The Naked Island  

2,523 words

The familiar narrative surrounding World War Two involves a main theater of war in Europe and Russia, with a late intervention from the USA. But it was, of course, a World War, with fighting taking place across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Much of the world was involved in some way. Even former socialist utopia Sweden, who supposedly remained neutral throughout the war, was not really as uninvolved as it would like to have the world believe. Sweden allowed Germany to use their territory to transport iron ore by rail, leading, among other things, to the occupation of their neighbors, Norway. Sweden was like a conscientious objector smuggling guns to the front line despite doing no fighting themselves. In this global conflagration, the Anzac countries, Australia and New Zealand (and Tonga, to be fair), played a minor but important part in the war in the Pacific.

One of the great Australian documents of that country’s war effort is Russell Braddon’s 1951 book, The Naked Island, most of which describes the treatment of Australian and other allied troops at the hands of the Japanese in prison camps in Malaya, Burma, and Thailand. The book went on to sell over two million copies, becoming part of Australia’s literary tradition. It is a gruelling book which is at once a gripping record of army life (both serious and amusing), a testament to the will and determination of white men under duress, and an insight into what is surely one of history’s cruelest people, the Japanese. Anyone who knows anything about the infamous “rape of Nanjing” in 1937, in which Japanese troops visited appalling atrocities on a Chinese village which had already surrendered, will need no introduction to Japanese cruelty. Many Western nations have a lasting animosity towards the Japanese because of their treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) before VJ Day (Victory in Japan). In 1998, when then Emperor Akihito visited London, some British ex-POWs turn their backs on him as he rode past in a carriage with the Queen. It was a moving protest against Japanese torture and forced labor.

The book opens with Braddon using a camp latrine. On the way, across “twenty feet of maggot-ridden mud”, he sees a Scottish soldier, crippled by dysentery and ashamed to have uncontrollably fouled himself. Braddon uses the vile latrine and returns past the guard. The Scotsman is dead. An unpleasant opening, but pastoral compared with what will come in a book which largely concerns horror and cruelty inflicted for purely racialist reasons.

A flashback, and Braddon enlists in the Australian army, aged 20. He is posted to Malaya and is not expecting a glorious war: “Regretfully we resigned ourselves to a war without battles where our sole function was to guard the Empire’s greatest source of tin and rubber.”

After a relaxing time in Singapore, with his biggest gripe being the incivility and ingratitude of the natives he is helping protect, Braddon’s war soon becomes hotter, and the coming of the Japanese is foreshadowed when Braddon’s company are forced to decamp without their new mascot, a small Malay orphan who has attached himself to the company:

When the war came to Tampin and his soldier foster parents were sent to fight elsewhere, it is said that Little Tinea was killed by the bombs. I don’t know. I rather hope he was; for there was no place for children such as he in the arms of the soldiers of Nippon.

The war was changing, and Braddon with it. The young man does not consider himself a coward – he joined up voluntarily, after all – but notes in himself a “tendency to terror” just before he kills his first Japanese. Bayoneting the man, he compares the technique used as “just like a stop volley at tennis”, surprised at his casual attitude to his first kill. The troops are told that the Japanese often use fire-crackers to imitate the sound of gunfire, but it is not a firecracker that tears Braddon’s sergeant’s throat out mid-conversation. His war has begun in earnest.

Military intelligence has been ridiculed many times in literature, and so it is here. We hear much about “misinformation” in our modern, pampered state of peace, usually relating to some trivia or other. In wartime, misinformation can have deadly consequences for the men on the ground. Discovering they have been guarding the wrong aerodrome for days due to a similarity in names, the unit travels to the correct aerodrome only to learn that the attack on Pearl Harbor has just taken place, and they are now sitting ducks. Stranded when their relief fails to arrive, Braddon and his fellow soldiers fall into the hands of the Japanese:

A last message came through on our dying radio. The Loyals had been beaten back in their attempt to fight through to us. We were alone. Australia, it said, was proud of us which was nice.

