Remembering the Last Survior of the USS Houston (CA-30)

After a few false starts, Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber (R-MN) inserted in the July 15, 2025, Congressional Record a memorial to Bob Hanley, the last survivor of the sinking of the USS Houston (CA-30) off the coast of Java in the Sunda Strait on February 29, 1942 (a leap year). Seaman Hanley became a POW of Japan for over three years and survived the infamous Thai-Burma Death Railway.

The Congressman's staffer, unfamiliar with the history and geography, misinterpreted my suggestion that the statement be issued on April 9 in conjunction with National Former POW Recognition Day and the anniversary of the fall of Bataan. I told him that the soldiers of Company A of the 194th Provisional Tank Battalion who fought on the Bataan Peninsula and who also became POWs of Japan were from Brainerd, which is in his boss's district. 

It turned out that the staffer put aside the statement for months and did not have me review the draft. The result was an insertion for the Congressional Record on July 10 that had Seaman Hanley surviving both the sinking of the USS Houston and the Bataan Death March a month later, 2,000 miles away. As you cannot delete a insertion for the record, a new, corrected statement was issued on July 15, 2025. It is below.

This account is not to embarrass either the congressman or the staffer. It is only to illustrate how much isnow forgotten. With the U.S. military returning to the Pacific, often to many of the places the U.S. fought and built temporary bases, it is even more important to remember this history and these places on the map. To honor the American POWs and the veterans of the Pacific War is to learn the lesson of the men left behind on the Philippines, Wake, Guam, and the Sunda Strait. We need to be prepared.

[Extensions of Remarks]

[Page E672]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


        HONORING THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF ROBERT L. "BOB" HANLEY

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. PETE STAUBER

                              of minnesota

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 15, 2025

  Mr. STAUBER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the extraordinary 
life of Seaman Second Class Robert L. ``Bob'' Hanley, the last living 
survivor of the sinking of the USS Houston (CA-30) in the Sunda Strait 
off the coast of Java on February 29, 1942, ending the storied U.S. 
Asiatic Fleet.

  As one of only 368 of the ship's complement of 1,060 to survive this 
sea battle, he showcased American grit, tenacity, and commitment in the 
fight against fascism and tyranny. He endured multiple POW camps, 
``hell ships'' to Singapore and Burma, and slave labor on the infamous 
Thai-Burma Death Railway.

  His nearly four years of as a POW of Japan were marked by starvation, 
torture, and beatings. As a POW medical orderly, he labored without 
medicines and supplies to save the lives of his fellow brutalized POWs. 
He, himself, survived bouts of dysentery, malaria, and pellagra. At 
liberation in August 1945, he was among just 291 remaining USS Houston 
(CA-30) survivors.

  Bob's resilience never wavered, and his service did not end with his 
Navy discharge in 1947. He continued serving his country by enlisting 
in the U.S. Army for 15 years. After his military career, he worked in 
security at 3M for another 15 years, retiring in 1978 due to medical 
issues caused by his wartime imprisonment.

  Throughout his life, Bob's deep faith as a devout member of the 
Catholic Church of Saint Peter in Forest Lake, Minnesota, guided him 
through the darkest times and brightest moments, serving as a 
cornerstone of his strength. On September 12, 2024, Seaman Second Class 
Robert L. Hanley passed away at 102 years old. May he rest in peace.

Historian of the POWs of Japan

Linda Goetz Holmes of Shelter Island, a journalist who devoted decades of her life to bringing to light the treatment of Allied POWs imprisoned by Imperial during World War II, died August 18, 2020. She was 87.

Holmes was a member of the Overseas Press Club Foundation and past president and board member of the Society of the Silurians, the nation’s oldest press club. She was also an associate member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

She wrote three influential books about POW experiences, 4000 Bowls of Rice: A Prisoner of War Comes Home, Unjust Enrichment: American POWs Under the Rising Sun (of which there are two editions , 2000 and 2008, with the second having a new forward), and Guests of the Emperor: The Secret of Japan’s Mukden POW Camp. She also completed and published POW archivist Roger Mansell's book on the men and women captured on Guam by the Japanese in December 1941,  Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam.

Born into a news family

Linda Graves Goetz was born May 4, 1933, in White Plains, NY. She was the second child of Florence (née Brown) and Theodore Becker Goetz, a prominent newspaperman in Westchester County.

Along with her older sister, Susan, she attended Scarsdale schools. According to the Scarsdale Alumni Association, Holmes was “the wittiest in her class”. The caption under her senior photo was “Lady of the Press”.

After graduating from Wellesley College in 1955, Holmes jumped into the world of broadcast. She worked in the television production department at Ted Bates & Co., a pioneering advertising agency in Manhattan, and at CBS Television.

In 1959, she married Theodore Edward Holmes. The couple had two sons and later divorced.

POW research
In 1994, Holmes published her first book, 4000 Bowls of Rice, about Allied prisoners of the Japanese who built the Burma Railway. The book was inspired by a conversation over dinner on Shelter Island with an Australian friend, who’d spent three and a half years in POW camps in Java, Burma, and Thailand.

Holmes relates how Cecil Dickson, who served with the Australian Pioneer Battalion, off-handedly marveled while passing a serving dish of rice, that even though he’d eaten nothing but rice for over 3,800 consecutive meals, he still enjoyed it.

Dickson, also a journalist, was the first POW Holmes met who had actually worked on the Death Railway made famous in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. After he passed away, his widow sent to Holmes a packet of letters that he’d written during his time as a POW. Holmes conducted research and connected Dickson’s stories of forced labor to records kept about Allied prisoners who built the notorious Thai-Burma Death railway.

In 4000 Bowls of Rice: A Prisoner of War Comes Home, which includes photographs taken in secret by POWs and not previously published, Holmes tells a story of slave labor that had not before been reported. She said she was inspired by the spirit of the prisoners, “the indomitable determination to look ahead because if you dwell on the past you are still a captive in your own mind.”

What enabled the POWs to survive unspeakable hardship? “They helped each other. They helped each other have the will to live.”

The book was added to the John E. Taylor collection of military history and intelligence volumes at the National Archives Library in College Park, Maryland, the National POW Museum at Andersonville GA, and the Australian War Memorial.

In 2011, Linda was the American Defender of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society's first Roger Mansell Guest Lecturer. She spoke in Pittsburg at the Society's 2nd annual convention about her work on Roger Mansell's book about the Guam POWs.

Locating and declassifying records of World War II war crimes
Richard Myers, a senior archivist for the National Archives Modern Military Records, was among the people Holmes got to know well during her research. It was at his recommendation that she became the first Pacific War historian appointed to the U.S. Government Interagency Working Group (IWG). It was formed in 1999 under the aegis of the National Archives to locate and declassify material about World War II war crimes. The agency made a final report to Congress in 2007.

In her work with the IWG, Holmes interviewed more than 400 ex-prisoners of war, their families, American and Japanese military personnel and historians, government and banking officials, and archivists from around the globe to authenticate what happened to prisoners in Japanese hands and why.

She presented her findings before audiences at the National Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History, the National Museum of the Pacific War (Admiral Nimitz Museum), and numerous civic groups, veterans organizations, and classrooms throughout the country. You can watch an interview with Holmes recorded for the Robert H. Jackson center on YouTube.

Long time resident of Hay Beach
Holmes was a long time resident of Shelter Island’s Hay Beach and had also lived in Manhattan. She was president of the Hay Beach Property Owners Association (HBPOA) for two separate terms and served as the organization’s unofficial historian. She contributed to Then & Now: The Story of Hay Beach, a publication of the Shelter Island Historical Society and the HBPOA.

In that book, you can see photos of her beloved colonial-era home on Dinah Rock Road, a circa 1775 house that she had transported by barge from Cutchogue. Holmes bought the house in 1968 and a year later hired the Davis Brothers to transport it across the bay to a lot she’d purchased for $7,000.
Services

Holmes was predeceased by her parents and sister. She is survived by her sons, Philip and Theodore. The Shelter Island Funeral Home assisted the family, who received friends on Tuesday, August 25 at the Parish Hall at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. Funeral services were held the following morning officiated by the Rev. Charles McCarron. Interment followed at St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

requiescat in pace

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from one that first appeared in the Shelter Island Reporter. Their intern Maeve Browne contributed to researching and writing this report. They owe special thanks to Patrick Clifford of the Hay Beach Property Owners Association for bringing this remarkable woman’s story to our attention. Thanks also to Katherine Moore at the Shelter Island Public Library for quickly locating Linda Holmes’ books for us to read.

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.

Things Japanese in DC

Click to purchase book

JAPAN IN DC is a 128-page full color, high-quality paperback, based on the writing, photography, and creative expressions of Washington, DC students who spent their summer 2017 investigating the presence of Japan in their own hometown. The adventure was coordinated by Globilize DC. It is a quirky, curious albeit heart-felt addition to Washington's travel literature. The students encounter not just the obvious, but discover Japan's complex involvement in the nation's capital.

They visit memorials, museums, theaters, gardens, nonprofits, exchange programs, Japanese markets, Japanese restaurants, veterans groups, foundations, think tanks, companies, and the Embassy of Japan. There are a surprising number of WW II-focused sites visited and described.

One stop they make is to the Navy Yard where in 1860 the first Japanese delegation to the U.S. arrived to visit Washington. At the Yard's National Museum of the U.S. Navy the students marvel at the WWII guns. Yet, missed was the 14 foot model of the USS Houston (CA-30). The sinking of this heavy cruiser in the Sunda Strait off Java on March 1, 1942 marked the end of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet. Only 368 of the total complement of 1011 men of the Houston managed survive the sinking and machine gun attacks.The survivors became POWs of Japan and most were sent to the Thai-Burma Death Railway as slave laborers. Of this group, 79 died of maltreatment and starvation.

USS Houston (CA-30)

JAPAN IN DC is destined to be a significant artifact of Abe Administration public diplomacy. Tourists and historians are encouraged to purchase a copy. A bargain at only $16, your purchase is also a good deed. All proceeds from the sale of the book support Globalize DC's Japanese language and culture programs. which are offered at no cost to DC public high school students.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

The Last Train

October 14th is Railway Day in Japan. It celebrates the opening day in 1872 of Japan's first railway, which was between Shimbashi Station in Tokyo and Yokohama. This was a significant step in the modernization of Japan.

October 17th is celebrated by only a few. It is remembered, however, as the day in 1943 of the opening ceremonies of the Thai-Burma Death Railway. Engine C5631, built by Nippon Sharyo in 1938 at its Narumi plant, was the locomotive used at the opening. It was hauling a cargo of Comfort Women.

This notorious engine now sits restored at the entrance of the Yasukuni Shrine's war museum in Tokyo. The museum celebrates the "Bushido" of Imperial Japan's military and it success in liberating Asia. A recent article in the right wing propaganda online magazine Japan Forward highlights the annual celebration for this wartime relic. The author dismisses the atrocities associated with building the infamous tract. 

Between June 1942 and October 1943 the POWs and forced laborers laid some 258 miles (415 km) of track from Ban Pong, Thailand (roughly 45 miles [72 km] west of Bangkok), to Thanbyuzayat, Burma (roughly 35 miles [56 km] south of Mawlamyine). Japanese forced approximately 200,000 Asian conscripts and over 60,000 Allied POWs to construct the Burma Railway. Among them were nearly 700 Americans, survivors of the USS Houston and the 131st Field Artillery/2nd Battalion (known as the “Texas Lost Battalion”), both captured on Java.

Ralph Levenberg

The truth is that more than 100,000 Asian and Allied POWs died in its making from abuse, torture, starvation, and lack of medical care. No one is sure how many of 200,000 Asian laborers died, as the Japanese did not consider them human enough to count. There were Allied POWs. As the dead cannot speak, I urge readers to comment on the piece and alert veterans groups in Australia, England, and the Netherlands. Japan Forward was created in January 2017 by the rightwing Sankei Shimbun as part of the Abe Government's stepped up PR and history revision campaign.

October 18th (2019) was the funeral for former POW of Japan Air Force Major Ralph Levenberg (September 12, 1920 – July 29, 2018) and his wife Kathie at Arlington National Cemetery. They were buried with full military honors: an Air Force Rabbi, a horse-drawn caisson, an Air Force casket team, an Air Force firing party (three shots), a bugler, an Air Force escort platoon, and an Air Force military band.

Major Levenberg was with the Army Air Corps' 17th Pursuit Squadron at Nichols Field in the Philippines when Japan attacked on December 8, 1941. The Field was destroyed on December 10th and the surviving airmen were moved to Bataan to form a provisional infantry. He and all American-Filipino troops on Bataan--estimated to be 85,000--were surrendered on April 9, 1942.

From the funeral

He was one of the small number of Jewish soldiers on the infamous Bataan Death March to Camp O'Donnell. From mid-April until most of the camp was shut down in early June 1942 and the POWs moved to Cabanatuan, thousands died. Levenberg participated in a number of grueling work details outside the camp in the Philippines before he was shipped to Japan to be a slave laborer.

