Lucy Colback

Nearly seven years ago, in November 2018, I wrote a piece for the OC describing my somewhat meandering path to where I was in life at that time. I had left a twenty-year finance career, which began as an investment manager and then morphed into writing for the Financial Times, in order to interview World War II veterans for a book.  

I won’t cover that ground again, but I will start where the book's story began. After I had decided to leave the FT, an editor encouraged me to write a farewell piece, a “Diary” for the FT Weekend, describing what was pulling me away. I wrote about the inexplicable compulsion I had to speak to World War II survivors and document their experiences and how, since I had made that decision, the war was creeping into every corner of my life—where I travelled, the people I met and the stories they shared.  

Given my background in Chinese and the fact that I had spent much of my adult (and school) life in Asia, I had had in mind to interview people who had fought in the China-Burma-India theatre. I thought I would weave it into a book about the relationship between China, Japan and the US, which had been shaped by the war and was highly relevant to the world of commerce. China’s rise and increasing assertiveness, Japan’s resultant anxiety and the US’s more combative and less avuncular attitude towards China would shape the next phase of our lives.  

Unfortunately, I was not clear about this aspect when I wrote my FT swansong: I just said “I’m off to interview survivors”. A bit of an oversight, it turned out, because my inbox the following week was, if not exactly flooded, gently adrift with a flurry of emails from people wanting to share stories with me. Some came from family and friends of survivors offering their relatives’ stories, some came from the survivors themselves asking was I interested? Perhaps I should have said “No”, and reverted to my original plan, but with people eager to have their experiences recorded I felt it would be disrespectful to turn them down. It wasn’t as though I had a clear brief in mind, after all.  

So I set off on a remarkable odyssey, beginning with a Holocaust survivor in Bangkok who in the subsequent years became a dear friend, along with his wife. I found all along the way I was educated about aspects of the war I had not intended to cover, and this trip to Thailand set the tone. Ernest and Saisampan took me to Kanchanaburi, the Thai terminus of the Death Railway at what is known as the River Kwai, where Allied POWs slaved to build a train line for the Japanese.  

She walked with me along the railway, the two of us in silence as the insects screeched around us. He walked with me around Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries as I hid my watering eyes behind huge sunglasses. As we travelled and shared wonderful Thai meals together, he told me about his childhood years in Westerbork and Bergen Belsen. Liberated by the Red Army (he was on a “lost train” from Belsen), he was the driving force behind the inclusion of Soviet voices in my book, for which I am indebted. Ernest and Saisampan died within a year of each other, in 2023 and 2024. 

In the four years after I met Ernest, I interviewed some 80 people, always in person. I accumulated hundreds of hours of tapes (I didn't video our encounters to avoid a sense of intrusion). Sitting with them made for an intimate experience—I felt I was not there to “get the story” as much as to share their memories. Sometimes there were silences. Sometimes there were tears. Occasionally I was privileged enough to stay with people for a while—besides with Ernest and Saisampan, I spent several days in the south of France with the parents of a friend. It was a beautiful spot, they were lovely people and, because it was nearby, I went to the Rhone American Cemetery, where I learned about lesser-known Allied operations as well as more modern conflicts from the memorial’s American superintendent. He cried when he told me what he had seen in Bosnia and I thought please, God, may my book make a difference. 

When Covid hit it upended everything; an in-person approach to interviews was impossible. I had had plans to go and interview more Chinese Nationalist soldiers (left out of history for so long by their Communist rivals) as well as Philippines comfort women—that euphemistic term for women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. Perhaps among those who suffered from such extreme cruelty I might have come across people who wanted revenge. Or maybe just an apology and recognition of their suffering.  

It was not to be. But in the days when travel had still been possible, I had met Japanese who were desperately lobbying for an accounting of their government’s misdeeds. I met British POWs who bore no residual ill-will—one, even, who had slaved on that Death Railway that I visited with my friends in Thailand and had suffered at the hands of some of humanity’s most brutal representatives. I met a Russian and a Dutch Indonesian philosopher who shared uncannily similar views on modern society’s unbridled pursuit of wealth. 

Once I could no longer travel, I sat down to write around what I had. It was not easy. The lack of a thesis came back to bite me more than once. I tried to write the “me journey” and I tried to write it thematically, but neither of these worked on their own. I grappled with all the disparate nationalities that had fought in unconnected battles and no agent wanted an account of the war without an “arc” (explain that to me—we all know the story!). The university press which did look at it, needless to say, did not find my approach particularly academic.  

In the end, after two years of wrestling with reams of transcripts and beta reader feedback and a further two years of almost getting a book deal, I appointed an editor and a cover designer and published Afterbursts myself. It was daunting, but ultimately not hard—and more importantly it was long overdue, eight years on from when I began. Since we had met, most of those whom I had interviewed had died; those who remained were into their 90s or beyond. I wanted even just one of them to see what their words had become. Art Naff, 99 in February this year, keeps his copy of Afterbursts in its padded envelope, the page with his story is marked. When I emailed to let Roy Cadman know that the book was out, the reply informed me he'd died that morning. Rolfe Monteith died a few weeks later.   

It has been something of a whirlwind since the book has come out—launch events in London (six Mayfield girls in attendance) and the US, interviews and podcasts lined up. It isn't a regular World War II sell as Afterbursts is not a regular World War II history. It is part what I learned as I met these remarkable people and educated myself subsequently and part how I felt as I sat with them. But mostly it is their words, telling us what they experienced. It isn’t perfectly tidy, but then nor is war. I had a (reluctant, she subsequently confessed) reader force herself through the book: war does not attract her and most accounts, she finds, focus on the “process and not the victims”. When she was done reading it she said, “I want to thank you for this book: it’s riveting, moving, full of wisdom and, unlike most things connected with war, profoundly human.” That’s all I could ask for it to be. 

I jokingly say that one of my ambitions for this book is to achieve world peace. I’d love world peace, of course, but on a more realistic scale, I wrote it for the people who gave their youths for our freedom. They were all someone’s loved one, friend or child. I wrote it, too, for the mothers—of all those who served and those who still do—and in the hope that by showing the human face of war we might at least move one step further from thinking that killing each other is a solution.