Bernie W. (bernie2260) reviewed The Suez Maru atrocity: Justice denied! : the story of Lewis Jones, a victim of a WW2 Japanese hell-ship on + 119 more book reviews
Review Written By Bernie Weisz Historian Pembroke Pines, Florida U.S.A. November 21, 2010 contact: E mail/BernWei1@aol.com
Title of Review: "Japanese Hell Ships:An Example Of The Lowest Depths Of Man's Inhumanity To Man Under The Most Appalling Conditions" Allan Jones, the author of "The Suez Maru Atrocity-Justice Denied!" wrote this book for one reason only, the least of which is acclaim or monetary gain. Jones succinctly explains his reason in the opening pages of this hard to obtain book as follows: "By the very existence of this book, my father, Lewis Jones, continues to live. Every time that someone reads about his life-no matter how sad and unfortunate it was, his memory cannot fade."Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War Certainly it must have been a grueling process to both research and write this book about his father, British Gunner Lewis Jones, who through unfortunate circumstances of fate became along with 547 of his comrades a victim of a cold-blooded and unpardonable Japanese World War II war crime. The perpetrators of this atrocity cleverly concealed their culpability and evaded persecution to the extreme indignation of Allan Jones as well as other surviving family members. Jones goes out of his way to historically explain how Japan went from World War I signatory to the 1907 "Hague Convention" which spelled out rules regarding the rights and responsibilities of belligerents in regard to prisoners of war and their treatment to declining to ratify in 1929 the "Geneva Convention."
The "Geneva Convention" specifically spelled out how in the case of capture, POWS must be humanely treated, not worked excessively, be maintained by their captors with proper rations, adequate quarters and sufficient clothing, and not be excessively worked or engaged in any toil associated with the operations of war. The main provision was Article 23, which forbade a nation from killing or wounding a POW who has laid down their arms and surrendered. Just four years after this refusal, Japan in 1933 initiated it's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," a front for the Japanese aggressive policy towards China, eventually quitting the League of Nations altogether. Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War IIAs 1942 ended, Japan was warring with Great Britain, America, the Netherlands and all British Commonwealth countries, adapting as standard policy barbarism and maltreatment of anyone taken prisoner of war. Jones puts forth frightening statistics to back this up. Being a Japanese POW, a captive of the "Rising Sun" had a 5 times greater risk of perishing than being a Nazi POW. Jones went further in his research: "After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners, of whom more than a quarter died in captivity. By the end of the war, of the 300,000 total POW's captured by the Japanese, 100,000 were already dead when the day of liberation dawned. It was said that if the war had lasted another year, there would not have been a single POW left alive."
Jones initial history lesson builds up to what was done to his father, Lewis Jones, who along with hundreds of thousands of others was exploited illegally as a Japanese labor source for armaments, fuel industries and the wider war effort against the Allies. Ships from Hell: Japanese War Crimes on the High SeasPOWs were force-marched or ferried in unfit, dilapidated oceanic "hell ships" from place to place around the conquered territories as well as back to the Japanese mainland. Since these "hell ships" were unmarked to indicate that they were Japanese, or carrying POWS, they were prime "friendly fire" targets to Allied submarines and aircrafts. Allan Jones lost his father in 1943, when he was three years old. While it is impossible to determine whether it was the former or ladder along with 547 of his comrades, Lewis Jones was either drowned or killed while en route aboard the "Suez Maru", a Japanese prison Hell Ship. A hell ship was a ship with extremely harsh living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew used by the Imperial Japanese Navy to transport Allied POW's out of areas such as the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore during World War II. The POWs were taken to Japan, Taiwan, Manchuria, or Korea to be used as forced labor.
As Allied forces closed in with victories in the battle of the Coral Sea and Midway, the Japanese began transferring POWs by oceanic transport. Similar to conditions on the "Bataan Death March", prisoners were often crammed into inhumane cargo holds with little air, food or water for journeys that lasted weeks. Many died due to asphyxia, starvation or dysentery. Some POWs in the heat, humidity, lacking oxygen, food, and water became delirious and unresponsive to their environment. Many men became insane and crawled about in the absolute darkness of these hell ship holds armed with knives, attempting to kill their fellow prisoners in order to drink their blood. Some POW's resorted to canteens that were filled with urine and swung them in the dark. Holds were so crowded and interlocked with POW's that the only movement that was possible was over the heads and bodies of others. Allan Jones wrote this account with designs of expressing a personal epitaph to his father. However, in his research, Jones's work evolved into a full accounting of the "Suez Maru" sinking, an unpardonable and unpunished transgression against man and the rules of warfare.Richard Kidder: WWII Survivor: Manila to Bataan. To Corregidor. To Cabanatuan POW . To a Hell Ship. To Umeda Bunsho POW in Osaka. To Tsuraga POW. To Home, Alive. Jones final conclusion was as follows: "Not only had my father been a POW of the Japanese, interned at one of the worst labor camps established in the Indonesian Molluccean Islands, but he had been a victim of "friendly fire,' drowned when the ship on which he was being transported was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine."
