The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Spirit of survival
As a Japanese prisoner of war, Tony Lucas was beaten, starved and put to work on the infamous Death Railway. Marcus Scriven tells his story
When Allied forces surrendered Singapore 75 years ago, 80,000 troops became Japanese prisoners of war. For Tony Lucas, thus began three years of extreme cruelty, cholera, and hard labour on the notorious Death Railway – an ordeal that almost broke his body, but could not bow his spirit. By Marcus Scriven. Portrait by Laura Hynd
It is difficult to envisage Tony Lucas as an arsonist – either now, at home in Suffolk, aged 98, his benevolent face capped with hair of an almost celestial white; or 75 years ago, when, on February 15, 1942, as a clean-cut pipe-smoking Territorial lieutenant in the Royal Artiller y, he, like 80,000 other Allied troops in Singapore, became a prisoner of the Japanese.
‘A terrible moment,’ he remembers, speaking in the enunciated English of his generation. ‘They lined us up with their guns and bayonets, [and removed] all our watches and fountain pens, and any money they could find.’ But they left Lucas in possession of a car key. It was then that he decided on arson.
He had been given the car, a blue Buick, shortly after his voyage to Singapore, 18 months earlier, during which he and a fellow officer had taken two young sisters under their wing. The g i rls’ fat her, Si r Newnham Worley, Singapore’s former acting attorney general, appreciated the officers’ chivalry. ‘They asked us to parties and drinks and dances,’ Lucas says. As the Japanese closed in, a shell blast cratered the entrance to the Worleys’ garage, prompting Sir Newnham to hand Lucas the key to his Buick. ‘He said, “If you can get it out of the garage, you can have it.”’
Lucas managed to do so, and the key remained in his pocket. ‘I thought, “You are not going to get this car. I’ll burn it, you bastards,”’ he says. Taking advantage of ‘absolute chaos’ immediately after his capture, Lucas made his way out of the tented encampment where he and his fellow prisoners were being held – the Japanese victor y had been so swif t they hadn’t had time to build perimeter defences – and got back to the Buick, then drove it to an area of mangrove swamps.
With some difficulty, he set it alight and steered for the water, hearing the tramping feet of t he Japa nese pat rol as he did. He jumped out of the car and ran after it into the swamp, intending to hide, but the water barely reached his knees. The Japanese patrol came into sight; shots were fired. ‘They obviously heard me, but I managed to get into thick mangrove,’ he says. While the burning car monopolised Japanese attention, Lucas made ‘a very difficult journey through the mangrove’, back to the encampment.
Though ultimately futile, the arson was an expression of the defiance and fury felt by him – a nd ot her junior of f icers a nd men – at the order from high command to surrender. ‘We were shocked,’ he says. ‘We were encouraged by Churchill’s order that senior officers should fight with their men “to the last”. We wanted to fight on.’
The son of a canon of Birmingham Cathedral, Lucas joined the Territorial Army in 1937, not long after leaving King Edward’s School, and was commissioned i nto t he 69t h Roya l Warwickshire Regiment, Royal Artillery. He and his contemporaries trained on the latest ack-acks (anti-aircraft guns), predictors (automated fire-control systems) and radar, known then as ‘Seaman’s Killer’. However, on arrival in Singapore in September 1940, Lucas – by then commanding Indian troops – was staggered by the outdated weapons in ser vice. ‘They didn’t have predictors or Seaman’s Killer. We had 3in naval g uns. All the equipment was First World War,’ he says. Lucas and his TA peers nicknamed the instructor of g unnery ‘Bow and Arrow’ Archibald.
