A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia During the Second World War

A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia During the Second World War PDF Author: David Tett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Postal service
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The author combines the general history of the period with personal references from individual correspondences to give detailed context to the postal arrangements for POWs and internees into and out of East Asian countries under Japanese occupation during World War II.

A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia During the Second World War

A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia During the Second World War PDF Author: David Tett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Postal service
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The author combines the general history of the period with personal references from individual correspondences to give detailed context to the postal arrangements for POWs and internees into and out of East Asian countries under Japanese occupation during World War II.

Stranger in the House

Stranger in the House PDF Author: Julie Summers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416526846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
'It is as if I have been waiting for someone to ask me these questions for almost the whole of my life' From 1945, more than four million British servicemen were demobbed and sent home after the most destructive war in history. Damaged by fighting, imprisonment or simply separation from their loved ones, these men returned to a Britain that had changed in their absence. In Stranger in the House, Julie Summers tells the women's story, interviewing over a hundred women who were on the receiving end of demobilisation: the mothers, wives, sisters, who had to deal with an injured, emotionally-damaged relative; those who assumed their fiancés had died only to find them reappearing after they had married another; women who had illegitimate children following a wartime affair as well as those whose steadfast optimism was rewarded with a delightful reunion. Many of the tales are moving, some are desperately sad, others are full of humour but all provide a fascinating account of how war altered ordinary women's lives forever.

Forgotten Warrior

Forgotten Warrior PDF Author: Michael Snape
Publisher: SPCK
ISBN: 0281086923
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Eighty 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.

Wartime Captivity in the 20th Century

Wartime Captivity in the 20th Century PDF Author: Anne-Marie Pathé
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785332597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Long a topic of historical interest, wartime captivity has over the past decade taken on new urgency as an object of study. Transnational by its very nature, captivity’s historical significance extends far beyond the front lines, ultimately inextricable from the histories of mobilization, nationalism, colonialism, law, and a host of other related subjects. This wide-ranging volume brings together an international selection of scholars to trace the contours of this evolving research agenda, offering fascinating new perspectives on historical moments that range from the early days of the Great War to the arrival of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Forgotten Armies

Forgotten Armies PDF Author: Christopher Alan Bayly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674017481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

Goodnight Bobbie

Goodnight Bobbie PDF Author: Marilyn Dodkin
Publisher: UNSW Press
ISBN: 9780868408507
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
It is 1941. Australia is at war and there are fears of an attack on the homeland. Captain Bobbie Puflett, a doctor serving with the 10th Australian General Hospital of the 8th Division in Malaya, writes to his parents Bob and Ethel and sister Del. When the Allies surrender to the Japanese in February 1942, Bobbie is one of 15,000 men of the 8th Division who disappear. It is eighteen months before his family knows that he is a prisoner of war, but they continue to write. This is one family’s story told through letters. We learn of everyday life in wartime Sydney and service in the allied forces before the fall of Singapore. Most of all the letters bring to life the pain of separation.

India in the Second World War

India in the Second World War PDF Author: Diya Gupta
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1805260758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
In 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while 3 million civilians were killed by the war-induced Bengal Famine, and Indian National Army soldiers fought against the British for Indian independence. This captivating new history shines a spotlight on emotions as a way of unearthing these troubled and contested experiences, exposing the personal as political. Diya Gupta draws upon photographs, letters, memoirs, novels, poetry and philosophical essays, in both English and Bengali languages, to weave a compelling tapestry of emotions felt by Indians in service and at home during the war. She brings to life an unknown sepoy in the Middle East yearning for home, and anti-fascist activist Tara Ali Baig; a disillusioned doctor on the Burma frontline, and Sukanta Bhattacharya’s modernist poetry of hunger; Mulk Raj Anand’s revolutionary home front, and Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of civilisation. This vivid book recovers a truly global history of the Second World War, revealing the crucial importance of cultural approaches in challenging a traditional focus on the wartime experiences of European populations. Seen through Indian eyes, this conflict is no longer the ‘good’ war.

Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia

Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia PDF Author: Kevin Blackburn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134092229
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 619

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Book Description
Experiences of captivity in Japanese-occupied Asia varied enormously. Some prisoners of war (POWs) were sent to work in Japan, others to toil on the ‘Death Railway’ between Burma and Thailand. Some camps had death rates below 1 per cent, others of over 20 per cent. While POWs were deployed far and wide as a captive labour force, civilian internees were generally detained locally. This book explores differences in how captivity was experienced between 1941 and 1945, and has been remembered since: differences due to geography and logistics, to policies and personalities, and marked by nationality, age, class, gender and combatant status. Part One has at least one chapter for each ‘National Memory’, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Indian and American. Part Two moves on to forgotten captivities. It covers women, children, camp guards, internee experiences upon the end of the war, and local heroines who fought back. By juxtaposing such a wide variety of captivity experiences – differentiated both by category of captive and by approach - this book transcends place, to become a collection about captivity as a category. It will interest scholars working on the Asia-Pacific War, on captivities in general, and on the individual histories of the countries and groups covered.

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway PDF Author: Lizzie Oliver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350024147
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway is the first book to detail the experiences of British former prisoners of war (POWs) who were forced to construct a railway across Sumatra during the Japanese occupation. It is also the first study to be undertaken of the life-writing of POWs held captive by the Japanese during the Second World War, and the transgenerational responses in Britain to this period of captivity. This book brings to light previously unpublished materials, including: · Exceptionally rare and detailed diaries, notebooks and letters from the railway · Memoirs from Sumatra, including detailed recollections and post-war statements written by key personnel on the railway, such as Medical Officers and interpreters · Remarkable original artwork created by POWs on Sumatra · Contemporaneous photographs taken inside the camps Employing theories of life-writing, memory and war representation, including transgenerational transmission, Lizzie Oliver focuses particularly on what these documents can tell us about how former POWs tried to share, preserve and make sense of their experiences. It is a wholly original study that is of great value to Second World War scholars and anyone interested in 20th-century Southeast Asian history or war and memory.

Reduced to a Symbolical Scale

Reduced to a Symbolical Scale PDF Author: Tony Banham
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888390872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In July 1940, the wives and children of British families in Hong Kong, military and civilian, were compulsorily evacuated, following a plan created by the Hong Kong government in 1939. That plan focused exclusively on the process of evacuation itself, but issues concerning how the women and children should settle in the new country, communication with abandoned husbands, and reuniting families after the war were not considered. In practice, few would ever be addressed. When evacuation came, 3,500 people would simply be dumped in Australia. The experience of the evacuees can be seen as a three-act drama: delivery to Australia creates tension, five years of war and uncertainty intensify it, and resolution comes as war ends. However, that drama, unlike the evacuation plan, did not develop in a vacuum but was embedded in a complex historical, political, and social environment. Based on archival research of official documents, letters and memoirs, and interviews and discussions with more than one hundred evacuees and their families, this book studies the evacuation within that entire context. ‘Reduced to a Symbolical Scale is an original and interesting addition to the evacuation literature. Tony Banham has done a masterly job of integrating archival documents with other forms of communication. The stories of individual evacuees and their families are very skilfully woven into the narrative.’ —John Welshman, Lancaster University; author of Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain