ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the first six months of confinement at Changi. As we have already seen, the mood apparent among many of the men of Malaya Command upon entering captivity was more buoyant than might reasonably have been expected. This was due, in large part, to the way in which many men chose to interpret the surrender and its implications. Naturally, this was accompanied by a fair degree of apprehension about what captivity would bring, and this concern obliged the POWs to defer any recriminations about the significance and the magnitude of the defeat at Singapore, for the time being at least. In the early months at Changi, once the initial fears about what captivity might bring had been partially allayed, the POWs returned to the issues raised by the surrender and attempted to come to terms with them through numerous public lectures and private debates.
