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Hall Romney and his comrades on the railway in Siam despised their senior officer, Colonel Knights, never more so than when a visiting Japanese general asked whether the prisoners were satisfied with their conditions, and Knights answered: “Yes, very.” The colonel, wrote Romney bitterly, “seems to accept everything665 the Japs propose without daring to protest or suggest alterations.” Flying Officer Erroll Shearn666, a forty-nine-year-old RAF administrative officer, was disgusted when the padre in his camp on Java, a non-smoker, persuaded desperate men to exchange their bread for his cigarette ration. Many British officers endorsed documents presented by the Japanese, promising not to escape. “You are signing away667 your honour, gentlemen!” cried a mocking British private soldier as most of his former commanders scribbled their names in Rangoon Jail. One of the most senior British captives, Maj.-Gen. Christopher Maltby, testified later about his shame that he had given such a promise, and had encouraged subordinates to do likewise: “During the early months668 a number of parties and individuals succeeded in escaping. In the light of after events it is to my lasting regret that I did not encourage larger parties to make the attempt.”

In few camps did Allied solidarity prevail. When a hundred Americans suddenly arrived in the camp where Stephen Abbott had become senior British officer, there were immediate tensions. One American said: “Get this straight, Limey. We gotta look to the Nips, but we’re not taking orders from any f—ing Britisher!” Abbott wrote that he thought these GIs the most frightening group of people he had ever met, Japanese not excluded. In almost all camps there was friction between Dutch prisoners, who were accused of selfishness on behalf of their own people, and POWs of other races. Erroll Shearn hated the Dutch in his camp on Java, and later scornfully dismissed the books written about their mutual experience by the South African Laurens van der Post: “The grandiose picture he draws669 is very much a figment of his extremely fertile imagination.” Dr. Marjorie Lyon, an internee on Sumatra, was shocked that the Dutch refused to admit British casualties to their hospital: “The Dutch doctors I met670 were all ignorant and obstinate…[they] had given our men very shabby treatment.” Doug Idlett, an American who worked at Yoshioka in a mixed-nationalities camp, said: “There was no love lost671 between certain nationalities, especially between us and the Dutch. The Dutch and Javanese had got there first and had all the best jobs, in the kitchens and suchlike.”

Most men agreed that the key to survival was adaptability. It was essential to recognise that this new life, however unspeakable, represented a reality which must be acknowledged. Those who pined for home, who gazed tearfully at photos of loved ones, were doomed. “There was a weeding-out672 thing,” said Corporal Paul Reuter of the USAAF. “The ones who cried went early.” Andrew Cunningham, a former Hastings accountant captured with an air-sea rescue unit in Singapore at the age of twenty-four, spent almost two years building an airfield on Surabaya. “My life was a nonentity673, a blank,” he said later. “It was a mistake to look at photographs. It made people melancholy. I made a conscious decision that this was the new life, and I had to get on with it. I just dismissed the old one, as if it didn’t exist. The tragedy was that so many people couldn’t accommodate themselves. If anything plunged a dagger into me, it was seeing people give up. I saw some really nice guys just disintegrate, and throw themselves into boreholes. I could never understand how a person could sink so low. What a way to commit suicide! In a hole full of sewage!” Doug Idlett of the USAAF was bemused by the manner in which some men resigned themselves to death, even embraced it. He himself, by contrast, “wanted to survive674, intended to survive. I felt it was up to me.”

Some men could not bring themselves to stomach unfamiliar and indeed repulsive