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The Star
6 days ago
- General
- The Star
'Nobody else knew': Allied prisoners of war held in Taiwan
JINGUASHI, Taiwan: In a small urban park in Taiwan, more than 4,000 names are etched into a granite wall - most of them British and American servicemen held by the Japanese during World War II. The sombre memorial sits on the site of Kinkaseki, a brutal prisoner of war camp near Taipei and one of more than a dozen run by Japan on the island it ruled from 1895 until its defeat in 1945. For decades, little was known of the PoW camps, said Michael Hurst, a Canadian amateur military historian in Taipei, who has spent years researching them. Many survivors had refused to talk about their experiences, while PoWs held elsewhere in Asia had been unaware of "the horrors" in Taiwan, and museums and academics had glossed over them, Hurst told AFP. After learning of Kinkaseki in 1996, Hurst spearheaded efforts to locate other camps in Taiwan, build memorials for the veterans, and raise public awareness about their bravery and suffering. Starting in 1942, more than 4,300 Allied servicemen captured on battlefields across South-East Asia were sent to Taiwan in Japanese "hell ships". Most of the PoWs were British or American, but Australian, Dutch, Canadian and some New Zealand servicemen were also among them. By the time the war ended, 430 men had died from malnutrition, disease, overwork and torture. The harsh conditions of Taiwan's camps were long overshadowed by Japan's notorious "Death Railway" between Myanmar and Thailand, Hurst said. More than 60,000 Allied PoWs worked as slave labourers on the line, with about 13,000 dying during construction, along with up to 100,000 civilians, mostly forced labour from the region. Their experiences were later captured in the 1950s war movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai". But as stories of Kinkaseki slowly emerged, it became "known as one of the worst PoW camps in all of Asia", Hurst said. Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler's physician father was among the more than 1,100 prisoners of war held in Kinkaseki. Wheeler said she and her three older brothers "grew up knowing nothing" about their father's ordeal in the camp, where the men were forced to toil in a copper mine. After her father's death in 1963, Wheeler discovered his diaries recording his experience as a doctor during the war, including Taiwan, and turned them into a documentary. "A War Story" recounts Ben Wheeler's harrowing journey from Japan-occupied Singapore to Taiwan in 1942. By the time her father arrived in Kinkaseki, Wheeler said the men there "were already starving and being overworked and were having a lot of mining injuries". They were also falling ill with "beriberi, malaria, dysentery, and the death count was going up quickly," Wheeler, 78, told AFP in a Zoom interview. Trained in tropical medicine, the doctor had to be "inventive" with the rudimentary resources at hand to treat his fellow PoWs, who affectionately called him "the man sent from God", she said. Inflamed appendices and tonsils, for example, had to be removed without anesthesia using a razor blade because "that was all he had", she said. Taiwan was a key staging ground for Japan's operations during the war. Many Taiwanese fought for Japan, while people on the island endured deadly US aerial bombings and food shortages. Eighty years after Japan's surrender, the former PoWs held in Taiwan are all dead and little physical evidence remains of the camps. At 77, Hurst is still trying to keep their stories alive through the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society and private tours. His book "Never Forgotten" is based on interviews with more than 500 veterans, diaries kept by PoWs and correspondence. A gate post and section of wall are all that remain of Kinkaseki, set in a residential neighbourhood of Jinguashi town, surrounded by lush, rolling hills. On the day AFP visited, a Taiwanese woman taking a tour with Hurst said she had "never" studied this part of World War II history at school. "It's very important because it's one of Taiwan's stories," the 40-year-old said. Hurst said he still receives several emails a week from families of PoWs wanting to know what happened to their loved ones in Taiwan. "For all these years, maybe 50 years, they just kept it to themselves," Hurst said. "They knew what they'd suffered, and they knew that nobody else knew." - AFP
The Guardian
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Narrow Road to the Deep North first look review – Jacob Elordi's war epic is big, bold and deeply pleasurable
A double-episode showcase of prestige TV has now become commonplace at film festivals. It's a bit disconcerting to stop watching two-fifths of the way in, but for those wondering if this dilutes or betrays the great cause of the big screen – well, it was good enough for David Lynch. Justin Kurzel's The Narrow Road to the Deep North has now come to Berlin, a big, bold, complicatedly sensual epic of wartime anguish and personal reckoning, adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the Booker prize winning bestseller by Richard Flanagan. The story operates in three phases: before, during and after the second world war. Jacob Elordi is Dorrigo Evans, an Australian medical student about to ship out, engaged to a beautiful woman from a wealthy family – but he has a passionate affair with Amy (Odessa Young), the younger second wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker). During the war, he is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma railway – beaten, brutalised and tortured like all the rest. After the war, as an older man in 1989, Dorrigo is played by Ciarán Hinds; he has become a celebrated surgeon living in a handsome modernist house and a spokesperson for his generation of ex-servicemen. He is shown exploding with rage at a young journalist who suggests that what the Japanese suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than cancels what they did to Allied PoWs on the Burma railway. What is interesting here is not that all the drama – of Dorrigo's relationship with Amy, of the war itself – happened in the past, while the present is a matter of bittersweet memories and a placidly married Dorrigo not talking to his wife Ella (Heather Mitchell) about a lifetime of lies and guilt. No: dramatic and transgressive things are happening right now. Older Dorrigo is having a passionate affair with Lynette (Essie Davis), the wife of a surgeon colleague, and who's to say if that liaison is not every bit as meaningful as the one transfigured by the wartime past? Perhaps what the war has taught Dorrigo is to grab moments of sensual pleasure when you can. The drama indirectly discloses mysteries which underpin events: Dorrigo's unreflective Uncle Keith (an unassumingly good performance from Simon Baker) seems very relaxed about letting his nephew spend quality time with the young second wife he took soon after the death of his first. Is it because he himself feels guilt? That he senses Amy is dissatisfied and is prepared to turn a blind eye to a connection with the nephew he thinks may well die in the war? And what are Dorrigo's feelings about that or anything else? Both Elordi's younger and Hinds's older Dorrigo are opaque – as the older man testily explains to the young journalist: feelings were not as fashionable in the 40s as they are now. And perhaps feelings are what got scorched away by the violence of war. Any drama with this subject and these scenes – the brutality of the work camps, the terrible poignancy of the PoWs taking a delusional pride in their enforced labour, the muster parades of emaciated men, the confrontations between western and Japanese officers – inevitably brings back memories of a classic like David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (even the title of this has, I suspect, a tiny echo). Perhaps the key horrible sequence is the hint of friendship between Dorrigo and the relatively kindly Maj Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), who then tactlessly reveals to his commanding officer Col Kota (Taki Abe) that he has been almost fraternising with him. Coolly, Kota asks the Major if he has ever beheaded a man, an experience he suggests should be a rite of passage for a Japanese warrior. He orders one shivering Australian captive to kneel in front of him, the increasingly uneasy Major and the rest of the prisoners – just to demonstrate the stance with the sword, just a theoretical test, he assures everyone. Kurzel handles the material with confidence and storytelling verve and gets fervent, focused performances from Elordi, Hinds and Young.
