Ballybunion To The River Kwai
(Fergus Kennedy, Non-Fiction, Gill Books - Softback 2025)
A book that essentially traces the Far East POW period of the life of the author's father, an accountant who qualified in 1940 and had to join the British Colonial Service for a job due to non-recruitment in Ireland after the Emergency. He had also become engaged to a young woman he met during a pre-war holiday at Ballybunion and hoped to "send for her" as soon as he got established in Singapore - until the Japanese threat prohibited sending relations of UK colonial staff to the orient by ship.
This is a very factual book. It debunks many of the impressions we all have absorbed of Far East POW life. Many of the latter of course were formed by the 1957 lauded movie,
Bridge On The River Kwai - a film based on
an eponymous novel by a French writer, a largely fictional work that used - and often distorted - the events at a FEPOW camp commanded by Lt-Col. Toosey merely as a backdrop for its own themes and perspectives.
The impact of the privations described in this book are told with insight (the author is a doctor from a multi-generational medical family) and full candour. A whole spectrum of human character is covered in a matter-of-fact manner, yet always with dignity and no small amount of compassion - for some of the captors as well as the unfortunate captives.
For someone who worked as a busy GP in Canada for most of his life, the author does a jolly decent job of research into the whole Far East theatre of WW2. Unlike many movies or documentaries on the subject, Kennedy answers many of the questions arising along the way in a reader's mind be it on the rationale for the Japanese invasion, their imperial mindset, the need for a Burma railway, tropical diseases, nutrition supplements, crude antibiotics of the period, etc. He has also written it in a very readable way - an important facet in a type of book that one would hardly read for pleasure.
This is a book that, while I can't say I "enjoyed" reading it, has provided me with great reassurance on the creativity and resilience inherent in the human spirit as well as its providing a lot of informative material on that period. If anyone is going through challenges of their own and needs a little relief and perhaps empathy, you will benefit from reading this book.
