A NEW ZEALANDER’S ESCAPE STORY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27203, 21 November 1953, Page 3

A NEW ZEALANDER’S ESCAPE STORY

Hongkong Escape. By R. B. Goodwin. Arthur Barker. 223 pp. This book, a welcome addition to the list of stories of escapes from prisoner-of-war camps, is written oy a New Zealander well known in yachting circles, a civil servant turned naval officer. Lieutenant-Commander Ralpn B. Goodwin was wounded in the thigh when serving in motor torpedo boats and was in hospital in Hongkong when that city surrendered to the Japanese on Christmas Day, 1941. The tales of rape, murder, torture, filth, bestiality, and starvation that Lieutenant-Com-mander Goodwin tells are common tc most books dealing with Japanese prisoners and prison camps. Although death was the only for anyone trying to escape, Goodwin waited his chance—he would not have helpers because of reprisals that would “feed anew the smouldering sense of inferiority in our captors.” Then in a monsoon in August, 1944, LieutenantCommander Goodwin took his chance and was free—a white man free in a land of yellow men whose language he did not know. He could travel only at night, in a strange land, and hide in the daytime, but dare not sleep till he was well away. He had almost incredible' escapes. Very ill from malaria and beriberi and utterly exhausted he at last found a camp of Chinese communists who helped him and sent him on to ADied camps. Lieutenant-Com-mander Goodwin went back to his prison camp after Japan’s surrender, and his evidence helped to convict the Japanese commander, who received a long prison sentence.