| |
A dark piece of WWII history in
Taiwan
By Matthew Smith
TAIPEI - Overcast and chilly, gradually turning
to a steady rain, the weather is unwelcome but entirely
appropriate for the occasion. A group of perhaps 70
people has arrived at the town of Chinguashi, amid the
windswept, grassy hills overlooking Taiwan's rugged
northern coastline and the South China Sea. The town is
not far from Jiufen, a larger hilltop community popular
with Taiwanese tourists. But the group that gathered at
Chinguashi last Sunday did not come to enjoy the area's
natural beauty.
Indeed, four of the visitors
know the area most for its horrendously ugly past, for
the suffering they and their comrades endured 60 years
ago. These men know the location by a different name:
Kinkaseki, site of one of World War II's worst prisoner
of war camps. It is a name that they know all too well,
having spent years living under atrocious conditions and
working as slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army. Their
story - unlike the misery of Allied POWs in places such
as Thailand, Burma, the Philippines and Borneo - has
never entered the world's general consciousness. But
Jack Edwards, Les Davis, Harry Brown and Bill Kingate -
as well as other surviving former Kinkaseki inmates
around the world - still remember those years of
suffering, and the hundreds of their comrades who died
here.
When Singapore fell in 1942, tens of
thousands of British soldiers surrendered to the
Japanese invaders, whose busido code upheld that
a true soldier should commit suicide rather than give
up. At the time, Taiwan had already been a Japanese
colony for 47 years, supplying food and natural
resources to help fuel Japan's ongoing industrialization
and militarization.
Among the bounty of Taiwan
were the mines at Kinkaseki, which boasted the largest
copper output in the Japanese empire. While there was no
shortage of Taiwanese civilians willing to dig in the
mines, they refused to enter the deepest and most
dangerous shafts. For that work, the Japanese brought
more than 500 British Commonwealth and Allied POWs to
work as slaves at Kinkaseki in November 1942. That total
was to rise to over 1,000 men before the war ended.
Conditions at Kinkaseki were worse than any of
Taiwan's other 15 POW camps. The men were forced to
march daily up and over a high ridge to the mine
entrance - "the hellhole of Kinkaseki". Working in a
mineshaft as much as a mile long and more than 800 feet
in depth, the prisoners were made to produce daily
quotas of copper ore - and administered daily beatings
when they could not meet the quotas. With skin stained
yellow by the hot sulfurous water in the mine, covered
in bruises from daily beatings to their slowly starving
bodies, the POWs were forced to work in unstable shafts
amid temperatures that reached as high as 55 degrees
Celsius (130 degrees Fahrenheit).
Under such
conditions, hundreds of POWs died and were buried in a
nearby cemetery over the next three years; and those who
survived the war would continue to suffer and die from
their injuries in the years following World War II. The
torture, degradation and slow starvation they endured -
which became worse as the war continued - is best
described by former Kinkaseki inmate Jack Edwards in his
book Banzai You Bastards!. "The culmination of
nearly three years of being on a starvation diet, being
treated brutally, and the hard labor in the mine, was
resulting in rapidly increasing illnesses, mental
depression, and death. All of us were sick, some worse
than others. Men dragged themselves back and forth to
the mine like zombies."
Jack Edwards is doggedly
unapologetic about the book's title, which was the
Kinkaseki inmates' morale-building cry when US bombers
attacked the camp and the nearby copper smelting works
as the war turned against the Japanese. The author's
insistence on using it made publishers balk, he says:
"But I told them, 'I don't give a damn if we never sell
a single copy - that's the title'." The book has sold
surprisingly well in Japan, considering the Japanese
translator's similar aversion to niceties: The Japanese
version is titled "Drop Dead, Jap Bastards!"
Despite an admirable level of good humor, the
pain the POWs endured is still apparent in those who
survived the ordeal and its aftermath, and who returned
for this year's memorial. "It was terrible, and I
wouldn't have wished it on anybody," says former POW
William Kingate, who made the return trip to Taiwan this
year. "Not even my own worst enemy."
