A Cool Head in Hell: The Wartime Diaries of a British Doctor from Dunkirk to the Burma Railway

Harry Silman joined the British army in 1939. As a medicalofficer under bombardment on the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940, he was one of the last soldiers to be shipped out during the mass retreat.When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, his division was assigned to assist in the defence of Singapore; they arrived just before the island fell to Japanese forces in 1942. Harry spent the rest of the war in the notorious Changi POW camp and upcountry at Hellfire Pass, where he tended to the wounded and dying men who were forced to labour on the Burma Railway.Throughout, Harry kept diaries – highly secret, illegal, and dangerous for a POW. He managed to write a detailed account of his harrowing experiences in the camps when he himself was weakened and exhausted, caring as best he could for hundreds of desperately ill men. Articulate, graphic, compassionate, and lit with good humour, this is Harry’s war in his own words. His diaries, arguably one of the most comprehensive surviving contemporaneous accounts of this period of World War Two, have been edited with great care and illuminating commentary by his daughter, Jacqueline Passman. Read more