Frith and Far East New book tells of survivor who saw worst of the world
JACK FRITH was a survivor who had managed to live through the very worst the world could throw at him.
Two weeks after his 23rd birthday, he survived a torpedo attack when the ship he was being transported on was sunk in the Java Sea.
Ordered to build a runway for the planned Japanese invasion of Australia, he had endured almost two years as a Far East Prisoner Of War where he suffered horrific beatings, disease, malnutrition and forced marches at the point of a bayonet.
But as he swam away from his sinking vessel, the Suez Maru, he was among around 250 British and Dutch POWs to be gunned down in the water by his Japanese captors.
One of the worst atrocities of World War II was kept a closely guarded secret for decades by his own Government.
A War Crime Trial that was due to bring his murderous Japanese guards to justice in 1949 was controversially dropped and they never faced justice, while his grieving family were never told the grim truth about how he died.
Now, after 10 years of painstaking research, his great niece Jacquelyn Frith – she was named after him – followed in his footsteps to write Unwritten Letters To Spring Street, a deeply moving book based on his life.
She has done so to raise awareness of the courage and the sacrifice of Jack Frith and the many thousands of other members of the Far East ‘Forgotten Army’ as Britain prepares to honour the 75th anniversary of VJ Day, when the announcement of Japan’s surrender was made to mark the end of World War Two.
Jacquelyn, who grew up in Southport, said: “The story is all about Jack, a young lad in Manchester who signed up during World War Two to do his bit. Jack was 20 years old, doing essential war work, in a factory in Hyde. It used to make rexine, a type of leather cloth, but it was converted into making munitions.
“His close friend died when he was on board a ship that was torpedoed off the island of Crete so Jack wanted to sign up and avenge him. It was December 1941 when he left behind his family and his life and he went to war like so many others.
“Whilst in a convoy which was bound for the Middle East the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, triggering their entry into the war.
“Hastily regrouped and ordered instead to the Far East, the illequipped convoy set off for Java and was sunk in a torpedo attack. Jack ended up as a Prisoner Of War in Java just three weeks after he had set off, without ever firing a shot. The start of the book plunges him into the sea off the sinking ship and it tells the story of his life from there. The vessel sank in 20 minutes and leaves him floating in the sea until the Japanese picked up their own survivors.”
Jack spent almost two years in captivity in unspeakable conditions which he only narrowly survived.
Jacquelyn said: “He had been forced to work on building an airstrip on the island of Ambon which the Japanese were eager to use in preparation for the invasion of Australia.
“The POWs tried their best to sabotage the work but that came at great personal cost. Men were killed if they were caught.
“One day one chap, a Trooper with the King’s Own Hussars, simply spilled water on himself and jumped up. He was accused of raising a hand to a Japanese guard. The Japanese started hitting him with their rifles. He put up his arms to defend himself but they thought he was trying to grab one of their weapons so they took him to their commanding officer. After the briefest of ‘hearings’ then took him into the forest and they dispatched him. He is one of many Far East Prisoners Of War with no resting place. Stories like that from the camps are replicated ad infinitum on islands all over the Pacific.
“The survival rate of Axis (German, Japanese etc) Prisoners Of War in Allied hands was practically 99.9%.
“But the mortality rate of Allied prisoners at the hands of the Japanese was over a quarter of our chaps in the Far East, such was the inhumanity shown towards them. Those that did survive and return home suffered ill health.”
On November 25, 1943, Jack was among 548 Prisoners Of War (415 British and 133 Dutch) who were crammed into the Suez Maru ‘hell ship’, a Japanese freighter which was sailing from Ambon for Surabaya. The POWs on board were all sick men from the work-camps on Moluccas and Ambon. At least twenty were stretcher cases.
The Japanese usually transferred POWs by sea. Similar to treatment on the notorious Lisbon Maru, Junyo Maru and others, prisoners were crammed into cargo holds with little air, food or water for journeys that could last weeks. Many died due to starvation, dysentery or unprovoked beatings. When a PoW passed away the Japanese simply wanted them dumped unceremoniously overboard, yet their brother PoWs did all they could to afford some semblance of dignified burial at sea. These unmarked prisoner transports were targeted as enemy ships by Allied submarines and aircraft. The Geneva Convention set out that prisoner or hospital ships should be marked clearly with red crosses and they would be avoided. By not marking any of their ships they unnecessarily made themselves legitimate targets, they chose not to protect even their own ships.
