Ordered to rest for a year, he came to England and met his ex-P.O.W. After the War he re-entered the university to study law. Russell Braddon, son of a brilliant lawyer and great-grandson of Sir Edward Braddon, Premier of Tasmania, took his degree at Sydney University and joined the Australian Army just in time to sail with the ill-fated 8th Australian Division to Malaya. This PAN edition has a new Foreword and is specially illustrated with photographs that did not appear in the original edition.

Readers are warned, too, that he does not gloss over the grim, details of the prisoners’ ordeal. He does not disguise his view that thousands suffered for the mistakes of the pre-War planners. Russell Braddon tells the tale with simplicity and with a cynical wit. Yet the captives showed that the human spirit can surmount the extremes of physical agony and stay unconquered and a few men of exceptional bravery emerged, like Padre Noel Duckworth and the medical officer Major Kevin Fagan. The Japanese knew every trick of humiliating and breaking their prisoners. Then followed over three years of captivity-in Kuala Lumpur, in Changi gaol at Singapore, in Thailand (Siam) building the notorious ‘railway of death’. On his twenty-first birthday he was captured and seated in a ditch to be shot-but the Japanese changed their minds. After sketchy training the troops were plunged into battle against an enemy well trained and overwhelming in numbers. Russell Braddon arrived in Malaya in 1941. THE NAKED ISLAND is a war narrative of appalling suffering, but also of indomitable courage and endurance on the part of British and Australian soldiers. He’d got them from a friend at work, along with many of his minor possessions, while he worked at Saunders-Roe, an aircraft company in East Cowes, Isle of Wight.

They were already well-worn, some with loose pages. My stepfather, Sep Charlton, had a dozen war books in Pan paperback editions.

The Piddingtons by Russell Braddon