This is one of the most remarkable untold stories of the Second
World war. At 11.02 am on an August morning in 1945 America dropped
the world’s most powerful atomic bomb on the Japanese port city
of Nagasaki. The most European city in Japan was flattened to the
ground ‘as if it had been swept aside by a broom’. More than
70,000 Japanese were killed. At the time, hundreds of Allied
prisoners of war were working close to the bomb’s detonation
point, as forced labourers in the shipyards and foundries of
Nagasaki. These men, from the Dales of Yorkshire and the dusty
outback of Australia, from the fields of Holland and the remote
towns of Texas, had already endured an extraordinary lottery of
life and death that had changed their lives forever. They had lived
through nearly four years of malnutrition, disease, and brutality.
Now their prison home was the target of America’s second atomic
bomb. In one of the greatest survival stories of the Second World
War, we trace their astonishing experiences back to bloody battles
in the Malayan jungle, before the dramatic fall of Fortress
Singapore, the mighty symbol of the British Empire. This abject
capitulation was followed by surrender in Java and elsewhere in the
East, condemning the captives to years of cruel imprisonment by the
Japanese. Their lives grew evermore perilous when thousands of
prisoners were shipped off to build the infamous Thai-Burma
Railway, including the Bridge on the River Kwai. If that was not
harsh enough, POWs were then transported to Japan in the
overcrowded holds of what were called hell ships. These rusty
buckets were regularly sunk by Allied submarines, and thousands of
prisoners lived through unimaginable horror, adrift on the ocean
for days. Some still had to endure the final supreme test, the
world’s second atomic bomb. The prisoners in Nagasaki were
eyewitnesses to one of the most significant events in modern
history but writing notes or diaries in a Japanese prison camp was
dangerous. To avoid detection, one Allied prisoner buried his notes
in the grave of a fellow POW to be reclaimed after the war, another
wrote his diary in Irish. Now, using unpublished and rarely seen
notes, interviews, and memoirs, this unique book weaves together a
powerful chorus of voices to paint a vivid picture of defeat,
endurance, and survival against astonishing odds.
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