WITHOUT GLAMOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 435, 24 October 1947, Page 15

WITHOUT GLAMOUR

OF DEATH BUT ONCE. By Roy Bulcock. F. W. Cheshire Pty. Ltd., Melbourne. ‘THE man who recounts the treatment ‘" of prisoners-of-war at the hands of the Japanese faces a grave difficulty: the actual facts are so appalling that not so much do they challenge belief, as they cannot be set down at all in writing without overwhelming’ the reader with their atrocity. The narrator of events in Japanese prison camps has therefore to coax his readers with selected crumbs of truth, just so much as can be complacently digested, while he gradually builds up the true picture of the years of misery which he has luckily survived. Roy Bulcock (an R.A.A.F, administrative officer caught in Java in 1942) makes a reasonable fist of this difficult task, although, in spite of his having kept a diary at great risk, his narrative tends to be scrappy and anecdotal rather than a complete and connected story. And he sneers easily, perhaps too easily. The book has new light to throw on the British defeat in Malaya: the panic evacuation of Kuantan airfield (a real sauve qui peut in which few waited for orders to depart) left the nearest aerodrome to the scene of the destruction of Prince of Wales and Repulse a few days later without aircraft and virtually unserviceable. Transferred to Java, Bulcock saw the scenes of disorganisation repeated, with the difference that allies with a policy of their own added to the turmoil. The narrative of his personal adventures reflects the characteristic experience of prisoner-of-war in Japanese hands: the incredulity with which Nipponese hypocrisy and brutality were at first received; the moral toughness of the majority of prisoners (from those who "took" a bashing to those who risked unpleasant death to operate a secret radio, hiding it in a stool, in a tableleg, in a prisoner’s wooden clogs); the intense dread of being sent to work on the Burma-Thailand railway, to the Jouter islands (where the chance of survival was about one in two), or to Japan itself across waters mercilessly by United States submarines. The Japanese could be bluffed, but it was risky. Their worst characteristic was their unpredictability. Some of these stories of heroism are not well documented elsewhere: the "lady on the bicycle," symbolising the steadfast courage of Dutch women, and _ the R.A.A.F.-Wing-Commander in the hands

of the Kempeitai whose spirit remained aggressive through years of specialised torture and persecution. "Prison experiences are depressing," says Vance Palmer’s introduction, implying a reaction against this type of war book. If that is true, we did not deserve "victory. These experiences, on the contrary, should exhilarate, relating the firmness and courage of the average man on a stage remote from glory but not, it is to be hoped, from honour.