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.
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).
