Description
Title: The Missing Years – A POW’s Story from Changi to Hellfire Pass
Author: Lloyd, Stu
Condition: Mint
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 9781877058776
Cover: Soft Cover without Dust Jacket – 240 pages
Comments: This is the gripping story of Captain Hugh Pilkington’s disastrous Malaya campaign in which he was shot by a Japanese sniper, became a PoW while hospitalised in Singapore, then— with only one good arm — was packed off to work on the Thai-Burma Death Railway. But he lived to tell the tale, and what a tale …
This account is refreshingly different because: * Pilkington survived the heinous Alexandra Hospital Massacre of February 1942 * He gives the only known account of PoWs travelling north by train to work camps along the Death Railway (most others marched up to 300 km) * His memoirs were completed in October 1945 while on a POW repatriation ship, hence providing this raw, unfiltered, surprisingly dispassionate voice, undistorted by time * Travel writer Stu Lloyd (who has spent 13 years in Southeast Asia) retraces the captain’s steps with Pilkington’s son, to uncover Pilkington’s past as a rubber planter and soldier, and find out— with often surprising results— what the locals today make of that period they know largely as ‘Japan time’
About the author: Rhodesian-born, Stu Lloyd is one of the most widely published adventure travel writers in the Asia/Pacific, specialising in military and colonial history. He’s had five non-fiction books previously published. His work appears in The Australian, Sun Herald, National Geographic Traveler, New Zealand Herald, South China Morning Post, etc.
About Pilkington and Son: Captain Hugh Pilkington was born in India, 1904 and worked as a rubber planter in Malaya from 1922-37 before joining the Royal Norfolk Regiment in 1939. His knowledge of the tropics, landscape and language proved invaluable to the Allies. He died in 1982.
His son, Paul, was born in 1941 and was nearly five before he met his father, back from war. A ‘Ten Pound Pom’ he migrated to Sydney in the Sixties and, like his father did, loves a good curry.
