The lucky and the strong... one man’s story of survival in brutal 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. His story of survival against the odds, in a conflict he once described as “complete madness”, is a personal tableau of recollections, rather than a strict historical account, of a young man from the Rhondda Valleys thrown into a global conflict...
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 betterorganised 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 near-death 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, 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 one-sided 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 wouldn’t 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 and the gun emplacements there can still be seen. Many was the night they fired at German raiders attacking the industrial infrastructure of south Wales. In one daytime incident a German bomber was spotted over the Bristol Channel, apparently lost. The guns of the 77th sent it to the bottom with none of its crew bailing out.
In early 1942 the regiment was sent to Basra, in what is now Iraq. En route, they were diverted to Singapore
to face the Japanese, and then sent on to Java after the Japanese, whom the British had seriously underestimated, took the colony. He was to spend the rest of the war half a world away.
As we mark VJ Day 75 years on, Reg, who died in 2011 at the age of 92, would have said that survival was a combination of three things – luck, physical durability and mental determination.
He certainly had luck. The journey to Japan was unbelievably dangerous. The men were packed into the holds of Japanese merchant navy ships, unmarked with Red Cross symbols which the Geneva Convention (which the Japanese had not signed) prescribed. These became famous as Hellships. He was moved from Java to Singapore on the
Macassar Maru on October 1, 1943, stayed at the infamous Changi prison until October 21 and then travelled via Saigon and Formosa (Taiwan) to Moji in Japan on board the merchantman Matsue Maru, arriving on November 15.
American submarines were hunting and sinking Japanese ships, and the Macassar Maru was attacked several times, according to the Japanese Guards on board accompanying the PoWs. It has been estimated that 19 out of 20 Japanese ships making these trips were sunk. Reg was one of the lucky few to make it through.
At his second camp, Wakayama, where the PoWs worked in a factory making parts for Japanese submarines, he was once locked out all night, naked, in the winter for a small infringement. The guards were amazed he was still alive in the morning.
Above all, it was his obsession with getting home that was crucial. He wanted to see his parents, Campbell and Margaret, again, and this was the goal that kept him going. With the benefit of hindsight it is now obvious, in later life, that he suffered emotionally with what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “You had friends in the camp. You would say goodnight to the man next to you and in the morning he was gone.”
Many struggled to cope, some dying young or committing suicide. Another frustration for those in the Far East was, as many of them including Reg saw it, a lack of recognition for their sacrifices. It was only in 2001, 56 years later, when a great many of the PoWs had passed away, that compensation was finally paid by the government.
One of his elder brothers, Godfrey, was assigned to the RAF as a mechanic. He died horrifically in the propellers of an aircraft he was servicing at RAF Hunsdon in Hertfordshire early in the war. Their father, Campbell, a miner at Lady Windsor and Ynysybwl collieries, had been trapped in an accident underground and badly injured.
The Little Big Man, as he was known in Ynysybwl due to his short but stocky physique, was a wellknown local character. Unbeknown to Reg, he was clinging onto life to see his youngest son come home from the other side of the world.
At Ikuno, the Commandant had told the PoWs that in the event of an invasion of Japan they were all to be killed. Bullets would not be wasted, but they would be bayoneted to death.
Three days after Little Boy, a second nuclear weapon, Fat Man, obliterated Nagasaki and the war was near its end; the Japanese abandoned the camp, fleeing to escape retribution, abandoning the enfeebled men, many of whom were close to death.
Even then the men were in danger. Some travelled home through areas radiated by the bombs, developing cancer. Other liberated prisoners boarded a plane heading home which crashed, killing them all.
Reg took the longer route by ship and train, hoping to recuperate before he arrived. Many of the emaciated men ate all they could on the American aircraft carrier that took him across the Pacific before a doctor intervened, explaining they must resume a normal diet slowly or they might die.
Reg eventually made it home to Ynysybwl – the day before Campbell’s funeral.