Aboard the hellship Nissyo Maru, via Formosa, he arrived at the Port of Moji early August 1944. There he as taken north to the Nagoya POW Camp #2-B Narumi. This camp provided labor to Nippon Sharyo, where train engines were built and repaired. The same factory that built Engine C5631 that opened the Thai-Burma Death Railway.

Most of the time Levenberg worked in the "kitchen" boiling water for the thin soup to feed the POWs. Two weeks before the end of the war, he was savagely beaten by a guard and fell into a month-long coma. He did not revive until September 3 when he was evacuated to an American hospital ship. At liberation, he weighed 72 pounds and could not walk.

Nippon Sharyo factory still maintains the factory at Narumi where Levenberg toiled and was beaten. The Company is now owned by the rail corporation JR Central. The company is promoted by the Japanese government as wanting to build high-speed rail in the US with proposed projects between Dallas and Houston, and Baltimore and DC. The firm, however, has never apologized to nor acknowledged its American POW slaves. 

Both Nippon Sharyo and JR Central have offices in the United States. Both were alerted to Major Levenberg's funeral. Neither replied nor sent condolences.

Major Levenberg remained in the US Air Force after the war and saw combat in the Korean War. He held numerous world-wide assignments as a security professional in the Strategic Air Command and then as a U.S. civil service member of Naval Air System Command.

In retirement, Levenberg donated his time and energy to support other former POWs at the VA Hospital in Reno, Nevada. He also served on the VA's National Advisory Commission of Former Prisoners of War and as National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC) from 1979 to 1980.

In 1994, he joined, on behalf of ADBC, the group of ex-POWs of the Japanese from other former Allied countries in an appeal to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights regarding these countries' failure in addressing the injustice suffered by POWs of the Japanese during WWII. The appeal was based on the denial of a previous appeal with respect to the "gross violations of human rights" committed by Japan against American POWs during WWII. (Excerpts from the appeal document for UNCHR prepared by Mr. Levenberg) Although their appeal was again denied, it led to the payment by Canada, the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia to their former POWs of the Japanese. The United States is the only country that has not done so.

His oral history was recorded by the Library of Congress and the University of Nevada (“Nothing Had Prepared Me For This Kind of Brutality” p 570). In 1996, Dick Cavett interviewed Levenberg for his HBO series Yesteryear...1942 -- a look at the first year of America's involvement in WWII.

Honoring a Thai hero

On January 29th, please take a moment to give a prayer of thanks to Boonpong.

It is the 37th anniversary (1982, at the age of 76) of the passing of Boonpong Sirivejjabhandu, or simply Boon Pong – a Thai merchant and member of the underground resistance known as V Organization during the Japanese occupation of Thailand.

He owned a Thai traditional medicine business and a general store in Kanchanaburi province, which had been passed to him by his father Mor Khein, a Thai traditional doctor. He was also a mayor of Kanchanaburi from 1942-45 during World War II. His public responsibilities brought him into contact with the Japanese troops in charge of building the Thai-Burma Death Railway. Boonpong got a contract from the Japanese to manage the canteen for POWs in the camp nearby, which allowed him to enter the camp with few restrictions. 

His regular visits allowed him to see the appalling conditions experienced by the sick and wounded, as well as dead prisoners of war of many nationalities including American, Australian, British, Dutch, Australian and others. The horror of the inhumane treatment he witnessed gave rise to compassion and drove Boonpong to create a personal mission to help these unfortunate soldiers. He managed to smuggle in critical medicines, food, money, and messages. The camp POW doctors and POW commanders credit him with saving hundreds of lives.

After the war when rumors reached Britain in 1947 that Boonpong had fallen on hard times, three British POW camp commanders - Toosey, Knights and Lt. Col. Harold Lilly- launched an appeal among former Thailand prisoners of war. The appeal raised £35,000 and enabled Boonpong to start the Boonpong Bus Company, which flourished.

Boonpong's courage and compassion was later recognized by the British government, which honored him as a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE). The Netherlands also awarded him the Order of Orange-Nassau. Sir Edward 'Weary' Dunlop once praised Boonpong by quoting Shakespeare in Henry VI: "In thy face I see the map of honour, truth and loyalty." Initiated by Sir Edward, the Weary Dunlop-Boonpong Exchange Fellowship was was established in honor of two men in 1986, and continues through strong cooperation between the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons of Thailand.

Both a Thai PBS drama series and a musical have been made of his life.

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.

75th Anniversary of the opening of the Thai-Burma Death Railway

Death Railway Engine at Yasukuni
Manufactured by Nippon Sharyo

Seventy-five years ago today, 17 October 1943, the Thai-Burma Death Railway opened. The ceremony was timed to coincide with the first day of the Autumn Festival [Shuki Reitaisai  秋季例大祭] at the Emperor-focused, war-memorializing Yasukuni Shrine. The train engine, C5631, that ran that first day is now displayed at the entrance of the Yasukuni Shrine's entrance.

What distinguishes the Spring and Autumn Yasukuni rites above all is the presence of an emissary (chokushi) from the Imperial Court. The emissary brings the Emperor's offerings of silk in five colours to add to those which the shrine priests place before the kami at the start of the rites. Whereas the Emperor has not visited Yasukuni since 1978, an Emperor’s representative has attended the principle ceremonies that merge the Emperor with the state.

Japanese Prime Minister Abe celebrated today's Yasukuni fall festival by sending his usual ritual offering. A number of members of his Cabinet also sent offerings to Shrine and some members of his Party visited. No mention was made of the Railway anniversary.

What gave the Death Railroad its gruesome notoriety was not its uniqueness as an engineering achievement, remarkable feat though it was, but the ruthless determination of its architects to have it completed on time, however daunting the task in the inhospitable climate and topography of the region, and regardless of the cost in human life.

In many respects, it was this callous pursuit that was celebrated on this day in 1943. A group of high-ranking Imperial Japanese Army officers and engineers gathered in the tropical heat in Thailand, some 11 miles south of the Three Pagodas Pass, to ceremoniously mark the completion of the Burma-Thailand Railroad construction project. Since June 1942, the Japanese had forced some 200,000 Asian and 61,000 Allied POW laborers to construct two sections of railroad tracks—one originating in Nong Pladuk, Thailand; the other originating in Thanbyuzayat, Burma.

Some 80,000 Asians and approximately 13,000 Allied POWS had died of starvation, beatings, and various tropical diseases from lack of medical care while building hundreds of trestles, placing thousands of railroad ties, and laying over 258-miles of tracks. But now, as the two sections of railroad tracks were about to be joined together at Konkuita, the Japanese had decided that “the final act of labor” in the railway construction project—the installation of the last spike into a wooden sleeper—would be a special celebratory moment, carried out and shared by the senior Japanese officers and engineers, themselves.

