John Baxter
Former Japanese PoW BORN FEBRUARY 19, 1919 DIED FEBRUARY 13, 2017, AGED 97
IN THE three years John Baxter spent imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World War, he endured terrible hardship and at one point was only given a 50 per cent chance of survival after suffering from malaria, dysentery and diphtheria.
Captured as a corporal in the Royal Engineers in 1942, he was starved and beaten then suffered scorching by the blast of the Nagasaki atomic bomb as he toiled in harsh labour mines on the island of Kyushu, 40 miles away.
Yet despite being subjected to shocking cruelty, Baxter, a Londonborn apprentice plumber, struck up an unlikely friendship with Japanese guard Hayato Hirano who showed him small acts of kindness.
The pair kept in contact after Baxter’s release in 1945 and 50 years later they enjoyed an emotional VJ anniversary reunion.
“It was a relationship of mutual respect,” Baxter once said. “He was a kind, compassionate guard.
“He risked his life to get extra rations for PoWs. He treated us differently. If someone in our gang was not feeling well Hirano would tell them to go and rest by the warmth of the furnace that was kept going in the workshop.”
The pair remained friends until Hirano’s death in 2009.
In 2010 Baxter published his wartime experiences in a book called Missing, Believed Killed. Although now out of print, his family plan to put it online with proceeds going to the Java FEPOW Club 1942 which carries on the tradition of reunions and welfare for surviving Far East PoWs.
After he returned to the UK in 1948 he met and married a nurse, Lilian Hill, before settling down in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. The couple had three children and Baxter worked as a heating engineer until his retirement in the 1980s.
He leaves behind two sons, a daughter and two grandchildren. His wife died of cancer in 1980.