Woman’s plea to find boy who helped her father in Japanese POW camp
Daughter visits Japan in an attempt to trace and thank the youngster who shared his food with Navy sailor
THE daughter of a Royal Navy sailor who spent more than three-and-a-half years in a prisoner of war camp in Japan has launched an appeal for help to find the Japanese boy who helped him survive the ordeal.
Barbara Mottershaw has spent two weeks in Japan attempting to track down the then 15-year-old youth who appears alongside her father, Gaythorne Bartholomew, in a grainy picture that was apparently taken just days after the war ended in August 1945. “When we were growing up, my father never really talked about what he went through during the war, and it was not until we were playing a game of cards in 1993 that some of it suddenly started to come out,” Mrs Mottershaw told The Sunday Telegraph.
“Something about the cards must have triggered the memories and he just started talking,” she said.
Mr Bartholomew, from Worksop in Nottinghamshire, had been an able seaman aged 19 aboard HMS Exeter, a heavy cruiser that was sunk by Japanese warships on March 1, 1942, in the Second Battle of the Java Sea.
Picked up by a Japanese destroyer, he was held in a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia before being transported to a camp close to the city of Nagasaki, in southern Japan. Mr Bartholomew was later transferred to another POW camp, close to the city of Fukuoka, where he was put to work in local factories and building an airstrip for the Japanese military.
“He told us that some local students had been brought in to work alongside them to get the airstrip finished,” said 69-year-old Mrs Mottershaw, who now lives outside Perth in Western Australia. “Each day the prisoners were given a bowl of rice. It was pretty disgusting stuff and never enough, but somehow he became friends with this boy,” she said.
“The boy offered him what was in his own lunch box and from that day on they shared his meal,” she said. “It was a brave thing to do because if he had been caught helping the enemy he would have been severely punished.”
Mr Bartholomew sent the photo to his brother in the UK before he was repatriated by the Allied occupation forces, but the family has no record of the boy’s name. Mr Bartholomew died in 2004 at the age of 81.
Mrs Mottershaw made contact with the POW Research Network Japan in an effort to find out more about her father’s experiences and was invited to attend a memorial ceremony on Sept 9 at the site of her father’s prison camp in Nagasaki.
She later went to Fukuoka and met the headmaster of the junior high school that stands on the site of his second camp in Japan. The headmaster presented her and her husband, Dennis, with a framed photograph taken from a US aircraft of parachutes containing food and medical supplies floating down into the camp.
To date, however, no one has been able to put a name to the face in the photo alongside her father.
Mrs Mottershaw hopes that local media coverage of her visit and word of mouth in the local community might identify him.
“The first thing I have to do is thank him,” she said.
“My father believed that it was very possible that he could not have survived without the help of this boy and that means that I would not be here.
“Everyone knows about the cruelty that went on during the war and I do not want to water down other people’s experiences or excuse what happened back then, but there are also stories of great kindness among ordinary Japanese people and those are so rarely heard,” she added.
“I hope that we are able to find this man so I can tell him that.”