Merry Christmas

 

Ronald Searle (3 March 1920 – 30 December 2011) is perhaps the best known of the artists who were POWs of Japan. The British illustrator said that his POW experience on the Thai Burma Death Railroad "directed" the rest of his life. Many of his wartime drawings documenting the horror are in the Imperial War Museum. In 1986, he published Ronald Searle: To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939–1945.

Books of the Thai-Burma Death Railway

Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American Pows in Burma, 1942-1945 by Robert S. LaForte (Author), Ronald E. Marcello (Editor) (1993)

River Kwai Railway: The Story of the Burma-Siam Railroad by C. Kinvig (2005)

These two books are considered the most rigorous in presenting how the railway was built and the workers and slaves were treated.


The famous illustrator Ronald Searle who drew cartoons for the New Yorker was a British POW of Japan on the Death Railway. Another British POW Jack Chalker was an accomplished artist who also recorded his experience through drawings.


To the Kwai—and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945 by Ronald Searle  (2007)

Burma Railway: Original War Drawings of POW by Jack Chalker (2007)

The two most famous books, one fiction and one non-fiction, about POWs surviving the Thai-Burma Death Railway are:


Railway Man A POWs Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness by Eric Lomax (2008)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Merry Christmas, memories of imprisonment linger

Ronald Searle was one of Great Britain's most famous illustrators and cartoonists. His work graced many a cover of the New Yorker. An architectural draftsman for the British Army, Searle was captured by the invading Japanese in Singapore March 1942. For the next three years until September 1945 he endured the horrors of the Changi prison camp and then the building of Thai Burma Death Railroad. Throughout, he continued draw even switching to his right hand when his dominant left hand was covered in ulcers. Above is a Christmas card he sent to a fellow former POW. The tower is the one in Changi. To the Kwai and Back is a collection of Searle's war drawings.