Kept--the Other Side of Tenko
Author: L. L. Baynes
Publisher: Guild (WI)
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13:
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Forgotten Warrior
Author: Michael Snape
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2023-05-18
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 0281086923
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEighty years after his death in a Japanese prison camp, this compelling new biography charts the career of a distinguished but hitherto neglected hero of the British army. Major-General Merton Beckwith-Smith DSO, MC commanded the British 18th Division during the catastrophic Fall of Singapore in February 1942. A highly respected and much decorated veteran of the First World War, he was captured along with tens of thousands of other soldiers - British, Indian, Australian, and Malay - who were then held prisoner on Singapore Island. Amidst hunger, disease and widespread despair in Changi, over the next six months he rallied the spirits of his soldiers, created a make - shift university and theatre, and helped to inspire a remarkable renewal of collective church life. At the same time, he improved conditions for hospital patients and encouraged sports and other recreations. While the fate of many of the men he led was to toil, and often die, on the infamous Burma Railway, Beckwith-Smith was exiled to Karenko Camp, Formosa (present-day Taiwan), where, mistreated and malnourished, he died of diphtheria and heart failure on 11 November 1942. Beckwith-Smith, was the most senior British officer to end his life as a prisoner of war in the Far East. Yet until now he has been a strangely forgotten warrior. Based on exclusive access to family archives, and drawing on an array of other eye-witness accounts, Michael Snape's richly detailed biography brings to an end that neglect. The result is a story that offers vivid insights into one man's experience of two world wars, while also revealing why he was so admired by his fellow officers and by the ordinary soldiers who served under him.
The Man Behind the Bridge
Author: Peter Davies
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2013-12-17
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1780939620
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey was the senior British officer concerned with the building of the notorious "Bridge over the River Kwai". Toosey understood from the very beginning that the only real issue was how to ensure that as many of his men as possible should survive their captivity. Many thousands who knew how Toosey stood up to their oppressors at great personal risk were incensed by Alec Guinness's brilliant portrayal of 'Colonel Nicholson' in the film version of Boulle's book. This book provides an accurate historical account of the terrible events during which more than 16,000 PoWs died while building the Thai-Burma railway, of which "the bridge" formed an essential part. A memorial to Toosey, this book is also a definitive history of the building of the railway in the context of the Far Eastern theatre of World War II. First published in 1991, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.
The Will to Live
Author: Len Baynes
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-06-26
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 1781593000
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Author kept a diary recording his 1,000 days of captivity at the hands of the Japanese army. The difficulties and risks involved in this task were immense, yet he persevered although it meant deliberately defacing and cutting up the small pieces of paper. As a result, his memoir is both contemporaneous and entirely reliable.??Reading this account of life and death during the fruitless fighting and his subsequent captivity in numerous camps in Singapore and on the Death Railway in Thailand is a humbling and moving experience. He describes not just the appalling hardship and brutality but, tellingly, his relationships with fellow POWs, his captors and the local population. As an NCO, Len found himself fronting up for his men and, being a self-sufficient man with strong beliefs, this led to some difficult situations, at times, with both the Japanese and his British superiors. While critical about a number of the latter, he has nothing but respect for others such as the legendary Colonel Toosey of Tamarkan Camp.??Thanks to his honest and direct style, The Will To Live is a fine and inspiring firsthand example of the ever popular Japanese POW/Railway of Death genre. It reveals much about the nightmare experiences suffered by the Author and his colleagues and the way they coped under the most adverse conditions. His drawings complement the text and the Foreword by Ronald Searle, also a POW, speaks for itself.
