Four thousand bowls of rice : a prisoner of war comes home
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Four thousand bowls of rice : a prisoner of war comes home
Allen & Unwin, 1993
- Other Title
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4000 bowls of rice
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Note
Includes bibliograpy (p. 174-175) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This work tells how one prisoner of war prepared himself, mentally and physically, for his journey home after three and a half years of brutal captivity in Java, Burma and Thailand during World War II. Staff Sergeant Cecil Dickson was a member of the 2/2 Australian Pioneer Battalion, which was forced to surrender to the Japanese in March 1942. His engineering unit bore the heaviest work in constructing the Burma-Thailand railway. The author draws on Dickson's letters home to his wife, and on research and interviews with many surviving Pioneers, to paint a dramatic picture of prisoner-of-war life under the Japanese. Readers can discover what it felt like to emerge abruptly from one day's starvation to the next day's air-drops, and from being in regimented captivity to being in charge of one's own time again. Dickson's writings also provide a glimpse of one man's determination to free his mind from continued captivity by replacing bitter memories with the sights and sounds of post-war Bangkok, and with tender thoughts of reunion with loved ones.
Table of Contents
- A Sunday lament
- it's good being free
- too much of a good thing
- the most exciting day
- undreamed-of luxury
- a would-be correspondent
- finally, some money!
- all this mail!
- moving out
- in touch with things again
- this accursed lack of pence
- "you understand?"
- news from home!
- another anniversary apart
- free to shake the shackles
- we're well on the way!
- lost and found
- 2/2 Australian Pioneer Battalion prisoners of wars.
by "Nielsen BookData"