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was caught in the streets during an Allied air raid, their senior officer kept them marching in formed ranks. It seemed essential “that the Japanese, contemptuous of us696 anyway for being prisoners, should not be given any reason to despise us further,” wrote Lt. Charles Coubrough. This was, he said, “one of the few examples of firm leadership I was to meet during my captivity, and I responded gladly.” Almost every prisoner afterwards felt ashamed that he had stood passively by while the Japanese beat or even killed his comrades. In logic, what could bystanders have done? To survivors, however, logic offered little comfort.

Each man chose his own path towards a relationship with the Japanese. Coubrough believed that it was essential never to show fear or seem to condescend. He sought to be cheerful and friendly: “It was pointless to maintain697 a defiant attitude for years.” Prisoners hated the necessity to bow to every Japanese, whatever his rank and whatever theirs. In any case, no display of deference shielded them from the erratic whims of their masters. Japanese behaviour vacillated between grotesquery and sadism. In Ted Whincup’s camp on the Burma railway, the commandant, Major Cheetah, insisted that the prisoners’ four-piece band should muster outside the guardroom and play “Hi, ho, hi, ho, it’s off to work we go”—the tune from Snow White—each morning as a column of skeletal inmates shambled forth to their labours. “Nobody looked or felt like the seven dwarves,” noted Whincup grimly. If guards in his camp took a dislike to a prisoner, they killed him with a casual shove into a ravine. The Japanese seemed especially ill-disposed towards tall men, whom they obliged to bend to receive punishment, usually administered with a cane. Airman Fred Jackson, working on an airfield on the coral island of Ambon, found himself diverted to build a tennis court for the commandant, under the supervision of a pre-war Wimbledon umpire. When prisoners began to die, at first the Japanese commandant attended their burials. There were soon so many corpses, however, that he ceased to trouble himself.

One day, for no discernible reason six British officers were paraded in line, and one by one punched to the ground by a Japanese warrant officer. A trooper of the 3rd Hussars, being beaten beside the tea bucket by a guard with a rifle, raised an arm to ward off blows and was accused of having struck the man. After several days of beatings, he was taken outside the camp, tied to a tree and bayoneted to death. The commandant proclaimed the execution “a necessary exercise698 of discipline.” The prisoner was not shot, he said, lest the sound of gunfire unsettle local natives.

At Hall Romney’s camp on the railway, a soldier who struck a Japanese was placed at attention in the sun outside the guardroom. Whenever he moved, he was kicked in the stomach until his screams rang through the compound. The man was then dragged onto a lorry and taken away by a guard detail equipped with rifles and spades. Next day, his identification card was removed from the files in the camp office. An officer of the Gordons who protested against sick men being forced to work was taken into the jungle and tied to a tree, beneath which guards lit a fire and burnt him like some Christian martyr. At a camp in Japan, days before the end of the war five British officers were shot when a radio receiver was discovered in their barracks.

“The ordinary Japanese699 has the mind of an adolescent,” Philip Stibbe wrote contemptuously. “His cruelty to animals, his attitude to sex matters, his ability to swallow the direst propaganda, his childish irritability and petty attitude to life all indicate this…[For a prisoner] ignorance of a rule or failure to understand an order, even when it was in Japanese, was never considered an excuse. If they were in a good mood, you had your face slapped; if they were feeling just a bit liverish they struck you with a clenched fist; on bad days they would use a rifle butt and kick you on the shins. But whatever they did the victim was supposed to