Lewis Jones's body was never recovered from the sea. Instead, he is memorialized on the walls of "The Kranji War Memorial" in Singapore along with another 24,000 soldiers and airmen who lost their lives at the hands of the Japanese and has no known grave. It was there in March of 1997, seeing his father's name inscribed on the wall that Allan Jones would both write his father's story as well as expose the depravity of the Japanese hell ship system, focusing in particular on the ship his father met his maker on, the "Suez Maru." Why does the student of history have to fervently search to find out about the Lewis Jones's and hell ships of World War Two? Are their deaths any less important than those lost at "Pearl Harbor or Guadalcanal?" Jones proposes the following reason for the absence in most history texts of this sordid W. W. II occurrence: "The trouble is that the nature of war being what it is, with thousands of men engaged in a struggle of epic and global proportions, the personal experiences of these ordinary men have been submerged beneath the biggest stories of the major engagements and the grand strategies, as well as of the prominent personalities, the generals, the admirals and the politicians. Thus, the ordinary men have become the unsung heroes of these epic times. But their story deserves to be told."
Jones claims in this book that while he was growing up, he never felt a sense of being different because he grew up fatherless and as an only child. Commenting further, Jones wrote: "I suppose that many war widows later remarried so that the otherwise fatherless youngsters grew up with step brothers and step sisters. But just as many, and my mother was one such, never remarried because they were quite unable to contemplate the possibility of feeling the same degree of love and devotion for another man."Forgotten MenAs Jones aged, reminders of his father began to disappear. Jones lamented: "Gradually, those few relatives and friends who hold the intimate secrets I so earnestly needed to recover have died too, taking with them the grave irreplaceable parts of this vital biological jigsaw." The final motivating iota that compelled Jones to write his father's story was his two children, Lindsey and Paul. As such, Jones asserted: "All at once, it seems, I was struck by their misfortune in not having a grandfather (in fact, of not having either grandfather, for my wife's father had also been a war casualty), a deprivation which mirrored my personal gulf. Thus it was, primarily on their behalf, that I embarked upon the quest to find the identity of the father that I had lost all those many years before." Most challenging to Jones, in an effort to reconstruct his father's final destiny, would be the period after 1942, where his father was captured by the Japanese. Clarifying the investigative block facing him, Jones wrote: "try as hard as I might, it was just impossible to obtain more than the bare minimum of first or second hand testimony or documentation and, of his incarceration, virtually nothing at all. Thus, as a result, I have been left with gaps in Lewis Jones's personal story which I now accept can never be filled." However, Allan Jones is entirely correct on the following premise: "By the very existence of this book, my father, Lewis Jones, continues to live. Every time that someone reads about his life-no matter how sad and unfortunate it was-his memory cannot fade."
Here are the essential facts in Lewis Jones life. He had a brother two years his senior, named Ben, and was born in the first year of the "war to end all wars", on September 7, 1914. As a result of a complicated pregnancy, his biological mother died two months after his birth, and his father, a coal miner, was unable to care for his two sons. Adopted by another family, Lewis lived with the "Garnworthy's" in New Tredegar, South Wales, eventually leaving on his own for London, where he met and married Doris Beales, Allan's mother. Allan was their only child, born on December 2, 1938. Ten months after Hitler invaded Poland and Neville Chamberlain declared that Britain was at war with Germany for the second time in 20 years, Lewis Jones was drafted on July 15, 1940 into the British Army. He was placed in the 6th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment in the Royal Artillery, and on November 11, 1941 embarked for overseas service on the "Monarch of Bermuda" converted luxury passenger liner. Initially headed in a convoy bound for Iraq in the Middle East to fight the Germans, his ship was diverted on December 7th, 1941, when Japanese forces, along with the action at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, attacked Kota Bahru in Malaya. Now, Britain declared war on Japan, and Lewis Jones was thoroughly in the mix.
