Down to Bedrock: The Diary and Secret Notes of a Far East Prisoner of War Chaplain 1942-1945

"He’d also kept notes, but his diary is a lot shorter. It’s a very different perspective, because he talks a lot about faith. He was a very humane person. My father and Eric Cordingly were from different religions, but they got on really well. They both had a job to do. One thing I hadn’t realized is that they were both only ‘attached’ to the army. In all the records, it says Army Chaplain, Army Medical Officer, treated separately with non-combatant status. Louise, his daughter, has sent me the books she’s written based on her father’s story. We were put in touch by a mutual Far East prisoner of war organization and she was thrilled her father was mentioned 86 times in my father’s diary. I also have quite a few photographs of our two fathers together. We’ve kept in good contact since. Eric Cordingly writes that although it was maybe the worst time, it was also one of the best times in his life, because so many people who you wouldn’t have expected would come to his church services—whether it was for the religious side or just getting together and singing together. He found it a very fulfilling time. Yes. I can understand the attraction. I found the book very moving. The church in Changi was in a little mosque. I know Dad, in a way, was a little bit envious, because he said people were spilling out of the church. They also had Jewish services, but there weren’t so many people. I think 0.5% of the army was Jewish, and not all of them would have come. What I liked was the way they used to have discussions about all sorts of topics at night. They just enjoyed each other’s company. They had a fair knowledge of war events in Europe, thanks to their illegal radios. One of the reasons why my father’s diary was so difficult to decipher is that there are bits cut out. He realized that if the Japanese got hold of the diary, they would realize he could only have got certain items of news from an illegal radio. I don’t think they had any awareness of what Hitler was doing to the Jews in Europe, but then that also applied to people in the UK. In Dad’s medical room, he had a chair with hollow bamboo legs. That’s where they kept the bits of the radio—inside the legs of the chair, and then some of it, apparently, in one of the pipes of the sink. If he’d been caught, I don’t think he would have survived to tell the tale because it was absolutely forbidden. Keeping a diary was bad, but having an illegal radio was the death penalty. No. I have read a huge tome about Jewish Far East prisoners of war and there’s only one anti-Semitic incident documented. As far as the Japanese were concerned, the prisoners were all the lowest of the low. Their religion was not an issue. In the last year, they actually provided materials for the Jewish prisoners to build a synagogue within the camp. They hadn’t previously had a proper synagogue; they just used odd rooms up to then. The Japanese seemed to actively encourage religious services. I think it was because it kept the prisoners out of mischief. Also, I think they were a little bit superstitious: you didn’t upset other people’s gods. The whole rationale in the Japanese army was brutal, so each successive level would brutalize the people below them. For the bottom-ranking, ordinary Japanese soldiers, the only people they had to take it out on were the prisoners. There was a television programme, maybe two or three years ago, where they interviewed two Japanese guards. One had been a high-ranking officer and one was very low. The one who was high up said he had no guilt at all. He was just following orders and they didn’t do anything wrong. The one who was in the lowest echelon of the army ranks said he still, even after all this time, had sleepless nights about the way they treated the prisoners. Yes. The Padre was caught passing notes, so he was tied to another prisoner, and they were both put in a 10-foot-deep pit. They were given nothing. Then, at night, one of the Japanese soldiers, a Christian, climbed down a bamboo ladder and gave them sweetened tea and two bananas. This soldier would almost certainly have been shot if they’d found that out. No, and that is a fault I ought to rectify. I have been to Japan. I went with my daughter and granddaughter a few years ago. The place that made the biggest impression on me was going to Nagasaki. I found that so horrific and so moving. I can’t really get my head around it, because I know that if it hadn’t been for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, none of my family would be here. There was a limit to how long my father could have lasted under POW conditions. But does the end justify the means? I’m not sure. Also, it wasn’t just for that generation: the radiation effect spread through subsequent ones too."