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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop.

80 years ago, as the news rippled through the world, the Normandy invasion, hopes rose that the ordeal of total war that engulfed so much of the world

might soon be at an end. Nowhere was that hope felt more keenly than among the Allied prisoners

of war held in German occupied Europe and the Japanese conquests in the Far East. The prisoner

of war experience was profoundly different for the two groups.

British or American soldiers, sailors or airmen, taken captured by the Germans,

could expect to be treated reasonably well.

The Nazis, of course, drew a strict distinction between them and Soviet prisoners of war,

for whom capture would very likely prove fatal.

But for British, Australia and New Zealand

servicemen taken prisoner by the Japanese, incarceration was an appalling ordeal. The Japanese

treated them with consistent calculated cruelty, starving them, working them to death, and punishing

even the slightest perceived offence with death.

With me to talk about all this is my friend and neighbour Simon de Wardela, whose father Hugh

de Wardena went into the bag, as the military would say, when the Japanese captured Singapore

early in 1942. He then spent the next part of the war in the notorious Changi prison before being moved

north to work on the so-called railway of death. Despite the dreadfulness of this experience,

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