Articles on Reg Newton's chapter of the Pacific Prisoner of War Experience
Listed below are links to some articles on matters which, in the process of investigating something of the Reg Newton story, I have found highly engaging. Please be aware that this page is still in its formative stages but, as of mid-April 2022, one of the links is not active. Whether the articles are to your satisfaction will be a matter that time and reading will tell. But nothing that is here is yet locked in concrete and, if you have comments, criticisms or feedback, you can use the ‘Contacts’ page from the menu above.
What Great Leadership Looks Like
The novel and film versions of ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’
Guide to Research into Pacific POWs
Journal Article entitled ‘Uren View vs Kappe Reality’
Video Presentation on Omuta and the Little Court Martial
Video Presentation on LAC Billy Griffiths, RA
Video Presentation on Socialism on the Burma-Thailand Railway
Shortly after his capture on February 10th 1942 Reg Newton was sent to Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur where he virtually appointed himself as the head of the Australians interned there. It was here where ‘Roaring Reggie’ learned the key elements of dealing with his Japanese captors. There were about 180 Australians and over 900 British POWs in this jail and those who survived it were moved on in October 1942. On the night of August 13th/14th however there was a breakout involving eight servicemen: five Britons, a Dutch pilot and two Australians. There was and remains a great deal of confusion over the precise details of that breakout and this article discusses the circumstances of the escape and some of the questions which remain.
As remarkable as it may seem, POWs on the Railway and elsewhere frequently found reasons to laugh. While it was hardly a case of a laugh a minute, humour was a recurring theme in postwar memoirs and accounts. As in other places, a shared joke or happy moment was an important part of group bonding. The human face has a wider variety of muscles than any other part of the body. Making and maintaining eye contact in times of passion, despair and during shared laughter is extremely important to human relationships. Unlike chimpanzees who bare their teeth to show aggression, humans bare their teeth to smile or laugh and that shared laughter is a uniquely human thing. It may sound counter-intuitive, but it was an important part of coping with the mindless cruelty and what must have seemed an endless round of harsh realities for those fettlers, hammer and tap teams, navvies and slaves engaged in Imperial Japan’s incredible WW2 construction folly through the malarial jungles and misty mountains of Burma and Thailand.
Being a chaplain to prisoners of the Japanese was a difficult job, especially on the Burma-Thailand Railway where many men questioned their belief in a benevolent supreme being who loved them all. Reg Newton worked closely with three chaplains: Harold Wardale-Greenwood, Harry Thorpe and Joseph ‘Pop’ Kennedy. Padre ‘Pop’ was renowned as a plain-speaking man and there are wonderful pen portraits of him written by two of the great writers who accompanied Reg Newton to Japan: Ray Parkin and Ken Harrison. But there is a puzzle to his story which this article discusses.
Clearly making judgements about the nature of good or great leadership is going to be a primary driver for anyone reading or investigating the story of Reg Newton or any of the other great POW leaders on the Burma-Thailand Railway. What skills were required? What kind of leadership worked best? What did effective leaders look like but also what happened when the required leadership was absent? What did ineffective leadership look like and how common was it? That being said, anyone who has read this far on this website would know full well that officers were not required to work. On the Railway, the death rate amongst officers was extremely low, with only a handful dying compared to an overall mortality rate amongst Australian ORs of over 20 percent, with ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces experiencing rates of almost 30 percent. In these grim circumstances, why did more officers not put themselves out there to protect their men or is that asking too much and simply a naive suggestion given the dreadful equation of life or death involved? Would things have worked better if men were left to their own devices or organised themselves into collaborative soviets exhibiting all the celebrated proletarian virtues?
I first saw David Lean’s 1957 film, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, as a youngster. I may have even seen it at the cinema or a drive-in theatre, in the days when such things existed. Anyway, it was a long time ago, but I only read Pierre Boulle’s novel of the same name in April 2025. I found it interesting to see the ways the film-makers took a good story and turned it into a modern classic, one which now holds the status of a piece of cultural iconography. This page features a discussion of areas in which both the novel and the film deviated from fact, how they deviated from each other and why I believe the changes made by Lean and his team enhanced and elevated their version of this wonderful (but fictional) story in ways which were nothing short of brilliant.
