AustLit

'During the Second World War, some 30,000 Australians became POWs. Of the more than 22,000 prisoners held by the Japanese, around 8000 died. This equated to a death toll of 36 per cent, an extraordinary figure when compared with the much lower death toll of 3 per cent suffered by those taken prisoner in the European and North African theatres. The wartime suffering of these men and their experiences of captivity has been the subject of much scholarship. But in The Battle Within: POWs in Post-war Australia, Christina Twomey takes up the narrative of POWs of the Japanese after the ‘camp gates were thrown open’ (5). She eloquently traces both the individual and collective responses of these men and small number of women to the effect of captivity on their lives in the decades following liberation.'  (Introduction)