Braddon spends his 21st birthday tied up with his comrades, and sitting on the edge of their pre-dug grave. He and what little remains of his unit have been captured, and for them, although the combat war is over, the real hell has just begun.

From the moment Braddon gets inside the internment camp, things become squalid. Seven hundred men are crowded into an area designed for 30 female office workers to exercise. There is no water and no latrines. The entire tone of the book changes. Once inside the jail itself, the first thing that happens is a fusillade of stories about the other prisoners, and their respective captures. The reader is kept aware that the Japanese are not keeping their captives alive out of some old, Shinto sense of honor, but because they need workers for the war effort. But the stories are a sudden departure from the book’s earlier, diaristic style. It’s as though Braddon (the character, not the author) senses that the horror is coming, and so rushes into a sort of narratomania. It’s one of the best sections of the book.

The jail is appalling. The only thing making it preferable to, say, Solzhenitsyn’s cell in the gulag, is that at least the Aussies were in no danger of hypothermia. Eventually, the 700 men are moved into a wing of the camp, and the comparative luxury of three men in cells meant for one. They chalk up comical signs above the cell doors. “Shangri La”, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”, “There’s no place like home”. They watch the Chinese in the opposite cell pacing around because “tomorrow, one of them will die at random, their head later appearing on a pole in the town.”

The description of these 700 men in such crushed squalor made me wonder what today’s Western 20-year-olds might make of such incarceration. The stench, the gangrenous wounds, the lice, the diet of glue-like rice, the sound of dying men moaning like the damned. Some of today’s youth may struggle to find within themselves the optimism, stoicism, and humor which come naturally to the Australian.

As is so often the case with accounts of Caucasian troops stationed in tropical climes, tiny creatures prove as vexatious as the enemy. Braddon tells of hookworms, sand-flies, and lice, the first potentially deadly, the latter pair maddening. It is reminiscent of Orwell’s description of lice-riddled uniforms in Homage to Catalonia. The lack of any fruit or vegetables leads to avitaminosis followed by an appalling disease of the scrotum – “Rice balls” – which is left raw and bleeding. This terrible condition affects every trooper, and each man is in constant agony, there being no pain-killing drugs available, or any medicine at all. Braddon also debunks the myth of the inscrutable Asian:

When an Indian, Chinaman, Jap, Korean or Indonesian is in pain he screams and moans with an abandon which, to the European, is downright embarrassing. They are all of them admirably impassive about inflicting pain on others being apparently immune to the European’s ability to suffer vicariously but when stung themselves, they become most vociferous.

Braddon contracts beri-beri, and this six-foot-tall man reduces to a skeletal 81 pounds. Nevertheless, Braddon vows to maintain his personal grooming, and also to read and memorize one page a day of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in order to understand the enemy.

The ingenuity with which the POWs create a mini-society in the depths of hell on earth is a testament to a superior ethnicity. Stealing from the Japanese and using their resources against them, the officers rationalizing food and whatever medicine can be bought on the black market, the POWs soon have the basic structure of an economically run society. Again, I imagine 700 black men, ranging from 18 to 40, in the same circumstances. Would we have a case of equal outcome, given the equal opportunity? Meanwhile men die agonizing deaths from dysentery, crippling disorders are rife, and the Japanese are notable for the relish with which they perform acts of needless cruelty. This is a good book to give to a cultural relativist, someone who thinks all cultures are essentially worth the same, and Braddon’s book will make you more ethnocentric than you were before you started it.

Moving munitions in work units, the men feel the guilt of helping with the Japanese war effort. These shells would be used on their own kind, so as much sabotage as possible is carried out. With the discovery that mortar shells were susceptible to moisture, men would queue up to urinate on cases of them.

It’s an apolitical book, but at one point, when a monthly contribution is raised by the men for provisions for the sick, an officer pipes up that this is a type of health insurance scheme. He is shouted down, Braddon calling him a “socialist pleasure wrecker”. It’s a great epithet for the left and their need to codify normal human gestures, the bureaucratic reflex endemic to every socialist. As for the Japanese, they are hardly better off than their prisoners. On the Emperor’s birthday, each Japanese soldier receives two cubes of tinned pineapple.

