Long Night's Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941-1945 (review)

Abstract

This is a harrowing book. The fruit of more than two decades of research by a distinguished and recently retired Canadian medical historian, it is broader in scope than its title indicates. Although the focus is on those who survived the conquest of Hong Kong in December 1941 and their subsequent captivity there and in Japan, with a special emphasis on the 1,900 Canadians among them, Roland has thrown a wide research net to include materials illuminating Japanese treatment of POWs throughout the Pacific Theater. His bibliography contains the bulk of what exists in the English language on his topic, and matters abutting it. In a previous work he examined Courage under Siege: Disease, Starvation, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (1992).