FSU, the latest of your constant and frequent reminders to us all that the AFAP
lied to its members made me go in search of a recent post from the erudite
Wiley on another thread. I’m sure Wiley won’t object if I quote him below.. .. .(For those who haven’t read the original thread, Wiley’s answer was in response to
Dogimed, another respondent who seems to be in FSU’s camp, when he asked why the 89ers couldn’t forgive those who had chosen another course in 89 since an elderly veteran of Changi and the Burma Railway had forgiven the Japanese.) . .. .Wiley’s answer below gave an answer very much in line with my thoughts on the subject and the people involved.. .. . </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica"> Dogimed, ask your old POW mate if he’s still with us whether his commendable sense of forgiveness extends to his fellow POWS who cheated their mates out of food rations by using doctored scales and informed on fellow prisoners to the Japanese for extra rations or favoured treatment, sometimes resulting in the deaths of their fellow countrymen. . .. .Or of the not so small number of Australian officers who, at the end of the war, still had their full issue of kit and lived relatively comfortably in the officers’ lines while some of their men didn’t even have a pair of shorts to wear – they got by with lap-laps. We Australians like to ignore some unpalatable truths in our maintenance of the ANZAC legend, but what I’ve mentioned above happened. My reference? ‘Changi Samauri’, by Penrod Deane and James Clavell’s classic ‘King Rat’. . .. .Those ‘not so bronzed’ ANZACs did pretty unspeakable things for their own advantage and to the detriment of their mates, as a small proportion of any group will do when faced with a desperate situation. But except for the Indians who joined Bose’s puppet Indian National Army under the Japanese, I don’t know of any other POWs in the Pacific theatre who donned the uniform of the Japanese and took up arms against their former comrades. . .. .Unlike the ‘heroes’ of 47 years later that we’re talking about here. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica">So my question to you is this, FSU: since even a casual reader of history will agree that General Percival and all the inept British
and Australian senior military staff officers
lied to their troops about their lack of preparations to resist the Japanese attacks, does that mean that each and every Allied soldier taken prisoner when Singapore fell had the right to go his own way and look after Number One at the expense of his comrades?