The "Monarch of Bermuda" convoy arrived at Durban, South Africa on December 18, 1941. Lewis Jones and his regiment was transferred to the "Aorangi" for immediate departure to Singapore, where they arrived on January 13, 1942. Japan invaded the Allied stronghold of Singapore because it was the major British military base in South East Asia and nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the East". The fighting in Singapore lasted from 31 January 1942 to 15 February 1942.Belly of the Beast: A POW's Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival Aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hellship, the Oryoku Maru It resulted in the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, and the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history. About 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops became prisoners of war, joining 50,000 taken by the Japanese in the Malayan campaign. Lewis Jones was one of them. Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the ignominious fall of Singapore to the Japanese the "worst disaster" and "largest capitulation" in British history. Furthermore, The Japanese Army simultaneously invaded Malaya, Summatra and Java from Indochina, moving into northern Malaya and Thailand by amphibious assault on December 8th,1941. The Japanese were superior in close air support, armor, coordination, tactics and experience. Moreover, the British forces repeatedly allowed themselves to be outflanked, falsely believing that the jungles of these countries were impassable. The Allies had no tanks, which had put them at a severe disadvantage. The Japanese also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, which allowed swift movement of their forces overland through the terrain that was covered with thick tropical rainforest, albeit criss-crossed by native paths. Jones wrote that the Japanese had progressed through 490 miles of Malayan jungle in just 70 days traveling solely by bicycle. Although the Japanese had not brought bicycles with them (in order to speed the disembarkation process), they knew from their intelligence that suitable machines were plentiful and quickly confiscated what they needed from civilians and retailers.
Needless to say, after the surrender of British forces in March of 1942, Lewis Jones became a Japanese prisoner of war, and would experience ghastly horrors that would cost him his life. Doris Jones, from the time she was told her husband was missing, finally received notice on July 3, 1943 in an official letter from the British government stating that her husband was in fact a Japanese Prisoner of War. One postcard was received from Lewis in his own handwriting from Java "Camp Y" at Boei Glodok, Batavia, claiming that he was being treated well. Nothing could be farther from that truth, as the Japanese treated prisoners of war with loathsome contempt and indifference, completely disregarding their health, nutrition and safety. As a cheap source of labor, they were regularly beaten and in constant fear for their lives. As an example of Japanese brutality, Allan Jones gave this horrifying anecdote written by Jan Ales, a Dutch POW interned at Liang: "A striking instance of the Japanese mentality is the following. A friend of ours had died and we took him to the graveyard. The Japanese commander was present and before the crate with the dead body was lowered into the grave, the Japanese said, pointing to the crate: "You asked for meat. Take this and have your steak." Lewis Jones was held from April to November, 1943 at the Liang camp on the island of Ambon, where over a quarter of the prisoners died mostly from dysentery, cholera, beriberi, typhus and malaria. The prisoners slept on the floors of huts without roofs, unable to wash, bathe or have any basic medical treatment.Prisoners in Java: Accounts by Allied Prisoners of War in the Far East (1942-1945) Captured in Java With a diet that consisted of steamed rice, rodents and insects, the exposure, beatings and sadistic Japanese beatings were enough to test anyone's sanity. Men that were unable to work were denied food, thus worsening their conditions.
Thousands of POW's were killed in summary executions, forced marches or punishments meted out of sadistic Japanese whim. However, one form of torture that has received the smallest attention was the POW transportation by sea transport in ship cargo holds unfit even for livestock. These prison ships, dubbed "hell ships" transported huge POW workforces from one conquered territory to another, ranging from the islands of the Indonesian archipelago to the Japanese mainland itself. Most of these Japanese sea vessels were antiquated and vulnerable to submarine fire, as they sailed across the ocean unmarked. A prime target for Allied "friendly fire", when these dilapidated hell ships were sunk with POW jammed cargo holds, it resulted in total loss of life. Ship holds were usually locked down and upon attack and sinking, POWs were given no opportunity to escape. If they did escape, they were usually rammed, machine gunned or run over by their surviving Japanese captors. Lewis Jones had been induced to join a work draft to erect an airstrip at Liang (which turned out to never be used), and after surviving barbaric conditions, was assembled on November 22, 1943 for return to Java aboard an old cargo ship called the "Suez Maru" along with 547 others. The official Japanese line was that the POW's, as a result of severe malnutrition and systematic starvation were too weak to be of any value in Ambon and in Java they could recover from their illnesses. On November 25, 1943, the Suez Maru weighed anchor and departed across the Banda Sea for Java.
