´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bruce Logan of the CSV Media NI Team on behalf of James A. McCall and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
====

Towards the end, the Japs more or less had given up hope. At the beginning of 1945 one of the American task forces bombed Saigon. And the morale of the Japs went down then. We knew the war was won. It was a matter of time. The number of ships that were sunk in the Saigon harbour. And of course, the prisoners themselves.

We did a tremendous amount of sabotage. The stuff that we done …
Unloading the tankers, 45-gallon drums of petrol, you’d have to roll 1 of them maybe 3-400 yards from the ship to stack it up. Well, there wasn’t guards at every corner. You’d roll a barrel round a corner, prop it up, take the bung out, get a handful of sand in or even pee in it, you know, anything at all like that to sabotage it. They had plenty of guards around, but they couldn’t watch every single prisoner every place. There was one time we were supposed to be loading a Japanese ship with rice, and we used to have Gunga Dins — some blokes with water, to carry the water because of the heat of the ship. We had more Gunga Dins than usual, and nearly every bag of rice that went aboard had a splash of water put over it. I understand that 4 days after the ship left it had to come back in. The rice had swollen and the ship had started to burst open. Things like that. Lorries, put sand or something like that in the petrol tank. Anything like that at all. I remember one time, for the hell of it I do not know why. We were working in the Japanese HQ. Forget what we were doing.
An American and myself were walking past the Japanese officer’s quarters. There was a Japanese full dress uniform hanging there. The American reached in, there wasn’t a window, just an opening. He took the uniform. Going past the latrines, which were open, and he got the uniform, pushed it down into the you-know-what with a stick. What for, I do not know. The Jap officer must have wondered about what happened to his uniform.

[the Jap didn’t punish them]
Well, he didn’t know. Things like that, we done.

There was Sgt Miller, he had a secret. He kept a radio. And for a long, long time that was our source of news. He had made it up. He was a radio technician. And when we moved, everybody maybe got a wee bit of this and that. I got a valve or something one time to take. So if they ever caught, they never got the whole thing. At one time the Japs though we were very good to them. We made a clothes line, for them to hang their clothes on. They didn’t realise we were using it as an aerial. He used to go to the Jap HQ hut, and if there was a lorry there, he used to hook up onto the car battery.

But he would never announce the news, as such, right away to the blokes. He always waited for 2 or 3 weeks afterwards. Because if the Japanese had found we knew something that had only happened 2 or 3 days ago, they would have cottoned on straight away. The battle of Midway, we heard about maybe about 2 months afterwards. If we’d have heard about it 2 days afterwards, obviously the Japs would have been hard.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.