British WWII POWs remember life as prisoners in Taiwan

William Roy, Stan Wood and Stan Vickerstaff were part of a group of six former POWs who flew to Taiwan to participate in the Nov. 12-16 series of POW commemoration activities, and while here they revisited the POW camps in which they were held in Taipei City's Dazhi District and Xindian and Jinguashi in Taipei County.

The annual event is organized by Michael Hurst, MBE and director of the Taiwan Prisoner of War Camps Memorial Society, which was founded in 1997 to unearth the stories of World War II POWs in Taiwan.

“I don't think I will come again because it's a long and tiring journey, but I'm glad that I've come,” said 91-year-old Wood, who was held at the Kinkaseki POW camp in Jinguashi.

“I never wanted to come back. I wanted to have nothing to do with it. I drew a curtain down so as to not have any memory about it,” Wood said while recalling the hardships the POWs suffered and the atrocities they were subjected to by their captors.

From 1942-1945, Taiwan, then a colony of Japan, had 14 POW camps around the island housing Allied soldiers captured in the Pacific war. The Kinkaseki Camp, located nearby the copper and gold mine at Jinguashi, was the most notorious, with prisoners continually being brought from other camps to work as slave labor in the mine.

According to the Taipei POW Camps Memorial Society in Taiwan, 10 percent of some 4,300 POWs held in Taiwan were killed or died in captivity, compared with just 1-2 percent of those captured by the Germans and Italians, the other Axis powers.

The POWs suffered constant threat of death, disease, starvation and other ill treatment.

Vickerstaff recalled that in November 1942, when they were brought to Taiwan from Singapore, the Japanese had civilians with children standing along the road holding their noses as a sign of disrespect to witness the deplorable condition of the British POWs, who had arrived after a three-week journey on a prison ship.

“The idea was that the Japanese were trying to humiliate us. They had schoolchildren watching us. It was all a big propaganda exercise for the Japanese,” said Vickerstaff, who was attending the remembrance ceremony for the fourth time.

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