The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Last survivor of wartime Kwai horror dies at 104
By Craig Simpson and Dominic Nicholls
A VETERAN believed to be the last surviving Allied prisoner forced to work on the infamous “Burma Death Railway” has died aged 104.
Jack Jennings survived the brutal forced labour on the Burma-Thailand Railway line, immortalised in the 1957 film which cost the lives of more than 100,000 prisoners.
Jennings is thought to be one of the final surviving veterans of the railway to pass away, dying peacefully in Torquay 80 years after his liberation from a Japanese camp.
His family believe he was likely the last remaining survivor of the Fall of Singapore in 1942, during which 85,000 British and Commonwealth troops were killed or captured.
His daughter Carol Barrett told the BBC her father played a harmonica to keep his comrades’ spirits up in the camp, and he was “still playing it a week before he died”.
Before his death, Jennings had reflected that when he celebrated his 22nd birthday in a brutal Japanese prisoner of war camp, he thought he had little chance of seeing another year.
Born in the West Midlands in 1919 in the wake of the First World War, he was a young man when a global conflict again broke out, and he signed up as a private in the 1st Battalion of the Cambridgeshire Regiment.
It was with this unit that he was captured when Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942 following hard fighting, marking the biggest capitulation of British forces in history, and the entry of tens of thousands of servicemen into cruel captivity.
Jennings had a narrow escape during the battle when a bomb that landed next to him failed to explode.
Japanese martial philosophy held that surrender was contemptible, and prisoners were subjected to forced labour, malnutrition, torture, and execution.
He once recalled seeing coconuts for the first time, knowing that they were “restricted for the Japanese”, as British soldiers subsisted on meagre portions of rice which led to a “a great struggle for survival”.
He was put to work with thousands of others on the Burma-Thailand railway, a line which was central to the plot of
in which Allied operatives seek to blow up a portion of the track.
Disease and starvation claimed 16,000 prisoners of war and around 90,000 civilians to forced labour by the Japanese.
Jennings recalled in 2015 the suffering of soldiers forced to work on the line, saying: “They were brutal in the camp, but not as bad as when you were working on the railway. They beat you up for the slightest thing.
“If you weren’t working like they thought you should, you’d get a stick or the butt of a rifle. But I had to keep going. I had a friend who slept next to me. I woke one morning and he was dead. He just gave up.”
A carpenter by trade, Jennings tried to maintain morale not only by playing his harmonica but by crafting chess pieces he handed out to other prisoners.
Captured soldier endured brutal forced labour on railway line immortalised in 1957 Alec Guinness film