'A Cool Head in Hell' brings us the World War Two diaries of Harry Silman which his daughter, Leeds-based Jacqueline Passman, has curated and contextualised into a compelling historical narrative.
00:00My name is Jackie Passman and I'm the editor of The Cool Head in Hell, which is based on my father's wartime diaries.
00:09My father was a prisoner of war, the Japanese, and as children, we only knew he'd been a prisoner of war, didn't know anything else,
00:17apart from the fact that my mother used to say, your father would have been very glad of this meal when he was a prisoner.
00:24I was round at their house one day and they said, I've something to show you. And he got down this old suitcase from the top of his wardrobe and inside, it was like a treasure trove.
00:36I'd never seen anything like it. There were diaries, photographs, memorabilia of the war.
00:41He was at Leeds Grammar School and then he studied at Leeds Medical School.
00:46And when war broke out, he was actually a member of the British Expeditionary Force in France and was present at Dunkirk,
00:54ferrying injured people going over the sands backwards and forwards to the boat.
01:00They set sail down the coast of America and they thought they were headed for North Africa.
01:05But on December the 7th, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and other places of strategic importance.
01:15And so they were rerouted to Singapore.
01:18He arrived with his division 10 days before Singapore fell and the diaries start then.
01:24I've explained quite a lot about prison conditions in Changi, but they were there for just over a year before they were sent up country.
01:33That's the way dad described it.
01:35There was the final group to go and work on the Burma Thai Railway and they were sent to the most northern camps.
01:42And if ever there was a description of hell, that is, that was it.
01:47My father as a doctor wasn't actually fighting, but what he had to cope with, one of the things that he absolutely hated,
01:57the Japanese insisted on having a certain number of men to go out and work on the railway.
02:03And they would come into the hospital where dad was in charge and say they wanted 60 men.
02:09And dad would say they can't go, they're too ill.
02:12And they would get their bayonets out and point them at the patients and make them get out.
02:18The veterans, and there aren't many of them left, feel very much they were the forgotten army.
02:23People know a lot about the war in Europe, very little about the war in the Far East.
02:28And there's a very good reason for that, because when they were on the ship coming back, being repatriated,
02:34they were all issued with an order not to talk about it.
02:39The order said that the war in Europe has been over, people are getting on with their lives,
02:44they don't want to hear your tales, and it's horrendous to think that they weren't allowed to talk about it.
02:50He was a very optimistic person.
02:53He had a great sense of humour, misplaced sometimes.
02:56And I think that was what had kept him going through the war.
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