大象传媒

My pa-in-law Doug was a reticent soul by nature but sometimes he would talk about his POW experiences in the Far East. His son Steve (my husband) and myself never really felt we could broach the subject with, feeling that we had no right to pry.

After a neglected and often miserable childhood Doug ran away from home and joined the Army in 1934, aged only 17 but the Army did not enquire too closely at that time if you looked fit and healthy enough. He joined the Middlesex Regiment and was out in Hong Kong when war was declared in 1939. On 6th December 1941 the Japanese attached Pearl Harbour and then went for Hong Kong and Singapore. On Xmas Day 1941 Doug was in a piil-box with his unit on a Hong Kong beach where they were overrun and captured by Japanese troops, beginning three and a half years of nightmarish captivity.

The conditions the men were kept in were appalling and soon a diphtheria epidemic broke out. Doug was due to be loaded on a ship called the "Lisbun Maru" bound for Japan but it was thought he had diptheria and was left out, luckily as it turned out. As described by others on this database, the "Lisbun Maru" was torpedoed by an American submarine and many of Doug's friends were lost at sea, drowned whilst battened down in the ship's hold, those who got out were machine-gunned by the Japs whilst in the water, or taken by sharks. The only time I ever Doug speak of the sinking, he became very distressed even after all those years. He eventually ended up in Japan on Kyushu Island - at what period of time is not known.

Doug witnessed much cruelty and brutality meted out to the prisoners by the Japs and the Korean camp guards alike. Once he witnessed an arbitrary execution of a prisoner by a Jap guard who felt the man had not bowed low enough or quick enough for his liking; so he pulled out his samurai sword and beheaded the man - the head flying one way and the body another. So much for the Japanese code of Bushido - they smeared it for ever by the way they treated prisoners and civilian internees.

There was acute starvation and Dough probably ate more rice in three and a half years than most folk eat in a lifetime. At one time he went blind from beri-beri and suffered from a complaint called "Happy Feet".

In spite of all their dreadful circumstances the men in the camp managed to run all kinds of activities, including a jazz band that Doug took part in and afterwards he kept two drumskins on which are drawing of Allied flags and cartoons of the band members.

Doug was never one to speak ill of people but he was highly scathing of the British officers who were too busy looking after No. 1 to care about the welfare of the troops. The officers did not have to go on working parties but the NCOs and men did, in many cases more dead than alive. The commands shouted at Doug and his mates would never ben forgotten, "Speedo!" for "Faster!", "Buggero!" for "Stupid!" and - more welcome, "Yasme", for "Rest". It also means "Heaven" or "Peace". (Years later when Doug had his own building business, his custom-built family home in Bovingson, Herts was called "Yasme". The house where Steve and I now live is also called "Yasme" - it seemed the right thing to call it).

One fine day in August 1945 Dough and the others heard a strange muted drawn-out explosion in the distance and had no idea what it was. As it happened, the camp was in the next valley to the city of Nagasaki and they had heard the detonation of the second atomic bomb - Fat Man as the Americans called it. Eventually the news filtered into the camp of the Japanese surrender and things started to relax a little. One day American aircraft flew over, dropping welcome food and medical supplies, but the mens' stomachs' were so shrunken from hunger that they could only eat tiny amounts. When Doug was finally liberated, although 5' 8" in hiehgt, he only weighed 4 stone.

The survivors were taken from the camp to be treated for all their ailments and to be slowly introduced back to a normal diet. They embarked on a US bound ship across the Pacific to the west coast of America and once there, they were taken by train across the US from west to east, to be picked up by a UK bound ship and sailed home across the Atlantic to Britain, for demobilisation.

Doug was back in civvy street, turning his hand to any job going and at least the Army had trained him in building skills. In 1947 he was cleaning out a drain at Sun Printers in Watford and somebody kept flushing the ladies' toilet, drenching him each time. Finally he stuck his head out of the yard manhole and shouted at a passing canteen girl, "Will you tell that silly cow to stop flushing the toilet? I'm getting bloody soaked down her!" The girl he shouted at was a feisty brunette called Mary Meikle and to cut a long story short, they were engaged in six months and married nine months later. Their son Stephen arrived in 1949 - but that's another story.

In loving memory of Charles Douglas Matthews - 1917-1988.

Die hard lads, die hard!

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