Dusty Miller (martyr)

"Dusty" Miller was a British P.O.W. in Thailand on the Burma Railway during Second World War. His life and death is attested to in Ernest Gordon's autobiographical work Through the Valley of the Kwai (also published under the titles To End All Wars and Miracle on the River Kwai).

Background

Miller was a gardener from Newcastle and a Methodist. He was (like Gordon) in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, but was drafted into the Military Police or "Red Caps".

Internment

He became known to Ernest Gordon during a period early on in their three and a half year incarceration under the Japanese. Gordon was dying and was daily attended to by Miller, and "Dinty" Moore, a Roman Catholic P.O.W. In their care Gordon, very unexpectedly, recovered.

Through the examples of Miller and Moore, the recovery of Gordon, and the self-sacrificing examples of numerous others, both faith and hope were restored to many soldiers in the death camps.

Death

At the war's end Gordon was the sole survivor of the three. Upon liberation as he sought news of his friends he found that two weeks before the war's end Miller had been crucified as a result of his faith by a Japanese guard.^[1]

See also

• God: Sole Satisfier
• Night (book) by Elie Wiesel
• "Silence", the acclaimed historical novel by Shusaku Endo dealing with the history of Christianity in Japan.
• Christian martyrs
• Forty Martyrs of Sebaste

References

1. ^ Gordon, Ernest. Miracle on the River Kwai. Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1977, p. 173.

Contemporaries of note

• Paul Schneider (pastor), martyr.
• Drina Martyrs
• Alberto Marvelli
• Edith Stein, martyr.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr.
• Bartolome Blanco Marquez, martyr.
• Ivo Protulipac, martyr.
• Óscar Romero, martyr.
• Martin Luther King, martyr.

External links

• Ernest Gordon's To End All Wars

Persondata
Name	Miller, Dusty
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Date of death	1945
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