Under the Sun

Under the Sun is set in the closing stages of World War Two in the South Pacific. Flight Lieutenant Edward Strickland is a young RAF Spitfire pilot flying sorties over the Carolines and their outlying atolls. On a dawn patrol he is shot down attacking a submarine and ends up on a remote island occupied by a small Japanese garrison. The garrisons commander Captain Tadashi Hayama brutally interrogates his captive and a battle of wills develops between the two men. But events take an unexpected turn and the island becomes, for a while, a kind of Eden. Yet beyond its shores danger lurks and Japans capitulation after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leads to a climactic end which shatters the idyll forever.