Hellfire audio book

Cameron Forbes

The story of Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War. For months during 1943 there was no night in Hellfire Pass. By the light of flares, carbide lamps and bamboo fires, men near-naked and skeletal cut a passage through stone to make way for a railway. Among these men were some of the 22,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Second World War. In camps across Asia and the Pacific, they struggled, died, and survived with a little help from their mates. Their experiences became a defining feature of the war. Hellfire details the individual stories of those caught up in history: the Hudson bomber pilot attacking the Japanese invasion force on Day One; the prisoner of war who refused to be blindfolded for his execution, and another who coped with misery and death by sketching plumbago flowers; the man the atom bomb didn't kill in Nagasaki and whose homecoming helped change Australia. Hellfire was researched in Australia, Japan and across South-East Asia. It draws on 50 first-person interviews, ranging from former prisoners to an old Mon villager deep in the Burmese jungle, and from Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew to veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army. This is an unabridged reading of Cameron Forbes book, by Peter Byrne. Duration 18 hours 15 minutes on 15 CDs.