Steve,
You may like to read a book written by Australian Historian Gavan Daws entitled "Prisoners of the Japanese; POWs of World War II in the Pacific" (Scribe Publications).
It is one of the most confronting; yet powerful books I have ever read (and I read a lot). I admit I found certain passages of text and personal accounts very, very difficult to read. I shed a lot of tears before I finished it
. I have lent it to friends who have not been able to finish it...at times it is very hard to accept what happened to these POWs.
But it gave me a real insight into what truly happened in those horrible years. It is wonderfully written. From the rear cover...
"This great book, written by one of the most gifted of Australian historians, whose work is known worldwide, has never been published previously in Australia.
Gavan Daws combined ten years of documentary research and hundreds of interviews with POWs on three continents to write this shattering re-creation of the experience of Allied POWs of World War II in the Pacific - Australian, British, American and Dutch.....
Daws' account, which was neither researched nor written under military auspices, is the humanly indispensable reverse side of official history. This book is his 'best effort to tell a story conspicuously absent from the official histories of both sides, missing in action, so to speak: the truth of life according to the POW'. In this, he has succeeded masterfully".