The hell ship was escorted by two Japanese Minesweeper ships and an aircraft located on the foredeck of the Suez Maru. One of the Japanese accompanying minesweepers peeled off, leaving the Suez Maru with only one Minesweeper who was not "pinging" (using it's sonar to search for Allied submarines in the area). Neither ship was "zigzagging," a naval procedure that made a ship a more difficult target for submarines. On November 29, a U.S. submarine, the "Bonefish" located the Suez Maru, with Lewis Jones in the ships prison hold. Surviving Bataan And Beyond: Colonel Irvin Alexander's Odyssey As A Japanese Prisoner Of War (Stackpole Military History Series)The American sub had departed her home base of Fremantle, Western Australia on November 22, 1943 on her 4th patrol. The Bonefish probably tracked The Suez Maru for about 20 minutes, poising itself for attack. At 8 am it fired it's 4 torpedoes at overlapping targets, i.e. the prison ship and the Minesweeper, with only the Suez Maru being hit. Allan Jones postulated that the majority of POWs that were unhurt came out of the hatches with their life jackets on. At gunpoint, they were ordered to go back down below the holds to rescue the injured. With the ship sinking, the heavy life rafts were thrown into the sea and POW's were jumping overboard. With the The Suez Maru finally disappearing below the surface taking down with her the dead and seriously wounded who were unable to make it above deck, the surviving POWs, between 200 and 250 of them, were floating in the sea. As they clung to the rafts, pieces of wood and debris while slowly drifting in the currents, the POW's watched in horror as the Japanese Minesweeper that dodged the Bonefish's torpedoes returned, cruising around in a large circle only picking up Japanese and Korean survivors.
After the last Japanese survivor was taken out of the sea, the commander of the Minesweeper, Captain Kawano, ordered the shooting of all Allied survivors. According to him, there existed standing orders of the Japanese Army that explicitly dictated that under no circumstances shall any Allied survivor fall into enemy hands. The Minesweeper cruised at a slow speed within 50 meters of the POWs, and shot them dead by machine gun and rifle fire. Knowing they are going to be shot, some POW's stood up on the debris they were clinging to and presented themselves as targets for the bullets. After the war, Jones proved that to conceal the murder of his father and the 547 others massacred men, a false version of the events was drafted.Defending the Enemy: Justice for the WWII Japanese War Criminals However, three years after the end of the war, a witness, Yoshio Kashiki, wrote a letter to General Douglas MacArthur and the War Crimes Investigators in Tokyo releasing the grim details of this ruthless murder. Allan Jones reprinted his confession in this book. In the wake of Kashiki's revelation, Allan Jones shows how there were 10 Suez Maru crew members and 12 Minesweeper crew members that escaped culpability by declaring that they were only following orders, showing no remorse whatsoever. The Japanese did face the music of their bellicosity with their own version of post world War II war crimes trials. Both the British and American public largely ignored the war crimes trials in Tokyo and throughout Asia in 1946-1949. Unlike the charismatic Nazi leadership, who were infamous throughout Europe, the Japanese leadership was not well known. That was due in part to the Allied propaganda, which did not want to criminalize the Emperor. If the Allied public saw him as a criminal, they would demand his removal, which would have prolonged the war. Hirohito's role in the conflict was not clear. He was generally seen as ineffectual, although there was some evidence offered in the 1990's that showed he was an active participant in the war planning. However, to maintain order in Japan, the Emperor was not indicted. The Men put on trial in 1947 and 1948 were the first of 20,000 civilian and military former leaders who had either killed prisoners or had participated in the vague crime of instigating the war.The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes While many would endure prison sentences of varying lengths, 900 were executed in trials around Asia. Those executed included Hideki Tojo, General Masaharu Homma, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and five others who were blamed for atrocities during the war. The Japanese argued that they were subject to war crimes trials simply because of the heinous crimes of their German allies, essentially claiming the Allies were finding them guilty by association.
Finally, the murderers of Allan Jones's father were never prosecuted. Jones gives several reasons for this, one of which was the fact that only a small percentage of the British public had been directly affected by the Japanese participation in W.W II. British interest in seeing the Japanese war criminals punished, in view of the 6 long years of British war restrictions, shortages and war weary disruptions, drastically fell away. In the late 1940's Britain was not in war crimes trials that depressed national spirits, but rather in light hearted diversions. Another reason was the Cold War. Political polarization divided the world into forces of Communistic Stalinism or industrialized pro Democracy. Since Western Germany and Japan now fell into the pro Western orbit and were key to post war economic recovery, the desire to punish the 22 Suez Maru accused waned. Along with the world's attention now on the 1950 Korean conflagration as well as the tense Chinese Communist vis a vis Taiwanese confrontation, a time limit was set of terminating willy-nilly all Japanese war crimes trials by September 30, 1949. This date passed, and with it the death blow to any justice meted out to the murderers of Allan Jones's father. However, Allan Jones succinctly does have the last words, at least in this book review. His reaction to those unpunished in the Suez Maru atrocity is as follows: "The certain punishment of the guilty, should act as a deterrent to both potential perpetrators and those national leaders who would encourage or condone such inhumane acts. Suspension of the judicial process relating to atrocities committed during war-time, for whatever reason-be it flawed clemency deals or an arbitrary cut-off date-only serves to have the reverse effect. It only undermines efforts to enforce better standards of human conduct and mutual respect, regardless of race, color, or creed. In such circumstances, the process is reduced to an empty gesture, discredited and disrespected, doing little or nothing, either now or in the future, to prevent repetitions of such outrages as the No Gun Ri incident, Oradour-sur-Glane, the Katlyn Forest massacre, Srebencia, Auschwitz or....the Japanese Hell Ships." Now....if only the world would listen!