More than 20,000 Allied prisoners died at sea when the transport ships carrying them were sunk.
On November 29, 1943 the Suez Maru, which did not bear the markings for a Prisoner Of War ship that it should have done, was torpedoed by American submarine USS Bonefish near Kangean Island. The crew of Bonefish was unaware that Suez Maru was carrying POWs.
Most of the prisoners drowned in the holds of the ship but around 250 escaped and struggled to survive in the water, including Jack.
Nearly four hours later the escort ship minesweeper No12 returned from dropping depth charges near the USS Bonefish submarine. The minesweeper only picked up Japanese survivors, pushing POWs back into the water if they tried to climb aboard.
Captain Osumu Kawano, master of W-12, discussed with the POW transport commander Lt Masaji Iketani what should be done with the surviving POWs. Iketani informed him that Major General Sanso Anami had told him that in the event of the ship being torpedoed that the POWs should be shot. Captain Kawano quickly agreed, ordering gunnery officer Yatsuka to arrange 20 soldiers with rifles on deck and two machine-guns on the lower bridge, whilst other crew pointed out survivors amongst the wreckage. The gunnery crew then shot and killed all surviving POWs in the water. There were no POW survivors.
A memorial to the British POWs aboard Suez Maru who were murdered by the Japanese was dedicated on 29 November 2013, the 70th anniversary, at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. It was designed by Jacquelyn and her father, and built by the families of the Suez Maru men.
Jacquelyn said: “Jack survived almost two years in a Prisoner Of War camp, in relentless inhumanity. He then survived a ship being sunk in a torpedo attack, only to be shot as he struggled in the sea.
“They suffered atrocities in the camps and the atrocity of the murder at sea, only for it to be concealed by the British Government.
“The official papers about it were only declassified in 2010.
“I grew up knowing I was named after my Great Uncle Jack, as Jacquelyn. But I didn’t know what had happened to him.
“One of my Grandads, Harry Beirne, served in North Africa, Italy and Greece. His war memories sounded like a Charlton Heston movie, although I am sure there was a lot he didn’t tell us.
“My other Grandad, George Frith, who fought in India and Burma, never spoke of his experiences at all. He was never the same when he returned and died in his 60s in 1982.”
The book title Unwritten Letters To Spring Street comes from 13 Spring Street in Hyde, in Manchester, where Jack lived, and the loving family home this young man, barely out of his teens, left to sign up.
Jacquelyn said: “I visited the site of where he lived, but it is no longer there. It is now under a Morrison’s supermarket car park. I found a bit of cobble that would have once been the road. “The ‘Unwritten Letters’ title is because the POWs were not permitted to write nor send letters home.
“Some kept diaries, at great personal risk, but the chaps were only allowed to write letters, seems to average one a year, by copying out pre-prepared sentences supplied by the Japanese. I imagine the chaps would have chosen the sentences that would bring the most comfort to those at home.
“Jack chose the sentences - “I am well. “I am working for pay.” Neither of which was true.
“I imagined a scene in the book whereby Jack wished himself into a grain of sand to be able to fold into a crease of the letter to enable himself to be sent home to his loving family.
And I imagined his brother, my Grandad, holding the letter from Jack back at Spring Street on its arrival, which tragically was after he had been killed, and imagining the letter’s journey backwards through time, he holds the paper knowing this very sheet was held by his dear brother.”
There was more heartbreak to come for the family. Six years after the Suez Maru atrocity, and four years after Japan’s defeat in World War Two, a War Crimes Trial was due to take place - but, under controversial circumstances which remained secret for many years, it never happened.
Jacquelyn said: “The case came to light in 1949. The Australians built up a very strong open and shut case, recording 22 statements from eyewitnesses, with each of the accounts very similar.
“We know from interrogation records exactly what happened. You can draw it out on a piece of paper and you can plot it out. It is quite relentless.
“Despite that, not long before the sixth anniversary of the massacre, the Allies , primarily the Americans but including the British Government, suddenly decided that the case should not come to trial and that they were shutting down the War Crimes Trials against the Japanese.
“Immediately after the war the well-publicised Nazi War Trials took place and it was right that they were as extensive was they were. They were prosecuting Nazis behind the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. Even today, they are chasing down 98-year-old Nazi war criminals in places like Venezuela.
“That is right that they do that. But there was a Far East Holocaust too. If you look at pictures of liberated prisoners of war in the Far East, they are reminiscent of victims of Belsen and Auschwitz.