The Ient Family: Family History

Innoshima

This little ferry took us to this little island called Innoshima on the Inland Sea. There was 100 of us, 40 of us on our feet and 60 on their back with all the diseases I just mentioned. There were no doctors, no pills, no powders, no nothing, so I mean what can you do? The cure for dysentery as far as the Japs was concerned, was to go to the cook house and grind up the wood and make charcoal out of it. Grind up the charcoal, and swallow that! The charcoal was supposed to ‘bind’ us, to stop the dysentery! That’s their cure!

As I say 40 of us on our feet, 60 on our backs. We did the best we could but started to lose a few blokes. Now, as I say, we’re only kids, 20, 21, 22. We had read that you can sit in a corner and give up hope and die. Now I never believed this. But it happened. If you think about it, it’s the first time we’ve been away from home, there was no newspapers, there was no letters, no Red Cross, we didn’t know where we were, no concept of how the war was going, how long it was going to last, when do we get out of this, how long is it going to be and so forth. So they just gave up hope. They sat in the corner and they died! Not all of them died that way, but three or four they gave up the ghost and they just faded away. They just stopped eating, got dysentery and died. I don’t know why it is, but if you’ve got dysentery and you’ve started to hiccup, a hiccup was the first sign that you were going to die.

We learnt that very quickly! If a man with dysentery got hiccups he was finished. There’s only one man I ever knew out there who, with dysentery, with hiccups, who lived, but the rest of them got hiccups then we knew that nothing more could be done.

This went on and after about three or four weeks then they started forming working parties. They marched us from the camp about 3 to 4 miles away to the docks, the shipyard. They lined us up and they picked out the six biggest blokes – I was one of them – and they gave us shovels and from then on, for the next three and a half years, we got all the dirty, stinking, filthy jobs there was to do in the dockyard. Cleared out engine rooms, boiler rooms, dry docks, coal havens. Because it was an island, there was nothing on the island at all, everything had to be imported. Coal was very precious as far as the Japs were concerned; we  couldn’t use coal in the camp, we had to use wood. For the first year the Jap guard stood over with rifles and bayonets fixed; prodding us with bayonets and knocking us about generally. Morale was very low. Up at 5 o’clock every morning, did your physical jerks from 5 til quarter past; then a cold water shave, if you had a razor blade. My razor blade lasted three years. We sharpened it by firstly putting the razor blade in a drop of water and then ran it round the inside of a tumbler [glass]. That is the way you sharpened your blade [demonstrating]. It lasted three and a half years, saved a fortune!

Laughter.

On top of that all our hair had to be shaven off, everybody was bald, which was a good thing really, we didn’t like it to start with. I mean the lads with curly hair were crying, it doesn’t matter about being a prisoner of war, they get that curly hair cut off they were in tears. Anyway, it was explained to me later on that if you’ve got curly hair to start with, when it regrows it will grow curly, because if you’ve got curly hair you’ve got a fault in the skull. Apparently, as far as I understand, inside the skull there’s follicles, and the hair comes from these follicles, and if the holes don’t line up you get a kink in the hair like that and that’s how you get a curly hair.

Laughter.


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