THE LATE ENEMY

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31215, 12 November 1966, Page 4

THE LATE ENEMY

The Brave Japanese. By Kenneth Harrison. Rigby. 280 pp.

The tragically few survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps who are also qualified to set down their experiences tell much the same story of stoical heroism and endurance in face of brutal treatment from their captors, and the murderous climate in which they had to work. All of them endeavour to be fair to the latj enemy, but Kenneth Harrison goes a step further and tries to explain the Japanese soldier, in the latter’s own terms, as a fanatically brave and disciplined being, whose very inhumanity has been instilled into him as part of his rigorous training. “We could loathe everything they stood for, be disgusted at their cruelty, shake our heads incredulously at their stupidity. be scornful of their duplicity, laugh ourselves sick at the thought of such men believing they descended from the Sun God. But one thing; we could not doubt; they were brave. . . .” A generous victim of an implacable enemy makes this statement without reserve, and Mr Harrison confesses that after three years of being racked by illness, and bludgeoned into working 12 hours a day in pitiless conditions, the sight of Hiroshima a fortnight after the atomic bomb had destroyed it complew cleared him of

his last feeling of resentment i against the beaten enemy. The author’s period of captivity began before the fall of Singapore, when he and other Australians were confined in Pudu camp—one of the better ones, where rest periods were enlivened by a little recreation, and the commandant was humane and civilised. From there he was sent to Changi, in which embarrassingly large numbers of British and Australian troops were incarcerated after the fall of Singapore. So great indeed was the concentration of prisoners that their captors left them more or less free to run the place themselves. Such a state of affairs could not possibly last, and Kenneth Harrison’s relatively peaceful period of captivity ended when he was sent first to Thailand to do coolie work under heavy blows from junior Japanese n.c.o.s and then to the notorious Hell Fire Pass in Burma, to work on the “Death Railway." Only in Nazi concentration camps was man’s inhumanity to man so cruelly exemplified as it was in that terrible place, where men died daily from the remorseless toll of heat, cholera, dysentery and sheer ill-treatment. They were made to work until they dropped. The author, who buried his friends one by one, recorded instances of their unbreakable spirit in which they still managed to laugh at the ignorant japes of their brutal guards.

In May, 1945, when Europe I was already rejoicing at the defeat of the Nazis, Harrison was sent to Japan in a leaky old tub which was very nearly sunk on more than one occasion, and finished his captivity in No. 2 Camp at Nagasaki. Nearing starvation point he was made to labour in a condemned mine which frequently fell in, burying unfortunate prisoners who happened to be working on the spot. His survival from this final peril was indeed miraculous. The author was only recently inspired to write his book after an Anzac Day celebration in Melbourne, and his record is fair and wellbalanced, particularly in his summing up of the (to us) odd Japanese mentality. Regarding all prisoners with contempt (as they would prefer death to captivity themselves) and wholly disregard-! ing the Geneva Convention, there was nothing to prevent j them from exercising their natural savagery on defenceless captives. The wonder, perhaps, is that they did not always do so, but, instead, recognising that brave men could refuse to offer up their lives to no purpose, were prepared to treat them as human beings. Mr Harrison pays tribute to the dignity and calm friendlines of the Japanese in defeat, and left a country which had given him full cause for hatred with a feeling of compassion, and something akin to respect.