By this time, 668 (of the 902 total) American POWs who had been captured on Java—survivors of USS Houston (CA-30) and soldiers of the 131st Field Artillery/2nd Battalion (known as the “Texas Lost Battalion”)—had joined the Allied POW labor force working on the railroad Most of the 220 USS Houston (CA-30) survivors and the 448 Lost Battalion soldiers had worked on the Burma side of the line. On this particular day, none of these Americans was at Konkuita to witness the senior Japanese officials as they pounded in a “final spike” into a railroad tie, and congratulated each other on the railroad’s completion.

Officially, the railway project was finished. But, for the Allied POWS who’d survived its construction, their ordeal was hardly over. Nearly two more brutal years were to pass before Japan would surrender and Allied prisoners of war would be liberated. 

And during those two years, the railroad—built to carry some 3,000 tons of Japanese supplies per day, which included Comfort Women—would become the constant target of allied bombing attacks, and thus, would require constant repair. The rail line would never stay completely “finished,” per se. In the end the so-called “completed” Burma-Thailand Railroad would never achieve the Imperial Japanese Army’s objectives; most of the tracks would be dismantled after the war; and the Japanese-controlled rail line, which once linked Nong Pladuck and Thanbyuzayat and cost approximately 100,000 lives—including the lives of 77 USS Houston (CA-30) survivors and 89 soldiers of the 131st Field Artillery/2nd Battalion—would become known forever as “the death railroad.”

It should be noted that Nippon Sharyo, the company that manufactured Engine C5631, still exists and is active in the U.S. The company was able to maintain production during the war due to POW slave labor: Nagoya POW Camp #2-B, Narumi. 

The founder of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, Sam Moody (Reprieve from Hell), was a POW who was tortured at the Narumi factory. The company is now owned by JR Central. This company, created by a close friend and adviser of Prime Minister Abe, Yoshiyuki Kasai, heads the main consortium bidding on high-speed rail projects. 

If you want to know more about the Lost Battalion and the USS Houston (CA-30) see:

Hell under the Rising Sun: Texan POWs and the Building of the Burma-Thailand Death Railway by Kelly Crager, 2008.

Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors by James D. Hornfischer, 2007

Remembering Eddie Fung

Typical labouring scene. Shows Hammer
and Tap, Embankment. Labouring, Timber felling
and an excavated cutting by Lt Fred "Smudger" Smith 

At the entrance of the Yushukan, the museum at the Yasukuni Shrine to selected members of Japan's war dead in Tokyo, sits Nippon Sharyo's engine C5631. It is infamous for having pulled the first train over the Thai-Burma Death Railway in October 1943. Reportedly, Korean Comfort Women were the train's first cargo.

The Japanese forced over 200,000 Asian conscripts (romusha) and over 60,000 Allied POWs to construct the Railway. Among the Allied POWs were some 30,000 British including colonial troops, 13,000 Australians, 18,000 Dutch, and 700 Americans. Between June 1942 and October 1943 the POWs and forced laborers laid some 258 miles (415 km) of track from Ban Pong, Thailand (roughly 45 miles [72 km] west of Bangkok), to Thanbyuzayat, Burma (roughly 35 miles [56 km] south of Mawlamyine). During this time, prisoners suffered from disease, malnutrition, injury, and cruel forms of punishment and torture inflicted by the Japanese.

One of the Americans was Eddie Fung. He was a private with the Texas Lost Battalion that fought the Japanese on Java in early March 1942. 

Dr. Fung, 96, died peacefully at home in his sleep on March 25, 2018. He will be buried with full military honors at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California on June 20, 2018. All are welcome to attend.

Dr. Fung had nothing less than an “extraordinary” life. 

Eddie became the only Chinese-American soldier captured by Imperial Japanese forces during World War II. His battalion—all white Texans, except for Frank Fujita, a Japanese-American from Abilene, Texas—became known as the “Lost Battalion” as it was surrendered on March 8, 1942 by its Dutch Commanders on Java and its fate unknown until near the end of the war.

In the statement below inserted in the Congressional Record on June 14th by US Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), the quote by Eddie is incomplete. It should continue on with:

click to order

 When people ask if I’ve had a good day, and I know them fairly well, I’ll say that I’ve never had a bad day since August 19, 1945 [his liberation in Burma], because nothing can be as bad as those camp days.  Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself, I can always say, ‘No, no, Ed, you’ve got a short memory, you’ve forgotten the lessons that you have undergone.’  One lesson I’ve learned well is that every moment that you’re alive, you’d better take advantage of the fact and enjoy it.

REMEMBERING EDDIE FUNG 

[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 99 (Thursday, June 14, 2018)] [Page S3949]

Ms. HARRIS. Mr. President, California and the nation lost a trailblazer and a war hero. Mr. Eddie Fung served our country bravely throughout his tour with the Army National Guard as part of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery of the 36th Infantry Division, including 3\1/2\ years in a Japanese prisoners of war camp. Mr. Fung will be buried with full military honors at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, CA, on June 20, 2018. 

Born in San Francisco in 1922, Eddie left home at 16 to become a cowboy in Texas. He joined the National Guard at 17, and his unit was activated in November 1941 as part of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery of the 36th Infantry Division that was sent to Java, now part of Indonesia, to fight the invading Japanese in the early months of WWII. 

Eddie became the only Chinese-American soldier captured by Imperial Japan during World War II. His battalion was known as the Lost Battalion, as it was not until near the end of the war that there was any news of what happened to the men. 

Of the 558 men and officers who landed on Java on January 11, 1942, 534 became prisoners of war, POWs. Ninety-nine were sent to Japan to be slave laborers at Japanese factories and mines, and 435, including Eddie, were sent to work on the Thai-Burma "Death'' Railway that was made famous by the film "The Bridge on the River Kwai.'' Eddie endured nearly 4 years of grueling work, near-starvation, beatings, and tropical diseases as he worked on the infamous railroad project that resulted in the loss of over 12,000 Allied POW and 70,000 Asian lives. Eighty-nine of the men from the battalion died in captivity. 

Although Eddie said his capture was a defining moment in his life, the horrific experience is just one aspect of his long and rich life. It includes his Chinese-American upbringing and his life after the war, when he studied chemistry at Stanford University on the GI bill. He also worked as a metallurgist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and became a Tai Chi master after retirement. 

