The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of distinction between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler
Gavan Daws combined ten years of documentary research and hundreds of interviews with surrviving POWs to write this explosive, first-and-only account of the experiences of the Allied POWs of World War II. The Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners, and one in four died the hands of their captors. Here Daws reveals the survivors' haunting experiences, from the atrocities perpetrated during the Bataan Death March and the building of the Burma-Siam railroad to descriptions of disease, torture, and execution.