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’
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.