The book I read to research this post was The Brave Japanese by Kenneth Harrison which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. Kenneth was the first nonjapanese person allowed into Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. He describes it as being absolutely silent even the birds weren’t singing and he compares it to Flanders were despite all the carnage they could still hear the odd bird. Everything was absolutely flat so that the wind was silent as it had nothing to blow against. He was captured by japanese forces in Malaysia while they advanced towards Singapore. He was in the australian army and many of the so called allied thought tanks were too cumbersome to be used to fight in Malaysia. The japanese were to prove them wrong. There were more allied troops in Asia than japanese but the japs were more concentrated so were able to sweep all of them aside. He had the rather unenviable job of using an antitank gun and the breach smashed into a wounded soldiers arm wounding him even more. They couldn’t see anything so had to fire blindly and when they were down to 20 shells had to just shoot at anything that attacked them. In one part when they couldn’t get a boat the communists helped them out. It’s interesting that the japanese used the infighting in India to get the Sikhs on their side. Apparently the Sikh guards at the camp were so aggressive they had to turn to the japanese to defuse the situations. He does say that many of the prisoners hated the japanese for what they did but his experience at Hiroshima showed him a different brave side to them hence the title. There is a funny incident when someone upset one of the guards who chased him with an iron bar and they hid the rather unfortunate individual in the cholera compound. The guard looked everywhere but there because of course cholera is contagious.