When
Walter Kirkby was drafted to serve in the British Army at the beginning of World War II, he had no idea that it would be more than six years and a complete circumnavigation of the globe before he saw the dales and valleys of Yorkshire again.
Mobilized in August 1939, Kirkby served in various locations around England, missing out on early fighting in both France and Norway before his unit, the 80th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, was told it was being drafted abroad.
“On the way out, we thought we were going to Middle East, desert, but we weren’t. We called in at Durban, Bombay and then eventually Singapore. It was about six weeks in total on a crowded boat. A big, big liner turned transporter,” he says in his strong Yorkshire accent. “When we arrived in Singapore it were all strange of course. But there were plenty of food, much different to being rationed at home.”
Following several weeks acclimatizing, a trip north into present-day Malaysia saw Kirkby encounter the Japanese army for the first, and unfortunately for him, not the last time. As his unit moved out towards the coast at Kota Bahru to try and prevent the Japanese landing — they were already too late — they were bombed and strafed by Japanese fighters.
After holding them off for a few days, the next few weeks were spent in retreat in the face of the fierce Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula until he and his unit ended up back in Singapore, stranded after the causeway connecting it with the mainland was blown up.
Following the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Kirkby and the rest of the Allied troops found themselves corralled in the city’s Changi Prison. “It were a hell of a place, three or four of us to a small concrete cell,” he recalls.
Conditions were not good, the prisoners used to draw water from a nearby well, but after a couple of days the well began to run dry.
After three weeks in prison, Kirkby volunteered for the first of several work parties, helping the victorious Japanese build a Shinto shrine on Singapore’s Bukit Timah Hill.
This decision, taken as he thought he might be able to find more food, possibly saved his life as most of his unit was shipped north to work on the infamous “Death Railway” connecting Thailand and Burma.
But left in Singapore, reminders of death were never far away. Kirkby remembers driving past a “row of severed heads,” probable Chinese collaborators, every morning on his way to work.
Then, in October 1942, “We were loaded on the England Maru, and I mean loaded. We were packed in solid, like sardines,” he recalls.
‘HELL SHIP’ TO TAIWAN
The England Maru was one of dozens of World War II Japanese transporters, many of which were named after countries and cities, that came to be known as “hell ships” for the horrendous conditions endured by the POWs during the voyages.
“We had buckets for us toilets. What rice we got were lowered down, whether it was the same bucket or not I couldn’t tell you,” he says with a laugh.
The ship landed at Keelung 14 days later and the men were taken ashore. After a short train ride they were marched up a hill to what was then the Kinkaseki Mine, in present-day Jinguashi (金瓜石), Taipei County.
A few days later the men were put to work in the copper mine, at the time the most productive in the whole Japanese Empire.
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