Captive Fathers, Captive Children : Legacies of the War in the Far East

I first met Lizzie Oliver at the 2015 FEPOW Conference in Liverpool. She had completed her PhD the year before and was well on the way to publishing her book Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway. During the conference and since, she has been a great source of inspiration and advice about the nitty-gritty of the publication process. Thank you Lizzie. I must also make special mention of Clare Makepeace, who died in April 2019 at the young age of forty. Serendipitously, Mike Roper was the link between me and Clare: he had been her PhD external examiner. Mike put us in touch and, for four years or so, we were in contact by email. Eventually we met face-to-face, at the 2017 launch of her book Captives of War, a uniquely memorable and creative event that integrated music and performance. She was such a compassionate and empathetic historian, a warm, charming and bright person, and a hugely talented academic. Thank you Clare. My thanks go to the following friends for generously granting image permissions: Toby Norway for his father's painting on the cover, and Sally Grumbridge for Figure 2 Angels of Life and Figure 3 Prayers by the Kwae Noi. I must also thank the Thrale family and the Imperial War Museum for Figure 1 Executed for no Apparent Reason by Charles Thrale. This book would not have been possible without the influence of Keiko Holmes OBE and her many dedicated supporters, both here and in Japan, for organizing pilgrimages to remote POW camp sites across Japan. Her long-term commitment to individual ex-FEPOWs and their families, together with her efforts to promote reconciliation between British and Japanese communities at every level, is extraordinary. I must make particular mention of Jinsai Sugino, one of Keiko's volunteers, who has become a great friend and supporter of my research over the past few years. I also want to give special thanks to Yuka Ibuki, a member of the Prisoner of War Research Network Japan (POWRNJ), for inviting me to assist her with translating a range of war-related documents. Yuka and her husband Juji have been staunch friends for several years. Finally, not a word of this would have been written without the unwavering love and support of my family, in order of appearance they are ... my wife Lalitha, daughters Amanda and Julie, son-in-law Murray, and grandchildren Maya and Aden. ANT Actor Network Theory COFEPOW Children of Far East Prisoners of War CRU Civil Resettlement Unit ' A child is a hollow vessel with a thundering echo' 1 Somewhere in the heat and humidity of Java, my father, Edwin Smyth, was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army. It was the spring of 1942, and he was to spend the next three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war (POW). 2 Until his death in 1995 he remained steeped in his memories of this time, and his traumatic wartime experiences had a profound effect on me and on the wider family. After retiring from full-time employment, I began to research my father's time in the Far East. With the generous help of people in Britain, USA and Japan, I eventually discovered the name and the precise location of the prisoner of war camp in which he had been incarcerated, and from where he had made his daily trek to work in a coal mine. 3 Once armed with the location, I wanted to visit. And so, in 2010, my wife and I travelled to Japan for the first time, as part of a 'pilgrimage' of reconciliation. 4 During the course of these trips, and subsequently, I met many survivors of the FEPOW camps, 5 and many more of their children. 6 As a result, I became intrigued by why it was that, as adults, many of us are still gripped by our fathers' captivity, tenaciously researching the facts, and becoming active in remembrance events. In short, why is it that seven decades after the war, we remain fascinated by what our fathers went through? And why does this fascination hold so much emotional sway after all these years? To finally answer these questions, I edged my way towards a PhD. In spite of -or perhaps because of my advancing years -I decided to take the plunge, and got the research underway in 2013. While immersed in the fieldwork, I clearly recall noticing that I had set myself the target of completing the PhD in three-anda-half years, the same length of time my father had spent as a prisoner of war. Just a coincidence, but as someone deeply invested in this traumatic history, it was a feature that gave me moments for pause and reflection, as well as placing questions of temporality firmly in the forefront of my mind. Loss lay at the heart of my research: behind my decision to begin, present in all the interviews, and baldly manifest in the barbaric realities of war. As a Prologue Prologue xv child, I knew that something important was missing from my life; I felt I had lost a father. And I knew, albeit vaguely, that this was somehow connected with his being a prisoner of war. Uncommonly as it turned out, my father was one of those POWs who spoke freely -perhaps too freely -about his captivity. As a young boy, I was in no fit state to listen, to really listen. The history went into hiding. I shut out all the stories, closed my ears to the arguments, and waited for sixty years to pass. xvi ## Tell me about your early childhood memories ... Well, one morning -when I was about seven -my father was in a really bad mood, very tense. He grabbed and pulled at the tablecloth. The breakfast crockery and cutlery that my mother had just laid out crashed to the floor, a cup smashing against the fireplace. This was going to be worse than usual. I curled up tight in my armchair, hands over my ears, eyes shut tight. By that time, I had learned that if I didn't react in any way at all, his outburst might end more quickly. My mother started to cry, got to her knees and gathered up the broken crockery into her apron, wiping her eyes as she did so. She was accustomed to this, as was I, but the familiarity didn't lessen the tension and distress. My father stood over her, shouting at her. 'Why did you make me do that?' he screamed. 'You know this is your fault, don't you. Don't you?' My mother cowered silently, carefully skirting round my father, as she tried to collect the broken crockery. 