As he concluded in his autobiography, "The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War,'' University of Washington Press: ``Taking my life as a whole, I've had many more good days than I've had bad ones. But even the bad days serve a purpose. They remind me of how good I have it now, in the sense that if you have never known hunger, you will not appreciate food; if you have never been enslaved, you will not appreciate what it means to be free.'' 

Eddie Fung is a hero and a role model, and we will miss his vibrant spirit. The thoughts of San Franciscans and Californians are with his wife, Judy Yung of Santa Cruz.

Honoring the men of the USS Houston (CA-30)

Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 44 (Tuesday, March 13, 2018)]

[Extensions of Remarks] [Pages E306-E307]

ANNIVERSARY OF THE SINKING OF THE USS HOUSTON

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring your attention to a memorial ceremony for the men who served aboard the USS Houston (CA-30) held this month in Sam Houston Park in my hometown of Houston. Descendants of the sailors and Marines of the "Flagship" of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet that was sunk by Imperial Japanese Naval forces on March 1, 1942 which honored their bravery and determination. Seventy-six years ago, the American heavy cruiser USS Houston (CA-30) and Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth, outnumbered and outgunned by an Imperial Japanese Navy Battle Fleet, fought to the last in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. Both went down with their captains aboard and their guns still firing. Nearly 1,000 Allied servicemen perished. It marked the end of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet and the naval forces of the American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) Command. As the crews abandoned the sinking ships, Japanese sailors machine- gunned the decks and the men in the oil-soaked sea. Only 368 sailors and Marines, including four Chinese stewards and mess attendants from the Houston, made it to shore where they were taken as POWs of Japan. Some were held in a POW camp on Java, eight officers were sent to Japan to corporate POW camps, and others to the infamous Changi Prison in Singapore. Most, 220 of the survivors were shipped to Burma to be slave laborers constructing the Thai-Burma Death Railway. 

For the next three and one-half years, the surviving men of the Houston and Perth suffered together through humiliation, degradation, physical and mental torture, starvation and horrible tropical diseases. Only 291 men from the Houston's complement of 1008, and 214 of the Perth's complement of 681, returned home after the War. This shared history speaks to the American spirit and grit as well as to our enduring alliance with Australia. Back in Houston, Texas, news of the destruction of the warship hit the city hard. The result was a mass recruiting drive for volunteers to replace the lost crew. On Memorial Day 1942, a crowd of nearly 200,000 witnessed 1,000 ``Houston Volunteers'' inducted into the Navy. An accompanying bond drive raised over $85 million, enough to pay for a new cruiser and an aircraft carrier, the USS San Jacinto. According to a 1949 Houston Chronicle article commemorating the event, word of the ship's fate ``aroused a fever pitch of patriotism'' in the city. ``Her loss made the war something more of a personal conflict to more than half a million people,'' the article reads. "Official news of her destruction . . . slapped the city squarely between the eyes, and set off a series of events that stands unequaled in the nation." So this week, we pause to remember the brave men of the USS Houston (CA-30) who inspired their country and who gave so much to fight tyranny in the Pacific. They who "Still Stand Watch Over Sunda Strait" represent our enduring commitment to liberty. And I thank the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society and the USS Houston CA-30 Survivors' Association and Next Generations for ensuring that the sacrifice and lessons of this greatest generation is remembered and honored.

Senator John Cornyn's tribute to the Lost Battalion

REMEMBERING THE SOLDIERS OF 2ND BATTALION 

131ST FIELD ARTILLERY REGIMENT

U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this week, we remember the brave men of Texas who gave so much to preserve freedom in the Pacific and survived the greatest horrors of World War II. Soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment from Camp Bowie, TX, a Texas National Guard unit, were fighting alongside Australian forces on Java, an island in Indonesia, against invading Japanese forces. On March 8, 1942 the Americans and their Australian allies were captured by the Japanese. A report was never filed by the Japanese to identify the captured unit. As a result, the Texas soldiers had disappeared and were dubbed ``the Lost Battalion.''

They were combined with survivors of the USS Houston, CA-30, which had been sunk in the Battle of Sunda Strait on March 1, 1942, and dispersed to POW labor camps located in Burma, Thailand, and Japan to work as slave laborers. They worked on the Burma-Siam Death Railway, building a railroad through the jungle and into the coal mines, docks, and shipyards in Japan and other Southeast Asian countries. For 42 months, the men of 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery and the USS Houston suffered together through humiliation, degradation, physical and mental torture, starvation, and horrible tropical diseases, with no medication.

Five hundred and thirty-two soldiers of the battalion, along with 371 survivors of the USS Houston were taken prisoner. As many as 163 soldiers died in captivity, and of those, 133 are estimated to have died working on the railroad.

In August of 1945, after 42 months of captivity and forced labor, the survivors of 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment and the survivors of the USS Houston were returned to the United States. March 8, 2017, marks the 75th year since their capture on the island of Java, and these soldiers deserve to be remembered for their heroic service and sacrifices in the Pacific theater of battle.

From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office
March 8, 2017
115th Congress, 1st Session
Issue: Vol. 163, No. 40 — Daily Edition
[Page S1686]

Senator Ted Cruz's tribute to the USS HOUSTON (CA-30)

75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SINKING OF THE USS ``HOUSTON''

Congressional Record, March 2, 2017

115th Congress, 1st Session

Issue: Vol. 163, No. 37 — Daily Edition

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Houston (CA-30), the ``flagship'' of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, which fought bravely against the Imperial Japanese Navy Battle Fleet. During an engagement on March 1, 1942, the USS Houston and the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth were sunk at the Battle of Sunda Strait, suffering a combined loss of nearly 1,000 servicemen; the surviving sailors and marines became prisoners of war. After the war, it was revealed that they had been sent to Japan and then transferred to the mainland and used as slave labor for construction of the Thai- Burma Railway. Only 266 men from the Houston's complement of 1,008 and 214 of the Perth's complement of 681 returned home after the war. The news of this horrific loss hit the Lone Star state hard, but with typical Texan gusto and determination, it prompted a mass recruiting drive for volunteers to replace the lost crew. On Memorial Day 1942, a crowd of nearly 200,000 witnessed 1,000 ``Houston Volunteers'' inducted into the Navy. An accompanying bond drive raised over $85 million, enough to pay for a new cruiser and an aircraft carrier, the USS San Jacinto. This historic event speaks to the American spirit and grit as well as our enduring alliance with Australia. 

In honor of this occasion, we remember the brave men of Texas, and all of those from the Greatest Generation, who gave so much to preserve freedom in the Pacific and fight for America. They fought for country and liberty in the face of impossible odds. These sailors, soldiers, and marines represent America's unbeatable determination.

