The Saigon Battalion Record Book
L/Bdr Reuben Kandler
These extensive POW records were compiled from 1943 to 1945 by L/Bdr Reuben Kandler, while he was a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma Railway.
They chart the movements of the first thousand prisoners to have been shipped into slavery following the fall of Singapore. After initially being sent to Saigon, most of these men had since been moved into the jungles of Thailand; the high death rate shown in this record book demonstrates the grim truth of what that meant.
There is other material shown here too – including a surprising speech by a Japanese camp commandant and maps of two POW camp cemeteries (with details of the men buried there).
| The Saigon Battalion Record Book |
The book became one of a number of forbidden items that Kandler had to keep hidden from the Japanese guards and military police over a prolonged period, at risk of torture and execution.
As the war moved into its final stages, unannounced searches of the prisoners' huts became increasingly frequent (often being sprung on them at night), forcing Kandler to find alternative ways of concealing the record book and other items.
He was dangerously close to being found out when the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945. The end of the war had not come a moment too soon.
As the war moved into its final stages, unannounced searches of the prisoners' huts became increasingly frequent (often being sprung on them at night), forcing Kandler to find alternative ways of concealing the record book and other items.
He was dangerously close to being found out when the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945. The end of the war had not come a moment too soon.
More recently, Stephen Hagen has drawn up the following spreadsheet which has the advantage of presenting the contents of the record book in an electronic (and therefore searchable) form:
| Spreadsheet (Saigon Battalion Record Book) |