Foreword
by
Roderick Suddaby Keeper of the Department of Documents Imperial War Museum

The appearance of these two books is extremely welcome for several reasons. Although the events and publicity surrounding the 50th anniversary of VJ Day in 1995 reminded people of the terrible privations endured by Allied prisoners of war in the Far East, attention has continued to be focussed on those men who were employed on the construction and maintenance of the Thailand-Burma railway or on dreadful episodes such as the Borneo death marches in 1945. The plight of prisoners of war in Japanese hands elsewhere has received less notice and so the detailed diaries which Atholl Duncan kept while in captivity in Java and Japan between 1942 and 1945 help to fill a gap in our knowledge of this aspect of the Second World War.

Atholl Duncan's diaries are important, too, for the way in which they consistently dwell on the subjects and themes that are common to the writings of all Far Eastern prisoners of war. As well as their many references to the physical privations - the wholly inadequate diet, the lack of proper medical attention, the callous and occasionally brutal behaviour of their captors - his diary entries also communicate powerfully to the reader the prisoners' sense of isolation from the outside world and, above all, their families. The frequency with which he mentions his longing for news from his fiancée begin to arrive from March 1944 onwards, underline just how vital any link with home was to the morale of a prisoner of war.

As Major Alastair Campbell wrote in his foreword to the first volume, what Meg has also successfully achieved in the pages of these books is to show how Atholl Duncan's captivity impacted on his family and his fiancée back in this country. They, too, had an awful burden to bear during these years: a long period of uncertainty after March 1942 wondering whether he had survived the fighting in Singapore and Java, then irregular and sparse messages offering little insight into the realities of his existence as a prisoner of war and, finally, anxieties about the extent to which his captivity might have made him a changed man.

In recounting, very largely in his own words, the story of her father's experiences during the Second World War, Meg has put into the public domain another fascinating contemporary first-hand account of that conflict which will be of value to the military and the social historian alike.

Roderick Suddaby
 Keeper of the Department of Documents
Imperial War Museum