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hardback HK$295.00
Hong Kong University Press
Paddyfield.com
More reviews by Stephen Maire
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We Shall Suffer There by Tony Banham
In 1981 a design by Maya Lin was selected for the U.S. Vietnam War memorial. The design called for a "V" shaped cut into the ground faced with black marble on which were listed in chronological order all U.S. military personnel who had died in Vietnam. There was to be no statuary or poetry glorifying combat or grieving at the loss of so many lives. The memorial was a simple and stark. The very simplicity and starkness was a source of both outrage over the design, yet the same qualities gave the memorial its power. In the years since the memorial has been open it has proven to be one of the most powerful and moving sites in Washington, D.C.
In many respects, TONY BANHAM's WE SHALL SUFFER THERE is a literary equivalent of Maya Lin's sculpture. Banham has here created a diary of the experiences of the Hong Kong prisoners of war and internees of the Japanese from the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas day, 1941 until their repatriation. The very simplicity of this approach together with Banham's detailed listing of all POW deaths while imprisoned creates the power of this work.
Banham is clear at the outset that his goal is to let the prisoners and internees speak for themselves. He quotes from a variety of POW and internees journals, diaries and published autobiographies. The format is diary-like itself with the entries presented chronologically. Interestingly, in not a few cases, Banham has found and presents two or three entries for a single day commenting on the same event. Some of the more interesting examples of this are accounts of U.S. air bombardment of the oil depots in Hong Kong or factories in Japan. While the POW camps in Hong Kong were distant from the bomber's targets, this was not the case in Japan. There, POW camps were built close to the factories, in part to deter U.S. bombing out of expected allied concern for "friendly fire" deaths should that factories be targeted. When these factories were targeted a number of POWs were a killed or wounded, and yet, what comes through clearly in Banham's selections is the sense that although these deaths were unfortunate, the greater goal of defeating Japan was served by the bombing.
Consistent with Banham's desire to let the prisoners and internees speak for themselves, the body of the text is almost exclusively quotes from period diaries and writings. Banham's own remarks are very limited. As a result the context needed to understand many of the entries seems lacking. Banham has provided extensive back notes which serve much to fill in the missing commentary and analysis, but this does make the notes a significant part of the book and require that they be read along with the text. While this arrangement will not be satisfying for all readers, it does leave the words of the POWs and internees to stand on their own, as Banham intends, and is what gives WE SHALL SUFFER THERE its memorial power.
Though this format might dissuade some readers, the rather simple solution of reading nearly any general history of Hong Kong during the war will suffice to provide sufficient context to enjoy WE SHALL SUFFER THERE. Philip Snow's fairly recent The Fall of Hong Kong will serve well in this regard.
For one's efforts, the reward is a strangely powerful book. Banham's source material includes not only a large number of individual accounts already published, many of them dating from shortly after the war, but a large number of diaries that remain unpublished. The variety of sources enables Banham to cover a broad range of experiences as well as insure that voices in his selected quotations do not become repetitive. Moreover, as noted earlier, he is often able to provide multiple views of a single event.
Just as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking or George Hicks's The Comfort Women proved seminal works examining the wartime experience in these areas, WE SHALL SUFFER THERE should prove a core work in the history of the experience and fate of POWs of the Japanese. While Japanese atrocities in the course of the Pacific War have yet to be dealt with in any comprehensive way, Banham's work is an important piece to our understanding of Japanese conduct during the war.
The past several years have seen publication a number of works on Hong Kong's experience under the Japanese during the war. WE SHALL SUFFER THERE is a welcome addition to this field of study not just for its power as a memorial to the fate of the Hong Kong prisoners, but as a record of their experience in the war.
Stephen Maire
14/12/2009
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Stephen Maire is a Director of garment manufacturing and trading company. He has lived in East Asia for more than twenty years. |
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