Return from the River Kwai (Signed by Japanese POW)

1979, signed by British soldier Charles Marriott (Suffolk Regiment), captured at Singapore and held at Camp 4D

Author

Joan and Clay Blair

Publisher

Macdonald and Jane's, London, 1979

Return from the River Kwai (Signed by Japanese POW)

Printing Details

First edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 24 × 16cm, 338pp.

This copy belonged to a former Japanese POW. Signed to the ffep by C Marriott, this was Charles George Marriott, born in 1919. He was a private (army number 5828266) in the 5th Battalion, The Suffolk Regiment and was captured at Singapore in February 1942. He was held at Camp 4D (Thailand) at Kanburi (Kanchanburi), a 'Death Railway' camp, where the prisoners who were forced labour on the Burma-Thailand Railway were held.

A definitive historical account documenting the harrowing post-railway fate of British and Australian Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOWs) following the completion of the Thai-Burma Death Railway. The authors detail the 1944 movement of surviving prisoners aboard unmarked Japanese transport vessels—the infamous "Hell Ships"—bound for industrial slave labour in Japan, and the subsequent tragedy in the South China Sea when the convoy was torpedoed by Allied submarines unaware of the POWs on board. Drawing on official naval logs, Japanese records, and survivor interviews, the work chronicles both the disaster of the sinking of the Rakuyo Maru and Kachidoki Maru and the dramatic, unexpected rescue of survivors from the water by U.S. Navy submarines.