Merchant Naval Seaman David Wilson

	In the Merchant Navy.
	This page: Kawasaki POW Camp.

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Kawasaki Camp

David and the other prisoners were taken to their prison camp, Kawasaki POW Camp 1:

The bunks were full of big red bed bugs which would come out at night in droves. We would be covered in bites every night and when you squashed one it gave off a sickly smell. After a time we got used to them and did not take much notice of the bites. We were issued with two thin blankets each and a canvas pillow filled with straw. . Whenever we passed one of the guards, we were required to bow low to him. This took us a bit of time to remember to do but, as we got beaten around the head every time we forgot, we soon got the hang of it. . .It was about 2 miles to Mitsui Docks and we were put to work in the holds of old British ships which had been sold for scrap to Japan before the war but used by them to bring supplies in. Our job was to shovel coal into slings to be hoisted out of the holds. . . We were allowed up on deck at midday to eat our meagre meal and have a few minutes to relax. It was horrible to see the brass plate at the foot of the bridge and see where the ship was built, shipyards on the Tyne, the Clyde or Belfast made me terribly homesick, even though the actual shipyards were strange places for me. As we did not have any nourishing food, it was not long before people started going down with various illnesses. Dysentery was common which would start as diarrhoea and end up with passing blood and losing weight rapidly. . .Another distressing illness was Beri-beri, wet or dry. . . We all got depressed and some men said we would never be free again, so why go on with this miserable life. They just lost the will to live and faded away. . . I am sure I owe my life to Tom Gordy a US Marine from Texas. I had been ill for about ten days and could not eat the pink rice served up. One morning Tom cooked me an egg on a piece of tin in the boiler room and brought it to me before going to work, he stood over me and made me eat it, it tasted delicious. The night before he had wormed his way across the yard, past the guard room and into the chicken run which was kept by the guards for fresh meat and eggs. He silently stole an egg without disturbing the birds and, of course had to worm his way back without breaking the egg. What a wonderfully unselfish act, we never had any meat or eggs in our diet. From that day I started to get better.

Letter to David's parents advising he was still classed as missing.

During 1943 David was allowed to send a card home, the first since his capture twenty months previously. At last his parents knew he was alive:

Everyone, except for my mother had given up any hope of seeing me again. The card arrived on Christmas Day 1943, in wartime there was a post every day, and my father was walking along towards the church to get ready for the service when he was astonished to see the postmistress riding up the hill towards him shouting - 'he's alive!' Peldon being a small village, everyone knew about me and she wanted as many people as possible to hear the good news. My mother played the organ that morning with so much gusto that the poor boy pumping the bellows wet himself with the effort!

About this time the camp began to be plagued by rats who ate the prisoners' soap, gnawed holes in their clothes and bit them during the night. In August 1943, David and four others were taken to a 'hospital' camp as suspected diphtheria cases, where they endured reduced rations as there were no working parties going out from this camp.

Our hut was next to the cookhouse and, although prisoners worked in there, it was more than their lives were worth to let us have spare food. However, on odd occasions they would throw over a bone which had been stripped of meat and had been in a stew. We would take it in turns to chew on it for five minutes then pass it to the next person. By the time it had been passed round a few times, each end of the bone would have gone and all the marrow. The marrow was delicious but we were careful to make sure everyone had some of it.

David's experiences left him with a life-long dislike of sharing utensils or food with others, an understandable reaction given the conditions under which the prisoners existed. Although it was considered a hospital camp, David never saw any medicines being administered. The camp commandant inflicted a variety of punishments on the inmates, including forcing prisoners to stand in the latrine tank, or stand on a box in the yard all night in freezing conditions. The latter punishment frequently led to pneumonia. Life was made more bearable by the appearance of a brown dog who spent his time between the different huts and was fed by the prisoners from their own meagre food ration.

From 1944, American B29 bombers began raids on Japanese cities. The raids would result in more beatings for the prisoners, cheered on by the local inhabitants. David witnessed the Kamikaze pilots' attacks on American bombers. On 15 April 1945 the air raid sirens sounded at 10.15pm:

A few minutes later we heard a tremendous roar as the first planes swept in and dropped their bombs. The whole camp building shook so much we thought it would collapse, so we went outside. The napalm bombs on impact would send a stream of flaming jelly a hundred yards. In no time at all the whole city was a roaring furnace which, in turn created a fierce wind which blew all before it, roofs, doors, windows and all kinds of debris. Part of the camp fence caught fire and we thought we would be engulfed but we managed to put that fire out and then the wind suddenly changed and the fire moved away. . .The devastation revealed the next morning was unbelievable. For approximately four miles in any direction there was not a house or wall standing, just a blackened desert.

Kawasaki Camp from the air, with David's plea for food on the roof.

On 17 August 1945 the prisoners discovered that the war was over:

The whole camp went wild and several prisoners immediately armed themselves with various sharp instruments and went looking for the guards but they had disappeared. The senior officers in camp managed to convince everybody that it was in our interests to keep calm and we really needed the guards to protect us from the population. The guards did appear later but kept a low profile. The next day Japanese military police came to the camp and took the guards' rifles away but left them with their bayonets, for their protection and, perhaps ours. That evening the livestock kept by the guards, a pig and some chickens, were slaughtered and we all enjoyed a meal of roast pork, chicken and home-made bread - the first decent food we had tasted for three years. It is hard to summarise how our feelings were at that time. We had lived in fear of starvation, disease and bombing for so long. We had been brutally treated, made to work under harsh conditions, got into the state of mind when I thought we would never be free again then, very suddenly the war was over. I think most of us felt stunned.

Having missed the American food drops for two days, David painted 'POW Camp, Drop Food' on the roof and supplies quickly arrived by parachute:

The pilots certainly made up for missing us on previous days. Two of them took their life in their hands and took motion pictures of us. Several emptied their pockets and threw down packets of cigarettes. Others scribbled messages - 'See you in the States in a month', 'Compliments of the Fighting 83^rd USS Essex' tied them onto their singlets and tossed them to us. One pilot sent down the names and addresses of all the pilots on USS Essex. They all did aerobatics over the camp for about 15 minutes whilst we laughed and cried and cheered them. How wonderful they were to us that day.

David photographed in 1999.

David arrived home to a wonderful welcome from his family and the villagers laid on a Welcome Home party, but he found it took some time to settle back into family life. Post war David remained in the Merchant Navy until 1951 and then worked for HM Customs and Excise until retirement. In 1950 he married Ina and they had two children. It was Ina who persuaded her husband that his memoir should reflect his feelings and her advice has resulted in a rich and powerful account of life both in the Merchant Navy and as a Prisoner of War in Japan. The Centre is very grateful to David for allowing us to quote from his recollections, a copy of which is held in the archive.

	In the Merchant Navy.
	This page: Kawasaki POW Camp.