Title of Review: "Japanese Hell Ships:An Example Of The Lowest Depths Of Man's Inhumanity To Man Under The Most Appalling Conditions" Allan Jones, the author of "The Suez Maru Atrocity-Justice Denied!" wrote this book for one reason only, the least of which is acclaim or monetary gain. Jones succinctly explains his reason in the opening pages of this hard to obtain book as follows: "By the very existence of this book, my father, Lewis Jones, continues to live. Every time that someone reads about his life-no matter how sad and unfortunate it was, his memory cannot fade."Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War Certainly it must have been a grueling process to both research and write this book about his father, British Gunner Lewis Jones, who through unfortunate circumstances of fate became along with 547 of his comrades a victim of a cold-blooded and unpardonable Japanese World War II war crime. The perpetrators of this atrocity cleverly concealed their culpability and evaded persecution to the extreme indignation of Allan Jones as well as other surviving family members. Jones goes out of his way to historically explain how Japan went from World War I signatory to the 1907 "Hague Convention" which spelled out rules regarding the rights and responsibilities of belligerents in regard to prisoners of war and their treatment to declining to ratify in 1929 the "Geneva Convention."
The "Geneva Convention" specifically spelled out how in the case of capture, POWS must be humanely treated, not worked excessively, be maintained by their captors with proper rations, adequate quarters and sufficient clothing, and not be excessively worked or engaged in any toil associated with the operations of war. The main provision was Article 23, which forbade a nation from killing or wounding a POW who has laid down their arms and surrendered. Just four years after this refusal, Japan in 1933 initiated it's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," a front for the Japanese aggressive policy towards China, eventually quitting the League of Nations altogether. Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War IIAs 1942 ended, Japan was warring with Great Britain, America, the Netherlands and all British Commonwealth countries, adapting as standard policy barbarism and maltreatment of anyone taken prisoner of war. Jones puts forth frightening statistics to back this up. Being a Japanese POW, a captive of the "Rising Sun" had a 5 times greater risk of perishing than being a Nazi POW. Jones went further in his research: "After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners, of whom more than a quarter died in captivity. By the end of the war, of the 300,000 total POW's captured by the Japanese, 100,000 were already dead when the day of liberation dawned. It was said that if the war had lasted another year, there would not have been a single POW left alive."
Jones initial history lesson builds up to what was done to his father, Lewis Jones, who along with hundreds of thousands of others was exploited illegally as a Japanese labor source for armaments, fuel industries and the wider war effort against the Allies. Ships from Hell: Japanese War Crimes on the High SeasPOWs were force-marched or ferried in unfit, dilapidated oceanic "hell ships" from place to place around the conquered territories as well as back to the Japanese mainland. Since these "hell ships" were unmarked to indicate that they were Japanese, or carrying POWS, they were prime "friendly fire" targets to Allied submarines and aircrafts. Allan Jones lost his father in 1943, when he was three years old. While it is impossible to determine whether it was the former or ladder along with 547 of his comrades, Lewis Jones was either drowned or killed while en route aboard the "Suez Maru", a Japanese prison Hell Ship. A hell ship was a ship with extremely harsh living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew used by the Imperial Japanese Navy to transport Allied POW's out of areas such as the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore during World War II. The POWs were taken to Japan, Taiwan, Manchuria, or Korea to be used as forced labor.
As Allied forces closed in with victories in the battle of the Coral Sea and Midway, the Japanese began transferring POWs by oceanic transport. Similar to conditions on the "Bataan Death March", prisoners were often crammed into inhumane cargo holds with little air, food or water for journeys that lasted weeks. Many died due to asphyxia, starvation or dysentery. Some POWs in the heat, humidity, lacking oxygen, food, and water became delirious and unresponsive to their environment. Many men became insane and crawled about in the absolute darkness of these hell ship holds armed with knives, attempting to kill their fellow prisoners in order to drink their blood. Some POW's resorted to canteens that were filled with urine and swung them in the dark. Holds were so crowded and interlocked with POW's that the only movement that was possible was over the heads and bodies of others. Allan Jones wrote this account with designs of expressing a personal epitaph to his father. However, in his research, Jones's work evolved into a full accounting of the "Suez Maru" sinking, an unpardonable and unpunished transgression against man and the rules of warfare.Richard Kidder: WWII Survivor: Manila to Bataan. To Corregidor. To Cabanatuan POW . To a Hell Ship. To Umeda Bunsho POW in Osaka. To Tsuraga POW. To Home, Alive. Jones final conclusion was as follows: "Not only had my father been a POW of the Japanese, interned at one of the worst labor camps established in the Indonesian Molluccean Islands, but he had been a victim of "friendly fire,' drowned when the ship on which he was being transported was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine."
