Len Gibson
Soldier who endured three and a half years as a prisoner of war building the Burma-siam railway
LEN GIBSON, who has died aged 101, was a prisoner of the Japanese for more than three years and was forced to work on the notorious Burma-siam “Death Railway.” In October 1941 Gibson, a bombardier serving with 125 Antitank Regiment RA, embarked with his Regiment at Avonmouth bound for Halifax, Canada, where he transferred to another ship. At Bombay, he transferred to the troopship Empress of Asia.
On the approaches to Singapore Island they were attacked by Japanese aircraft. Three bombs hit the vessel, setting it ablaze. The order was given to abandon ship and swim.
Gibson had never ventured into the deep end of Sunderland’s swimming baths, but the cork lifebelt that he was wearing kept him afloat until he was rescued and taken to Singapore.
The island was under continual attack from the air. Gibson’s troop towed four anti-tank guns to the Bukit Timah Road, one of the main routes into the city. On February 15 1942, after several days of bombing and shelling, they were ordered to cease fire and surrender.
He was marched to Changi and then to the River Valley Camp. Equipped with a handcart, he joined a work group clearing debris after all the destruction. He had lost his banjo in the sinking, but he made another from an abandoned wooden crate and later replaced it with a guitar fashioned from scrounged materials.
In October, the work battalion was crammed into steel trucks and travelled for five days and nights to Bang Pong, a camp of bare bamboo huts. There were further moves to camps at Wampo and Tonchan.
Work on building the railway took place in stifling heat. Clearing boulders meant digging holes in the rock a metre deep for the explosive, using only a hammer and chisel.
There were regular beatings when the guards were not satisfied with progress. Meals consisted of rice, tea, and gippo, which was little more than hot water flavoured with odd ingredients. If you found a piece of meat, Gibson noted in a hidden diary, you thought it must be your birthday.
Bites from insects made life a misery. The leeches only dropped off the Pows’ bodies when they were too bloated with blood to hang on. After cholera swept through the camp, a hundred of Gibson’s group died within a week.
There were no medical supplies and Gibson helped to dig mass graves. Having contracted typhus, he lay on his bed with a temperature of 104F and was given nothing to eat for six days.
One night, two scorpions fighting in the roof of the hut fell on him and bit him in the chest. The medical orderly told him to get to his feet, warning him that if he lay down he would die. After what he described as the longest night of his life, he began to recover.
The next move, by train, took him out of the jungle and back to the plains at Nakhon Phanom. One evening, a concert party was arranged. There were violinists and trumpeters and Gibson played the guitar. Some 300 Pows made up the audience.
The order for “Lights out!” went unheard and raucous singing went on far into the night. The infuriated Japanese called out the guard and charged the gathering with fixed bayonets. There was a stampede for safety. Gibson and his fellow musicians were interrogated, knocked about and made to stand with their instruments held above their heads until dawn.
In April 1945 he was at Khiri Khan in the Gulf of Siam. The Japanese had been building a road across the isthmus from there to Mergui. They were in full retreat before the Allied advance and were desperate to complete this escape route before the onset of the monsoon in July.
Some 16,000 of Gibson’s comrades – and more than 60,000 in all – had died working on the railway.
The survivors, some of them in the last stages of illness from disease and malnutrition, were deemed by their captors fit enough to set about joining up the uncompleted sections, hacking a road through seemingly impenetrable jungle in one of the most inhospitable regions on earth.
For many of them it was the road of no return.
At the end of August, a fortnight after the Japanese surrender, a British officer reached Khiri Khan camp. Gibson was flown to Rangoon by Dakota a week later. He boarded a ship for England. It docked at Liverpool and he was reunited with his parents in Sunderland.
Leonard Gibson was born in Sunderland on January 3 1920. His home was close to the railway and a large shipyard and he became inured to the noise of shunting coal trucks, the hammering of rivets into steel and the hooting of big ships.
He was educated at West Park Central School but, aged 15, during the Depression, with jobs hard to find, he left to work alongside his father in a timber factory. He attended evening classes in science, mathematics, English and French at Sunderland Technical College and, early in 1939, enlisted in 125 Field Regiment RA.
The Regiment, re-roled as 125 Anti-tank Regiment RA, moved to Norfolk, and for several months it manned defensive positions on the coast.
One evening, he and a comrade went to a pub in Norwich. They only had enough money for two half pints of beer. Two glamorous girls came in. Expensively dressed and festooned in jewellery, they settled on barstools, swung their legs, lit up cigarettes and made a great play with their long, shiny cigarette holders.
Gibson’s friend walked straight up to the young women and challenged them to a game of darts. “The girls played well,” Gibson recalled, “but I was so embarrassed I could hardly hit the board.”
The girls strutted out after the game leaving the barman convulsed with laughter. “Wait till I tell my boss,” he chortled. “Two blooming squaddies with only a shilling between them entertaining the most expensive prostitutes in the whole of East Anglia!”
After returning to Sunderland at the end of the war in the Far East, Gibson convalesced at Ryhope General Hospital. He weighed less than six stone and had suffered from more than 20 bouts of malaria, dysentery, beriberi, ulcers and typhus.
At the hospital, he met Ruby, a nurse and his future wife.
He did not want to return to the timber factory, however, and instead became a schoolmaster, teaching general subjects and music. For 17 years, he was deputy head of Hasting Hill School, Sunderland.
He and other former Far East POWS formed the Changi Club and he used to visit the sick and needy in homes and hospitals on his bicycle.
Gibson was awarded the BEM in 2009. With the help of the charity Daft as a Brush, his book, Len Gibson, a Wearside Lad in World War II, was released a few days after he died. Proceeds of the sale will go to the charity, which provides free transport to hospital for cancer patients.
Len Gibson married, in 1946, Ruby Pounder. She predeceased him and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Proceeds from Gibson’s memoir of his wartime experiences go to the cancercare charity Daft as a Brush