A Cool Head in Hell

Dr Harry Silman’s WW2 diaries, detailing life as a POW tending to fellow combatants during forced labour on the Burma Railway.

A Cool Head in Hell is a compelling historical narrative based on Harry Silman’s diaries, comprising one of the most comprehensive accounts by a POW under the Japanese to survive WWII.

Silman joined the British Army in 1939 as a medical officer. In 1940, he was one of the last soldiers to be shipped out during the mass retreat from Dunkirk. In 1942, his division was assigned to assist in the defence of Singapore, but arrived just before the island fell to Japan. Captain Silman spent the rest of the war in the notorious Changi POW camp as well as in the northernmost camps of the notorious Burma Railway, where he tended to Allied forced-labourers.

Throughout, Silman kept diaries in secret – illegal and dangerous for a POW. He wrote regular accounts of his harrowing experiences in the camps when he himself was weakened and exhausted, caring as best he could for hundreds of ill, wounded and dying men. Articulate, graphic, compassionate and lit with good humour, the diaries have been edited with care and illuminating commentary by Silman’s daughter, Jacqueline Passman.