The Ient Family: Family History

American Bombers

By this this stage of the war, we hear American bombers coming over, bombing and machine gunning and all the rest of it. After the war was over, I got a postcard from a colleague. It was of a photograph that he’d taken of the camp from a distance.

Chick then describes the scene on the postcard:

There’s a mark down the middle, that’s where it got creased, so don’t take any notice of that. There’s the camp up and down there, there’s the Inland Sea down there, there’s a gantry. We were in these huts, and you can see PW, meaning prisoner of war, on top of our buildings. This was the cook house, and you can see round there in the bottom right, this is where the Yanks came and bombed and machine gunned us. Oh, we had a great war, we’re fighting everybody!

Laughter.

For the Japanese, it was pretty pointless taking our names and addresses. So what they did, they took group photographs of us, no names of course, took us in groups of 4 or 8 [showing a photograph].

In this photograph they took of us, we are shown with Japanese uniforms on. I’m in there somewhere.

Turning to another item, Chick says: This over here is a leaflet that was dropped by air to tell you that the war was over. This here is a photograph, aerial photograph from possibly 25,000 feet, of the camp and dockyard before they came over and bombed us. Here is my work card which you got stamped every day. If you worked you got tuppence a day [2 old pence = less than 1 pence in today’s money] and you got two cigarettes a day; if you worked. If you didn’t work you got nothing and half rations.






Yes, they came over and they bombed the shipyard. This was the most glorious sight you’d ever seen! Sounds stupid, but here are the Japanese scurrying about all over the place getting ready for the bombers coming over, and there’s 100 prisoners of war with our shirts off and cheering them on! Bloody bombs dropping all over the place. And of course a lot of the Japanese blamed us for the bombing. They said it was our fault, as we directed the bombs over there.

Here’s a bit of a cartoon drawn by the camp artist, and this is it, I’ll pass this around.

This is showing – that’s me, it’s supposed to be me, there’s the key I was telling you about, there’s the padlocks, that’s the lookout there, this is the fella filling the bag, and you turn over, you walk back to the camp with your bag sticking out of your belly like that, out there!

Laughter.

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