Lewis Jones's body was never recovered from the sea. Instead, he is memorialized on the walls of "The Kranji War Memorial" in Singapore along with another 24,000 soldiers and airmen who lost their lives at the hands of the Japanese and has no known grave. It was there in March of 1997, seeing his father's name inscribed on the wall that Allan Jones would both write his father's story as well as expose the depravity of the Japanese hell ship system, focusing in particular on the ship his father met his maker on, the "Suez Maru." Why does the student of history have to fervently search to find out about the Lewis Jones's and hell ships of World War Two? Are their deaths any less important than those lost at "Pearl Harbor or Guadalcanal?" Jones proposes the following reason for the absence in most history texts of this sordid W. W. II occurrence: "The trouble is that the nature of war being what it is, with thousands of men engaged in a struggle of epic and global proportions, the personal experiences of these ordinary men have been submerged beneath the biggest stories of the major engagements and the grand strategies, as well as of the prominent personalities, the generals, the admirals and the politicians. Thus, the ordinary men have become the unsung heroes of these epic times. But their story deserves to be told."
Jones claims in this book that while he was growing up, he never felt a sense of being different because he grew up fatherless and as an only child. Commenting further, Jones wrote: "I suppose that many war widows later remarried so that the otherwise fatherless youngsters grew up with step brothers and step sisters. But just as many, and my mother was one such, never remarried because they were quite unable to contemplate the possibility of feeling the same degree of love and devotion for another man."Forgotten MenAs Jones aged, reminders of his father began to disappear. Jones lamented: "Gradually, those few relatives and friends who hold the intimate secrets I so earnestly needed to recover have died too, taking with them the grave irreplaceable parts of this vital biological jigsaw." The final motivating iota that compelled Jones to write his father's story was his two children, Lindsey and Paul. As such, Jones asserted: "All at once, it seems, I was struck by their misfortune in not having a grandfather (in fact, of not having either grandfather, for my wife's father had also been a war casualty), a deprivation which mirrored my personal gulf. Thus it was, primarily on their behalf, that I embarked upon the quest to find the identity of the father that I had lost all those many years before." Most challenging to Jones, in an effort to reconstruct his father's final destiny, would be the period after 1942, where his father was captured by the Japanese. Clarifying the investigative block facing him, Jones wrote: "try as hard as I might, it was just impossible to obtain more than the bare minimum of first or second hand testimony or documentation and, of his incarceration, virtually nothing at all. Thus, as a result, I have been left with gaps in Lewis Jones's personal story which I now accept can never be filled." However, Allan Jones is entirely correct on the following premise: "By the very existence of this book, my father, Lewis Jones, continues to live. Every time that someone reads about his life-no matter how sad and unfortunate it was-his memory cannot fade."
Here are the essential facts in Lewis Jones life. He had a brother two years his senior, named Ben, and was born in the first year of the "war to end all wars", on September 7, 1914. As a result of a complicated pregnancy, his biological mother died two months after his birth, and his father, a coal miner, was unable to care for his two sons. Adopted by another family, Lewis lived with the "Garnworthy's" in New Tredegar, South Wales, eventually leaving on his own for London, where he met and married Doris Beales, Allan's mother. Allan was their only child, born on December 2, 1938. Ten months after Hitler invaded Poland and Neville Chamberlain declared that Britain was at war with Germany for the second time in 20 years, Lewis Jones was drafted on July 15, 1940 into the British Army. He was placed in the 6th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment in the Royal Artillery, and on November 11, 1941 embarked for overseas service on the "Monarch of Bermuda" converted luxury passenger liner. Initially headed in a convoy bound for Iraq in the Middle East to fight the Germans, his ship was diverted on December 7th, 1941, when Japanese forces, along with the action at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, attacked Kota Bahru in Malaya. Now, Britain declared war on Japan, and Lewis Jones was thoroughly in the mix.
