A NEW book by journalist Roger Maynard provides a compelling account of one of World War II’s most brutal prisoner of war camps — on the Indonesian island of Ambon. It is a tale of mateship, heroism and the triumph of the human spirit but controversially, Ambon reveals what happened when Allied officers and men turned against each other.

THE POWs on Ambon were not only sick, starving and demoralised, but camp discipline was now posing such a serious threat that Major George De Verdon Westley, who was by now commanding officer of the 2/21st Battalion, was forced to countenance the unthinkable: erecting a second jail within the Japanese prison for those men deemed to require additional punishment.