Military intelligence was equally inadequate, predict ing t hat a ny Japa nese invasion of Singapore would come from the south – the jungle to the north was judged impenetrable. Intelligence also propagated ‘absolute nonsense’ about the Japanese: ‘they couldn’t see in the dark; they wouldn’t be able to fly; they’d never land during the monsoon…’
On t he night of December 8, 1941, t he Japanese landed on the north-east coast of Malaya during the monsoon. Lucas and his Indian troops, in position near the coast, soon came under heav y shellfire. Allied planes – antiquated and few in number – were ‘shot up on the g round’, and the Japanese infant r y ‘wiped out [Allied] shore defences’ and reached nearby oil reser ves. Lucas reca lls, ‘ Jonah [Close, his captain] turned our two g uns – we only had two – on the oil tanks to prevent them being used by the enemy.’
With their position overr un by Japanese troops, Close ordered his men to withdraw through the jungle. Lucas never saw his Indian
At Changi, Japanese guards ‘crucified a Scotsman’, says Lucas. ‘Tied him up to a tree. They had us all out there.’ His composure almost falters
troops again. Along with Close and a handful of others, he joined the retreating 8th Brigade and made his way back to Singapore. Here, ‘there were no defences at all because the governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, said that it would alarm the Chinese population’. Lucas adds, ‘Everything about Singapore was badly organised, stupidly organised.’
As the Japanese approached, some of the immense Singapore guns were finally turned nor t hwards. The sound as t hey f ired was ‘tremendous – like a Tube train rushing just above the sea. And then nothing. They were all armour-piercing shells [rather than high explosives]. They were just slamming into the soil.’
Around t his t ime, Lucas was appointed staff captain responsible for monitoring antiaircraft guns, placing him in close proximity to senior officers, including Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, commander of the British forces. ‘He was in such a state that he… he was sort of shaking,’ Lucas recalls.
On February 8, 1942, one week before the Allies would eventually surrender in Singapore, Lucas witnessed the retreat of hundreds of men f rom an Aust ralian infant r y br igade. One of them told him that the carnage was ‘worse t han Ypres’. Lucas later lea r nt t hat Australia, desperate to send reinforcements, ‘had emptied t he dregs of Dar win pr ison and sent these old lags out to the Australian Imperial Force. They’d been under very severe shelling and deserted their front-line trenches.’ They didn’t stop until they reached Singapore docks. ‘They commandeered one of the last boats out at rifle-point, turfed off women and children, and made their way to Australia.’
Exactly a week later, the Allies surrendered, and after two days the prisoners of war were marched 17 miles to a sprawling gar r ison ca mp a nd pr ison in Chang i, where t hey ex per ienced t he cr uelt y of t he Japa nese g ua rd s. One of t hei r met hods was t he ‘slappo’ – a beating, usually to the face, always hard enough ‘to knock a man to the ground. You got up and stood at attention.’ This was repeated ‘until the guard had satisfied himself ’ or, occasionally, until the prisoner had died, Lucas remembers.
At Changi, the Japanese also used other methods of killing. ‘They crucified an Argyll [Scotsman],’ says Lucas. ‘Tied him up to a tree. They had us all out there. They were bayoneting him.’ He pauses, rigid in his armchair – it is the only time during two two-hour conversations that his composure almost falters. ‘I couldn’t watch. One of the Argyll’s officers grabbed a gun from one of the Japanese and shot this chap dead, to save him from further [agony].’
Lucas and other prisoners of war also learnt of a massacre at Singapore’s Alexandra hospital (‘They went through and killed the nurses and doctors, and patients on the operating table’); the execution of those aboard one of the last ships leaving the island after the invasion (‘It was taking about 30 Allied nurses. It was sunk close to shore. The nurses got back on to the island – Japanese troops sent them back into the water and shot them’); and the severed heads of Chinese soldiers impaled on stakes.
If the Japanese thought that barbarity would cow their prisoners, they were mistaken. ‘It stiffened our resolve,’ Lucas says. A letter to his parents concluded by assuring them that he was ‘bloody but unbowed’. He and three fellow junior officers – John Barnet, Roger Horne and Bill Bailey – stuck together. ‘We looked after each other,’ he says.
Physical strength was less easily sustained. Rationed to a daily cup of rice sweepings – the