One man’s story of survival in brutal Japanese PoW camps

As we mark VJ Day today – 75 years since the end of World War Two in the Far East – journalist Nigel Gabriel, pictured below, outlines the story of his father Reg’s three-and-a-half-year captivity in PoW camps in Java and Japan

AS COLONEL Paul Tibbets banked Enola Gay steeply away, the plane was, he said, “filled with a blinding light and was cracking and crinkling”. Eleven miles away the first nuclear weapon used in war, Little Boy, had vaporised thousands of human beings and wrecked most of the city of Hiroshima in an instant.

About 200 miles to the north east in Japan, a group of ragged men had just arrived at the gates of the Ikuno Mine with their water canteens and tools. By the summer of 1945, they could scarcely face the mile or so walk from the camp in the little town for another day of back-breaking labour.

Ikuno bears a striking resemblance to the home of one of those prisoners, Reg Gabriel, of Ynysybwl, near Pontypridd. These days, the small Japanese community sports a cheerful website aimed at visitors from the Osaka and Kyoto conurbations encouraging families to visit the mine, now a tourist attraction. A gift shop and mannequins of Japanese miners at work greet those who make the journey. School groups learn about the long history of winning copper and silver from the mountain.

Little, I would think, is said there of the war years, when some 350 British, and a handful of American and Australian prisoners of war laboured in the tunnels to mine copper for the Japanese war effort. Ikuno was one of the better-organised camps in the complex Japanese PoW system. It was said that no men died in captivity there, although that’s been disputed. Certainly, Reg came very close to spoiling this record in the closing months of the conflict.

With double pneumonia, he had been put in the ‘hospital’ (a hut with no medical facilities) after collapsing in the mine, and was expected to die. After a week in a coma, to the amazement of the camp doctor, he opened his eyes. He had, he said, “been seeing bright lights in marble halls” in a neardeath experience.

As Colonel Tibbets made the return journey in his Flying Fortress across the glittering Pacific to the island of Tinian, the skeletal men in Ikuno had no idea of the turn of events that morning with the devastating strike on Hiroshima. Back at work, and in a zombie-like state, Reg was trying to recover his strength. He knew he wouldn’t survive another winter in those conditions.

The camp was the least brutal of the three he had been prisoner in, at Batavia in Java, then at Wakayama near Osaka, and now in tranquil Ikuno. As the war dragged on, the men of 77th Heavy Artillery, raised in South Wales, had been split into work parties and sent to camps around Japan.

They had avoided the worst horrors of the Burma Railway and other hellish places, but still large numbers had perished from malnourishment, overwork, illness, brutality and neglect. From the Japanese perspective, soldiers who surrendered were beneath contempt, shaming their families and countries.

“Duty is as heavy as a mountain, death is as light as a feather” was the Bushido code adopted by the militaristic regime which held the country in its thrall.

But not all

Japanese followed Bushido to the letter. At

Ikuno, an elderly local miner who supervised Reg and his two workmates would divide one of his precious daily cigarettes between them before work.

It might surprise some readers to know that PoWs were, at least in theory, paid a pittance for their labour by the Japanese companies they worked for.

This was very different from the regime in Bandung, Java, where some of the 77th were first held after surrender in 1942. Riding high after stunning victories in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Java and Pearl Harbour, the Japanese war machine was on the march throughout Asia.

The captors were in high spirits. They had humiliated the British and Dutch colonialists who had long ruled the roost in Asia. Britain had been shown up as a paper tiger unable to protect its empire, suffering its worst military catastrophe at Singapore, where 80,000 soldiers and a great number of civilians were captured.

A joint Dutch, British and Australian fleet had been decimated in the Battle of the Java Sea (seldom mentioned in British history books) where more than 2,100 sailors lost their lives. The mighty battleship Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk. The American fleet had been devastated in the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Asia was, said the Japanese, now for the Asians and under a new order.

The 77th, with its 24 anti-aircraft guns and a thousand or so men,

had fought alongside Dutch troops in a bitter but onesided struggle with the Japanese to save Java, the jewel in the Dutch Imperial crown. Strafed by Zero fighters in jungle clearings, they fought off successive attacks for several weeks until the Java Sea Battle meant the game was up. The island was surrendered after it was surrounded by the Japanese Navy.

Reg had made a little money selling cigarettes to his comrades, which he hid in his boots. Others scoffed at his caution, saying, wrongly as it turned out, that the Japanese would confiscate their money and possessions.

This was to be his lifeline, using it to buy scraps of food from locals through the camp wire in the dreadful early days of what was to be three and a half years of captivity.

Early on at the Bandung Camp, four young Dutch soldiers had slipped under the wire and gone into the town to get wine to celebrate a birthday.

They were caught as they returned and sentenced to death. Each dug a grave and they were shot, falling into them. This was to set the tone of harsh and cruel discipline in the camps in Java.

Having learned some basic Javanese, Reg would often act as interpreter between the Japanese and Javanese.

The slightest error would lead to a brutal kick in the testicles. The guards, often bored and sullen, would devise schemes to torment the prisoners.

Knowing that the British were animal lovers and would often adopt stray dogs as pets, they would take delight in torturing the hapless creatures in front of the prisoners, who would watch in impotent fury.

There were nuances and absurdities too. As is common with most men who endured these experiences, Reg spoke rarely of his time as a prisoner. Others were more forthcoming after the war, for example, Ron Williams, also of the 77th, who shared some of Reg’s camps and wrote an excellent account in The Jungle Journal, completed by his son, Frank, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of VJ Day. In contrast to the horrors of casual and needless brutality, Ron describes rugby games of NCOs v officers in the early days when the men were still fairly fit, which I dare say Reg would have played in as he represented the Regiment in rugby and athletics. There were also concerts and plays, and apparently even practical jokes when the mood was right.

Rugby and sport would have been a reminder of Wales, and a solace for my dad. Growing up in Ynysybwl, a village which could well have served as a template for a Gren cartoon, he would walk up the steep gradient from Penygraig Terrace, where the family of nine lived, to the Recreation Ground on the hill. From here the road cuts a straight line down towards Pontypridd, where he excelled at the grammar school. University, though, was out of the question due to lack of money.

The youngest in the mining family, he was a promising rugby player, appearing alongside the legendary Welsh international and fellow captive Wilf Wooller in the centre for the regiment. He once said that, during a match against another regiment, Wooller complimented his play. But being modest, Reg added: “He was only playing at half-pace with us really.”

He volunteered before the start of the war, aged 19. Initially based on Christchurch Hill to protect Newport Docks from bombing, his battery moved to Lavernock, near Penarth, to help cover Cardiff; the gun emplacements there can still be seen. Many was the night they fired at German