The British POW experience in Hong Kong and Oeyama, Japan: the memoirs of Frank Evans (1917–1996) and Joseph Henry Newman (1914–2002)

Exceptionally among British enlisted men held captive in Hong Kong and Japan during the Second World War, Evans and Newman wrote post-war memoirs about their captivity in both places, mostly in the same camps, enabling a direct comparison between them. Their endurance suggests that although acceptance, resilience, self-discipline, focusing on the present, and maintaining hope were crucial, survival greatly depended on luck and chance and uncontrollable, external factors. Despite commonalities, their experiences and responses sometimes differed, enlarging our understanding of the variety of POW experience, and demonstrating the importance of individual recollections in historical understanding of Far East POWs.