Green Hell

THE JUNGLE Is NEUTRAL (384 pp.)--F. Spencer Chapman--A/or/on ($3.75).

In May 1945, a British lieutenant colonel who had escaped from the Japanese and was hiding in a Malayan mangrove swamp, wrote a letter to the Japanese occupation governor. Would His Excellency be so good as to mail to London the Englishman's diaries, which had been taken from him by his former Jap captors?

Lieut. Colonel F. Spencer Chapman never got his diaries back, but what had happened to him in the Malay jungles was etched in his memory. His book, The Jungle Is Neutral, has been greeted in England with the kind of praise that British reviewers pass out once in a blue moon --"magnificent," "enthralling," "terrific." It is indeed one of the finest personal accounts to come out of World War II.

Burn the Papers. Like most Englishmen, Chapman had supposed that Singapore would never fall. He was sent behind the Jap lines in Malaya to organize and train native guerrilla fighters. When Singapore was taken, he and a few other Britons were trapped. Chapman was one of a handful that survived. He came through because he was tough and knew life in the wilderness (in 1937, he had become the first man to scale the 23,930-ft. peak of Chomolhari in the Himalayas, was already a famed Arctic explorer), because he had a sense of humor, and because he kept himself busy plaguing the Japs. Writes Chapman: "[The jungle] provides any amount of fresh water, and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe . . . It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive . . . The jungle itself is neutral."

During his three years on the loose in the neutral jungle, Chapman trained Chinese Communist guerrillas, lived and fought with them. He admired the rank & file fighters although, in a sense, he was their prisoner. No guerrilla band could make a move, nor its leaders a decision, without an O.K. from party headquarters. It took months for Chapman to get a suggestion to the party bigwigs and their reply; a good deal of the time was spent in enforced and irritating idleness. He was always admired but always a little suspect, and could not move from band to band without permission. He quickly discovered that the real power in each group lay not with the military leader but with the political commissar. Once, when Chapman started a newspaper, the party members on the staff politely printed what he wrote, then burned the entire second issue and never printed another. That reduced Chapman's cultural contributions to yodeling and Eskimo songs, which always made a great hit.

Eat Rat Meat. Chapman was captured twice but escaped each time. His weight dropped from 170 Ibs. to 90. He learned to eat rat meat and think it tasty; once, he, even took in stride the information that he had just eaten roast Jap. He was frequently near death from malaria, and he left the jungle in August 1945, with a complexion the color of his jungle-green uniform. But before the month was over, he volunteered to go back on a military mission and was parachuted back into his "green hell" for another two months.

The Jungle Is Neutral is packed to the boards with incredible adventure and impressive evidence of human fortitude, but it is written without a note of excitement, understated to the point of monotone. For that reason, and by the simplicity of its statement, it makes most first-person war books seem almost shrill.

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