers in Captivity

The 1st Battalion Leicestershire Regiment in the Malaya Campaign and as Far East Prisoners of War 1941-1945.

by Ken Hewitt

Ken’s research into his father’s military career with the Leicestershire Regiment started in 2006 and quickly led to an interest in all 936 men of the 1st Battalion who fought in the Malaya Campaign, many of whom became Far East prisoners of war under the Japanese.

In 2015, to commemorate VJ70, he presented his research findings to an audience of 100 FEPOWs, descendants, Regimental veterans and other interested parties. Following the talk, he was strongly encouraged to document his findings more formally and now, seven years later after further research, writing and re-writing, sorting of photographs and creation of charts and maps, his book, Tigers in Captivity, is finally published.

The book starts with the Battalion’s move from India to Malaya in early 1941 and continues with the defensive actions and withdrawal, from Jitra in the north to Singapore in the south over a 55-day period following the Japanese invasion of Malaya in December 1941. It describes the early encounters with the enemy, the chaotic withdrawal from Jitra and the amalgamation with the 2nd Battalion East Surrey Regiment to form the British Battalion.  The subsequent defensive actions of the British Battalion at Kampar, Batang Berjuntai and Batu Pahat and on Singapore Island are all addressed. It continues with the eventual surrender of Singapore, the so called “Impregnable Fortress”. Those who are known to have escaped the island around this time are identified and, where known, their ultimate fate recorded.

Nearly 700 men of the battalion were now prisoners of war and Tigers in Captivity goes on to describe the movements of the captives around the Far East – the work parties in Singapore, the transfers of men to Japan and other Far East countries and the exodus to Thailand to build the infamous death railway. Even after the railway was completed the horrors continued with malnutrition, illness and disease, hard labour, brutality and ‘hellship’ transfers to Japan. Liberation finally arrived in August 1945 and the book addresses the repatriation of these now ex-POWs and the post war situation in which they found themselves.

Of the 354 men of the 1st Btn Leicestershire Regiment who were killed in action or who died as prisoners of war, 196 (more than half) have no known grave and are remembered on the Singapore Memorial, Kranji War Cemetery.

Every man who was killed in action, or who died as a prisoner of war, is remembered by name at the appropriate point in the text and specific information on the circumstances of his death and grave location is given.

Summary Charts present the statistics of the Malaya Campaign and the subsequent captivity. Movement Tables list the men in each of the POW movement parties and an A-Z listing of all 936 men summarises their fate and movements during this period. An extensive bibliography lists the sources of information and provides readers with a signpost to further relevant reading.

The main purpose of the book is to enable descendants of these men to develop a better understanding of the Malaya Campaign and the period of captivity which their relative experienced. Not only is Tigers in Captivity the definitive historical record of the 1st Battalion Leicestershire Regiment during this period, it provides a tangible ‘family’ memorial not only to the men who died at the time but also to those who survived and are no longer with us.

We will remember them.

Copies of the book are available at a cost of  £25 + postage and packaging directly from the author, Ken Hewitt at kenhewitt@ntlworld.com   or the publisher at www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop

For further information visit:   www.tigersincaptivity.co.uk.

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NEW BOOK: POW ON THE SUMATRA RAILWAY

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My name is Christine Bridges and John Geoffrey Lee, (Geoff) is my dad and I promised him, before he died on 22nd of June 2002, that I would get his book published. Finally, from the 30th of June 2022 his amazing story can now be told. 

Geoff joined the RAF on his 20th birthday on 26th June 1941 and trained as ground crew. In November 1941 with his unit, he boarded the Empress of Asia in Liverpool, but no one knew where they were headed. Travelling south, Christmas was spent in Durban and then they were transferred to another ship and onto Egypt. They were then chasing the Blenheim planes which were being flown to the Far East. Eventually Geoff and his compatriots found themselves in Java after being chased from Sumatra by the invading Japanese. In March 1942 the men capitulated to the Japanese, after they over ran Java. Geoff was posted as a deserter to his family back in Nottingham. 

