Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45
Formerly of the LondonTimes, MacArthur recalls the hideous treatment by the Japanese of British, Australian, and colonial soldiers they captured in 1942. For American readers, this topic invokes the movieThe Bridge on the River Kwai; however, MacArthur asserts that the movie's central theme was fiction. The blockheaded British colonel played by Alec Guinness strikes MacArthur as a libel of history's real colonel, Philip Toosey. The author's reasons for praising Toosey as a hero, not the David Lean-created prig, become brutally evident as he recounts Toosey's leadership of his men amid the barbarity by which the Japanese forced their prisoners to build a railroad from Thailand to their army in Burma. The construction was a project in sadism and starvation: tens of thousands died or were intentionally killed. From the survivors' diaries and memoirs, MacArthur topically organizes their ordeals into food, medicine, and human nature stripped naked by the depravity of the Japanese military. A tough history to face but a moving memorial to the men it remembers.Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved