With the rapid disappearance of the last adult participants in World War II, it is perhaps inevitable that historical attention should begin to turn toward the next generation and the effects of parental wartime experiences on daughters and sons born during and after the last great global conflict who still can be interviewed; in this case, the children of those servicemen who were unfortunate enough to have been prisoners of the Japanese Empire. Though much has been written about these men's experiences by themselves or by others, how these experiences impacted the families concerned has yet to be fully explored. Himself the son of one such ex-prisoner, Terry Smyth bases his study partly on his own memories but mostly on interviews he conducted, in pursuit of a doctorate from the University of Essex, with other first-generation descendants of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW). “My purpose in writing this book,” he explains, “is to show how the children of [British] FEPOWs have remembered and commemorated their fathers’ lives, and how different memory practices have been rooted in the POW experience” (173).

The initial chapter summarizes the British prisoners’ battle for survival—in the face of untreated tropical diseases, grossly inadequate rations, awful living conditions, overwork, and a great deal of arbitrary brutality on the part of camp guards—“in order to better convey and contextualize the traumatic memories the men brought back with them into the family home and into post-war British society” (44). The focus then shifts to the problems they faced in coping with long-term physical ailments as well as ongoing psychological issues after they were repatriated to the United Kingdom at war's end, and on how their problematic coping behaviors impacted their children's lives and allowed trauma to be transmitted into the next generation in myriad ways. Smyth devotes a third chapter to the complexities of recollection and commemoration, both individual and collective, which he finds “figures powerfully” amongst the pension-age sons and daughters. This was made manifest through everything from photographs on display and objects never discarded to attendance at special observances and the creation of webpages. Many of the interviewees, in short, felt a deep need “to preserve the memories of their fathers’ captivity” (71).

There then follows a fourth chapter that “acts as a bridge between the ‘raw material’ of childhood memories and the memory practices of adulthood,” where Smyth explores “how the children tried to make sense of the relationships they had with their fathers throughout their lives” (93). This process might take decades, involving coming to terms with the emotional baggage of the past long after the death of parents. Next comes a chapter on the home as a site of remembrance, with Smyth discussing object practices in relation to an eclectic variety of mementos ranging from medals to snapshots. The latter, he argues, are of great sociocultural significance: “we need to attend to what a photograph does as well as what it is” (124).

Smyth next looks at those individuals who went beyond interest in exploring their father's own military service to become de facto researchers into the who-what-where-when details of Japanese captivity more generally. Their methods and motives are explored, along with the ways in which emotion and identity tend to lie uneasily below a superficially objective, facts-based approach to the past. The seventh and final chapter looks at those sons and daughters who made pilgrimages to the sites of incarceration in Japan and across South-East Asia and thereby grappled with the legacies of their childhood. At least some of them were thereby able to use the experience “to restore a new psychic equilibrium with their past” (172).

Readers anticipating a series of lengthy interview quotes interspersed with occasional commentary of the kind found in popular books with “voices” or “experience” in the title will be disappointed. This is a much more complex work, employing as it does a variety of cross-disciplinary tools—“the core methodologies of oral history and memory studies, interlaced with insights from psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies and trauma studies” (3)—while taking a “life-course perspective” (4). Thankfully, Smyth is a skillful writer, which makes it easier to take on board the different analytical approaches he deploys at different junctures. If the reader is prepared to accept a subjective and occasionally self-referential approach to various aspects of growing up in the shadow of an ex-FEPOW, without worrying too much about matters such as an unspecified sample size, a deliberately unstructured approach to interviewing, or a somewhat disjointed three-part “reflective coda” rather than a conventional conclusion, there is much to gleaned from both the text and the accompanying illustrations.