For the next two years Geoff was transported around prison camps, somehow surviving four hell ship journeys from Java to Ambon, Ambon back to Java, Java to Changi. From Changi he was transported on a river steamer which blew up. Already suffering from malnutrition, malaria and many other diseases, Geoff and a few survivors were washed ashore twenty-four hours later and recaptured on the island of Sumatra. They were then sent to the Sumatra Railway. Here they were treated as slaves to build a railway across the equator, in appalling jungle conditions with the loss of many lives. Forced to carry heavy rails, man handle train engines, work in searing heat and a flooded river, only scant amounts of food, no medical equipment, bouts of malaria, and extreme cruelty and brutality from the guards – how anyone survived is a miracle. The railway was finished on the 18th of August 1945, and it was common knowledge that all the prisoners were to be executed, although the prisoners didn’t know what the date was. On the 19th all the guards had fled. Geoff was liberated on 20th September 1945 weighing only 6 stone and with a badly infected foot from a bayonet stabbing inflicted by a guard. 

Geoff arrived home on the 16th of December 1945 and was sent to hospital at RAF Cosford. Almost straight away, when asked where he’d been in the war, no one believed him. They said there was no such place as the Sumatra Railway and he must have been on the Burma Railway, but this was completed before the Sumatra Railway had started and it was 2000 miles away from Sumatra. They were also told not to talk about their experiences, so he didn’t. He also had to make notes about all that he remembered while at Cosford.

He eventually recovered, although he suffered from Malaria all his life, and just got on with life. Eventually in the 1970’s he started to talk and tried to find out about the Sumatra Railway. He had his paybook (below) which said he’d been in Sumatra, but still no one had heard of it despite contacting the Imperial War Museum, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the MOD. The letters and many photos are shown in his book.      

Way before computers, he managed to contact three other people who had been on the railway. One in Australia, one in New Zealand and one in Holland. They also were not being believed. As no one believed him, he decided to do something about it and in 1980 he went out to Singapore by Concorde and onto Sumatra, and with the help of the Caltex Oil Company, he found engines in the jungle villages. With the evidence he obtained, he submitted it to the IWM, CWGC and MOD but it was in the mid 1980’s before they acknowledged that he was in fact correct. He received many apologies especially from the FEPOW community as many did not believe him and this also meant a lot more men came forward who had been on the Sumatra Railway. Geoff decided to write a book, using his notes written at Cosford. This took him five years to write on a typewriter with two fingers. When he began to send out articles to newspapers and publishers, they were returned as ‘Just another Burma Railway story’. His book is so much about bravery, grit and determination, not only to survive but to prove that he was right all along, and he has shown the world what has been woefully under reported. 

Geoff died in 2002 just before his 81st birthday and I can finally say to my dad, I’ve fulfilled my promise to you.

POW on the Sumatra Railway by Geoffrey Lee and edited by Christine and Eddie Bridges is available now.

Books

New Book: “Captured at Singapore”

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“Captured at Singapore” by Jill Robertson and Janice Slimming, is a formal record of their father’s experience in one of the UK’s longest periods of war in the last 200 years. The small diary account recorded by a Royal Army Service Corps Driver, while residing under the hospitality of the Japanese in WWII, is another opportunity for future generations to understand and learn from history about the horrific atrocities of the Far Eastern years of POW captivity, from 1942 – 1945.

Book Cover of Captured at Singapore


Many war stories have been written for posterity. Captured at Singapore is structured through our father’s experiences of plight and fear in terrible, adverse conditions while being incarcerated by another culture. The diarised words may only be a small account and not a particularly heroic one, but it is our family’s account of a time that should never be repeated, if we are to be living and believing in a peaceful World. — Jill Robertson & Jan Slimming.


