Destined for Camp Nagasaki

Heroes Remember

Destined for Camp Nagasaki

Transcript

But after being in Changi a little while they decided well there’s too many people here, we’ve got to move some. This day they got us out on the parade ground and they had a good parade ground in Changi cause there’s a lot of army there you see. They got us on parade ground and they numbered off a bunch of men. Didn’t know where we were going, we had no idea. We had nothing to take with us anyhow, we had no clothes, bags, a few rags you had on. They never gave us any underwear anytime we were there you know. All we had was g-strings. They put us on the parade ground, they number us off. They, Japanese goes like this - ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju- numbered off in Japanese and when they got between me and a fellow Olman, from Bristol, England, they just dropped their arms like that, they said, “You go that way, you go that way.” Olman went that way, I went that way. I went on a Kamakura Maru which was built in Belfast, Ireland and went to Formosa and then from Formosa to Nagasaki. And I arrived in Nagasaki on the 17th day of December 1942.The camp itself was an old wooden shack or bamboo shack and in the rooms, I must say they had shingles on the roof. There was wooden shingles on the roof. I can tell you that one, it wasn’t thatched. They had one table running through it, a long table with so many men on each side of the table. There was nothing to keep you warm, not a thing in the world. No heat in the building and we lived there with a bunch of men on this side and a bunch of men on the top and the same on the other side and the table ran through the centre. And in that room they’d turn on the lights about six o’clock in the morning in Avon Valley and get you out for debugging. But the rooms themselves were so uncomfortable and so, well I suppose we caused the bed bugs and the fleas and the body lice. I suppose they came from us because we had no baths see. We only had a bath every two or three weeks and that wasn’t a bath. When you’re in a place you don’t have any soap for years you don’t get yourself clean without soap, and we didn’t have any soap for three years. We’d get this hot water thing and of course every couple of weeks, there’d be forty or fifty men get in the bath together; with all kinds of tropical sores, all kinds of diseases and how one survived I’ll never know because tropical ulcers were a very big thing out there. People would have them right from their ankles right to their groin and they’re very hard to conquer, very hard to cure cause you had nothing to cure them with. One of the first killers or the biggest killer we had in Japan when I arrived there first was pneumonia and pleurisy. We went from Singapore with 90 degrees to 100. We went to snow flurries in Nagasaki and the first three months we were there we lost sixty men - pleurisy, pneumonia. They never had an aspirin tablet, they wouldn’t give it to ya anyway. And many of lives could have been saved if they had a pack of aspirins or Epson salts, whatever the case might be. Vitamin B tablets, we didn’t have any of these. We had nothing for malaria and the Japanese wouldn’t give you any because whatever they had, they had for themselves and their own army.

Description

Mr. Ford tells us about being out on parade ground and not knowing what POW camp they would be sent to.

John Ford

Mr. John Ford was born March 25, 1919 in Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland. Both parents were previously married and Mr. Ford was raised in a family of 14 children, him being one of the younger children. As a child he attended school at the United School Academy graduating in Grade 11. After school he worked with the Newfoundland railway as a machinist for three years. In May of 1940, Mr. Ford decided to join the Royal Air Force. In August he went overseas onboard the Nova Scotia and landed in Liverpool, England. During his service, he was captured as a POW in Japan experiencing horrible conditions. He has dedicated much of his time to the Legion and volunteered as a board member for over 13 years. Mr. Ford is an active participant in visiting local schools and educating the youth of what life was really like as a solider and as a prisoner of war while serving with the Royal Air Force.

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