Irish POW in Japan didn’t know it was VJ Day until the end of August

The founder in 1950 of Ballinamallard’s internationally-acclaimed Fisher Engineering steel fabrication business was born in 1922 on a farm near Newtowngore in County Leitrim.

He joined the RAF in 1941, volunteered for a foreign posting, and was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is VJ Day 75, the 75th anniversary of Victory over Japan on August 15, 1945, three and a half years after the Japanese overran the aptly-christened ‘Gibraltar of the East’.

Since Tommy Fisher passed away in 2001 his family has cherished and treasured his memoir, recorded in conversations and written down in 2000 by Helen Stuart (nee Nawn), a family friend.

Tommy died on August 22, 2001, six months after his son Bertie, and two of Bertie’s children, Mark and Emma, were killed in a helicopter accident.

Wednesday’s extracts from Mr Fisher’s memoir ended with the young RAF-man and his comrades ambushed on a train bound for an evacuation ship on the coast of Java.

Some escaped, others were bayonetted to death by the Japanese, and some, including Tommy, were captured and ordered to lie in a rice field.

With no food and constantly guarded by a heavy machine gun they lay motionless all night, and the next day, and in a native shack for three more days, whilst some of the wounded died. Tommy buried his chum Micky Wilson “in a small grave in a corner of a rice field.”

Finally they were given “a big flat pan and a bag of rice” by the Japanese, who showed Tommy how to cook.

They were taken to Tjilatjap docks where “we worked long days and they treated us like slaves,” Tommy recounted in his memoir.

Then to Bandong prison camp, where men were regularly “beaten up, some of them badly, often for very little reason…the Japanese very often just invented a reason.”

Starvation was a constant torture.

POWs were put in cages in blazing sunshine for three days at a time “or they made you dig a hole in the sand in which you were buried up to your neck with only your head exposed.”

Some POWs were beheaded with swords.

After three months in Bandong Tommy and about 700 POWs were shipped under horrendous conditions to Singapore’s notorious Changi prison camp (on the site of today’s Singapore International Airport) where “a lot of ill treatment and atrocities took place.”

Three months later they were brutally crushed into a filthy, rat-infested ship for a three-week journey through a typhoon to Japan. The toilet was a bucket on a rope.

The ship’s hatches were battened down ensuring the prisoners would go down with her if the vessel was attacked and sank,

“It was three weeks of absolute hell,” said Tommy.

Their first POW camp in Japan was Wakiyama on the south coast, scraping raw steel for building ships.

Tommy ‘double-timed’ as cook.

The camp toilet was a wooden plank with a hole in it “underneath which was a strategically placed bucket…the prisoners had to carry this to the garden to fertilise the vegetables.”

The camp was “always plagued with diarrhoea or dysentery” said Tommy, and the POWs pushed their dead comrades to the crematorium in a wooden cart.

The bathroom (for 700 men!) was a tub about 20 feet square, filled with heated water once a fortnight.

The POW’s menu was rice with occasional vegetable-tops and odd bits of fish.

“We saw meat on only a couple of occasions,” Tommy recalled, explaining that the Japanese kept most of the POW’s fortnightly Red Cross parcels for themselves.

After Wakiyama they were moved to Ikuno Camp to work in the copper mines in the mountains near Osaka.

“Poor food, bullying and beating continued till the middle of August 1945 when we began to be aware that something ‘big’ was happening on the outside,” Tommy recounted.

Their Japanese guards became increasingly agitated by “vapour trails of American planes which had come over to bomb Japan.”

And they could hear huge explosions in the distance.

On August 28, 1945 a large American bomber roared up the valley.

“As it flew over our camp it gave the ‘wings up’ salute” Tommy recounted.

The bomber flew round again and dropped leaflets, one (which Tommy kept - reproduced here) explained that the Japanese had surrendered, POWs would be released as soon as possible and food parcels would be dropped.

Soon they were on the train to the coast and, well-washed “in great big baths”, they boarded ship to Manilla, via Hawaii to Vancouver, by train across Canada and by ship from Halifax to Southampton.

Tommy Fisher’s extraordinary wartime tale ended “all the boys from Eire were issued with civilian suits, and so we set off for home.”

We don’t know what type of US Air Force bomber dropped the leaflet which Tommy kept, but as well as tomorrow’s VJ Day 75 commemorative flypast over Belfast by the RAF’s Red Arrows, a US Navy Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft is formally honouring local veterans with a flypast over Enniskillen at noon, subject to weather conditions.