Stanley Albert William Moore a young man from Tooting, South London is gratefully, the only family who had to endure such wartime hardship. He is their unsung hero.

Sisters, Jill and Janice, through their research, have found it humbling to now understand this increasingly forgotten period of history, which may slowly fade away as those who experienced this episode reach old age and memories dwindle. Stan was part of the secret convoy from Liverpool, to Canada, then onward destined for desert warfare, fighting for King and Country, or so they thought. Instead, this book reveals the delights and insights into their experience at sea and ultimately the terrible plight during three and half years of captivity, by aggressors in WWII. It was so different to what could have happened: a toss of a dice and change in world affairs, meant their lives were spun in an entirely different direction. Stan’s direction was altered on 7 December 1942. Or was the die cast before?


While the European fascist dictatorship tried starving the British People into submission in 1940-1943, in another part of the World, thousands were already being starved to death, let alone submission, in the Far East. [This refers to the Hitler regime, and the Chinese/Hong Kong/ Vichy France atrocities. These last two invasions already carried out by the Japanese in their endeavours to claim parts of the Far East as their own Empire, dominate the entire coastal area of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.] From the miniscule diary that Stanley kept, he
re-wrote – in simplistic form, notes to ‘show and tell’ for his grand-childrens’ primary school history lessons. Eventually, his own spoken, extremely understated account was recorded on a Philips cassette tape recorder for posterity, in the early ‘90s. Delving into old photo albums, discovering delicate newspaper cuttings, documents, reference books, etc., compiling this book has been rewarding, cathartic and informative. Through the sisters’ research they overturned a few stones that have answered many of the questions, since his passing in October 2001, there are still some pieces to fit into the puzzle, as with most Prisoners of War, they did not want to, or they were ordered not to, reveal their own specific experience. Many horrific episodes were discovered. Could these have happened to Stan? Perhaps the family will never know. The story unfolds entwined with other small connecting episodes by a handful of other PoWs, where their paths meet and experiences are corroborated.


The authors’ aim is to provide an important reference work for future generations so they too can understand the ordeals their 1940s predecessors went through. It will be another source of referral in the hope the family names mentioned in the diary-cum-address book which Stanley had also written on the reverse, will come forward, or perhaps their ancestors will to reconcile these soldiers’ memories and discover more about their own family hero, before this part of history becomes just another fading sentence about being Captured at Singapore.

Captured at Singapore is due to be published 30th June 2022. For more details please visit the Pen and Sword website.

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You Must Endure: The Lancashire Loyals in Japanese Captivity, 1942-1945

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By Chris Given-Wilson

Among the 80,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners who surrendered to the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in February 1942 were around 600 officers and men of the 2nd Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, most of whom would spend the great majority of the next three and a half years in Korea’s Number One Prisoner-of War Camp at Seoul (renamed Keijo following the 1910 Japanese annexation). One of them was my father, 2nd Lt. Paddy Given-Wilson, who, together with two other Loyals officers, Capt. John Turner and Lt Tom Henling Wade, decided shortly after their capture, in order to ‘occupy a few idle minds’, to write and circulate a camp magazine which they called Nor Iron Bars. Fourteen issues were produced over the next three and a half years, totalling 516 pages. Great care was taken to conceal them, and despite snooping guards and frequent searches the Japanese never discovered the magazine. Had they done so, severe punishment would certainly have followed. When the war ended, therefore, it was brought back to Preston, where it was bound and displayed in the Lancashire Infantry Museum at Fulwood Barracks, where it is still kept.

A humorous take on the discovery of the magazine by the guards, with forged censor’s stamp.
 


Nor Iron Bars is an extraordinary but barely-known illustration of life in one of Japan’s more obscure POW camps. Not just a story, but, literally, an illustration. Every issue contained between twenty and forty drawings, cartoons (often deeply subversive) and even paintings, many of them done by extremely talented artists such as Capt. Donald Teale, the magazine’s ‘resident’ artist. And if the artwork was subversive, so too are the poems, plays and topical, often very humorous articles about camp life which made up the majority of the contributions. All these have been woven together with diaries, letters, war crimes trial transcripts and other documents to re-create the story of life at Keijo in You Must Endure, which is published by Carnegie Press, Lancaster, in October 2021.

