大象传媒

My name is Hugh Thomas Owen (Hughie) and I used to live at the White Row in Pontblyddyn. When the war broke out I was called up into the Army, in October 1939, and served in this country for two years until October 1941 when I was sent overseas to Iraq in the Middle East, however on our way out it was announced over our ship鈥檚 radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour and that the war was on in the Far East. So then we were diverted to Singapore and landed there on January 11th 1942. On February 15th 1942, the whole of the Allied Forces surrendered to the Japanese, so then we all became prisoners of war and the war in the Pacific was over. They had taken thousands of prisoners in Singapore and Malaya alone.
They rounded us all up and marched us to a place called Changi, which is out in the wilds of Singapore. We stayed there for a week or so and then they took us back down to Singapore to a camp called River Valley to clear up the debris caused by the bombing of the Japanese. This work was done under terrible conditions and after a while I was sent back to Changi Hospital with dysentery.
Towards the end of 1942, the Japanese wanted six thousand men (including me). We were taken back to Singapore railway station and put into railway vans (there were 37 men per van). We were taken on a five day and five night鈥檚 journey, with only one stop, for a meal of dirty, maggot-infested rice, in the whole of the thousand mile journey.
We arrived at our journey鈥檚 end- a place called Bang Pong. We had to get off there. So everyone disembarked and we had a few hours rest until about 8pm. We thought that that was going to be our destination, but they made us walk all through the night- about fifteen miles through solid jungle- where no white man had ever set foot before.
This walk through the jungle went on for about a month. At one of the camps we passed on our march, I saw two or three men by the barbed wire- they fenced you in alright- and I saw this fella- and it was Will Jones from Penyffordd, my sister鈥檚 boyfriend. So he was out there too. Mind you, we carried on 200 miles further up from where he was, until we reached our destination- a camp called Sonkurai or the Three Pagodas Pass, which is on the Thailand-Burma border and three hundred miles from our last train journey. I won鈥檛 disclose what I was doing for the first three months in the camp, but it was terrible and unbelievable. Eventually, I asked our own officer to take me off this job, and to put me out on the working parties on the notorious Burma Railway. I was made to work for 16-18 hours a day, hard labour, seven days a week on half a cup of filthy rice- three times a day. Also, there was no medication whatsoever.
By 1943, every man was nothing but a skeleton of about five stones. We were so thin you had a job to work out who was who. We lost so many men with cholera that there were only a few of us left in the camp. So then the Japanese moved us down to the next camp. The length of the whole railway was 500 miles, but we only did 300 miles, up to the Burma border. Then, the prisoners in Burma carried on. The railway was finished in 18 months with the loss of 200,000 locals, and approximately 20,000 allied Prisoners of War.
When the railway was finished, they took a few thousand of us back to Singapore (including me) and they put us in Changi Jail. They had civilians and children in there, who were in Singapore before we got there. And then they moved them out- I don鈥檛 know where they took them. The civilian men who were already in the jail- they鈥檇 started on the aerodrome which wasn鈥檛 very far away..
We were in Singapore to build the airport. While I was in Changi jail, I found this bit of cardboard and a piece of pencil- and I used to rub it in the concrete to sharpen it- and I drew Changi Jail from memory- sitting on the concrete floor- sitting on a rice sack. That鈥檚 all we had to lie on- a rice sack- and you even had to scrounge that from the kitchen..
I was in Changi Jail until they dropped the first atom bomb on Japan.
Nobody will ever know the suffering and cruelty that was inflicted upon us.

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