Daw's masterly work remains remarkable for the brutal rawness of his prose as much as his scholarship. It is still the best single work on the PoW experience across the Pacific theatre, covering the Australian, British, US and Dutch forces.

‘One of the greatest stories of men and suffering ever written.’

‘Written by an Australian, this is a great book, well researched and the details of the atrocities undertaken by the Japanese are heart breaking.’

‘Daws has done for the POW saga what Schindler’s List and The Diary of Anne Frank did for the Holocaust.’

‘Seldom is history written with such intensity and restraint, and with such narrative power.’

'Daws carries off his research so lightly. A phrase here, an example there, building up a picture from thousands of examples. A mighty human picture because it is so widely based on human experience … Story after story. Lightly, deftly touched on to tell us what happened. The method, the myriad examples, give us a book that is moving, gut-wrenching and profoundly depressing about human evil.'

'Daws eloquently tells the story of 140,000 Allied military prisoners whom history has almost forgotten. He convincingly describes Japanese POW camps not as homogenizing institutions but as tribal societies of Americans, British, Australians, Dutch-and Japanese. The Japanese showed no mercy to those who fell into their hands, the author stresses: Thousands were worked to death; as many more died of disease and starvation; others were beaten to death or beheaded, often so clumsily that two or three strokes were required to finish the job. Daws combines archival research and personal interviews to describe inmates who did what they had to do to survive and afterward tried to live with their guilt. Their experiences highlight the scale of human pain inflicted by Japan.'

‘The number of people who remember what Daws describes as a charnel-house of atrocities is diminishing fast, which makes this work indispensable. The book is hardly unique — dozens of individual memoirs have been published — but it offers a uniquely panoramic and unforgettable perspective of what American, Australian, British and Dutch POWs suffered right across the Pacific theatre.

'It examines in raw, searing detail the mental and physical ruses prisoners used to help each other stay sane and alive, the essential brotherhoods they formed against terrible odds, and how the scarred survivors coped — or failed to — after the war

'Daws is a distinguished Australian historian and film-maker who lives in Honolulu. He writes in an easy, conversational style, coloured with energetic American vernacular, but there is nothing comfortable about this narrative. Far from it — this is not a story for anyone of faint heart or stomach … Daws is angry that the Allies have put up few memorials to the servicemen who died in Japanese hands and angrier that Allied governments remain incomprehensibly reluctant to force an apology from Japan.’