A POW Merry Christmas

Painting by Gustav Potthoff survivor of Bridge over the River Kwai

Prisoner of war Potthoff, 94, used art to convey life in captivity

The Republic, Columbus, IN, 12/25/16 

Gustav T. Potthoff, a Columbus resident known for his paintings and the brutal conditions he endured as a World War II prisoner of war, has died.

He died at his home Thursday at age 94. Potthoff is survived by his wife, Adele; and their two children. Services are pending at Barkes, Weaver & Glick Funeral Homes.

Potthoff moved to Columbus in 1965 to begin a career with Cummins Engine Co. It was over the ensuing years that local residents learned of the cruelty he suffered, and later the joy and catharsis he experienced in creating artwork.

Gustav Potthoff created this painting of an angel he said was by his side while he was a prisoner 

in World War II, and that follows him everywhere. Potthoff died Thursday at age 94.

He was born in Indonesia March 11, 1922, on the island of Maluku, near New Guinea and Australia, and raised in a Dutch colonial orphanage. Potthoff was a mechanic in a Dutch Indies Army battalion when he was captured by Japanese forces in 1941. Potthoff and about 1,800 other soldiers were sent to Burma to work on the Burma-Thailand railroad project that would later become widely known in the movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” The movie was fictional but based on real-life events.

Potthoff was a prisoner for 3½ years. He suffered from cholera, dysentery and pneumonia. He saw fellow prisoners beaten, killed at random, starved and become ill. When he was freed in 1945, only 300 of the original 1,800 prisoners he was with had survived.

After his release, Potthoff went to Holland, but in 1962 he immigrated to the United States — specifically Indianapolis. Three years later he arrived in Columbus with the help of First Christian Church as his sponsor.

In 1986, Potthoff and his wife became American citizens.

It was after Gus Potthoff retired from Cummins in 1987 that he used painting to depict memories of his time as a prisoner of war, including the forced labor of constructing the railroad. They were a way to tell what happened during his imprisonment and remember those who didn’t survive. His paintings often included images of elephants, spirits of the dead, the lush countryside, railroads, bridges and angels.

“The angels are who was looking out for me. They’re still looking out for me,” Potthoff told The Republic in 2012.

He painted many works, but never kept count of how many. Potthoff never sold his works; he always gave them away.

Potthoff’s works were displayed throughout the community, such as at IUPUC, YES Cinema, the Columbus Learning Center, the Bartholomew County Public Library and the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum.

He was a familiar figure at the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum at Columbus Municipal Airport, where he was a member of the 95ers, a group of volunteers engaged in veterans support activities.

Potthoff’s contributions to the community and his story of survival earned the admiration of local residents, who made sure he received the honor he deserved and help when needed.

When climbing the steps to his front porch had become a difficult labor, two fellow members in the 95ers — Wendell Ross and Pete Jenkins — built a ramp up those steps for their friend.

“We didn’t look on it as a chore,” Ross, former manager of Columbus Municipal Airport and a U.S. Navy veteran, told The Republic in 2012. “Gus has gone through so much in his life and served as an inspiration to anyone who ever met him. It was really a labor of love.”

Sept. 16, 2016, marked the third consecutive year that Bartholomew County honored local residents such as Potthoff, who were prisoners of war or listed as missing in action. They were honored at a local observance of national POW-MIA Recognition Day, which is the third Friday of every September.

Organizer Robert Miller said it’s important to honor, remember and never forget these veterans.

Remembering the USS Houston CA-30

March 1, 1942

Arlington National Cemetery, Section 12
Memorial to the crew of the U.S.S. Houston-CA-30 & H.M.A.S. Perth

Over this week there will be a series of memorial events in Indonesia and Houston, Texas commemorating valiant battle of the Sundra Strait and the sinking of the USS-Houston CA-30. On Saturday, March 7th at 2:00pm in Sam Houston Park there will be a remembrance service at the USS-Houston Memorial.

click to order

On February 28, 1942, the day after the Battle of the Java Sea, the destroyers HMAS Perth (Australian Navy) and USS Houston CA-30 (U.S. Navy) steamed into Banten Bay. They ran into a Battle Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The two cruisers may have sunk one Japanese transport and forced three others to beach. However, a Japanese destroyer squadron blocked the Sunda Strait, their means of retreat. Unable to withdraw, Perth was repeatedly hit with gun and torpedo fire and sank about about 12:30 AM local time on March 1. Houston, losing power after a torpedo hit, managed to damaged three destroyers and sink a minesweeper. Finally dead in the water, with her captain dead, she began to sink. Japanese sailors proceeded to machine-gun the decks and the men in the sea until the ship capsized and sank shortly after the Perth went down.

Of the crew of 1,061, only 368 survived including 24 of the 74-man USMC detachment aboard. The crew became prisoners of the Japanese for the remainder of the war. Most of the remaining officers were sent to Japan to be slave laborers. The rest ended up toiling on Thai-Burma Death Railway. Seventy-nine men died of torture, disease and starvation while prisoners.

The wreck of the USS Houston lies in the Sunda Strait and has over the years been damaged by scavengers and treasure hunters. The US and Indonesian Navies are developing plans to project this hallowed war grave.  Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of her Survivors by James D. Hornfischer (2006) is considered a definitive history of the ship. 

Tom Uren an Australian hero: In Memoriam

Tom Uren, a man of letters: POW, MP, AC

January 27, 2015

''I'VE been hit with open hands, closed fists, pieces of wood, iron bars and bamboo about two inches in diameter,'' Tom Uren says.

He was hardly more than a boy then- a prisoner-of-war and slave of the Japanese in his early 20s on the Burma-Thai railway.

But Tom Uren would take many more hits as his long, often controversial life wore on, and he rolled with them all and refused to lie down.

Today, aged 91, with most of his opponents fallen away - and a lot of them forgiven by him, including the Japanese - he will receive the highest honour his nation can bestow on a civilian: Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia.

Others to be so honoured today include former Howard government foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, astrophysicist and joint Nobel prize winner Professor Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory, and the director of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra, the Reverend Professor James Mitchell Haire.

Australia mourns the passing of the Honourable Tom Uren AC. He was a prisoner of war, a parliamentarian, a minister, a deputy leader of his party and served our country throughout his adult life.He was an aspiring boxer and outstanding athlete who joined the army at the age of 20 and deployed to Timor.He spent his 21st birthday – and the following three – as a prisoner of war. He suffered the brutality of the Burma-Thai Railway and he witnessed from afar the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.Despite these experiences, he rejected hatred. -- Prime Minister Tony Abbott

Mr Uren's award states it is for ''eminent service to the community, particularly through contributions to the welfare of veterans, improved medical education in Vietnam and the preservation of sites of heritage and environmental significance".

