Speedo! Speedo!: To the Limits of Endurance [Paperback]

I feel as though I've been led by the hand through another person's memories and gained a great deal - a real sense of what it must have been like.

This is a real story of survival and how the human spirit can triumph against the odds. At last I understand what it was like to be there. Highly recommended.

A moving read.

SPEEDO! SPEEDO! To the Limits of Endurance - A personal account of working on the Thai railway, as a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War. 192 pages, with about 40 photos, illustrations and maps.

These men were plunged into army life, whisked away to the other side of the world, captured and enslaved. Somehow, with sheer determination and support from each other, many survived. This is a true personal account, with amazing detail, of the whole experience.
The author has amazing powers of recall and offers the reader a real sense of what the experience was like. He doesn’t major on all the well-documented atrocities committed by enemy forces during that period. Rather, he focuses on day-to-day life, working and trying to stay alive in the inhospitable conditions of the Thai jungle, what he saw and what he felt.
It’s all here, the starvation, the cruelty, the humour and tragedy. The reader derives a real sense of the comradeship that helped these men through their ordeal. The book is illustrated with detailed maps and diagrams, and numerous photos from the author’s collection. Highlights include photographs of actual ‘mementoes’ - including an actual wooden camp pass (to avoid being shot); a shaving mirror with the loose backing, where the author hid his money. Hundreds of faces – prisoners, Japanese guards – have looked into this mirror; an actual ink sketch of the interior of one of the huts by a fellow prisoner.
The author documents HIS war, from conscription in 1939, through Dunkirk, to the fall of Singapore and capture by the Japanese, through the years of enforced slavery and deprivation to final liberation at the end of the War. He’s had a life in the construction industry and brings a new insight into the efforts of the Japanese to build a railway through some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. He also has a sense of humour and this lifts the book in many places.
The book also covers his return to England, his struggle (matched by many other men) to re-establish a life and a career in the post-war years, and finally a return visit to Thailand and Singapore in 1998. The return visit offered him the chance for a new perspective on some of his memories.

When we came across this author, we found a man who'd bottled up all his wartime experiences for over 50 years. We've heard so much about the war in Europe, but less has ever been told about the experiences of the men and women who went out to the Far East. As we worked with the author to piece his meories together and organize them, we found he was re-experiencing much of what he felt at the time. We worried that this might be an ordeal for him (he was 80 when the project started) but instead, he used to opportunity to get all the events and the lingering feelings into some perspective - to come to terms with what he had been through. This book has been a revelation to us, and we believe that this is a story that must be told. There's been a lot in the news about claims for compensation, and television documentaries, but nothing beats a detailed first-hand account.

I had almost forgotten, or had put to the back of my mind, the events of the Second World War and the Thai-Burma railway. During my years in the building trade, I would occasionally meet someone else who had shared similar experiences. But the subject was never explored with my family. It was just something I didn’t talk about.
Once I'd embarked on this book, I dug deeper and deeper into my memory. It all came flooding back. I began to relive the events – the humour, the sadness, the fear and the stress. I could see and smell the places, hear the voices and picture the faces of the men with whom I shared those years.
Everything I know about that time is in this book, but you must remember that we were starved of hard information in the depths of the jungle. Time stopped for long periods. We would pick up the occasional bit of ‘news’, more often rumour, as men were moved from camp to camp and mingled. But we knew very little about how the war was going. I was surprised to find that I could recall a huge amount of day-to-day detail.
Most of my comrades are gone now. I salute those who have died, and also those who have made it with me into a new millennium.

Bill Spalding was born in 1917. He had started training for his career in the construction industry, when he was called up in 1939 and joined the Royal Corps of Signals. His intensely practical approach to life enables him to look back at the Japanese building methods on the Thai railway project and explain why it was an almost impossible task. During his life in the building trade (like his father before him), he built the two main houses where he and his family lived. He married in 1948 and had two children. He was widowed in 1981 and now lives in Surrey (UK).