Hellfire by Cameron Forbes

Australian POWs and the building of the Burma railway

Good condition – dust jacket shows corner and edge wear, cover intact

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 solid stone to make way for a railway. Among them were some of the 22,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Second World War, who struggled, died and survived across camps in Asia and the Pacific with a little help from their mates. Cameron Forbes charts the long history of tension between Australia and Japan and the forces that shaped both nations before the descent into war, then tells the epic and deeply personal stories of the men who lived through it. Drawing on fifty first-person interviews gathered across Australia, Japan and South-East Asia, Hellfire is a searing, meticulously researched account of both the brutality of war and the extraordinary courage required simply to survive it.