'What a mess. Why can't you just tell me the truth. ' And so the argument went on -my father shouting, holding himself back from striking out. He never attacked me or my mother physically except for the one occasion when he kicked out at my mother's leg. His anger was because he believed that people were looking at him, laughing at his appearance. My mother's repeated attempts to challenge his irrational belief fell on deaf ears. When I was older -in my early teens -I would retaliate, argue back. But, my overwhelming memory of those times was that logical argument never, ever, won the day. Rows came to their end through mutual exhaustion, rather than any acceptance on my father's part. [An edited extract from the author's personal journal, 2009] As an only child with few friends, I had no one to talk to about these events. Forming the emotional background to these outbursts were my father's frequent recollections of Java and Japan, of his malaria, beriberi, dysentery and death. And his regular nightmares. The papers relating to his 30 per cent war pension acknowledged these medical conditions and also diagnosed 'psychoneurosis' , although the records never mentioned his odd and intractable belief, or the extent of the rows with my mother. Matters at home were made worse when I began to lose my hair at the age of eight. Over the next few months it all fell out. My father made desperate, yet ultimately futile, attempts to get my hair to regrow: osteopathy, spiritual healing at a local 'cult' , long-distance prayer from Harry Edwards, 1 prescribed steroid creams, numerous mail-order potions, and ultraviolet (UV) therapy at the local hospital and at home. As the years passed repeated failures grew into acceptance. Once a medical problem, I was now more of a social problem. Isolated at home, by my mid-teens I had abandoned school, despite fraught visits from the education welfare officer. My mother fended them off, while I listened in secret from the top of the stairs. In 1967, armed with no school qualifications at all, I still managed to squeeze into the local nurse-training school, courtesy of a good-hearted matron and the General Nursing Council's 'entrance test' which, in that era, gave a chance to those poor souls who had potential but no GCEs. My father's outbursts became less frequent as I got older but the background tensions were ever-present, as were his paranoid ideas about appearance. I should point out that he was a goodlooking man in his prime with no features that could possibly be construed as a reason for others to mock. At the age of seventy-five, my father still had Japan on his mind. In papers I discovered after his death, he had typed out extracts from Aidan MacCarthy's book A Doctor's War. As a POW in Nagasaki, MacCarthy had witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb, and he described in heart-wrenching detail how the city had been laid waste. The final sentence my father had copied out was 'Many had lost their hair' . 2 Underneath, in forceful handwriting, my father wrote (over his signature), 'I was in my Prison Camp (between Hiroshima and Nagasaki) under the effects of the atom bomb (although the bomb was the only thing that got us out!)' . For the rest of their lives both my mother and father claimed that the cause of my hair loss was my father's exposure to radiation in Japan. As far as I am aware there is no empirical evidence for this, but it was common (and frequently with good reason) for the survivors of the Far East war and their children to attribute subsequent medical ills to the effects of captivity. Searching for explanations for my father's behaviour, I grew to appreciate the profound and prolonged influence of life in the camps. His mother and sister told me once that before the war he had been rather touchy, stubborn, and awkward in company. Despite this he was a proud man with a strong work ethic, and a powerful drive to 'put food on the table' . After the war, these qualities led him to refuse the offer of a place in a Civil Resettlement Unit, within a life-course perspective: this integrative and interdisciplinary approach is my 'new direction' . Four interrelated themes remain active throughout this book: captivity; trauma; remembrance; and the psychosocial. Because oral history was the principal means of data collection in the research, I begin with a brief background. ## \*\*\* The flourishing of social democracy in the years following the Second World War provided the right conditions for the emergence of oral, and local, histories: the twin pillars of 'history from below' . 5 Oral history in its present guise of recorded interviews arose at a time when protracted trauma had placed memory centre stage in the lives of ordinary people. Rob Perks suggests that oral history in Britain was a much-needed corrective and radical alternative to the dominance of prevailing male elite perspectives on history, and became aligned with 'socialist, communist, and feminist' ideological positions. 6 In those early days, oral history was largely a 'recovery' history, a valuable means of plugging important gaps in the written historical record, such as the voices of the working classes and, more recently, those of ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ communities (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning). 7 One feature of my interviews was that the only criterion for inclusion in the research was that of having a father who had been a FEPOW. Therefore the background of participants cut across the divides of social class, gender and sexual orientation. Contemporary oral history enquires into a great diversity of issues, undertaken in a bewildering assortment of settings, and is employed by academics and amateurs alike. Radical changes in digital technology over the past thirty years have allowed methodological variations to suit different objectives, heralding major innovations both in content (the what) and process (the how) of the discipline. Much of this work has focused on finding new archival techniques, but equally significant is the effort to understand and exploit social media, and how everyday mobile devices, such as smartphones, can be used to enhance communications between interviewer and interviewee. 8 Oral history, then, has prospered within a broad social and cultural landscape which has allowed it to evolve reciprocally with wider developments in the field, and beyond, including a range of intellectual trends such as 'post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and psychoanalysis' . 