All true, but it's an inadequate summation of the life of the Balmain-born man who, impoverished, left school at 13 years and seven months.

He fought for the heavyweight boxing championship of Australia at 19 (and lost), marched into the hell of the Burma-Thai railway at 21, served the Labor Party as member for the Sydney electorate of Reid for 32 years, became his party's deputy leader and a cabinet minister in the Whitlam government and later found himself consigned to the junior ministry for four years in the Hawke government.

As a whip-thin prisoner shipped from Thailand to Japan to labour in a copper smelter, he watched the sky discolour when the Fat Man atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. [He was at Omuta, Fukuoka 17 as a slave laborer for Mitsui Mining.]

It stopped the war and freed him, but he became one of Australia's leading anti-nuclear campaigners. The Japanese, he insists, were as much victims of militarism and fascism as anyone else.

Long a man of the Left, Mr Uren's early excursions into the peace movement were so passionate that ASIO believed he was taking his instructions from the Soviets. When newspapers published the libel, he sued and eventually won enough for two holiday homes, which he took delight in calling the ''Fairfax Retreat '' in the bush and the ''Packer Lodge'' on the New South Wales south coast.

His insistence in marching against the Vietnam War earned him several stretches in jails, including Sydney's Long Bay and Brisbane's Boggo Road. Mr Uren was appalled by the dehumanising effect of the old jails, and used his influence to get at least one of his fellow prisoners a job in Canberra.

''So many people are crook on their fellows, but I just look for the love in people,'' he says.

Often Mr Uren found himself talking, he says ''to two-and-a-half dogs". He was one of the early proponents of self-determination for the East Timorese, but no one seemed interested. He simply kept at it until it became mainstream.

The defining period of his life was the Burma-Thai railway. Taken prisoner on Timor aged 20, he marched into his first prison camp on the railway aged 21.

Always a big, strong man, he became known for his willingness to put his body between furious Japanese guards and his comrades, figuring he could take the beating that might kill a mate weakened by hunger, disease and slaving.

It was the influence of the camp commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward ''Weary'' Dunlop, that stayed with him. Colonel Dunlop, a surgeon, taxed fellow officers to build a small bank to buy medical supplies and food, saving the lives of many hundreds of men, and he ensured that the strong looked after the weak, the young looked after the old and the relatively healthy cared for the sick.

It was, Mr Uren says, collectivism - a principle he adopted for life and which during the Cold War found him branded a communist, though he never was.

He never forgot his fellow POW survivors, and fought a battle over 23 years to grant them extra benefits, arguing that they died younger and suffered greater illness than other returned servicemen. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that all remaining POWs would receive an extra $500 a fortnight.

Of the 22,000 Australian prisoners of the Japanese, only some 400 are alive now, but Mr Uren said Ms Gillard's action displayed compassion and justice, which he valued above all else.

And his elevation to Companion of the Order of Australia?


''I just want to thank my fellow Australians for their support, their warmth and their love in my evergreen years,'' he says.

Reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald by Tony Wright

In my father’s footsteps on the death railway

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Although many memoirs and histories have been written of the POW of Japan experience, few have been consider "literature." The books have not transcended from being a simple record of events to the art of telling a universal cultural tale. This has been in part because few of the stories told have been written with the skill or grace of an Anne Frank or an Elie Wiesel. Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken seems to have begun to fill this void. Hopefully, the related movie to be released this Christmas will provide more art to embed it into the national imagination.

Last month, Richard Flanagan the son of an Australian POW who slaved on the Thai-Burma Death railway was awarded prestigious Man Booker Prize for English Fiction for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It is a fictionalized account of the building of the Thai-Burma Death railway and living as its survivor.

Unlike Unbroken, it is not about virtue. The book’s hero, a doctor, and one assumes Flanagan too, is not romantic about war. He doesn’t believe that suffering is a kind of grace that lends virtue to the sufferers. Indeed, Evans “hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves.” Virtue, he believed, was just “vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.” This book is the next step in embedding the POW story into our national culture.

After slaving on the Burma-Thai Death Railroad, Flanagan's father was shipped to Japan to slave in a coal near Hiroshima on the In-land Sea, Hiroshima #9-B, the Ohama Mine in Onoda. The third book of Australian Ray Parkin's Wartime Trilogy novel of his experience as POW of Japan, The Sword and the Blossom, is an account of moving from the Death Railroad to this mine.

For an excellent analysis of the Flanagan novel, see Ian Buruma in the November 20th New York Review of Books.
To order: http://amzn.to/10cTKsM

Turning his father’s experiences as a Japanese POW into a Booker prize-winning novel became a pilgrimage for Richard Flanagan. Below he writes for the London Times how it took him from the jungles of Thailand and their ghosts to Tokyo, where he met the Lizard, a notorious camp guard. [Richard Flanagan, The Sunday Times (London) Published: 19 October 2014]

Allied prisoners toiling on the railway. (Topham Picturepoint/Press Association)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature. Written in 1689 by Matsuo Basho, the greatest of all haiku poets, it takes the form of a haibun, a nature journal that records a journey in prose and haiku.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, one of those put to work on what in Australia is known as the Death Railway. A pharaonic project, the railway was pushed more than 250 miles through wild jungle in what was then Siam — and is today Thailand — and Burma in less than a year in 1943.

It was built by more than a quarter of a million slave labourers working mostly naked, with almost no machinery and only the most basic of hand tools. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. More corpses than Hiroshima. More corpses than there are words in my novel.

My father was a survivor of that, of cholera, of the hell ships that took POWs to Japan, of being a slave labourer in a coalmine under the Inland Sea, south of Hiroshima, at the war’s end. If Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, my father and his mates’ experience is one of its lowest.

For 12 years I tried to write a novel about that experience and all it suggested to me. And for 12 years other novels came and went as I continued to be unable to write this one. I wrote five wildly different novels attempting somehow to tell this story, all of them failures, all files which I deleted and all manuscripts which I burnt. I understood, although it made no sense, that this was the book I had to write if I was to keep on writing. And yet I could not write it.

Then I realised that my father, by now in his nineties, was growing frail and weak and although there was no logical reason to think such a thing, I felt I had to somehow finish this novel before he died.

Flanagan’s father, Archie, was also a slave labourer in a Japanese coal mine

For a year I visited and called with endless questions about daily life in the camp. What came first, roll call or breakfast? How does a rotting shin bone revealed by a blossoming tropical ulcer smell? What was it like having cholera?

