A reader's glossary

Words in the account

Bill wrote for people who had been there, and used the words of his own time and trade without stopping to explain them. Some he does explain as he goes; those are noted below.

Nothing in his account has been changed. This is a separate list, for anyone reading it eighty years on.

Soldiering

Militia: The six months of compulsory military training brought in across Britain in 1939 for young men, followed by a spell in the Reserves. Bill and Tom Raine registered for it at the Employment Office in York.
the Reserves: Men who had completed their training and returned to civilian life, but who remained liable to be called back into the forces.
draft: A party of soldiers sent out together to join a unit overseas. To be "on draft to India" was to be posted there.
battalion: An infantry unit of several hundred men. Bill served in the 1st Battalion of The West Yorkshire Regiment.
regiment: The parent body a soldier belongs to, usually tied to a county, and made up of one or more battalions.
reveille: The bugle call that wakes the camp in the morning.
RSM: Regimental Sergeant Major, the senior warrant officer of a battalion and the man responsible for its discipline.
sub-conductor: A warrant officer rank in the Indian Army's supply and transport services.
puttee: A long strip of cloth wound round the lower leg from ankle to knee, worn with uniform.
housewife: A soldier's sewing roll, holding needles, thread and buttons. At the gates of Rangoon Jail the guards took the needles out of them, saying they could be used as weapons.
dubbin: A thick grease for waterproofing leather boots. Bill describes the prisoners using it to bind ground rice flour into something that would hold together. He explains it in the text.
Roll of Honour: A memorial board in a church or workplace listing local men killed in the war. Bill came home to find his own name on one, and had it erased.

In the camp

Tenko: The Japanese roll call. Prisoners were counted, in Japanese, and beaten for miscounting or for answering wrongly.
bugaro: Bill's spelling of a Japanese insult he translates as "stupid", shouted by a Japanese officer at one of his own men.
fundoshi: A Japanese loincloth, which the prisoners were issued in place of clothing. Bill explains it in the text, and describes smuggling two stolen eggs in his.
basha: A hut built of bamboo and thatch. Bill explains it in the text.
godown: A warehouse or store, from the Malay word. Used across British Asia.
cheroot: A cigar cut square at both ends, smoked widely in Burma. The prisoners rolled cheroot tobacco in newspaper for want of anything better.
red chapatti: The prisoners' nickname for the Japanese flag — a red disc on a white field — after the flat round Indian bread. It was meant as an insult, and it gives this account its title.
chapatti: A flat, round, unleavened Indian bread cooked on a griddle.
coolie: A labourer doing heavy manual work, in the language of the time. The word is now understood as offensive; it appears in the account as Bill wrote it, describing carrying loaded baskets on the head.
working party: A group of prisoners sent out of the jail under guard to labour — loading ships, re-treading tyres, clearing ground, and recovering unexploded bombs.

Illness

beriberi: A disease caused by a lack of vitamin B1, which is stripped out of polished white rice. It brings swelling, weakness and, untreated, heart failure. Rice was most of what the prisoners were given.
dysentery: An infection of the bowel causing severe and often bloody diarrhoea. Among the chief killers in the Far East camps.
strongyloides: A parasitic worm that enters through the skin, often from contaminated ground, and can live on in the body for decades. Bill was found to be carrying it long after he came home, having been diagnosed in 1945 without being told.
jungle sore: An ulcer that begins as a small break in the skin and eats steadily into the flesh beneath. Without dressings or drugs they grew very large.

Places

Burma: The country where Bill was captured, now called Myanmar.
Rangoon: Burma's capital and main port, in the south of the country. Now Yangon. Rangoon Jail, the civil prison, was used to hold Allied prisoners.
Pegu: A town north-east of Rangoon, on the line of the British retreat. Now Bago.
the Salween: A great river running south through Burma to the sea. A sergeant of Bill's battalion was ordered to blow the bridge across it, and did so with his own brother on the far bank.
the Chin Hills: Hill country in western Burma, towards the Indian border.
Akyab: A port on the Arakan coast of western Burma, now Sittwe. Bill passed through it after his release.
Chittagong: A port then in eastern Bengal, now in Bangladesh.
Barrackpore: A garrison town near Calcutta, in India. Tom Raine was photographed there in 1940.
Ranchi: A town in eastern India used as a British Army station.
Poona: A city in western India, now Pune.
Deolali: A British Army transit camp in western India, where troops waited to be sent home.
Shildon: The railway town in County Durham where Bill and Tom Raine were both born in 1918.

The wider war

AVG: The American Volunteer Group, American pilots flying for China against Japan before the United States entered the war, later known as the Flying Tigers. Bill describes them as mercenaries, flying without British backing.
Zero: The Mitsubishi A6M, the main Japanese fighter aircraft of the war.
Dakota: The Douglas C-47, the standard Allied transport aircraft, used to fly prisoners out after the liberation.
Field Marshal Slim: William Slim, who commanded the Fourteenth Army in the reconquest of Burma. Bill met him at a function at the drill hall in York after the war.
Combat Stress: The UK charity for veterans' mental health. Its carers encouraged Bill to write this account, and he gave the proceeds of the printed book to them.
The Not Forgotten Association: A charity providing outings and entertainment for wounded and ex-service men and women. It took Bill on canal trips and to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace.

Return home · The Reading Edition