Recalling life in a Japanese POW camp

The tag bearing his POW number Gunner Joy had to wear at all times.[Photo/China Daily]

Gunner Joy, who died at the age of 59 in 1979, was recently married and barely 20 years old when he was sent as part of a Royal Artillery unit to what was then the British colony of Malaya. He and his colleagues were taken prisoner in Singapore when General Arthur Percival surrendered to the invading Japanese forces in 1942.

Selected by the Japanese because of his engineering background, he was shipped to Mukden camp in Manchuria, and put to work in a factory there.

Life was brutal. He told his son of one instance when he suffered physical abuse at the hands of the Japanese guards. He was ordered to do 100 press-ups for some minor infringement of camp rules.

"Each time he pushed up a guard would hit him on the head with a rifle butt. His arms were useless for days afterwards," Alan Joy says.

Two prisoners escaped but were recaptured and after being paraded in front of the inmates, were bayoneted to death.

"My father engraved a mess tin as a memorial," he says.

During his confinement, Gunner Joy, like many other inmates, suffered the extreme winters prevalent in that part of China. He contracted frostbite.

"It used to recur during winter back here in England," his son says.

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