Providence
Created | Updated Dec 7, 2006
Early on during the time I spent as POW of the Japanese, I grew a beard. My hair is very blond and in Japan only the old have white hair and beards, so I was very well known among our guards, especially as I was in charge of our working party.
At the time, we were still in Singapore, working converting army huts into warehouses. We would break for an hour at midday, when we would eat the cold rice we had brought with us for our camp and our guards would eat their more sophisticated fare. They would usually drop off to sleep after having eaten and I had been in the habit of sneaking off over a cleared area, to a dump where our captors had deposited the many damaged vehicles that had been cleared from the road after the battle for Singapore. Many of these contained useful articles for a prisoner captured with little more than the clothes he stood up in, and I had been collecting these almost daily: a piece of foam latex big enough to sleep on, a blanket and a few tools. Our guards were not fighting soldiers and turned a blind eye to my acquisitions, although we were not supposed to move outside their control.
Now come the series of 'coincidences' that were to save my life. One evening in camp, my attention was drawn to the medical hut by the yells coming from among the men being attended to by our medical orderlies (whose devotion to the sick was one of the few bright spots of our confinement). A man with a few weeks' growth of beard was suffering from impetigo, and I mean suffering! With a pair of tweezers the orderly was removing the scabs — and unavoidably tufts of beard — for the subsequent medication to be effective. Determined not to suffer a similar fate, I arose very early the following morning and hacked off both beard and hair with my razor (ending up with a crazy paving affect).
On parade for 'tenko' (roll call) later, the Japanese guards thought I was a newcomer and gathered around me with 'oohs' and 'ahs'. Then they saw by the number on my armband, 2B4, that the apparent 70-year-old had suddenly suffered a sea-change to become 22!
I was at the time trying to build a wireless (penalty if discovered, death), and only needed a pair of earphones. I had noticed an army radio van further into the dump and during our midday break I made my usual sortie, found what I sought, put them in my haversack and started back across the open ground.
The brutal 'Kempitai' (military police) were even dreaded by the Japanese troops and we had never come across any there before. A hundred yards into the open, I heard a roar of 'COORAH!' and over my shoulder saw a couple of these soldiers racing towards me. With my double crime of possessing earphones and leaving my gang, fear lent me wings. I ran in the opposite direction from my work party to the concealment of a hutted area and reached my group by a round-about route, to lie down on my belly gasping for breath. After about a couple of minutes I heard my pursuers arrive to question our guards. With a major effort, I managed to control my gasping as they assured the Kempitai that no-one had left the camp. I'll never know whether they were aware of the truth. Had I still been wearing all my hair, there would have been no avoiding my identification.