You must endure: the Lancashire Loyals in Japanese Captivity, 1942–1945 (ISBN 978-1-910837-35-1) by Chris Given-Wilson.

There is no doubt that, relatively speaking, Keijo was one of the better places to be a prisoner of the Japanese between 1942 and 1945. Yet even here brutality, medical neglect and gnawing hunger were everyday events. Beatings and incarceration in the guardroom for days at a time, regardless of the fearsome Korean winter or the almost unbearable summer heat, were routine. So inadequate was the food that most of the prisoners lost a quarter or more of their body weight. In such circumstances, a camp magazine which combined humour with news, story-telling and wistful memories of better days, did much to lift spirits at the time and now provides fascinating insights into the resilience and resourcefulness of brave men experiencing the grim reality of Japanese captivity.

You must endure: the Lancashire Loyals in Japanese Captivity, 1942–1945 by Chris Given-Wilson is £9.99 and is available NOW with a 10% discount direct from the publishers on 01524 840111, or by visiting http://www.carnegiepublishing.com, and in selected booksellers.

Information correct at time of posting

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My Father’s Experiences as a POW

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By Paul Murray

I have recently published a book, “From the Gaeltacht to Galicia: a Son’s Tale”, which includes, as one of its main themes, my father’s experiences as a POW in Changi between February 1942 and May 1943, his transfer on the prison ship Wales Maru to mainland Japan, and his onward journey to the northern island of Hokkaido where he was imprisoned in six further camps until September 1945. My book follows on from the setting up of a website by my brother Carl in August 2020 called thebelfastdoctor.info where he published the secret diaries in the form of love letters from our Dad to the woman who was to become our Mum.

Paul’s parents on Newcastle Beach in N. Ireland with Slieve Donard in the background (Image courtesy of Paul Murray)

Using the diaries in which, apart from one month, there is an entry every day for 42 months, I travelled to Singapore in October 2017 and on to Japan to follow in his footsteps. This special pilgrimage proved to be an emotional roller coaster but I was so glad that I went as, with the help of a guide and an interpreter, I met numerous historians and museum curators who were able to piece together the story of some of the British, Dutch and American POWs in the ten camps on the island. I even met an elderly Japanese man who claimed to have met my father when he was imprisoned in what proved to be the worst of the camps, Muroran.

My father’s name was Major Francis J. Murray and he was the chief MO as well as the senior CO in two of the six camps on Hokkaido where he was in charge of 350 British prisoners. He was awarded the military MBE when he returned to N Ireland after the war to set up a practice as a GP in a working class area of north Belfast.

Major Francis J. Murray at Chitose Aerodrome near Sapporo, Hokkaido, on 13th September 1945. (Image courtesy of Paul Murray)

During my visit to Singapore, I met up with one of my sisters who flew in from her home in Canada and, together with the son of the country’s former first chief minister in 1955, David Marshall, we re-enacted our dads’ walk from the Padang beside St Andrew’s Anglican Cathedral along the route of the 14 mile march into captivity at Changi.

On Hokkaido, Dad was incarcerated for one week in Hakodate, four months in Yakumo, 19 months in Muroran, five weeks in Raijo (all the POW accounts I have read including my Dad’s know this camp as Nishi Ashibetsu), two weeks in Utashinai, and two months in Akabira. The only building still standing on its original site on the island is now a café in what was once the compound of the camp at Hakodate on the outskirts of the town. A television crew from Japan’s national station NHK together with a reporter from a local newspaper covered my visit to Hakodate and Yakumo. Later on my first day at Hakodate, I was taken to a temple which used to be the camp hospital and which has been reconstructed in another part of the town. There is a small plaque in the temple with the names of some of the British and Dutch POWs who died during captivity. Included on it are some of the thirteen men who died on my father’s watch and who are all buried at the Commonwealth War Cemetery at Yokohama. On my visit to Tokyo a few days earlier, I had laid poppy crosses at the graves of each of the men. Our guide at the camp at Hakodate and the Eizenji Temple was Masatoshi Asari, an elderly local historian, who was responsible for erecting the symbolic plaque of reconciliation and for bringing the story of the foreign prisoners to the attention of school children on the island.

