The Cruellest Blow

Of all the cruelties — and there were many — one stands apart in my mind, because it was not done to the body. The camp's status was changed from a field prison to a proper prison camp, and when the interpreter and the senior Japanese officer came to tell us so, they added that this meant they would now begin notifying our next of kin. At that, every man was ecstatic; our families had been left in silence since our capture, and the not-knowing had been, I had always thought, the worst thing they had done to us. Then came the rest of it. The notifying would be done methodically, they said — one prisoner each month, beginning with Captain Atkinson, and so on down. There were some two hundred of us. It would take many years. To raise a man's hope like that and then dash it so deliberately was as bad as anything they ever did, and it was a long time before any of us climbed back out of the misery of it.

The officers came in for particular brutality, for reasons of their own; more than once they were beaten and then made to face one another and beat each other. After one raid that killed a guard, an officer remarked to a Japanese corporal that yesterday's bombing had been very, very good — not knowing the corporal's closest friend had died in it. For weeks afterwards the corporal would send for that captain, stand him to attention, and slap him again and again.

There was a young Irishman who had lately lost his twin brother. On a working party a powerful Japanese, skilled in his martial arts, singled him out and threw him about without let-up until the lunch break, and then again until the end of the day — some ten hours of it. The lad came back to camp with his mind gone, and for fear of what the Japanese might do we kept it secret. But at Tenko one day he broke from the back rank, marched out to the camp commandant shouting "I want a word with you," and his cover was blown. They put him in solitary under a big Korean guard. When a plate of rice was handed in to him he carried it to the latrine tin, tipped the contents onto the plate, and — the guard watching at the bars, expecting him to eat — flung the lot in the man's face. When the prisoners were freed he boarded the hospital ship for Calcutta and would not be dressed, walking everywhere naked. I doubt he ever found his mind again.

Death could come in an instant, and from nothing. We were carried to a distant working party one day on a short-sided lorry, the whole party standing, holding to one another to stay aboard. Coming back after the day's work, still clinging on, one man let go and was thrown into the path of a following vehicle, which ran over him. He was past recognising, and was known only by the distinctive cap he wore — until we reached camp and were met by the very chap who had lent him that cap, alive and well.