Long Night's Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941–1945 by Charles G. Roland (review)

humanities 493 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Macdonald, Borden, and especially Meighen were the party of industrial capitalism and the tariff that protected capitalism and urbanism in Canada. Vincent Massey, a Liberal, is deemed by Massolin to be one of the critics of modernity. Yet he was an industrial capitalist and very much an urban Canadian. King despised Massey because he thought he was an elitist and hopelessly influenced by >Thames fever,= an affliction that befell those who came too close to the lure of British upper-class society. Maryon Pearson learned quickly that her husband=s superior in London in the late 1930s believed that private school education was essential for her children. Her husband, Lester Pearson, who had spent as much of his adult life in Britain as in Canada, became troubled that Massey trusted more his British friends than the prime minister that he served. Massolin is correct to identify a group of English Canadians who became critics of Canada=s political and cultural direction in the 1950s. Donald Creighton=s magnificent prose made John A. Macdonald the embodiment of an intellectual tradition that he termed Conservative, or Tory. Much evidence suggests, however, that this tradition was not so much a foe of modernity as representative of the British Canadian tradition in Canada. If the group had wanted allies in their opposition to modernity, they would have found many in French Canada. Yet they kept their distance and, if one may trust a short story by Creighton=s daughter, their profound distrust. In the end, it was not modernity so much as the United States that brought together these diverse personalities. Their interpretation of the Canadian past is as fanciful as Margaret Thatcher=s evocation of Britain=s Victorian age. They gave us not analysis so much as prescription. Massolin is wrong to identify anti-modernism as the major unifying theme in these conservative critics, but his book does contribute much to our understanding of the death of British Canada and to the motivations of those who fired the last cannon shots of resistance. (JOHN ENGLISH) Charles G. Roland. Long Night=s Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941B1945 Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xxviii, 422. $28.95 The story of the miserably timed despatch of two Canadian battalions to Hong Kong, barely three weeks before Japan launched its Pacific campaign on 8 December 1941, has been told many times. The medical historian Charles Roland tells it yet again, but in a way that makes the telling worth the read. He writes on the basis of an extraordinary breadth of original material, offering a degree of detail over the full run of the story from 1941 to 1945 that is unmatched in other accounts. But what is strikingly unique is the particular perspective that the author is able to bring to the topic as a medical historian. 494 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 This is not simply the tragic story of the Canadians= internment told yet again, but an in-depth and informed portrait of the bodily suffering that the internees were forced to undergo. As Roland so aptly points out, the reality of imprisonment in Hong Kong was >the reality of constant disease.= Undernourishment, torture, infections, and medical neglect were the almost universal experience of the Canadians. Their suffering was so severe that, of the 1975 who were sent to Hong Kong, 557 never made it home. Some died in the brief period of combat leading up to their defeat, and a few died defying their captors. The rest succumbed either in the unhealthy conditions of the POW camps in Hong Kong or else under the strenuous regime of the forced labour camps in Japan to which some were transported starting in 1942. Roland tells their story with clarity and compassion. The mortality rate among the Canadian prisoners of war is shocking, but even more shocking is the fact, which Roland mentions towards the end of the book, that this rate was only slightly above the overall mortality rate for Allied POWs in Asia, which was...