The "Monarch of Bermuda" convoy arrived at Durban, South Africa on December 18, 1941. Lewis Jones and his regiment was transferred to the "Aorangi" for immediate departure to Singapore, where they arrived on January 13, 1942. Japan invaded the Allied stronghold of Singapore because it was the major British military base in South East Asia and nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the East". The fighting in Singapore lasted from 31 January 1942 to 15 February 1942.Belly of the Beast: A POW's Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival Aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hellship, the Oryoku Maru It resulted in the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, and the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history. About 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops became prisoners of war, joining 50,000 taken by the Japanese in the Malayan campaign. Lewis Jones was one of them. Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the ignominious fall of Singapore to the Japanese the "worst disaster" and "largest capitulation" in British history. Furthermore, The Japanese Army simultaneously invaded Malaya, Summatra and Java from Indochina, moving into northern Malaya and Thailand by amphibious assault on December 8th,1941. The Japanese were superior in close air support, armor, coordination, tactics and experience. Moreover, the British forces repeatedly allowed themselves to be outflanked, falsely believing that the jungles of these countries were impassable. The Allies had no tanks, which had put them at a severe disadvantage. The Japanese also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, which allowed swift movement of their forces overland through the terrain that was covered with thick tropical rainforest, albeit criss-crossed by native paths. Jones wrote that the Japanese had progressed through 490 miles of Malayan jungle in just 70 days traveling solely by bicycle. Although the Japanese had not brought bicycles with them (in order to speed the disembarkation process), they knew from their intelligence that suitable machines were plentiful and quickly confiscated what they needed from civilians and retailers.
Needless to say, after the surrender of British forces in March of 1942, Lewis Jones became a Japanese prisoner of war, and would experience ghastly horrors that would cost him his life. Doris Jones, from the time she was told her husband was missing, finally received notice on July 3, 1943 in an official letter from the British government stating that her husband was in fact a Japanese Prisoner of War. One postcard was received from Lewis in his own handwriting from Java "Camp Y" at Boei Glodok, Batavia, claiming that he was being treated well. Nothing could be farther from that truth, as the Japanese treated prisoners of war with loathsome contempt and indifference, completely disregarding their health, nutrition and safety. As a cheap source of labor, they were regularly beaten and in constant fear for their lives. As an example of Japanese brutality, Allan Jones gave this horrifying anecdote written by Jan Ales, a Dutch POW interned at Liang: "A striking instance of the Japanese mentality is the following. A friend of ours had died and we took him to the graveyard. The Japanese commander was present and before the crate with the dead body was lowered into the grave, the Japanese said, pointing to the crate: "You asked for meat. Take this and have your steak." Lewis Jones was held from April to November, 1943 at the Liang camp on the island of Ambon, where over a quarter of the prisoners died mostly from dysentery, cholera, beriberi, typhus and malaria. The prisoners slept on the floors of huts without roofs, unable to wash, bathe or have any basic medical treatment.Prisoners in Java: Accounts by Allied Prisoners of War in the Far East (1942-1945) Captured in Java With a diet that consisted of steamed rice, rodents and insects, the exposure, beatings and sadistic Japanese beatings were enough to test anyone's sanity. Men that were unable to work were denied food, thus worsening their conditions.
Thousands of POW's were killed in summary executions, forced marches or punishments meted out of sadistic Japanese whim. However, one form of torture that has received the smallest attention was the POW transportation by sea transport in ship cargo holds unfit even for livestock. These prison ships, dubbed "hell ships" transported huge POW workforces from one conquered territory to another, ranging from the islands of the Indonesian archipelago to the Japanese mainland itself. Most of these Japanese sea vessels were antiquated and vulnerable to submarine fire, as they sailed across the ocean unmarked. A prime target for Allied "friendly fire", when these dilapidated hell ships were sunk with POW jammed cargo holds, it resulted in total loss of life. Ship holds were usually locked down and upon attack and sinking, POWs were given no opportunity to escape. If they did escape, they were usually rammed, machine gunned or run over by their surviving Japanese captors. Lewis Jones had been induced to join a work draft to erect an airstrip at Liang (which turned out to never be used), and after surviving barbaric conditions, was assembled on November 22, 1943 for return to Java aboard an old cargo ship called the "Suez Maru" along with 547 others. The official Japanese line was that the POW's, as a result of severe malnutrition and systematic starvation were too weak to be of any value in Ambon and in Java they could recover from their illnesses. On November 25, 1943, the Suez Maru weighed anchor and departed across the Banda Sea for Java.
The hell ship was escorted by two Japanese Minesweeper ships and an aircraft located on the foredeck of the Suez Maru. One of the Japanese accompanying minesweepers peeled off, leaving the Suez Maru with only one Minesweeper who was not "pinging" (using it's sonar to search for Allied submarines in the area). Neither ship was "zigzagging," a naval procedure that made a ship a more difficult target for submarines. On November 29, a U.S. submarine, the "Bonefish" located the Suez Maru, with Lewis Jones in the ships prison hold. Surviving Bataan And Beyond: Colonel Irvin Alexander's Odyssey As A Japanese Prisoner Of War (Stackpole Military History Series)The American sub had departed her home base of Fremantle, Western Australia on November 22, 1943 on her 4th patrol. The Bonefish probably tracked The Suez Maru for about 20 minutes, poising itself for attack. At 8 am it fired it's 4 torpedoes at overlapping targets, i.e. the prison ship and the Minesweeper, with only the Suez Maru being hit. Allan Jones postulated that the majority of POWs that were unhurt came out of the hatches with their life jackets on. At gunpoint, they were ordered to go back down below the holds to rescue the injured. With the ship sinking, the heavy life rafts were thrown into the sea and POW's were jumping overboard. With the The Suez Maru finally disappearing below the surface taking down with her the dead and seriously wounded who were unable to make it above deck, the surviving POWs, between 200 and 250 of them, were floating in the sea. As they clung to the rafts, pieces of wood and debris while slowly drifting in the currents, the POW's watched in horror as the Japanese Minesweeper that dodged the Bonefish's torpedoes returned, cruising around in a large circle only picking up Japanese and Korean survivors.
