Prisoner of war who made peace with his tormentor and wrote an acclaimed memoir, The Railway Man
The experience of three and a half years of slave labour and torture as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, on the notorious Burma-Siam railway, dominated the rest of the life of Eric Lomax, who has died aged 93. His 1995 memoir, The Railway Man, is a classic of its kind, and work on a major feature film based on it is well advanced for release next year.
It was only when he was in his 7os that Lomax achieved a kind of peace, by meeting Takashi Nagase, one of the men who had interrogated and tortured him, and striking up an unlikely but profound friendship with him after they met in Thailand.
Lomax was born in Edinburgh and on leaving school at 16 began a career in telephone engineering with the Post Office. Realising when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 that war was inevitable, he postponed his wedding plans and volunteered for the army aged 19, joining the Royal Signals and earning a commission as a subaltern in 1940.
His unit was in Singapore at the end of 1941 when the Japanese launched their great assault across a front stretching from the Malayan peninsula to the central Pacific. An all-conquering, lightning march down the Indochina peninsula brought 30,000 Japanese troops to the Strait of Johor, between Malaya and Singapore Island. The British garrison numbered nearly 140,000 but was in total chaos, under‑equipped with no aircraft or tanks, demoralised and disorganised. General Arthur Percival surrendered the island on 15 February 1942 – the greatest defeat in British military history.
The prisoners – British, Australian, Indian and Malayan - were initially force-marched to Changi, which rapidly became an overcrowded and insanitary concentration camp. From there, many thousands went to Burma to work on the railway to Siam (now known as Thailand) in appalling conditions. Brutal interrogations and gratuitous torture became routine.
Despite their suffering, Lomax and fellow prisoners managed to build a radio to try to keep in touch with the progress of the war. They also drew up a map of their area of confinement with a view to escape. But in August 1943 they were caught; 10 men were arrested, severely beaten (two died) and moved to a special prison for prolonged torture. Lomax "escaped" by throwing himself down a flight of steps in order to be sent to hospital.
One in three western prisoners of the Japanese are estimated to have died. Lomax thought David Lean's admired 1957 film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, was a sanitised epic that fell short of the truth. The censors would never have allowed the reality to be shown, he felt.
After the war, he stayed on in the army for two years and then joined the colonial service in what became Ghana. In 1955 he went into personnel management before taking up a post at Strathclyde University as a lecturer in industrial relations, retiring in 1982.
"People thought I was coping," he told an interviewer later in life, "but inside I was falling apart … I had no self‑worth, no trust in people and lived in a world of my own. The privacy of the torture victim is more impregnable than any fortress." He admitted that in some ways his family was made to pay for his suffering, and that he conceived an intense and implacable hatred for Japanese people. His first marriage broke up under the strain.
Lomax dreamed of getting his hands round the neck of his tormentor and beating him to death. On his retirement, he embarked on a long and painstaking period of research, looking for the man who had tortured him. Nagase turned out to be still alive and engaged in charitable work: he had even built a Buddhist temple in Thailand to atone for what he had done in the war.
In 1987 Lomax sought support from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, now Freedom from Torture, which helped him surmount his memories and attain a kind of catharsis. Encouraged by his second wife, Patti, who made the initial contact by letter, he went to Thailand a few years later to meet Nagase on seeing his compassionate and apologetic reply.
They met at the bridge over the Kwai, an event which was filmed as part of a prizewinning documentary. Lomax had arrived in anything but conciliatory mood but was taken aback by the deep contrition of the Japanese veteran. After a few days in each other's company, they got to talking and even laughing about their wartime experiences.
Lomax's autobiography appeared in 1995 to great acclaim, winning two literary prizes. The book is an unusual memoir, in that it includes the results of interviews with witnesses, as well as an account of Lomax's own experiences. It formed the basis of a docudrama entitled Prisoners in Time later that year, starring John Hurt as Lomax. The feature film will have the same title as the book, with Colin Firth as Lomax and Nicole Kidman as his wife.
Lomax is survived by Patti and by Charmaine, his daughter from his first marriage.
• Eric Sutherland Lomax, prisoner of war and writer, born 30 May 1919; died 8 Octobe