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Achtung, Achtung. Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland.

And we are well, we're delighted to be talking to someone from the other side of the Atlantic.

After all, we had a very good week of Thanksgiving podcasts and we couldn't fit our next guest into that week.

So here she is anyway because she's absolutely fantastic. James, who are we talking to today?

Today out, we are talking to Sarah Covner and particularly pleased that Sarah is joining us today

because she's done an awful lot of work onto the experience of being an allied prison of war of the Japanese.

Which all we really know is that it was a hellish thing to be.

But it's also good because you and I, you know, we're a bit guilty of being slightly west centric in our bios.

That was so slightly. And we're always like, we must do more on the far east than war against Japan and more about Burma and more about the Pacific

and more about everything war with the Japan related. And here we are. We've got Sarah on board and she can sort of, you know,

put us right on that to a certain extent. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you for joining us now.

I'm writing, I think I'm writing, saying this, there's a lot of received opinion about the experience of allied POWs in the second world war.

In this country, we have very much been fed via films like Bridge over the River Quiet and things like that.

Very much a clear picture of what happened to allied POWs. And with that goes an explanation, which is Japan was in the grip of a sort of Boshido cult idea

that there were warrior ideas about surrender being a disgrace and therefore that's why prisoners of war were treated so badly.

Am I writing thinking, A, that's way too simplistic and B, that's probably B, it's maybe even wrong.

Well, I think you're correct in saying it, maybe it's too simple and an explanation.

I wouldn't say it's completely wrong because certainly terrible things happen to people in places all through East Asia and Southeast Asia.

But I think it's too simple and that's what I argue in my book.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I've worked sort of strikes me is, is just a sort of extent of those that were killed.

I mean, if you were a British or American prisoner of war, I mean, this obviously does not apply to Red Army prisoners of war.

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