In January 1962 Reg Newton organised and led a 2/19th Bn Association tour of Singapore, Malaya and Thailand retracing his steps for two and a half years of his three and a half year captivity experience. On their return to Australia, Newton wrote a detailed report of their experiences which was published in four issues of the Association magazine that was then called ‘The Nineteenth’. For those who have travelled to these regions and for those who hope to, that report makes fascinating reading. It also includes some interesting insights into their wartime experiences from the perspective of twenty years’ reflection. This article is my summary of Reg’s original report.
This is a document I posted on Monash University’s ‘open access’ site in October 2025. It aims to assist those seeking to track down details on individual POWs or the broader topic of captivity in Japanese hands and all the issues and complexities which arose from it. I have tried to advise interested parties where they might look, to list sites and resources searchable online and to provide tips for getting the best out of those websites or databases, each of which usually has idiosyncrasies or can require ‘hacks’ to ensure users get the best results from them.
NOTE: The link above leads to a stand-alone PDF version of the article. I had intended to link directly to the ERAS journal but, for some reason, I cannot make a direct link from here. So, if anyone wants to see the article in its original context, search on ‘eras journal chris murphy uren vs kappe’ and you should be able to jump to it from there.
This is an article published in the Monash University journal ERAS in September 2025. It compares the comments made by Tom Uren in his famous 1959 maiden speech to the Australian Federal Parliament about conditions at the Hintok camp on the Burma-Thailand Railway. In that speech Uren described his experience in Dunlop Force where men lived “by the principles of socialism” whereas, across a small tributary of the Kwai Noi river, a group of British POWs (from ‘H’ Force and almost certainly under the leadership of the controversial Lt-Col. T.H. Newey) “lived by the law of the jungle”. I compare that account with the record and performance of the senior Australian officer in ‘F’ Force, Lt-Col. C.H. Kappe, who had the unenviable distinction of being one of the most reviled Australian POW leaders in the whole Pacific Theatre. My argument is that being a POW leader was by no means easy and that the reality is, many were called but not all who were rose to the occasion. Officers did not have to do manual labour (and strenuously resisted Japanese attempts to make them), they were paid significantly more by the Japanese than the enlisted men and, on the Railway, their mortality rate was, according to Kappe, less than one percent whereas the rate for all Australian prisoners working on the line was 20.5 percent so any suggestion that officers and men shared the same privations and risks is not supported by the figures. Yet this was a matter about which former enlisted POWs rarely spoke and, if it had been me, I’d have been squawking about that inequity for all I was worth for all the years I had left in me. This, perhaps, speaks to the values of a different era and the admirable restraint which guided the actions of that now gone but extraordinary generation.
Video Presentation on Omuta and the Little Trial
In 1947 US Naval Lieutenant Edward Neal Little was court martialled for actions he took while interned in Japan’s Omuta Camp known as Fukuoka 17. In this video, I talk about that case and the events at Omuta which led to it.
Video Presentation on LAC Billy Griffiths
In my humble opinion, the story of LAC Billy Griffiths, RAF, who was a FEPOW, i.e., a British prisoner of the Japanese, and captured in Java in 1942 is one of the most remarkable to have emerged from World War Two and that’s saying something.
Video Presentation on Socialism on the Railway
This is a truncated version of a talk I gave at a Labour History Conference in Melbourne on 28 November 2025. In it, I argue that strong and effective leadership made a significant difference to the survival rates of Railway parties. I also show that the popular Australian notion that members of our armed forces did significantly better on the Railway than the Brits is a myth since their mortality rates were 21.1 percent and 20.5 percent respectively. In fact, the best-performing large national group was the Dutch whose mortality was 13.8 percent. So, the key point is, many popular conceptions of the Railway were and are wrong; but the idea that unity and commitment to shared objectives were important is not. I think the point could be summarised by the word ‘trust’ and socialism cannot function without it.
POW Memoirs and Films
This is an almost four-minute collage of images, memoirs and films depicting the public memory of the Pacific POW experience.