My visits to Yakumo where the men constructed an air strip in the summer and autumn of 1943, and Muroran where they provided slave labour in the Wanishi Iron and Steel Works, proved to be equally fascinating though tinged with great emotion when I learnt more details about the tragic deaths of Signalman Stan Faunch at the former, and Private Raymond Suttle among the twelve at the latter.

An extract of Major Francis J. Murray’s secret diary. (Image courtesy of Paul Murray)

My book has a special focus on two Japanese officers whose treatment of the POWs was markedly different. Lieutenant Kaichi Hirate was camp commandant at Muroran and Raijo. Lieutenant Colonel Shigeo Emoto had overall responsibility for all the camps on Hokkaido between March 1944 and May 1945.

The stunning autumn colours of the interior were in stark contrast to the bleakness of the port at Muroran and it was so very special to gather in a clearing in the middle of the woods at Dad’s fourth camp, Raijo, to picture what he called his proudest moment when, on 5 September 1945, he was presented with a giant scroll of tribute by the British and American POWs.

I am indebted to two women from the POW Research Network Japan, Taeko Sasamoto and Yoshiko Tamura, who gave me so much assistance throughout my special pilgrimage to their country. They are among a number of volunteers who are continuing to bring the stories of the Allied POWs in all the camps in Japan to the attention of its people and, ultimately, to a far wider audience with the future publication of a book.

Cover of From the Gaeltacht to Galicia: a Son’s Tale by Paul Murray

As for my own book, it is available for purchase in paperback form at thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk  Any money I make from it will go to the arthritis charity NASS.

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“Children’s book written by Japanese PoW in weekly instalments for son at boarding school printed 75 years later after manuscript found in loft”

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A book, written by Arthur Stirby in installemts so that it could be sent to his son in boarding school, has been published 75 years later.

Arthur Stirby was a Japanese POW Camp survivor and wrote the book about a dog to “build a link” with his son Robert.

You can read more about the book, Now It Can Be Told, and how it came to be publsihed here.

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Did Allied Strategy Prolong FEPOW Suffering?

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By Mary Monro, author of Stranger In My Heart (Unbound, 2018)

We naturally focus on the long, terrible suffering of the FEPOWs. But what if there could have been an earlier end to the war? This is the question that struck me when I uncovered my father’s part in trying to liberate the PoWs in Hong Kong.

Major John Monro RA escaped, with two colleagues, from Sham Shui Po PoW camp in Hong Kong in February 1942, making their way 1500 miles across China to the wartime capital at Chongqing. In August 1942 he was made Assistant Military Attaché there, where his chief role was liaison with Col Lindsay Ride, founder of the British Army Aid Group (BAAG), a humanitarian and intelligence organisation supporting the Hong Kong PoWs.

My father also had close links with US Air Force Chief of Staff, Col Merian Cooper, who served General Chennault of Flying Tigers fame. Cooper had long been a pilot and he was also a film maker, creating and co-directing King Kong. He flies the plane that kills the beast in the final scene.

Images courtesy of Mary Monro

In autumn 1942 the Japanese seemed to be an unstoppable force and competing strategies were being considered by Allied Command. General Stilwell, Commander of Allied Forces in China, was an infantryman and land war proponent. Chennault was a forward thinking airman who believed that retaking control of China’s airspace and major ports would enable the Allies to attack Japanese shipping, disrupt their supply lines and ultimately attack the Japanese islands themselves.

