Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway PDF Author: Lizzie Oliver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350024139
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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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 This book brings to light previously unpublished materials, including: · Exceptionally rare and detailed diaries, notebooks and letters from the railway · Memoirs from Sumatra, including detailed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.

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway PDF Author: Lizzie Oliver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350024139
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

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 This book brings to light previously unpublished materials, including: · Exceptionally rare and detailed diaries, notebooks and letters from the railway · Memoirs from Sumatra, including detailed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.

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.

The Sumatra Railroad

The Sumatra Railroad PDF Author: H. Hovinga
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004253718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This is the gripping historical tragedy of the 220 km railroad that bored its way through the hot, humid Sumatran jungle during World War II. The railway was commissioned by Japan and built with the blood and tears of Allied prisoners of war and press-ganged Javanese romushas. Henk Hovinga interviewed nearly one hundred former railroad workers and did painstaking archival research. The result is a moving book, richly illustrated with numerous authentic drawings of life in the internment camps, charts and photographs. The original Dutch version of The Sumatra Railroad has become the standard work on the crime of the Japanese railroad construction in Indonesia. Unfortunately this indescribable human catastrophe has always been overshadowed by the drama of the notorious Birma Railroad. This work is first and foremost a posthumous tribute to the thousands of slave workers who lost their lives for the Pakan Baroe Railroad. At the same time, it is a homage to the survivors, for whom the war traumas would never end.

Ambushed Under the Southern Cross

Ambushed Under the Southern Cross PDF Author: George W. Duffy
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 9781436306355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
When George Duffy and his twenty-five classmate graduated from the Massachusetts Nautical School (MNS) on September 23, 1941, an era came to an end. Never again would the three-masted barque Nantucket to go to sea in her role as a sail training vessel for future merchant marine officers. They, also, became the last class to make two summer sail training cruises aboard, thus making the end of the school's tradition extending back to 1891. Those hardened young sailors were immediately recruited as deck and engineering officers into a rapidly growing United States merchant marine. Not quite a year after graduating from MNS, and just ten months into World War Two, George Duffy's good fortune came to an end, when his ship, the American Leader, was sunk by a German commerce raider. George and forty-six of his shipmates were plucked out of the South Atlantic Ocean and taken prisoner. This book relates his two spartan years in the Nantucket, the next rewarding year in the American Leader, and cover three years as prisoner in two German warships, and ten Japanese labor camps scattered over the southeast Asian islands of Java, Singapore, and Sumatra. In addition, a parallel tale recounts the life and career of a young German naval officer, Konrad Hoppe, who served in George's nemesis, the Hsk Michael. Many years after the war they met in Germany in, as Konrad expressed it, "Great delight that the fateful enmity has changed into a sincere friendship."

POW on the Sumatra Railway

POW on the Sumatra Railway PDF Author: Christine Bridges
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399015265
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
John Geoffrey Lee (always known as Geoff) joined the RAF on his 20th birthday in June 1941. He left Liverpool on a troop ship in December 1941, with no idea where he was going. He eventually arrived in Java, where he was captured by the Japanese, along with many others. During his time in captivity, he survived several camps in Java, Ambon and Singapore and three hell ship journeys. After being washed ashore in Sumatra, (as a ferry he was being transported on blew up), he was then recaptured and suffered sheer hell as a slave on the Sumatra Railway. Enduring bouts of malaria, beri beri, tropical ulcers and a starvation diet was bad enough, but this was exacerbated by the searing heat and extreme cruelty meted out to the prisoners by the Japanese and Korean guards. Geoff miraculously survived, weighing just 6 stone when he arrived back in Liverpool in December 1945. After his release he found he had difficulty in convincing people where he had been as no one had heard of the “Sumatra Railway”, only the other one, thousands of miles away in Burma. Letters to newspapers were returned as ‘Just another Burma Railway story’. The Ministry of Defence, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and The Imperial War Museum had no records of POW’s building a railway in Sumatra. So began Geoff’s journey, his aim... to prove to the establishment what he already knew to be true. This is Geoff's story of his captivity, release, and subsequent efforts in achieving his aim.

The British Sumatra Battalion

The British Sumatra Battalion PDF Author: Ann A. Apthorp
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description


Death and Deprivation on the Forgotten Sumatra Railway

Death and Deprivation on the Forgotten Sumatra Railway PDF Author: James H. Banton
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399006509
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
James Henry Banton was born in Burton on Trent in 1920. He worked as a driver of a steam locomotive used to transport beer and supplies to breweries around the town. When war broke out Jim joined the RAF, eventually becoming a Leading Aircraftsman as part of the RAF’s ground crew. During this time Jim had met the love of his life Dorothy Mason. Jim didn't know that when he left Gladstone Dock in Liverpool he would not see home or his family including Dorothy for another four and a half years. Eventually posted to the Far East he was captured by the Japanese in the hills on the island of Java. Used as slave labour, starved, beaten and witnessing death on a daily basis he was later put to work on the building of the Sumatra Railway. The Far East Prisoners of war became known as the Forgotten Army, however there has been little reference paid to the Sumatra Railway compared with other theatres of WW2. With this in mind the prisoners who worked on the Sumatra Railway could be considered to be the ‘Forgotten of the Forgotten Army’. In August 1945 the world celebrated victory in Europe, however for the FEPOW’s the war dragged on. As parts of the world were trying to return to normality Jim and his colleagues were being made to dig their own graves in the Sumatra jungle. The FEPOW’s lives hung in the balance as orders had been issued to murder all POW’s should mainland Japan be invaded by the Allies. This book is Jim’s story and it is hoped it will also be a reminder not only of the sacrifice of the Forgotten Army but also highlight the suffering of the ‘Forgotten of the Forgotten Army’ – The Sumatra Railway POW’s.

Traces of War

Traces of War PDF Author: Jan Banning
Publisher: Trolley Press
ISBN: 9781904563464
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Dutch photographer Jan Banning has interviewed and photographed 24 of the survivors of the Burma and Sumatra railways. The haunting images in this book show them as they worked, naked from the waist up. The words elicit, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, the misery of their constant understanding of death.

Tjideng Reunion

Tjideng Reunion PDF Author: Boudewijn van Oort
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 9781425151591
Category : Dutch
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Two Dutch families leave South Africa for Java, motivated by patriotism. Caught in the events of WWII, they are interned, emerging four years later as refugees, to make a new life in a changed world.

Prisoner of the Samurai

Prisoner of the Samurai PDF Author: James Gee
Publisher:
ISBN: 1612005985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
During World War II, Lt. Rosalie Hamric was an R.N., serving as Charge Nurse in the Psychiatric Ward of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Hospital. At the end of the war, a group of liberated prisoners of war from Southeast Asia, survivors of the sinking of the USS Houston in 1942, was sent to the ward for treatment. Many were encouraged to write down their experiences as part of their therapy. One, James Gee, PFC, USMC did a particularly detailed job. His account covers the sinking of the Houston, his rescue by a Japanese ship, and his experiences in Japanese camps over the next three years. Initially a prisoner in Java forced to load and unload enemy ships, then in Batavia, he was then transferred to Burma where he worked on the "death railway," living on the banks of the River Kwai. Those who survived the hard labor and harsh conditions there would be sent onto Thailand, then Singapore before arriving in Japan in 1945, spending the last few months of the war working in coal mines just 40 miles outside Nagasaki. Rosalie worked his accounts into a manuscript, which following her sudden death, languished in an attic for over thirty years. Now rediscovered, James's story can be told to a new generation.