POW camp couldn’t crush pilot’s spirit
Eric Jack Osboldstone, WWII pilot, grocer: b December 27, 1919, Whanganui; m Betty; 2d, 2s; d January 17, 2018, Waikanae, aged 98.
World War II pilot Eric Osboldstone attributed his survival as a prisoner of war to a ‘‘soul full of hope’’.
Captured in 1944, he spent six months in the Japanese-run Rangoon Prison in Burma but no amount of beating, solitary confinement or starvation could extinguish his spirit.
‘‘I’m sure the prayers of my people at home saved me,’’ he said in an interview upon his release from the camp. ‘‘I knew I had a lot to live for as I was waiting to get home to be married. I felt my fiancee with me all the time.’’
Osboldstone was born in Whanganui in 1919. His mother died from tuberculosis when he was eight and when his father, a baker, got a job away from home he moved the family to live with an aunt and paternal grandmother in Wellington.
He would later recall how his father had sent him and his three siblings down to Wellington with a commercial traveller he had met at a pub in Levin, who dropped the children off in the city, leaving them to find their own way to their new home in Thompson St.
Leaving school at 13, Eric found work as a delivery boy with a wine and spirits merchant, a job he found bewildering for a young man without much of an education.
At 17 he joined the territorials and spent time at Fort Dorset, in Wellington, before going on to join the war effort.
He joined the army in 1939 and transferred to the air force two years later. He would later tell family this was an accident after he took a wrong turn, ending up in the exam room for potential Air Force cadets.
Despite having never attended secondary school he passed the test and in 1942 was sent to Britain, where he trained for a year. He served in Burma as a flying officer in the 27 Squadron RAF but was shot down near the Burmese border in December 1944.
His co-pilot was killed but Osboldstone managed to crawl out of his flaming Beaufighter, only to be handed over to the Japanese, who sent him to Rangoon Central Prison, south of Mandalay, with about 800 other Allied prisoners.
As a prisoner of war, he shared his 2m x 3m cell with two other men; they had an ammunition box for a toilet and rice sacks for blankets. They were allowed out to wash once a week, and were fed diets so inadequate that many contracted beriberi.
Years later he would recall the horrors of that camp. ‘‘There were guys in there, they had given up hope ... they just got thinner and thinner.
‘‘... We had a whole group of them that would bring out their rice sacks and lie in a row out in the hot sun … just lie there and pull the thing over them and they just faded away ... They’d pull this sack right over their face ... They’d just given up hope.’’
For the first few months the only time he and his fellow prisoners saw sunlight was when their Japanese captors took them out occasionally to work in the rice paddy fields.
He recalled the terrible skin diseases the men contracted trapped in the darkness of their prison, the regular beatings with bamboo sticks and being starved for days.
But Osboldstone still believed he got off lightly. ‘‘I’d only been there six months. All it had done was thin me off. I had a soul full of hope and hadn’t given up the ghost, so I was pretty good,’’ he told the Waikato Times in 2002.
After he had spent months in the camp the Japanese surrendered but the Allied bombing continued
The remaining prisoners climbed on to the roof of one of the buildings and marked out a message: ‘Japs Gone, British Here’.
Meanwhile, Osboldstone’s fiancee, Betty, whom he had met before going to war, had received the dreaded telegram telling her he was missing, presumed dead. Six long months later Osboldstone himself was able to write to her saying he was on his way home.
On his return in August 1945 he was admitted to hospital in Auckland and Betty travelled to be with him ahead of their longplanned wedding, now to be conducted in the hospital chapel.
With a start-up grant from the government, he opened a grocery store in Karori. During these Karori years he and Betty had four children, a son and three daughters.
One of his daughters, the caterer Ruth Pretty, says her father’s personal service won him many friends over the years.
Indeed, long-time residents remembered ‘‘Mr Oz’’ opening Apex Grocers in the 1940s, and, in 1969, the Big A supermarket. He seemed to know every one of his
Eric Osboldstone on the horrors of a POW camp
customers personally and was a stalwart of the community, Pretty says.
This extended beyond his role as a grocer. He was president of the Karori Rugby Club and deeply involved in the Lions club in Karori and later in Waikanae.
At his service last month there was standing room only, with more than 400 mourners paying their respects.
Sources: Osboldstone family, New Zealand History, Waikato Times (Deborah Challinor), David McGill (POW The Untold Stories of New Zealanders as Prisoners of War).