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The Burma-Siam Railway The secret diary of Dr Robert Hardie 1942-45
The Burma-Siam Railway The secret diary of Dr Robert Hardie 1942-45
Hard Cover w/ dust jacket has plastic protective cover
181 pages + Biographical Index
Copyright 1983
CONTENTS
Foreword 7
Introduction 8
Robert Stevenson Hardie A Personal Note by Elspeth Hardie 11
Singaporez 5
Ban Pong29
Kanburi41
Wan Tow Kien65
March Up-River77
Takanun91
Chungkai137
Tamuang173
Appendix181
Biographical Index 183
DUST JACKET INTRODUCTION
Some 61,000 Allied prisoners of war were forced by their Japanese captors to work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. More than 16,000 died from sickness, exhaustion and malnutrition, an average of one victim for every 28 yards of track. But for the skill, ingenuity and devotion of the Allied medical officers and orderlies the death toll would have been even higher. In appalling conditions, using surgical instruments improvised out of scrap metal and with totally inadequate supplies of drugs and dressings, they fought to stem the ravages of beriberi, cholera, malaria, tropical ulcers, dysentery and other diseases.
Robert Hardie, a medical officer serving with the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force, spent over three years as a prisoner of war on the railway after the fall of Singapore.
Throughout this harrowing period he kept a diary, which he managed to conceal from the Japanese despite numerous searches. It is a remarkable contemporary record written by a cultivated, objective and sensitive observer, whose delight in nature was a major sustaining influence during the darkest days of his captivity. In his efforts to combat disease and alleviate suffering, Hardie had to contend not only with the indifference, incompetence and unpredictability of the Japanese but also with a certain amount of apathy and selfishness on his own side. His diary, which has an immediacy inevitably lacking in other more retrospective accounts, vividly conveys the hardships, monotony and humiliations of life in the squalid and overcrowded camps which marked the course of the `railway of death'.
The text is illustrated with Robert Hardie's own wartime sketches and watercolours.
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