Siam Railway Book Causes Outcry

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30846, 3 September 1965, Page 15

Siam Railway Book Causes Outcry

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyriflht) LONDON, Sept. 2. The Japanese book “Glorious Memories of the Railway Regiment” was valuable because it proved “they could honourably do it all again,” an Australian author, Russell Braddon, said in the “Daily Express.” The book gives the Japanese version of the infamous Siam “death railway.” Braddon said: “A disaster of a book this, for it must fan alive and blazing in us the embers of a hatred many of us had thought dead." Braddon spent four years on the railway and in Changi gaol, Singapore, as a prisoner of war. Yet it was a valuable book.

he said, “for it proves that the Japanese regard atrocities perpetrated upon their captives as un-atrocious.

“Proves that they could honourably do it all again. “Proves that before their bursting population drives them (at about the end of the century) to seek fresh lands by conquest, we should perhaps accommodate them peacefully somewhere outside of their present islands. “Glaring Lies”

“Proves, by the glaring lies it tells so glibly, that suddenly Nippon feels the need io whitewash a policy she has always previously regarded as honourable. Why? It could, of course, be to convert to militarism the allegedly pacifist Nipponese youth of today. And if that is the reason, the publication of this book in Japan this week is a frightening event indeed.” Braddon, aged 42, author of “The Naked Island” and

"Cheshire V.C.", said the fact that the Japanese believed everything they did to their prisoners of war they did honourably did not excuse the book’s tragic and almost incredible lack of compassion for men who died horribly, nor its Goebbels-like lack of truth. “Worst Treatment”

“Despising us utterly, and determined to achieve a colossal task in a near impossible time, Nippon quite deliberately gave us the worst treatment it could devise and sustain for more than a year,” he wrote. “And about this savage art Nippon can be taught nothing.” The “Daily Express” also reported that 42 British survivors of the Burma-Siam railway rose in fury tonight against the book. They were men who must spend up to two months each year at Roehampton Hospital,

Surrey. In various ways all were incurable, crippled or diseased from their years on the horror railway. At the hospital yesterday they held a meeting demanding suppression of the book.

“We shall burn the book publicly if it ever comes out here," said Mr Fred Kerns, aged 48. “But we hope such an atrocious lie will never be published here.” The men agreed with one claim in the book—that the film, “Bridge on the River Kwai,” was far from the truth “It was much too mild and gave no real idea of what the lads went through,” said Bill McCormick. Statements contained in the book were complete nonsense, a retired Lieutenant-Colonel said in Perth yesterday. Mr C. E. Green was commander of a force on the raili way.

The principal author was Yoshiteru Sambe, a former major of the sth Railway regi-

ment, one of the men who directed 50,000 prisoners of war, mostly British and Australian, to build the railway between 1942 and 1945. “I refute his statements completely," said Mr Green. A colleague of Sambe said the book pointed out that British prisoners received better treatment than the Japanese soldiers, the “Daily Express" reported. “Round The Clock” But Mr Green said prisoners worked round the clock and there was plenty of brutal treatment. For morning meals the prisoners had thin rice gruel and the guards’ ration was incomparably better, he said. The filth was unbelievable, Mr Green claimed.

Referring to the book's statement that about 1000 of the 15,000 Japanese had died on the railway, Mr Green said he knew nothing of any Japanese dying there.