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History Canada

Bamboo Cage

The P.O.W. Diary of Flight Lieutenant Robert Wyse, 1942-1943

edited by Jonathan Vance

Publisher
Goose Lane Editions
Initial publish date
Sep 2011
Category
Canada, Military, World War II
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780864925527
    Publish Date
    Sep 2011
    List Price
    $16.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780864925299
    Publish Date
    May 2009
    List Price
    $16.95

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Description

In 1942, RAF flight controller Robert Wyse became a Japanese prisoner of war on the island of Java in Indonesia. Starved, sick, beaten, and worked to near-death, he wasted away until he weighed only seventy pounds, his life hanging in tenuous balance. There were strict orders against POWs keeping diaries, but Wyse penned his observations on the scarce bits of paper he could find, struggling to describe the brutalities he witnessed. After cleverly hiding his notes in a piece of bamboo next to his bed, in December of 1943, he carefully hid his notes inside a bottle beneath his prison hut. After the war, he wrote to the Dutch authorities, asking them to dig up his diary and return it to him.

In this detailed and frank portrayal of life under Japanese occupation, Wyse reveals the both the best and the worst of human nature. He criticized his fellow soldiers for botching the defence of Java and Sumatra and admonished his captors for their brutality. Yet, Wyse also describes the selfless efforts of the Dutch civilians who helped the prisoners by doing whatever they could as well as his first-hand observations of acts of self-sacrifice among the prisoners themselves.

Bamboo Cage is volume 13 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

About the author

JONATHAN F. VANCE is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture. His books include High Flight, Building Canada and Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, which won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the C. P. Stacey Award and the Dafoe Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail and a reviewer for The Beaver, Vance is on the advisory committee of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He lives in London, Ontario.

Jonathan Vance's profile page

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