[Tennessee Nana]

Devil’s Island..

on my home town cenotaph in New Zealand there is a name of a young soldier who was a POW of the Japanese and beheaded..

I don’t remember if he was the one who escaped or he was murdered because someone else escaped but when anybody managed to the Japanese would behead 10 of the other prisoners...

As children and Brownies/Wolf Cubs, we stood at the cenotaph and read his name and told his story to each other on ANZAC DAY, April 25, and shuddered at the horror of his death..

[Mase]

One of my favorite books to this day is King Rat. Clavell lived through that horror and for that reason it was his best work.

All five of my uncles fought in WWII and their parents, along with most other parents, hoped their sons would be stationed in the European theater, rather than the Pacific, because the Japanese were so brutal and bloodthirsty. Only one of them fought in the Pacific. He was a Marine who battled through the islands and endured horrors that he could never discuss. He drank a lot after the war and died well before his time. The Japanese ruined lives during and after the war. They got off easy.