A classic account of captivity, escape and survival. As a prisoner of the Japanese in the Second World War , author Eric Burgoyne movingly narrates how he and his comrades fought to retain human dignity in the face of their captors’ appalling brutality, and of disease, starvation and death.

Signals RSM Eric Burgoyne was one of the fortunate few to escape Japanese captivity after the fall of Singapore. But it was a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ for Burgoyne’ and his comrades, who were captured by the Japanese after they occupied the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In this heart-rending and painstakingly reconstructed memoir of his time in Japanese hands, Burgoyne recalls his own and his comrades’ suffering as they toiled as forced labourers to build the notorious ‘railway of death’ for the Imperial Japanese Army. Treated with contempt - and often with cruelty - by their captors (the title comes from a derogatory phrase by Japanese Emperor Hirohito who called his captives ‘the tattered remnants of a degenerate nation’ ) - Burgoyne’s imprisonment became a gruelling and ultimately successful battle to hold on to his dignity and human status in the face of appalling odds and amidst conditions of starvation, brutality, disease and death. Even after the ‘British Sumatra Battalion’ were scattered through Thailand, Malaya and Indonesia - racked by illness, dressed in rags and in skeletal shape - they remained determined to escape and survive.

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Details


Product Code:	10862
Author:	Eric Burgoyne; foreword Richard Page, MP
Format:	448pp, b/w photographs, illustrations, hb. Published Price £17.95
Shipping Time:	This item is usually dispatched Next Day
Retail Price:	~~£17.95~~
Our Price:	£7.95 save 56%