After the last Japanese survivor was taken out of the sea, the commander of the Minesweeper, Captain Kawano, ordered the shooting of all Allied survivors. According to him, there existed standing orders of the Japanese Army that explicitly dictated that under no circumstances shall any Allied survivor fall into enemy hands. The Minesweeper cruised at a slow speed within 50 meters of the POWs, and shot them dead by machine gun and rifle fire. Knowing they are going to be shot, some POW's stood up on the debris they were clinging to and presented themselves as targets for the bullets. After the war, Jones proved that to conceal the murder of his father and the 547 others massacred men, a false version of the events was drafted.Defending the Enemy: Justice for the WWII Japanese War Criminals However, three years after the end of the war, a witness, Yoshio Kashiki, wrote a letter to General Douglas MacArthur and the War Crimes Investigators in Tokyo releasing the grim details of this ruthless murder. Allan Jones reprinted his confession in this book. In the wake of Kashiki's revelation, Allan Jones shows how there were 10 Suez Maru crew members and 12 Minesweeper crew members that escaped culpability by declaring that they were only following orders, showing no remorse whatsoever. The Japanese did face the music of their bellicosity with their own version of post world War II war crimes trials. Both the British and American public largely ignored the war crimes trials in Tokyo and throughout Asia in 1946-1949. Unlike the charismatic Nazi leadership, who were infamous throughout Europe, the Japanese leadership was not well known. That was due in part to the Allied propaganda, which did not want to criminalize the Emperor. If the Allied public saw him as a criminal, they would demand his removal, which would have prolonged the war. Hirohito's role in the conflict was not clear. He was generally seen as ineffectual, although there was some evidence offered in the 1990's that showed he was an active participant in the war planning. However, to maintain order in Japan, the Emperor was not indicted. The Men put on trial in 1947 and 1948 were the first of 20,000 civilian and military former leaders who had either killed prisoners or had participated in the vague crime of instigating the war.The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes While many would endure prison sentences of varying lengths, 900 were executed in trials around Asia. Those executed included Hideki Tojo, General Masaharu Homma, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and five others who were blamed for atrocities during the war. The Japanese argued that they were subject to war crimes trials simply because of the heinous crimes of their German allies, essentially claiming the Allies were finding them guilty by association.
Finally, the murderers of Allan Jones's father were never prosecuted. Jones gives several reasons for this, one of which was the fact that only a small percentage of the British public had been directly affected by the Japanese participation in W.W II. British interest in seeing the Japanese war criminals punished, in view of the 6 long years of British war restrictions, shortages and war weary disruptions, drastically fell away. In the late 1940's Britain was not in war crimes trials that depressed national spirits, but rather in light hearted diversions. Another reason was the Cold War. Political polarization divided the world into forces of Communistic Stalinism or industrialized pro Democracy. Since Western Germany and Japan now fell into the pro Western orbit and were key to post war economic recovery, the desire to punish the 22 Suez Maru accused waned. Along with the world's attention now on the 1950 Korean conflagration as well as the tense Chinese Communist vis a vis Taiwanese confrontation, a time limit was set of terminating willy-nilly all Japanese war crimes trials by September 30, 1949. This date passed, and with it the death blow to any justice meted out to the murderers of Allan Jones's father. However, Allan Jones succinctly does have the last words, at least in this book review. His reaction to those unpunished in the Suez Maru atrocity is as follows: "The certain punishment of the guilty, should act as a deterrent to both potential perpetrators and those national leaders who would encourage or condone such inhumane acts. Suspension of the judicial process relating to atrocities committed during war-time, for whatever reason-be it flawed clemency deals or an arbitrary cut-off date-only serves to have the reverse effect. It only undermines efforts to enforce better standards of human conduct and mutual respect, regardless of race, color, or creed. In such circumstances, the process is reduced to an empty gesture, discredited and disrespected, doing little or nothing, either now or in the future, to prevent repetitions of such outrages as the No Gun Ri incident, Oradour-sur-Glane, the Katlyn Forest massacre, Srebencia, Auschwitz or....the Japanese Hell Ships." Now....if only the world would listen!
