Transcript
Introduction
"I know that I'm a lucky man. I was lucky to survive capture in Singapore and to come out of the jungle alive after 750 days as a slave. I was lucky to survive my ordeal in the Japanese hell ship. And after we were torpedoed, I was lucky to survive 5 days adrift alone in the South China Sea. I was lucky to survive my close shave with the atomic bomb, when I was struck by the blast at Nagasaki. For over 60 years, I have remained silent about my sufferings, about the unsettling tails of unimaginable torment. I am breaking my silence to bear witness to the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of allied prisoners.
We were a forgotten force in Singapore that vanished overnight into the jungles to become a ghost army of starved slave laborers. We were starved and beaten, tortured and massacred in the most sadistic fashion. In the early years after the war, my nightmares became so bad that I had to sleep in a chair for fear of harming my wife as I lashed out in my sleep. My nose had been broken so often during the beatings that I could not breathe through it. The tropical diseases that racked my body gave me pain for many years.