My memories of my father when I was a child are of a sick man, debilitated by his war experience. We grew up with a man of often strange anxieties and deep compassion, whose stories of his POW experiences, while often funny, were compounded of love and pity. But I did not want the book to be about him. As much as his experience and perspective would influence it, I did not want some fictionalised version of his life. As much as it was about my father and me, it had to escape us both.

I went to Thailand and walked up and found the site of my father’s camp, walked that bitter track through the jungle from that camp to what little remained of the railway and the dead, overgrown embankments and cuttings. And I realised that the novel had to be a love story. Why?

Because great love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth about love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. War stories are the great story of death. War illuminates love; while love — if it does not redeem war — is the highest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life.

Friedrich Nietzsche regarded hope as the cruellest of human torments because it prolongs suffering. But it is also the nub of who we are. Not for nothing were the most forsaken in the Nazi death camps the muselmänner, those without hope. Similarly art — when it seeks to speak of darkness but does not allow for hope — will finally fail. Without hope such art is untrue to what we know as a fundamental truth of ourselves.

And I had long been taken by a story my parents were fond of.

A Latvian man they knew, a postwar refugee, caught up in the vast movements of lives that the Second World War had involved, had returned to his home village after the war, to find it razed and his wife, he was told, dead. He searched the wastelands of postwar Europe for her for two years and finally had to accept the truth: that she had perished. He emigrated to Australia, met another woman, married and had children.

(Getty)

In 1957 he visited Sydney. Walking down a crowded street he saw walking towards him his Latvian wife, alive, with a child on either hand. At that moment he had to decide whether he would acknowledge her or walk on.

This beautiful story had always moved me. I started my novel yet again, with this image at its heart. Now it was a love story and its leading character a figure utterly unlike my father — a doctor who is the POW commander in one camp and who, after the war, is celebrated as a war hero but feels himself to be anything but that.

My father worried that people would forget what had happened and he trusted me that I might write something that encouraged people to remember. If my father was helpful with my endless questioning of minute detail, he never asked me what the story was. He allowed me the freedom to write as I have to write.

Yet I felt, rather shamefully, that perhaps I would not be able to finish the novel until he died, as though there was something in all this that held me back.

Towards the end of 2012, with the novel taking its final form, I resolved to visit Japan.

There I searched and found several guards who had worked on the Death Railway. I met a man who had been a Japanese army medical orderly and had been at my father’s camp. It looked, he said, like a Buddhist hell. He recalled skeletons crawling around in the mud. He told me the Australians were very bad with their hygiene. The Japanese took hot baths. The Australians did not. I paid for his tea and taxi home.

Five minutes before meeting another guard who had been on the Death Railway, I realised that he was the one who had been the Ivan the Terrible of my father’s camp, the man the Australians called “the Lizard”. The meeting was to be in the offices of a taxi company owned by his son in outer suburban Tokyo.

The Lizard had been sentenced to death for war crimes after the war. Later he had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment and then was released in a general amnesty in 1956. He is the only man I have ever heard my father — a gentle, peaceful man — speak of with violent intent.

Lee Hak-rae,  as he is now, was a dignified, gracious and generous old man [Korean Japanese]. Near the end of our meeting I asked him to slap me. Violent face-slapping — known as binta — was the immediate form of punishment in the camps, doled out frequently and viciously.

It was a curious request and the old man took some persuasion. Finally we stood up, facing each other. I asked him to slap me as hard as he could. Of his slaps, I recall only how clean and dry the skin of his aged hand was as it struck me.

On the third blow the taxi office began to shake and toss violently, like a dinghy in a wild sea. For a moment I thought I was going mad. But in one of those coincidences in which reality delights, but fiction — for fear of being unrealistic — is never permitted, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo. For half a minute, as the room swayed and a wall of tossing taxi keys made a shimmering tingle, I saw the Lizard frightened. I saw too that wherever evil is, it was not in that room with that old man and me.

I went south to where my father was a slave labourer and the mayor of Sanyo Onoda city met me in front of television cameras to apologise.  I met villagers who remembered Australians arriving in that terrible winter of late 1944, skeletons in shorts. I met more guards. I was photographed by local media with one guard at the site of the camp where my father thought he would die in the spring of 1945. Below us, where once stood the minehead the POWs would run a gauntlet of sadistic guards to enter, there now stood a love hotel.

It was a bitterly cold day. We put our arms around one another for a photograph. A tiny, frail man, Mr Sato then curled into me in the manner children do when seeking forgiveness. Or perhaps he was just cold. When the photograph was taken, I took my arm away. Mr Sato stayed where he was, curling inwards.

That night I ended up drinking in a Japanese hostess bar with Kenji Yasushige,  the Sanyo Onada city council’s international relations and equal opportunities officer. As Kenji crooned a karaoke ballad to the largely empty bar, one of the hostesses looked at me and, smiling, asked why I was visiting the city.

“My father was a slave labourer here during the war,” I said.

“Really?” she replied, continuing to look at me with her dreamy, anime eyes. “What is slave labourer?”

There is strangeness in the world beyond any words.

My father, who was not a man for such things, rang within a few hours of my returning home. He wanted to know what had happened. He was 98, frail, but his mind was still good, his recall phenomenal. I told him how the Japanese people had been unfailingly kind and generous and how, amazingly, I had met some guards who had been at his camps, including the Lizard. He asked me what they said.

I thought of the earthquake. Of Mr Sato curling inwards. Of the near-empty hostess bar.

I said they talked in detail about all of their lives, except the camps where details seemed to elude them, but that I felt nevertheless that they carried shame, and how each one had expressed their sorrow and apologies for what had happened, and asked me to pass them on to my father.

My father stopped talking. After some time he said he had to go, and hung up.

Later that day my father lost all memory of his time in the POW camps. And yet his pre-war memory remained strong. He knew in an abstract way — as you know you have been in the womb — that he had been in the camps, but no memory remained. It was as though he were finally free.

For the next four months I lived mostly by myself on an island off the coast of Tasmania and I rewrote the novel. I felt I had written all my books in order to write this one book, to somehow communicate the incommunicable.

I emailed the final draft of my novel to my publisher on the Monday before Anzac Day. My father was ill, and I was with him early that morning. He asked how the book was going. I told him it was finally done.

He died that night.

In truth the novel was not quite done. There was some intensive rewriting, as is my way when publication approaches. And I see now what I could not see then, that hanging over it all, shaping everything, were his looming death and the question of love. But you only understand such things — and then only imperfectly — long after you have written the last word.

One thing did not change — the dedication: “To prisoner san byaku san ju go.” It was my father’s Japanese prison number, 335.

He had taught it to me as I was growing up as his son — a child of the narrow road to the deep north.