Tony Lucas was a prisoner of the Japanese
Tony Lucas, prisoner of war: b Plymouth, England, November
16, 1918, m Margaret Calver; 3d; d July 4, 2017, aged 98.
Tony Lucas, who has died aged
98, endured three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese, including slave labour on the Burma-Thailand railway; it was a measure of his remarkable capacity for forgiveness that he later regularly visited Japan on business.
Anthony Lucas was born in Devonport, in the Devon town of Plymouth, in 1918, the third child of John Lucas, a clergyman, and Marjorie, a virtuoso violinist. After his father’s appointment as a Canon of Birmingham cathedral, young Tony was educated at King Edward’s School.
After leaving school, he joined ICI and enlisted in the TA, in the
69th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Royal Artillery. By June 1939 he had been commissioned but, to his dismay, made Intelligence Officer for the
4th Anti-Aircraft Division in Chester. Discovering that his duties included drawing up drafts for overseas service, he inserted his own name and was drafted to Singapore.
Arriving in September 1940 to command Indian troops, Lucas and his fellow TA officers were entrusted with antiquated WWI
3-inch naval guns. Military intelligence insisted that the Japanese would invade from the south. ‘‘We were told they couldn’t see in the dark,’’ he recalled in The Daily Telegraph this year. ‘‘They wouldn’t be able to fly; they’d never land during the monsoon.’’
Lucas was close to Malaya’s north-east coast when the Japanese landed during the monsoon on the night of December
8, 1941. For the rest of his life he revered the infantrymen who, outnumbered and lacking air support, resisted the invasion. In particular, he remembered three men from the Cambridgeshire Regiment who allowed 50 of the enemy to advance to within 150 yards. ‘‘We saw sun glinting on the sergeant’s samurai. They went down like flies.’’
By then he had been appointed staff captain responsible for monitoring anti-aircraft guns. The authorities, he recalled, had resisted defending Singapore lest it alarmed the Chinese population; even when the immense guns in the docks were finally turned northwards, they fired not High Explosive but armour-piercing shells which thumped uselessly into the ground.
On February 15, 1942 he was one of 80,000 Allied troops to surrender, but made an immediate gesture of defiance. Held in a tented encampment lacking perimeter defences, Lucas made his way back to where he had left a Buick given to him by a former acting Attorney General of Singapore, drove to a mangrove swamp, set the Buick alight and steered it into the water. A Japanese patrol fired at the abandoned car, but Lucas returned to the tented camp undetected.
Later, at Changi prison, he witnessed the Japanese tying a soldier from the Argylls to a tree and bayoneting him, before an Argylls officer wrenched a rife from one of his captors and shot his own soldier dead. It was also at Changi that, for the only time throughout the war, the Japanese passed on a handful of Red Cross parcels. Lucas’s share was a tin of tomatoes. From the seed of a solitary tomato, Lucas managed to grow a plant. For the next three years he transplanted it from camp to camp, to supplement the daily ration of a cupful of degraded rice.
In September 1942, Lucas was one of 17,000 PoWs corralled into Selarang barracks – built for 800 – with all water supplies, barring one tap, disconnected, to compel them to sign a pledge not to escape. After the first deaths from dysentery, Colonel Holmes, the senior British officer, ordered the PoWs to comply. Thereafter, Lucas was transported by rail to Thailand. Thirty prisoners were locked into each airless steelroofed truck, in toxic heat. The journey lasted five days. Lucas thought he would die; several did.
In Thailand, hacking out the 258-mile railway line, reveille was at 4.30am, followed by a three-mile march through the jungle to the area the Australians named ‘‘Hellfire Pass’’. Men worked in pairs, alternately swinging a 7lb hammer and holding a 3ft iron bar. They never returned before
10.30pm.
Relief of sorts came for Lucas courtesy of a scorpion trapped in his right boot which had to be cut from his severely swollen foot. The wound went septic; maggots from the latrines were applied and ate the diseased flesh. Lucas also suffered dysentery, malaria and jungle ulcers; his weight dropped from 11-stone to six. On his twentyfirst bout of malaria, an Allied doctor gave him a massive dose of Paludrine. Thereafter he remained free from the disease, but contracted cholera whilst helping carry corpses out for burning. Death invariably followed within
12 hours, but he was again cured, this time with an injection of saline solution.
Though discovery would mean a savage beating or worse, Lucas made alcohol from rotten bananas. Towards war’s end, he antagonised ‘‘The Undertaker’’, a guard who had already bludgeoned two POWs to death with an iron bar. Felled by the Undertaker’s first blows – with belt and fist – which dislodged three of his teeth, Lucas then saw him reach for his iron bar. But a PoW interpreter intervened, with miraculous success.
On VJ Day, Lucas joined other PoWs in repeatedly singing the National Anthem, tears streaming down their cheeks.
After repatriation, he monitored the war-crimes trials, noting with satisfaction the Undertaker’s hanging. But he concluded that it had been Japan’s military, not its people, who had perverted their country. Working for an associate company of ICI, he was in Japan as early as 1960. When his Japanese business partner remarked that he had an astonishing understanding of the Japanese character, he said that he had ‘‘learned from experience’’, but elaborated no further.
A man of immense courtesy and integrity, Tony Lucas was sustained by his Christian faith when his only son drowned, aged
29, saving the life of another. In retirement in Suffolk, he was overjoyed to meet one of the men from the Cambridgeshire Regiment whose nerveless resistance he had witnessed in
1942.
– Telegraph Group