Read by Peter Byrne

For months during 1943 there was no night in Hellfire Pass. By the light of
flares, carbide lamps and bamboo fires, men near-naked and skeletal cut a
passage through stone to make way for a railway. Among these men were some
of the 22,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during
World War II. In camps across Asia and the Pacific, they struggled, died,
and survived with a little help from their mates. Their experiences became
a defining feature of the war, just as Hellfire Pass was to become
a defining symbol of what every prisoner experienced. Hellfire details the
individual stories of those caught up in history: the Hudson bomber pilot
attacking the Japanese invasion force on Day One; the prisoner of war who
refused to be blindfolded for his execution, and another who coped with
misery and death by sketching plumbago flowers; the man the atom bomb didn't
kill in Nagasaki and whose homecoming helped change Australia.

Hellfire was researched in Australia, Japan and across South-East Asia.
It draws on fifty first-person interviews, ranging from former prisoners to
an old Mon villager deep in the Burmese jungle, and from Singapore's Lee
Kuan Yew to veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army. The result is a tour
de force, a powerful and searing history of the prisoners of the Japanese.

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