The British PoWs who VJ Day forgot
70 years after the end of the Second World War, a monument is being erected to the British prisoners who perished in the Japanese camps and never lived to see victory
Naval Petty Officer Tom Humphrey (Front row, on left, looking down) before he was captured as a prisoner of war Photo: Jay Williams
By Joe Shute
8:00AM BST 15 Aug 2015
It was nearly a fortnight after VJ Day and the official end of the Second World War that news dropped on Thomas Humphrey and his fellow inmates at the Fukuoka prisoner of war camp in Japan.
It came in the form of a message, attached to a small medical kit released by a US bomber flying overhead. "War is over. Japs surrendered unconditionally to allies after atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki and after Russia entered war against Japs. American troops soon be (sic) here to free you."
The bomb itself was no revelation to Petty Officer Humphrey and his fellow 1,400 inmates at the camp, situated just five miles from Nagasaki Bay. When it was dropped at 10.55am on August 9, 1945, they had watched with a mixture of wonder and horror as the huge mushroom cloud rose in front of them. The camp was so close that they were caught in the ripples of the explosion. In his diary, Humphrey describes an "ear-shattering roar" that destroyed 134 panes of glass, two large pinewood doors, a single-storey building and the ceiling of the sick bay.
"Heard from one of the guards that the bomb dropped yesterday was a new kind of bomb," he later wrote.
An aerial view of the camp Photo: POW Research Network Japan
That first VJ Day was to prove the last Humphrey, a builder's son from Padstow, Cornwall, ever missed in his own lifetime. Each ensuing year until his death, aged 91 in 1998, he would attend a reunion with old war comrades to mark the event. The day of the final anniversary he attended – at Plymouth University - he was so ill his family had to stop the car en route for him to be sick.
The reunions were the only time he really talked about his horrific experiences at the hands of his captors during three-and-a-half years of imprisonment. He rarely, if ever, discussed the war with his wife Kath and four children - even if he refused to allow any Japanese-made items into the house.
Next month, however, the brutal details of what the inmates of Fukouka No.2 went through will finally be recognised. Seventy years after liberation, a memorial is being unveiled on the site of the camp commemorating the 72 men who died there. They represent just a fraction of the estimated 140,000 Allied military personnel captured by the Japanese in total - more than 30,000 of whom died from starvation, disease, mistreatment and accidents at mines, shipyards and other industrial facilities. The survivors felt they never received the apology they deserved.
Christmas at the PoW camp Photo: POW Research Network Japan
The memorial event has been arranged by officials from PoW Research Network, Japan, which was established in 2002 to identify all the country's prison camps. In April, the network launched an appeal for British survivors or their relatives to come forward. After reading about it in the Telegraph, Humphrey's youngest daughter Alicia Conium got in touch. She will attend the event on September 13 as part of a trip being funded by SSAFA and the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust.
"He never spoke about it," Mrs Conium, 68, says. "Mum said he was very quiet when he first came back. He never went out in the beginning. If he did and anybody spoke to him, he would just break down. She said he cried a lot."
While Mr Humphrey only spoke among those who had experienced similar horrors, his war diaries, in which he meticulously recorded every detail of his capture and subsequent internment, have proved invaluable to the researchers. He was a crew member aboard the HMS Exeter in the Java Sea when - along with two escorts, the destroyer HMS Encounter and the American destroyer Pope - it was intercepted by nine Japanese warships. All three Allied warships were lost in action.
Alicia Conium
HMS Exeter was torpedoed and sunk with 55 souls still on board. The surviving 600 or so crew were made prisoners of war and 152 would later die in the Japanese camps. About eight of HMS Encounter's crew were killed, and 149 taken captive, of whom 38 would die while incarcerated.
Initially, Humphrey was taken to a prison camp at a former school on Makassar, Indonesia. Here he managed to smuggle away a child's school exercise book – which became his diary for the next three-and-a-half years. "Been a PoW for a week," reads one of his early entries on March 8, 1942. "I wonder if Kath knows. I hope she does and does not give up our house. She always said she would if anything happened to me."
In fact, his wife, whom Humphrey had married in 1928 soon after he had volunteered to join the Navy, knew nothing of his capture. The couple already had three children. Alicia, their youngest, was born in 1947.
Thomas Humphrey aboard a Royal Navy ship
"At home, Mum said it was on the radio that HMS Exeter was sunk and also on the newspaper billboards," says Mrs Conium, a retired restaurateur who has two children and four grandchildren. "Then she received the telegram saying the Exeter on which your husband was serving has sunk. It was 18 months before she knew if he was dead or alive. When the telegram was sent saying he was being held as a prisoner of war, the postmaster insisted on bringing it up himself, he wouldn't let the telegram boy do it."
From his diaries it appears that Humphrey himself remained steadfast. While his desperate, starving fellow sailors bartered with jewellery for extra food he vowed he would never part with his wedding ring – a simple gold band. Despite being briefly stolen by a guard he managed to retrieve it and was buried with the ring still on his finger.
Six months following his capture, Humphrey was transferred to Fukuouka No.2 where he was to remain for the duration of the war. Other British prisoners held at the camp included sailors from HMS Stronghold and RAF pilots from 84 Squadron, 242 Squadron and ground crew captured at the fall of RAF Seletar in Singapore. Prisoners were put to work at a nearby shipyard operated by Kawanami Industry, fabricating the hulls of freighters. Many were killed in work accidents including Harold Jeffs, who had served aboard HMS Exeter and was "crushed by a cauldron of molten iron". Two crewmates, George Williams and William Phillips also died of "fracture at base of cranium".
In winter the death rate was at least one a day. Pneumonia and pulmonary tuberculosis were rife within the camp as well as beriberi, brought on by the near starvation conditions. Humphrey himself contracted dysentery, a condition that was to plague him for the rest of his life.
Prisoners in the Hanawa Prisoner of War Camp #6 at Honshu, Japan
There are gaps in his diary for months at a time when it was stolen by his captors, and he was on the receiving end of several severe beatings. Only one guard ever showed him any kindness, a man named Yamamoto, who gave Humphrey a service medal for fighting against the Chinese. He later turned it into a necklace for Kath and, in 1995, after helping an author research a novel about a Japanese PoW Camp, returned it to the guard's family.
All Alicia Conium knows of her father's time in Japan comes from those diaries – which she first read as an 11-year-old. What she says continues to stand out above all is his dignity in the face of such hardship, and the humanity he always retained.
"He always wrote so much about home, his family, and also he shared whatever food he could get hold of," she says. "I don't think he was ever bitter, even if the things he went through were terrible."
Next month she will stand on the shores of Nagasaki and make her father's peace – as well as those who never survived to see anything but suffering in Japan.
For more information on SSAFA and its work please visit www.ssafa.org.uk.