Summer Will Come Again by John Lane

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Some faint marks on right foredge. Signed and inscribed by author.

On 15 February 1942, within weeks of leaving Australia, John Lane was one of the 100,000 Allied troops who became prisoners of the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore. Following a short period at the infamous Changi prison camp, John was among the men who were shipped to Japan to be used as slave labour on the Japanese docks.

Shortly after his capture, John began a diary in which he recorded his experiences over the three and a half years he was a prisoner of war. Summer Will Come Again is a personal and extremely detailed account, based on those diaries, of John Lane's life as a prisoner in Japan.

With clear and immediate prose and acute observation, he tells of conditions in a Japanese hell-ship en route from Singapore to Japan, of appalling working conditions on starvation rations, the brutal treatment of prisoners, of the humiliation and fear of daily life in the heart of the Japanese nation. But John also recalls that despite the hazards and deprivations, there was among the men a magnificent camaraderie, unfailing humour and blind faith in the Allied cause that gave the POWs the strength to go the distance.

John Lane obtained a camera at the war's end and made a unique visual record of those turbulent weeks following the Japanese surrender. Summer Will Come Again is one of the first accounts of an Australian POWS struggle for survival on Japanese soil. (book flap)