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ISBN: 9780864925299

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Bamboo Cage

The P.O.W. Diary of Lieutenant Robert Wyse, 1942-1943

In 1942, RAF flight controller Robert Wyse became a Japanese prisoner of war on the island of Java in Indonesia. Starved, sick, beaten, and worked to near-death, he wasted away until he weighed only seventy pounds, his life hanging in tenuous balance. There were strict orders against POWs keeping diaries, but Wyse penned his observations on the scarce bits of paper he could find, struggling to describe the brutalities he witnessed. After cleverly hiding his notes in a piece of bamboo next to his bed, in December of 1943, he carefully hid his notes inside a bottle beneath his prison hut. After the war, he wrote to the Dutch authorities, asking them to dig up his diary and return it to him.

In this detailed and frank portrayal of life under Japanese occupation, Wyse reveals the both the best and the worst of human nature. He criticized his fellow soldiers for botching the defence of Java and Sumatra and admonished his captors for their brutality. Yet, Wyse also describes the selfless efforts of the Dutch civilians who helped the prisoners by doing whatever they could as well as his first-hand observations of acts of self-sacrifice among the prisoners themselves.

Bamboo Cage is volume 13 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

Contributors

Jonathan F. Vance

Jonathan F. Vance was educated at McMaster University, Queen’s University, and York University before joining the Department ofHistory at The University of Western Ontario in 1997. He was named the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture in 2001 and in 2003, his contribution to the study of history was further recognized with a Premier’s Research Excellence Award, to study the relationship between government, culture, and nationalism. His work on the First World War, aviation, national building projects, prisoners of war, and social memory crosses disciplinary boundaries to embrace history, cultural studies, communications theory, geography, and sociology. Among his books are the award-winning Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (1997), High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination (2002), Building Canada: People and Projects That Made the Nation (2006), and Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation (2008).
Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

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 In the introduction, Vance provides background on the journal’s author, Robert Wise, a flight controller in the Royal Air Force. 8 $0.80

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 This section of the diary covers Wyse’s time in Malang Prison Camp, where the prisoners were mistreated and abused by their captors, and suffered from malnutrition and disease. 24 $2.40

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 This section of the diary details Wyse’s time at the Lyceum Camp in Soerabaja, on the island of Java. Here he found little solidarity among the prisoners; food was always in short supply, … 30 $3.00

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 This part of the diary covers Wyse’s time at Darmo Camp, which was purported to have better sanitary conditions. Wyse believed that the English officers were not treating the Japanese … 24 $2.40

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 This section of the diary describes Wyse’s second year in a Janaese prison camp. He begins to experience problems with his eyes; sometimes there is a month between entries. Wyse was … 32 $3.20

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 The conclusion notes that Wyse buried his diary for fear of being discovered. He spent the rest of the war on Java, and was able to retrieve his diary and type up the manuscript. 4 $0.40