Test of Humanity

THE NAKED ISLAND (286 pp.)--Russell Braddon--Doubleday ($3.50).

Russell Reading Braddon, an artillery gunner with Australia's 8th Division, spent his 21st birthday with both feet in a grave. It was early 1942, and he had been captured by the Japanese as they slithered through Malaya like lizards, chewing up the paper-thin defenses of Britain's "naked island" fortress, Singapore. Singapore fell, but Gunner Braddon lived, not to fight but to write another day. The result is a gutty, scalp-raising account of the "war of capitulation" in Southeast Asia, and the best book of its kind since F. Spencer Chapman's The Jungle Is Neutral (TIME, Sept. 5, 1949).

Why the Japs didn't finish him off after pistol-whipping him, trussing him up and dangling his feet over the edge of a death ditch. Author Braddon still doesn't know. Instead, his captors yoked him to eight fellow-Aussies, prodded the group with bayonets and jeers of "Georgey Six, number ten! Tojo, number one!" and marched them off to Pudu, a prison camp in Kuala Lumpur. On the way, the sons of the Rising Sun treated Braddon to some grisly samples of the new order. At one point, his guards collared a senile old Chinese and lit a match to his hair. As the old man screamed, they handed him a can of scalding water which he poured over himself. While he screeched in agony, they doused his roasted scalp with gasoline, set it on fire and offered him more boiling water. Japanese laughter and excitement died some time after the old man.

Cat Tastes Like Rabbit. Under the sizzling tropic sun on the way to the prison camp at Pudu, the sense of common humanity melted away; a man saved himself. When a sniveling, fear-crazed sergeant begged to be carried, Gunner Braddon refused, then watched passively while a Jap guard pumped five bullets into the sergeant's stomach at a foot's range. At Pudu, each meal consisted of a handful of pasty rice sometimes crawling with weevils. Whenever he could get them, Author Braddon ate cats, dogs, snakes, grubs, fungus and leaves. He notes that "snake tastes like gritty chicken mixed with fish; dog tastes like rather coarse beef; cat like rabbit, only better." The camp had its rare saints, and one was the Anglican padre, Noel Duckworth. Putting on a winning smile, he would call to some brutish guard: "Come here, you charming little lump of garbage, and buy this perfectly worthless pen." The proceeds always went for food for all prisoners. Day in & day out, the padre conducted an average of three funerals as the men died of dysentery, beriberi, malaria and simple starvation.

Water for an I.O.U. Author Braddon lived to know new horrors which made those of Pudu fade away like old insect bites. He was marched to Thailand and assigned to the work gang building a Bangkok-to-Rangoon railroad. "Down there is much malaria--tomorrow you will be dead," said his guards mockingly. Countless Britishers and an estimated 130,000 Malay natives learned that the Japs were telling close to the brutal truth. Every crosstie under 400 miles of track was paid for with a human life, though, thanks to R.A.F. bombers, no train ever completed a trip. Author Braddon shriveled to 81 Ibs., collapsed with fever, and had to buy water from a fellow Aussie who made him sign I.O.U.s that finally totaled -L-112. The care of other less mercenary prisoners saved his life.

Gaunt and broken at war's end, Braddon nonetheless hiked 17 miles to see Lord Louis Mountbatten accept General Itagaki's sword in surrender. The old sense of common humanity came back strong; Author Braddon was certain that "the war had at least taught me to like my fellow men." But back in Sydney a little later, he was not so sure. One of the first letters he received was a demand for the -L-112. He offered to hand over a check for every penny if the act of payment might be photographed by the press. "I thought that as a tale of comradeship in arms it would read well in the dailies. Surprisingly, I received no answer."

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