At the Emperor's Pleasure: Surviving Wartime Captivity in the Far East

At the Emperor’s Pleasure follows the young couple Christopher and Topsy Man through the savage battle for Hong Kong and four years of enforced separation, he as a prisoner of war and forced labourer in Kobe, Japan, she interned in Stanley Camp, Hong Kong. The book is not about Christopher and Topsy Man alone but also of close friends and colleagues forced to suffer inhumane cruelty and deprivation at the hands of their captors. Some of Topsy’s nursing colleagues were raped and murdered, one friend was imprisoned within shouting distance of her husband being tortured then executed by the Kempeitai, while another died when their camp was mistakenly bombed by the Allies.Topsy was herself the reluctant witness to a macabre ritual execution. Christopher lost brother officers and many of the Cockney soldiers under his command in the battle for Hong Kong.Others drowned in the East China Sea, victims of a barbaric but little-known mass war crime, the sinking of the Lisbon Maru.Still others su