This is the story and pictorial record of the people, places, landscapes and incidents which occurred while the British artist Jack Chalker was a prisoner of the Japanese. A gunner in the Royal Artillery, he spent three and a half years in Singapore and in the Thai-Burma railway camps.

Captured on arrival in Singapore, Jack Chalker, an art student, joined the 60,000 allied prisoners in the slave labour camps of the infamous Burma Railway. This book presents his work that records not only the misery, squalor and savagery of the prison camps, but also the horrific reality of disease, wounds and the ravages of starvation.

The 'Death Railway' was very well named. More correctly called the Burma or Thai-Burma Railway, it was a major project during Allied Far East imprisonment under the Japanese. Over 60,000 prisoners worked on its construction, the majority of whom were British, and some 20 per cent died before release in 1945. Working conditions were appalling, the climate inhospitable, and food supplies grossly inadequate, making the POWs terribly vulnerable to a plethora of tropical infections and syndromes of malnutrition. No medical care was given by their Japanese captors, and it fell to the Allied POW doctors and medical orderlies to treat the sick, which they did with little in the way of medical equipment or drugs.

From June 1942 to October 1943, more than 100,000 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 film "The Bridge on the River Kwai." One of the few who survived was American Marine H. Robert Charles, who describes the ordeal in vivid and harrowing detail in Last Man Out. 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.