Part of Chennault’s analysis was the intelligence supplied to him by BAAG, giving him confidence in his plan to retake Hong Kong. My father saw an opportunity to liberate the PoWs as part of this plan, knowing that they were now too weak and sick to escape. He put his idea to Cooper and Ride and they hammered out the details.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the air war strategy was approved and reported in the press – an interesting read for the Japanese! Chennault and Stilwell travelled to Washington for the Trident Conference in May 1943, where they put their detailed and opposing plans to President Roosevelt. He was in favour of the air plan, as was Churchill, who famously said ‘going into swampy jungles to fight the Japanese is like going into the water to fight a shark.’

The air plan won the vote and Roosevelt wrote a directive for the War Department. He showed it to Chennault to check that it included everything he needed, but omitted to sign it, ‘FDR’. The War Department was headed by land war and Stilwell supporters, who ensured the error was never corrected. Chenault never received the planes, pilots, ammunition and fuel that he needed. The land war in Burma went ahead, with huge suffering and loss of life. Had Chennault’s plan been properly resourced, perhaps the war in the Far East would have ended early. Allied resources would have redeployed to Europe, shortening the war there. As many as 9 million lives might have been saved.

Mary’s book, Stranger in my Heart, please click the image to go the book’s website.

Books

‘The Borneo Graveyard 1941–1945’

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By John Tulloch

Borneo, the land of the head hunter, was a WW2 graveyard for POWs, internees, locals, Javanese and Japanese.

The narrative follows the raising of five air defence regiments in 1939, their deployment to South East Asia in late 1942, their short campaign in the Netherlands East Indies and eventual captivity as POWs in Java and then North Borneo.

This book portrays the horrific story of Borneo during the Japanese occupation of 1941-1945. Thousands of Australian, British, Dutch and Indian POWs, internees, locals of Borneo and Javanese perished in Borneo during this period.

The Borneo Graveyard 1941-1945, by John S. M. Tulloch

Allied POWs, who were sent to various POW camps in British and Dutch Borneo, were to die of maltreatment, malnutrition or execution. Many were forced to walk Death Marches in the jungle with a horrifying conclusion. Internees were held in internment camps and suffered dreadfully. The local populace suffered; torture, executions and massacres occurred and malnutrition was endemic. At great personal sacrifice they helped the POWs and internees. The secretive Z Force gathered intelligence and trained local guerrilla fighters. In 1945, the Australian military engaged in bitter fighting to liberate Borneo.

This book closes with the convalescence of survivors at Labuan, followed by the repatriation of British POWs and internees, and the dreadful wall of silence experienced by so many on returning to the United Kingdom.

This book is a tribute to the strength of character and bravery of those who endured the Japanese occupation.

The author, John Tulloch, served for eight years in the New Zealand Army including a 12 month Tour of Duty in Vietnam (68/69). He served 30 years in the British Army and then 12 years in the MOD Civil Service. For 21 years he was a visiting instructor on the Jungle Warfare Instructors Course in Brunei. He has trekked and climbed extensively in Sabah and Sarawak and has an extensive knowledge of the area. He has written articles and given talks on Vietnam and Borneo. This is his first book. He was honoured with the MBE in 2003.







  • The author on part of the 164 mile Death March route in 2016. The POWs faced 33 river/stream crossings in 1945



  • The author. In the Sarawak jungle



  • Members of the Royal Artillery group, on Ex SABAH SALUTE, who walked the 164 mile Death March route in August 2011 as an Act of Remembrance

Additional Information:

ISBN 978-983-3987-65-8                   Format: Hardback

Dimensions: 26x20x3 cm                   Pages: 472

Published: March 2020                       Cost: £25 plus p&p.

Contact and sole distributor: johnsmtulloch@gmail.com

For more information about the book and author please see the below flyer:

Book Flyer_01 -Borneo GraveyardDownload