Bamboo Cage: The P.O.W. Diary of Flight Lieutenant Robert Wyse, 1942-1943.

Bamboo Cage is the diary of a Canadian prisoner of war held in Java from 1942–1945. Captured by the Japanese, Flight Lieutenant Robert Wyse RCAF, suffered in unspeakable conditions in the POW camps and began to write about his experiences to keep his sanity. He hid his writings in bamboo poles until they became too dangerous to keep. Wyse had to stop writing at the end of 1943 and buried the scraps of paper in a bottle below his hut. He endured another 18 months of captivity before he was liberated weighing less than 90 pounds. The diary also survived and, after the war, a Dutch friend unearthed it for Wyse who then transcribed his writings from hundreds of pieces of paper.

The immediacy of the diary format makes reading this book a powerful experience. Wyse does not mince words as he describes the daily suffering from heat and humidity, manual labour, disease, starvation, filth, and brutal beatings by the Japanese guards. He has harsh words, too, for some of his fellow officers who failed their men. He observes how the conditions undermined prisoners’ integrity as they desperately tried to survive and how his own memory began to fail due to malnutrition. Readers might find the litany of horrors painful to digest, hard to believe, and yet important to know. Wyse does allow his wry humour to emerge in occasional anecdotes and in descriptions of the unusual activities the POWs devised to keep themselves occupied and alive.

Jonathon F. Vance, a history professor at the University of Western Ontario, has carefully edited Wyse’s precious record of an infamous period of history for the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series. Vance’s explanations and notes, and the pencil sketches drawn by Wyse’s fellow POWs, add to the vitality of the diary and assist readers in imagining what life in captivity was like. Distressing to read, Bamboo Cage is nonetheless strongly recommended for students of military history and history buffs who are interested in the War in the Pacific.