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This story has been contributed for the People's War archive by David Mannock on behalf of his old friend George Watts.

George Watts was a Londoner and I first met him at a hotel in Devon at Christmas 1981 and for quite a few ones after that. He had the unique distinction of being able to drink large amounts of gin and keep a group of people entranced with his genial conversation. The following are his stories that I can remember.

Just before the war started he had been accepted to train as a naval officer at Dartmouth but in September 1939 all that changed. The Navy took over the girls’ school at Roedean outside Brighton as an extra training establishment for the large number of officers that would be needed. After being commissioned and trained as an engineer officer he ended up in the Mediterranean on board HMS Penelope in time for the Malta convoys.

One of the convoys his ship was escorting was attacked by the Germans and Italians continuously for four days and the ship's company was at action stations for four days. When they eventually reached Valletta his ship had been hit so many times they nicknamed it "HMS Pepper Pot".
I think that may have been the convoy in which the Ohio, an oil tanker loaded with aviation fuel, was lashed between two destroyers to stop it sinking. The fuel was needed to keep the Spitfires flying.

Shortly after that, he was transferred as he said, "Out East". This episode began when he was on board an aircraft carrier in the East Indies, now Indonesia, when a small fleet of Allied ships went into battle against a much larger Japanese invasion fleet. He later said: "When they attacked we never knew what hit us."

From his duty station in the engine room, the force of the Japanese attack blew him straight up a ventilation shaft, out of the ship, two or three hundred feet in the air and landing in the sea about 500 yards away from the ship. It was a miracle he survived that. When he looked back towards the ship he saw an amazing sight. The ship was right out of the water and then broke in two plunging back into the sea and right to the bottom. Very few men survived that. He said he could count the survivors on one hand.

He and the others were "rescued" by the Japanese navy and eventually ended up in a jungle clearing with a collection of huts in it, where he and thousands of others in similar camps were to build the Burma-Siam railway. They weren’t made any happier when they learnt that a few years before, British surveyors had surveyed the route and abandoned the scheme because of the expected unacceptable high risk to the work force from disease and accident. Such details didn’t bother the Japanese.

He told how the Japanese didn’t think of them as men because they had allowed themselves to be captured. They were thought of as lower than animals. There was no distinction made between officers and other ranks. Everyone was expected to work - no work meant no food. So when they went out under guard to work in the jungle they would grab anything that was edible and eat it on the spot because all they were fed was plain boiled rice. They stuffed as much extra in their loin cloths, that’s all they wore because of the heat, to bring back to camp for the sick in the makeshift hospital.

It was whilst returning one day from working in the jungle with his booty stuffed down his loin cloth that a Japanese officer beckoned to George to step forward and kneel with his head bent. This was the norm for an execution. The officer drew his samurai sword, held it aloft and brought it down quickly shaving the top of George’s head with its razor sharp edge. Not everyone was as lucky as George that day and many died that way. He said he was beckoned out three times in all for execution. I can well remember him shuddering as he said, "Until you’ve had that done to you, you don’t know what fear is."

Someone once said to him, "Didn’t you try to escape?" "What for?", came the surprised reply. "There was nowhere to run to. We didn't have fences, there was no need of them. It was just jungle."

Somehow George managed to survive the war and come back to England. He was in hospital for four years before being offered a job at GCHQ in Cheltenham. He married and had a family with his wife Betty.

When I knew him he and Betty were living in semi-retirement near St Austell in Cornwall. They have both since died, and to his dying day George wouldn’t have anything Japanese in his house.

I rank George as the most interesting and remarkable man I have ever met and was greatly impressed by his bravery and endurance under such adversity. He was eventually decorated for his service, but he said that could never give him back those years he spent in hell.

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