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By Root 1170 0

being bored, “because the mind doesn’t generate many thoughts when you’re that hungry. I’m always angry with having wasted those years.” In Aomi, Japan, prisoners took it in turns to give each other lectures on such themes as “Letters,” “My Dog Rufus,” “World Government,” “The Virtue of Modesty,” “The American War of Independence.” In some camps, educational courses flourished. Andrew Cunningham took the opportunity to get coaching from a fellow prisoner in accountancy, his chosen career. In Rangoon Jail, British prisoners possessed some books. One officer, Bruce Tothill, kept a list of titles which he read. They included As We Were by E. F. Benson, Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier, Crime and Punishment, Robinson Crusoe, Mansfield Park, Eminent Victorians, 1000 Beautiful Things Selected by Arthur Mee, The Fair Maid of Perth by Walter Scott. Pocket editions of Dickens were especially valued, because their thin paper made them ideal for rolling cigarettes.

In Milton Young’s camp, when prisoners made a deck of playing cards they were thrashed by the Japanese for “presumption,” but in most places chess and bridge were tolerated. In Rangoon in 1944, Maj. Nigel Loring had just called “Six spades” when Allied bombs began to fall around the jail. Amid deafening explosions which killed or wounded several prisoners, the cards scattered in all directions. When at last peace was restored, Loring exclaimed ruefully: “Goddammit! That was684 the best bridge hand I ever had!”

In almost every POW camp, drugs to treat disease were scarce or non-existent. Superimposed upon a grossly inadequate diet, sickness carried off many men. In Burma and Malaya, beriberi was the principal killer, caused by a lack of vitamin B. Its symptoms began with chronic diarrhoea. Thereafter, a victim’s body either swelled, or shrank to skeletal dimensions. In Rangoon Jail, doctors had a thermometer and a stethoscope, which enabled them to diagnose a man’s condition, but they lacked drugs to ameliorate it. Guards were bribed to bring in poppies from which an opiate could be made. Working parties collected “blue stones”—copper sulphate—which could be crushed and stirred into water to form an antidote for jungle sores. Old razor blades were stolen for surgery. The ubiquitous flies provoked a cholera outbreak, which after killing ten prisoners was checked by skilful isolation of patients. Blood and mucus in a man’s stool indicated dysentery, another ruthless killer. Jaundice, dengue fever and of course malaria took their shares. Alf Evans, an RAOC wireless mechanic, observed laconically that his Malayan camp was “not a bit like Butlin’s685 at all. We had here ulcers, boils, crabs, malaria, blackwater fever, dingy, beriberi, sores, bugbites, Changi feet and depression.” In sapper Edward Whincup’s686 camp on the railway, open wounds were treated by scraping out pus with a spoon, then spraying the infected area with a saline solution or permanganate of potash with an RAF stirrup pump. When the British were joined by Tamil workers, unfamiliar with hygiene discipline, cholera struck.

An American Liberator crew was brought into Rangoon Jail in 1944, every man badly burned. As “war criminals” by Japanese definition, they had been granted no medical treatment whatever. When British doctors were belatedly allowed to see them, the airmen’s wounds crawled with maggots. “With one exception687,” wrote a British officer, “they died screaming in agony as they had done since their arrival.” Doctors found themselves grimly fascinated by the variety of illnesses which it became their lot to treat. For instance, prisoners working on an airstrip off Java developed “coral blindness.” Poor diet generated many cases of vision deterioration. “Burning feet” exactly described symptoms of the condition. It became worse at night, so that men unable to sleep in their agony paced compounds through the hours of darkness. One of many post-war medical reports described the case of Private Barton of the 2nd Loyals, sentenced to five years’ solitary confinement for an attempted escape from Changi