Reflections on POWs on the 80th anniversary of the Second World War – views from a dissertation student

In the wake of the 80th anniversary of the Second World War, this blog post by Bella Churchward, a recent History graduate at Cardiff, reflects on her dissertation supervised by Helena Lopes and the personal connection it held through my great-grandfathers.

As Bella writes…

My interest in military history and the Second World World (1939-45) started from a young age. Growing up in a military family, I attended remembrance parades and ceremonies, learned about WWII through my father’s passion for military history, and witnessed the realities of his own regular deployments throughout my childhood.

As I grew older, my mother began writing memoirs about our family’s past. Through this, I learned more about my great-grandfather, John ‘Ted’ Nash, a medical orderly in the 2nd South Staffordshire Regiment. He fought in the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944, was captured by the German army, and held as a Prison of War (POW) in Germany until April 1945.

Image of my great-grandfather Ted (second on the left, with his hands in the air, not looking at the camera) found in the Battle of Arnhem, page 8, Pitkin Publishing 1998- as he was captured by the Germans (taking the photo)

While I knew that I wanted to study the history of the Second World War for my dissertation, I initially struggled to choose a topic. The idea came after my father revealed that his grandfather had also been a POW. Cyril Churchward, a Naval painter, aboard HMS Exeter, was captured after the ship was sunk in the Java Sea on March 1st, 1942, and was held in Makassar camp, Indonesia, until August 1945. While Ted’s wartime experiences were preserved through letters, photographs, and his eventual reveal later in life of his experiences, Cyril never spoke of his captivity. His silence meant his story remained largely unknown to us.

A substantial amount has been written on the experiences of Prisoner of War, but I chose to focus my dissertation on those held under Japanese captivity. With only limited information about my great-grandfather Cyril, I felt a responsibility to understand what he, and other POWs in the Far East, endured, and why their experiences were often too painful to recount.

Camp details on a report saying where Cyril Churchward was captured and what POW camp he was in. (we have no pictures of him sadly)

My father described that Cyril suffered annual malarial relapses years after repatriation, walked with a permanent limp from an unknown injury during captivity, and could not bear to hear or see any news of Japan on the TV or radio. I compared what I learned about Cyril from my father, with primary materials such as memoirs, National Archive wartime records, interviews, and images to create a broader study of the treatment and experiences of POWs in the Far East.  Drawing on memoirs such as Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man, Alistair Urquhart’s The Forgotten Highlander, and the War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, I began to piece together the conditions faced by Allied POWs under Japanese captivity.

My research showed the physical hardships POWs endured, such as through malnutrition, disease, forced labor, and violence. I placed Japan’s treatment of POWs within a wider wartime context by comparing it with that of Germany, Britain, and the United States. I also explored the long-term psychological and physical impacts of captivity, as well as the postwar responses of both Allied and Japanese governments. The enduring suffering decades after repatriation struck me, as Lomax admitted “I was still fighting the war in those years of peace” (Lomax, The Railway Man, 222).

By the end of the war in 1945, over 140,000 Allied POWs had been captured by Japan, with approximately 35,756 dying in captivity. Prisoners were starved, suffering severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, and had little access to medical care, causing even minor wounds to become septic. Most deaths were caused by tropical diseases such as dysentery, cholera, tropical ulcers, diphtheria and malaria, illnesses that could have been prevented with adequate treatment. Those forced into labour worked in brutal conditions, and were transported in crammed trains and “hell ships”, where cases of vampirism and cannibalism occurred due to extreme dehydration. They faced sadistic punishments and executions, including beheadings, frequent beatings, and solitary confinement.

‘A hospital ward in Singapore showing members of the 8th Division released from the Changi Prisoner-of-War camp at Singapore. All were suffering from malnutrition’, 1945, Australian War Memorial, 019199.

As I uncovered the inhumane conditions endured by these prisoners, my dissertation research proved far more emotional than I had anticipated. My aim was to show that incidents of punishment, torture, starvation, and medical neglect, were not isolated, but part of a systemic practice across Japanese POW camps in the Far East. My research also taught me of the immense solidarity and courage amongst POWs, who showed extraordinary bravery in unimaginable wartime conditions.

My personal connection to my great-grandfathers, Cyril and Ted, drove me to gain a greater understanding of the experiences of POWs. I am grateful to have learnt about Ted’s experiences, allowing me to feel connected to him and understand more fully what he endured. I feel, to this day, a deep sadness that Cyril was never able to open up, never able to speak of what he endured, or confide in anyone. I can only imagine the internal suffering and trauma he carried throughout the remainder of his life.

Thus, as I mentioned in my dissertation: I hope to have honored Cyril’s resilience, as well as that of all Allied POWs under Japanese captivity, by giving voice and understanding to the suffering that he could not express in life. This work stands as a small act of remembrance, through recognising their endurance in the face of such immense suffering.