Railway of Hell: A Japanese POW's Account of War, Capture and Forced Labour

By Reginald Burton

A young captain in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, Reggie Burton was wounded in the closing stages of the disastrous defense of Malaya and Singapore. He vividly, yet calmly and with great dignity, describes the horror of captivity at the hands of the Japanese. After initial confusion, the true nature of their captors emerged as, increasingly debilitated, the POWs were forced into backbreaking work. This was only a taste of what was to come. Following a horrific journey in overcrowded cattle trucks, Burton and his dwindling band of colleagues were put to work building the notorious Burma Railway. Somehow he survived to tell this moving and shocking story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jun 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781783400492

Reviews for Railway of Hell

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is another account of the experiences of an ex-Far Eastern Prisoner of War in working on the notorious Burma-Siam railway under Japanese occupation of South East Asia in World War II. While the author's experiences are horrific, the diseases and malnutrition nearly causing his death, I somehow found this less emotionally engaging than Eric Lomax's The Railway Man. This account seemed more laconic and in places almost as though he was describing events happening to someone else - though in fairness this was no doubt just the author's writing style. On the positive side, Captain Burton is clear about the mental effects of his experiences and the mental attitudes that explained why some lived and some died. From the outset, he and his comrades found it "so hard to believe Singapore would fall....There was a soul-destroying sense of failure, of having expended so much of myself in achieving nothing. And this induced a lethargy; everything seeming so much trouble that it wasn't worth doing. Later on, "I found for myself – and I believe it was true for many others – that I'd no great awareness of the future. Perhaps it was a form of self-protection. The prospect ahead, a captivity of unknown length with protracted ordeals we'd experienced all too many times..." It was the sense of loyalty to their regiment, and at a personal level, "we were to find, later, that it was the man who kept himself as clean as possible, who shaved, and who did his best to be mentally and physically alert who survived". A good account, though not one of the most memorable ones of this type of memoir.