Last Man Out: Surviving the Burma-Thailand Death Railway

By: James Hornfischer
From June 1942 to October 1943, more than one hundred thousand Allied POWs who had been forced into slave labor by the Japanese died building the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an undertaking immortalized in the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai. One of the few who survived was American H. Robert Charles, who describes the ordeal in vivid and harrowing detail in Last Man Out: Surviving the BurmaûThailand Death Railway.

The story mixes the unimaginable brutality of the camps with the inspiring courage of the men, including a Dutch Colonial Army doctor whose skill and knowledge of the medicinal value of wild jungle herbs saved the lives of hundreds of his fellow POWs, including the author.

H. Robert Charles was born in Pitcher, Oklahoma, Charles grew up on a wheat farm and cattle ranch near Hutchinson, Kansas, and enlisted in the Marine Corps in June 1940.

He was a machine gunner aboard the USS Houston at the time it was sunk by the Japanese in Sunda Strait, March 1, 1942. He swam nine hours, was picked up off the coast of Java by the Japanese, and held forty-three months in slave labor camps in Burma, Thailand, and Saigon.

Repatriated at the end of the war by British paratroopers and Office of Strategic Services personnel, Charles spent time at a hospital in Calcutta before returning home.