The Other Side of Tenko
Author: L. L. Baynes
Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780745104539
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Ally to Enemy
Author: Philip Towle
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2021-11-01
Total Pages: 213
ISBN-13: 9004213643
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis study, closely researched by Philip Towle over the past thirty years, is principally concerned with the military relations between Britain and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century and the ambivalence, misunderstandings and misconceptions that informed their relationship, described by the author as ‘an epic tragedy’. Following the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, Japan was held up as a model in Britain and Britain in Japan. But within a generation, the British came to see Japan as the first country to challenge the League of Nations and to begin a new age of imperialism. Conversely, the Japanese armed forces saw Britain as the greatest obstacle to Japanese ambitions in China and elsewhere. In 1936, Lieutenant Commander Tota Ishimaru’s book Japan Must Fight Britain was printed in Britain, its significance ignored at many levels, and five years later the two countries were at war. ‘The feelings stirred up by that conflict,’ notes Towle, ‘still have resonance today.’ From Ally to Enemy brings together a most important body of research that is long overdue in book form and will be widely welcomed by historians and researchers of the period, as well as those seeking more detailed analysis of specific aspects of the pre-war Anglo-Japanese military relationship.
The Real Tenko
Author: Mark Felton
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
Published: 2010-03-10
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1848849664
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe author of Children of the Camps delves into the harrowing true stories behind the TV drama: the fate of women held in Japanese captivity during WWII. This book details the treatment of Allied servicewomen, female civilians, and local women by the Japanese occupation forces, including the massacres of nurses (such as that at Alexandra Hospital, Singapore), disturbing atrocities on both Europeans and Asians, and accounts of imprisonment. It reveals how many ended up in Japanese hands when they should have been evacuated. Also covered are the hardships of long marches and the sexual enslavement of white and native women (so called “Comfort Women”). The book is a testimony both to the callous and cruel behavior of the Japanese and to the courage and fortitude of those who suffered at their hands. “This well-researched book has to be read.” —UK Ministry of Defence “The story of the Allied medical staff who were caught in Japan’s wave of terror during the Second World War . . . briefly follows the fate of Australian nursing survivors as they try to rebuild their shattered lives.” —Soldier Magazine “Accounts of Japanese brutality towards Allied prisoners of war are quite well known, but the fate of the tens of thousand[s] of Allied women and children who fell into their hands is not so familiar (at least since memories of the TV drama Tenko have faded). This harrowing account should go some way towards redressing that balance . . . an important piece of work looking at an aspect of the Second World War that should not be forgotten.” —HistoryOfWar.org
Japanese Prisoners of War
Author: Philip Towle
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2000-01-01
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 1852851929
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDuring the Second World War the Japanese were stereotyped in the European and American imagination as fanatical, cruel and almost inhuman. This view is unhistorical and simplistic. It fails to recognise that the Japanese were acting at a time of supreme national crisis and it fails to take account of their own historical tradition. The essays in Japanese Prisoners of War, by both Western and Japanese scholars, explore the question from a balanced viewpoint, looking at it in the light of longer-term influences, notably the Japanese attempt to establish themselves as an honorary white race. The book also addresses the other side of the question, looking at the treatment of Japanese prisoners in Allied captivity.
Prisoner Without A Crime
Author: Jack Jennings
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2011-11-20
Total Pages: 162
ISBN-13: 1470961105
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJack Jennings, a carpenter by trade, was called upon to use his skills in the most harrowing of circumstances. Captured by the Japanese at Singapore, he was forced to work in slave-like conditions on the notorious Death Railway. He was fortunate enough to survive the horrors of working in the inhospitable jungles of Siam. This is his story, told in his words
The China-Burma-India Campaign, 1931-1945
Author: Eugene L. Rasor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 1998-03-19
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 031337080X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe China-Burma-India campaign of the Asian/Pacific war of World War II was the most complex, if not the most controversial, theater of the entire war. Guerrilla warfare, commando and special intelligence operations, and air tactics originated here. The literature is extensive and this book provides an evaluative survey of that vast literature. A comprehensive compilation of some 1,500 titles, the work includes a narrative historiographical overview and an annotated bibliography of the titles covered in the historiographical section. Following an introductory historical essay and a chronology, the historiographical narrative covers land, water, underwater, air, and combined operations, intelligence matters, diplomacy, and logistics and supply. It also examines the memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, and biographies of the personnel involved. Such cultural topics as journalism, fiction, film, and art are analyzed, and existing gaps in the literature are looked at. The bibliography provides both descriptive and evaluative annotations.
