"When I look back on my own captivity", writes author Terence Kelly in his disarmingly honest Preface to By Hellship to Hiroshima, "I cannot just dismiss those three-and-a-half years as an ugly experience best forgotten..." And there is a different resonance to this account of the writer's experiences following the fall of Java in 1942, initially as a prisoner in the appalling Boei Glodok Gaol and later, in a Camp on the Island of Innoshima which he believes to have been "quite unique" in the annals of POW experience. There, in Hiroshima 5, conditions were, we are told, better than most and there was a remarkable combination of men. In addition to RAF and volunteers there were those of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, with high-powered professional backgrounds including in the law, and Japanese-speakers. How this unorthodox arrangement worked out in practice is something explored in this book, which also seeks, without rancour, to enable the reader to view the Japanese in a "broader light" than is sometimes the case. No attempt is made to sanitise his captors, however, and we glimpse the dreaded Kempei Tai in action, as well as "guards whose sanity one sometimes doubted." We learn how prisoners had to loot to survive, and about varying degrees of effectiveness in terms of sabotage on the dockyard. To get there in the first instance, they had to endure the horrors of the hellship Dai Nichi Maru, and this Terence describes in detail.

Contrast is provided here and there with some stylish prose and fine descriptive writing, as in the manner in which, in onomatopoeic style, wartime Batavia is brought to life for us by the author and there are some superb illustrations from Kelly's fellow survivor Geoffrey Coxhead. There are insights into Japanese art and legend, and much more besides.

The concluding chapters make compelling reading, and the Epilogue on Hiroshima then and now, incorporated in this new edition, is truly memorable and, in some ways, most interesting of all. This dignified, balanced and uplifting book may contain a few surprises for the general reader and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the bigger picture that will be of value to historians and researchers.

Stephanie A. Jefford