The English POWs set up classes and societies, creating little theaters for Shakespeare productions. The English are also the most given to song, and a brothel piano bought from the Japanese is used for concerts. To conjure morale from the depths of hopeless despair says as much about manliness as the ability to bear arms. “The men of Changi were solid gold right through, as men, on the whole, always are,” Braddon notes.

Marched to Thailand to what they are told is a convalescent camp, the POWs are in fact a caravan of workers set to labor on the Thai railways. Not only did this involve wading waist-deep through jungle swamps, but occasionally two men having to carry a third who has collapsed, and would otherwise be left to die. Again, I am concerned about how our current crop of youngsters might fare in these climes and under conditions of war.

As the men approach the railway, they see the men who preceded them at the labor camp, “travesties of men”, and they see what they will soon become. It wasn’t just allied POWs who were worked to death. The Japanese killed 130,000 Malay on their railways. They would rather these men died than returned home to tell of what they had seen. Forty legs are amputated a day, and cholera, dysentery, and typhoid are rife. There is no Geneva Convention here. That was still five years away.

These men make their own soap, their own writing-paper, their own radios. Whenever white men are gathered together in adversity, they will always show themselves to be homo faber, they will always tend to get things done and made. They make shoes, prosthetic limbs, chess sets, and an engraver with which the word “Rolex” can be etched onto the cheapest watch, transforming it into an expensive item on the black market. They steal woolen jumpers from the camp guards, unravel them, knit them into socks, and sell them back to the Japanese. Again, what would a clutch of today’s Westerners from their teens upwards contrive to make if they were similarly confined in “that condition of unspeakable filth which only Asiatics can attain”?

Braddon finds himself incarcerated with Ronald Searle, the illustrator who would go on to become England’s most famous cartoonist after the war. As the men put together a Christmas pantomime, written by those POWs who were musical, Searle is the set-designer.

As for the sheer human, visceral suffering on every one of the book’s pages, a description of the workers on the railways is worth quoting at length:

They had feet torn by bamboo thorns and working for long months without boots. Their shins had no spare flesh at all on the calves and looked as if bullets had exploded inside them, bursting the meat outwards and blackening it. These were their ulcers, of which they had dozens, from threepenny-bit size upwards, on each leg. Their thighbones and pelvis stood out sharply and on the point of each thighbone was that red raw patch like a saddle sore or monkey’s behind. All their ribs showed clearly, the chest sloping backwards to the hollows of throat and collarbone. Arms hung down, sticklike, with huge hands, and the skin wrinkled where muscle had vanished, like old men. Heads were shrunken onto skulls with large teeth and faintly glowing eyes set in black wells: hair was matted and lifeless. The whole body was draped with a loose-fitting envelope of thin purple-brown parchment which wrinkled horizon tally over the stomach and chest and vertically on sagging fleshless buttocks.

I don’t know whether the late Mr. Braddon’s book is still a feature on the Australian curriculum, but I would take a guess and say probably not (I wonder if any Australian readers might tell me). Not because of the book’s gruesome depiction of war, but rather its portrayal of the grace, organization, and humor of the white man under pressure. Nothing that glorifies white excellence is admissible for today’s wreckers of education. It may also upset the Jewish lobby ultimately setting the agenda, as Jews presume that they have the monopoly on incarceration.

The Naked Island is a tough read, one of the rawest accounts of war I have ever read. But, as with the decreasing importance placed by the globalists on the sacrifices mostly white men made during the World Wars, there are also questions about the value of the societies those victories secured. A song by Eric Bogle, And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, is about the rout of Australian troops at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, and is both intensely sad and increasingly pertinent. During an Anzac Day parade, an old soldier watches his comrades pass him, and wonders whether the sacrifice was worth it:

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me.
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march,
Reliving the dreams of past glories.
I see these old men, all tattered and torn,
The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war.
And the young people ask me, ‘What are they marching for?’
And I ask myself the same question.