From June 1942 to October 1943, more than 100,000 Allied POWs who had been forced into slave labour by the Japanese died building the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an undertaking immortalised in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai.

One of the few who survived was American Marine H Robert Charles, who describes the ordeal in vivid and harrowing detail in Last Man Out.

The story mixes the unimaginable brutality of the camps with the inspiring courage of the men, including a Dutch Colonial Army doctor whose skill and knowledge of the medicinal value of wild jungle herbs saved the lives of hundreds of his fellow POWs, including the author.

Charles was a machine gunner aboard the USS Houston at the time it was sunk by the Japanese in Sunda Strait on March 1, 1942.

He swam nine hours, was picked up off the coast of Java by the Japanese and held for 43 months in slave labour camps in Burma, Thailand and Saigon.

Repatriated at the end of the war by British paratroopers and Office of Strategic Services personnel, Charles spent time at a hospital in Calcutta before returning home

Last Man Out by H Robert Charles is a 2006 first edition edition published by Zenith Press, St Paul, Minniapolis, USA.

It is a near-new 240-page 15x23cm gloss card soft cover with a section of interesting photographs and several appendices. It is subtitled Surviving the Burma-Thailand Death Railway: A Memoir.

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