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Community Compass: INTERVIEW: POWs honored by long-time resident

Tuesday, Nov 11, 2008, Page 4

“People have come to call me the Indiana Jones of Taiwan because I’m always groveling around in prison camps looking for stuff from 65 years ago.” — Michael Hurst

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Taipei Times: How and why did you get involved with the POW association?

Michael Hurst: When I was a little boy I found out that I lost uncles in both the first and second World Wars. Ever since I had always wanted to do something tangible to say thank you to my uncles and the family … It came to our knowledge in late 1996 following a Remembrance Day service in Taipei about the camp in Jinguashi [金瓜石, in Taipei County] and the copper mine and the prisoners that suffered so terribly down there, and in particular a Canadian doctor, Ben Wheeler, who was the camp doctor and saved the lives of literally hundreds of the men. So I sort of jumped at it in my position of vice president of the Canadian Society and said to the trade office director, ‘I’ll take it to the board as I’d like to do something to say thanks to the veterans.’

So in January 1997 we formed the Kinkaseki [Japanese for Jinguashi] Memorial Committee with myself and representatives of the Australian, New Zealand and British trade offices. We organized a memorial service in May 1997 to show a film produced in 1980 by Dr Wheeler’s daughter called a War Story and invited former Jack Edwards, a Taiwan POW who lived in Hong Kong at the time to come over and take us on a tour of the site at Jinguashi.

It was very successful and we thought it would be appropriate to erect a memorial at the gate of the camp. So we reformed the committee and by November 1997 we had the memorial built and had it dedicated later that month. The project generated a lot of interest in the community, but several people involved were leaving their postings or moving on and I thought we ‘can’t just build a memorial without finding survivors and letting them know what’s been done in their memory.’

So I reformed what became the Taiwan POW Memorial Society in 1999 ... Ever since it’s been like throwing a stone in the pond and the ripples have been coming back. We’ve had great support from Taiwanese and expats and managed to contact over 300 former Taiwan POWs.

What do I get out of it? Well it’s the joy of knowing that you can help these men to know that they’re not forgotten and to have the respect and friendship of these heroes is more than reward enough.

TT: Can you tell us how many POWs were situated in Taiwan, their nationalities, the number of camps, their locations and what the POWs were doing?

Hurst: In Taiwan there were 4,344 POWs the Japanese had listed as resident for some amount of time. We started off with knowledge of maybe three or four camps ... but in all there were 15 camps on the island. There was Jinguashi, or Taiwan camp No.1. There was the main camp in Taipei, in Dazhi (大直); a camp in Pingtung (屏東); there was another south of Taichung. Hualien had one; there was a small temporary camp at Yuli (玉里) on the east coast; a camp down at Baihe (白河), south of Chiayi; a camp opened at Muzha, which contained all the very senior officers and governors of all the colonies the Japanese had overrun. Then later on in 1944 as the Japanese tried to move the POWs out of Taiwan, there were short-term camps at Yuanlin (員林) and Douliou (斗六).

They also moved men into the hills about six miles [9.6km] south of Sindian and there was a satellite camp in Waishuanghsi (外雙溪) for two or three months at the end of the war. Taiwan, at that time, had the creme de la creme of the POWs, all the governors of all the conquered territories, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, the Straits Settlements, Guam, the Dutch East Indies; all the highest ranking officers from the Dutch, American, Australian and British armies.

The men worked in mining, sugar cane fields, farming, and other tasks such as digging riverbed flood diversion channel by hand.

There were only two Canadian POWs, two South Africans attached to the British Army. The largest number were British, the second-highest group were Americans, the Dutch had about 137 and the Australians had 59.

People have come to call me the Indiana Jones of Taiwan because I’m always groveling around in prison camps looking for stuff from 65 years ago.

TT: You were recently in the UK on a POW-related trip. Can you tell me a little about it?

Hurst: A British lady who was here in November last year e-mailed me a couple of months later and said her daughter and she would like to organize a reunion. We spent seven or eight months putting things together and from Sept. 12 to Sept. 15 in Newcastle we had a reunion with 12 POWs and a number of wives and widows and family members … over 60 people. We hadn’t had another all Taiwan reunion since 1999 so it was really good.

I wanted to go and be part of it so I went and then later visited POWs in Scotland and Yorkshire. Then, during the last week, for a number of months we had been raising money towards a memorial for George Harrison who was a medic in the mine at Kinkaseki. He was a very humble and unassuming man, even though he had been one of the heroes of the camp in saving so many men’s lives. But when he died he really never made any provisions for any kind of plaque.

We didn’t feel this was right so we raised about £1,500 pounds and we bought a beautiful teak bench with bronze plaques commemorating George and his wife and all the Taiwan POWs. It was a full and active three weeks of reminiscing with the men, most of who are in their late 80s or 90s.

Some of them are shut-ins, they can’t get out to the reunions so I try to focus on those chaps as the ones to see. It was quite emotional because they know as well as I do that this may be the last time we ever actually meet.

TT: You were awarded an MBE in 2002. How did that come about?

Hurst: A got a real surprise in May 2002 when the British Trade Office director called me and informed me that the Queen in her Golden Jubilee honors list had decided to bestow the MBE on me for my work with the POWs and for the work we did in promoting reconciliation between the POWs and the [Taiwanese] guards. But mostly the work we’ve done tell in telling the POWs’ stories.

At first I didn’t believe it … I went to Buckingham palace in October, and although all the correspondence said that the Queen would do this and the Queen would do that, when the time came she was actually on a tour of Canada and it was Prince Charles that gave me the MBE. It was a fantastic occasion. I don’t do much else with the medal except wear it on Remembrance Day.

It’s still hard to believe that [anyone notices] way out here in far off Taiwan. But somebody did I guess.

TT: World War II ended more than 60 years ago and the surviving POWs are very old men. Will the services continue after the last of them have passed away?

Hurst: We have no plan to stop. Once we got Remembrance Day going after 1996. I pledged that as long as I’m in Taiwan I will do something every year at Jinguashi and have some kind of ceremony, big or small.

In 1999 the question was raised what happens if I did leave Taiwan or something happened to me. So the four trade offices [UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada] formed a Commonwealth Committee and we work together every year to put the program on. Should I leave Taiwan then there would be a viable entity to ensure some kind of ceremony goes on.



More details about this year’s “Remembrance Weekend” can be found at www.powtaiwan.org.

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