In the 62 years since the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, and the subsequent recovery of Allied prisoners of war from all over the Asia-Pacific region, the story of the building of the Thailand-Burma Railway has been told and retold in books, films and television programmes.

This emphasis on just one aspect of the PoW story has resulted in the neglect of others, including the PoWs who were captured on March 8, 1942, at the surrender of the Netherlands East Indies. These included more than 5,000 men of the RAF stationed in Java or evacuated from Singapore just before the surrender.

The publication of Prisoners in Java goes a long way to correct this imbalance. The book consists of reminiscences published from 1984 in the Java Journal, the quarterly newsletter of the Java 42 Club of Far Eastern Prisoners of War (FEPoWs) and is illustrated with drawings – including the one reproduced above – as well as photographs and maps.

The present chairman of the club, Bill Marshall, 89, who has edited the newsletter since the early 1990s, writes: “We wanted to leave behind something tangible about our experiences, which, up until recent years, very few of us had shared even with our families.”

Although most of the FEPoW veterans’ clubs have disbanded, the Java Club flourishes, with a current membership of 207, of whom 95 are FEPoWs.

In recent years widows, wives and children have joined, united by a desire to discover details of the captivity about which most were ignorant.

The book has been compiled, edited and published solely by members of the club and their friends as a memorial to those who suffered and died in Java and Sumatra, in the Maluku Islands and Sulawesi (Celebes), in Borneo, on the transports (the “hellships”) and in Japan.

The introduction is by Professor Emeritus Leslie J. Audus, who as a young flight lieutenant commanded a radar unit and published an account of his own captivity, Spice Island Slaves (1996).

Prisoners in Java: Accounts by Allied Prisoners of War in the Far East (1942-1945) captured in Java, edited by Margaret Martin, (Hamwic Publishers, £18.99; ISBN: 978-0-9547228 -8-3); www.hamwic.co.uk