Jack
Edwards, 84, who returned to Kinkaseki in the years
following the war to gather and present evidence for war
crimes trials, eventually settled in Hong Kong. He has
made it his lifelong task to spread the word about the
POW camps of Taiwan, and to ensure that the memory of
the hundreds who died there is never forgotten. As
Edwards tells it, some 800 of the graves in Hong Kong's
Sai Wan Bay Cemetery are those of POWs who died in
Taiwan and were moved there after the war. Almost half
of them died from the effects of overwork, torture,
starvation or accidents in the mines at Kinkaseki.
Nevertheless, their story is still not widely
known. The British public, enthralled by "The Bridge
Over The River Kwai", which Edwards calls "a tremendous
film - and a load of rubbish", had little capacity for
listening to horror stories of the POW camps of Taiwan.
"A War Story", a 1981 documentary by Canadian Anne
Wheeler and commissioned by the National Film Board of
Canada, is a far more accurate piece on Japanese POWs,
the men say. The haunting film is based on the journals
of Ben Wheeler, Ann's father, who served as camp doctor
at Kinkaseki, and includes footage taken by Japanese
propagandists and Allied war crimes investigators. Yet
even this film was never widely circulated outside of
Canada.
Taiwan's POW camps might have been
entirely forgotten by everyone but the POWs themselves
and their families. But inspired by Edwards, a group of
expatriates here in the mid-1990s found the site of the
Kinkaseki camp at Chinguashi, and with the assistance of
Taiwanese authorities and local residents, a memorial
was established on the site of the camp in 1997.
(Despite being one of the few pieces of level land in
the mountainous area, Chinguashi residents believe the
site to be haunted, and never developed it.)
Meanwhile, the group also formed the Taiwan POW
Camps Memorial Society, an organization that finds
former POWs and tries to promote awareness - in Allied
countries, Japan and Taiwan - of what happened here. "We
just felt that more needed to be done," says society
director Michael Hurst. The group has so far located
over 200 POWs and their families, and has re-discovered
14 of the island's 15 WWII POW camps. With help from the
society, the past few years have seen many POWs return
to Taiwan for annual memorial services in November. And
now that the surviving POWs are all well into their 80s,
this resurgence of interest in their story comes not a
moment too soon.
One of the society's goals is
to raise awareness of the camps in Taiwanese society.
Ironically, many of the Kinkaseki prison guards were
recruited from the local population and remain living in
Chinguashi to this day. Yet for most Taiwanese, this
piece of history is completely unknown. Indeed, the
mines at Chinguashi, which only ceased operations in the
1980s, are a source of nostalgia and a potential tourist
attraction, which creates a strong incentive to airbrush
the camp from the area's history - as does the common
view in Taiwan that Japanese rule was benevolent. But
thanks to the POWs and those who support them, that
seems unlikely to happen.
"To Taiwan, we wish to
say, do not neglect the darkness of your past," says
Father Edmund Ryden, SJ, director of the John Paul II
Peace Institute at Fujen University, in a brilliant
sermon at the ceremony. "As you strive to be a country
of the high tech future, do not forget that on this,
your soil, in living memory, deeds of hate, torture,
violence and disrespect were committed. A present built
on a romantic fiction of the past lacks substance … To
forget the past is to be blind to the present too."
Likewise, Edwards stresses that one of his goals
is to teach young people in Taiwan to value their own
history, and to rethink their ongoing identification
with Japan and Japanese culture. Banzai You
Bastards! is now available in simplified Chinese
characters, and Edwards says that a traditional
character edition will be published soon, for the Taiwan
market.
"I sincerely hope that even when we pass
on, people will still go up to Kinkaseki and remember
what happened there, because as I say at the end of my
book, 'None of us should forget'." He adds a cautionary
note for all of us: "And please don't forget, because if
you do, you'll be condemned to go through it all over
again, just like our fathers were."
For more
information, visit the Taiwanese POW Camp Memorial
Society website: www.powtaiwan.org.
(©2002 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
