The train stopped at the end of the line, so “we had to get out and walk towards the docks at Nagasaki. It were a hell of a sight,” he says. “We got to the docks and they’d got some showers rigged up. The Americans were there and we stripped off, threw everything away and they deloused us with DDT powder and put us on a small aircraft carrier.”
The men eventually arrived in Manila, their first taste of freedom for more than three years.
Two weeks and a visit by Lady Mountbatten later, they “got on a ship destined for Frisco [San Francisco], but they [the dockers] were on strike, so we finished up at Victoria, Vancouver Island,” where they spent two more weeks.
From there, the men were taken across Canada by train to New York, where they were loaded, this time in more comfortable conditions, onto the RMS Queen Mary for the last leg of his epic journey to Southampton. A short rail trip later and Kirkby was home, complete with a giant jar of Maxwell coffee he had bought in the US as a gift for his mother. It was late November 1945.
Now, 63 years on, Kirkby has come full circle and is back in Asia, returning to Taiwan for the first time since the end of the war for last week’s annual Remembrance Day ceremony at his former prison camp, where he paid his respects to his fallen comrades.
He had been meaning to return ever since 1998, when he found out that a monument was being built at the camp to the men who didn’t make it, but for one reason or another things didn’t fall into place until this year.
Speaking about his feelings on his return to the camp, Kirkby, in typically unassuming fashion, says, “It’s sad, when you know what’s happened there. It’s all there behind scenes as you might say. Unfortunate that such a lot of lads didn’t come back from there.”
“You’ve got to be a bit hard and let go, because if you worry too much about that sort of stuff you’ll go yourself,” he says with a stiff upper lip.
He may be able to let go, but he says he will never forgive the Japanese.
“I certainly don’t like [the Japanese], that’s for sure. The farther they are away from me the better. Let me put it that way,” he says.
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