9 The extent of the productive relationships that oral history has formed with other disciplines, methods and epistemologies is testimony to the work of luminaries Just how does trauma flow between generations? The research into intergenerational transmission of trauma divides into two main branches. There is an established strand of quantitative research that chases correlations between the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in fathers and in their children. 25 On the other hand, qualitative approaches such as psychoanalysis try to unravel how emotional and behavioural patterns enable trauma to pass between generations. 26 But trauma transmission may need no words at all, as Carol Kidron's ethnographic fieldwork spotlights. 27 In Chapter 2, Brenda describes how her father didn't speak about his captivity within the family, but regularly withdrew into their 'front room' for days on end. 28 In The Generation of Postmemory Marianne Hirsch introduces the influential concept of 'postmemory' , the term she uses to describe how memories are transmitted between generations, not only through family relationships, but also through wider discourses that include cultural products such as paintings, photographs and fiction. 29 'there are places in the social world where the laws of human behaviour rise very near the surface' , and I appeared to have found one such place. 41 When it comes to the disclosure of traumatic memories, timing matters. Daniel Bar-On emphasized how his interviews with Israeli families who had suffered in the Holocaust had to wait until the late 1980s, when 'the need to talk ... became greater than the need to maintain silence' . 42 Timing also mattered in my research. When I began in 2013, most former FEPOWs had died, and many of their children -themselves into middle age or beyond -were ready and willing to tell their stories. The timing was also propitious because the 'baby boomer' generation, into which most participants fell, was still largely healthy, and fully expected to remain so even after retirement. 43 With this 'second-wind' , many of the children had begun to discover or rediscover their fathers' wartime histories. Frequently social-media savvy, they were now hunting down the facts of their fathers' captivity, and in the process were able to exploit digital 'If you see any Japs ... don't shoot, the Dutch have capitulated!' With these words, W/Cmdr Gregson destroyed any illusions of salvation we might still have maintained. My companions and I looked at each other in dismay and disbelief. 7 Tens of thousands of young British men, many quite 'green' from a military point of view, suddenly found themselves in the hands of a battle-hardened army. Little imagination is needed to conjure up how they must have felt at that moment: demoralized, disorientated, angry, scared. Many had left Britain in crowded troopships in the winter of 1941, landed in the Far East early in 1942, and in March found themselves prisoners of the Japanese, in whose hands they would remain for the next three to four years. Some had barely engaged with the enemy. With tens of thousands of POWs on their hands, the Japanese military leaders soon discovered that ruthless efficiency in military combat was no preparation for dealing with these unanticipated and unwanted logistical challenges. 8 Legally, prisoners of war were a distinct group, their rights protected by the 1929 International Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War ('Geneva Convention'). Although Japan had signed the convention, they had not ratified it. Despite Japan informing the Allies of its 'intention to correspondingly apply' the principles of the convention, the Minister for the Army, General Tojo, explained at his war trial that 'necessary revisions of the principles of international conventions could be made in accordance with the demands of the immediate situation and in accordance with Japan's domestic law. ' 9 Within the Japanese military, the task of looking after the FEPOWs was deemed very low status; indeed it was 'despised' . 10 The Japanese military ethic was derived from Bushidō, the 'way of the samurai' , whose codes of honour demanded unwavering loyalty to the emperor, and viewed any form of surrender with contempt. 11 Against such a background, and the unexpectedly large and dispersed contingent of slave labour they had on their hands, it was perhaps 'It was just ill-health all the time' Derek described how his father's ill-health affected the family's life in ways that were low-key, yet pervasive and cumulative. Derek had a pronounced stammer Why are the daughters and sons of Far East prisoners of war still captivated by the stories of their fathers? What is it that compels so many of the children, after so many years, to search for the details of their fathers' captivity? And how, over the decades, have they come to terms with their childhood memories? In his book Terry Smyth treads new ground by examining the processes through which the children's memory practices came to be rooted in the POW experiences of their fathers. By following a life course approach, and a psychosocial methodology, the book demonstrates how memory and trauma were 'worked into' the social and cultural lives of individual children, and explores how the relationship between their inner psychic worlds and subsequent memory practices unfolded against a challenging and morally ambivalent geopolitical background. The book invites readers to engage with the author in a journey of exploration and self-reflection, with elements of auto-ethnography adding richness to the text. Enlivened by interview extracts, case study material and ethnographic observations, this work opens up fresh and ambitious perspectives on the personal legacies of war. Cover 1 Contents 6 List of figures 7 List of tables 8 Note on cover 9 Foreword by Sir Tim Hitchens, KCVO, CMG 10 Acknowledgements 12 List of abbreviations 14 Prologue 15 Introduction 18 1 Life in captivity 40 2 Bringing war into the home 62 3 Remembering and commemorating 88 4 Finding meaning in memories 110 5 Home as a site of remembrance 132 6 The search for military family histories 152 7 Place and pilgrimage 170 Afterword: A reflective coda 190 Notes 201 Select bibliography 253 Index 254