VJ80: Surrender Story #3 - Gunner Dick Lee, Royal Artillery.
- Stu Lloyd
- Aug 15
- 3 min read
By any standards, Dick had had a hell of a war: his 11th Division copped an absolute pasting in the opening salvos of battle in Jitra, northern Malaya, where the Japanese crossed down from Siam/Thailand. Then he was blown off his despatch bike, when a Japanese pilot spotted him blamming along a plantation road. He was hospitalised in Singapore, but moved when the Selarang Hospital was bombed, and sent to the Alexandra Hospital. Talk about out of the frying and into the blast furnace! Then Changi and Sime Road Camp.
Inevitably, he was assigned to D Force on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, the squalor of the camps around Tarsao. Then back to Sime Road Camp, Singapore when August 1945 finally came around.
"We were out working. Every morning we went out at nine o’clock until five digging these bleeding tunnels. What we were doing was digging tunnels into any type of hillside, all over Singapore. They reckon there might be an invasion of Singapore and if any paratroops were dropped, these Japanese would be deployed in all these tunnels. That’s what we thought. But the tunnels were for us! The bastards were going to put us in them to do away with us.
This particular day, twelve o’clock came, sat down and ate our rice, the stewed up tap root that we used to find in fields. And we’d just finished that about 12 o’clock and the Jap guard says everybody put the tools away in the shed that was there and go back to camp. 12 o’clock in the day? This is unusual.
And of course we’d already heard from the Chinese that the war is over, so we put two and two together. But the Japanese never said nothing to us. It was a funny thing, because they’re still the guards, and you couldn’t run about showing all that excitement – you could still get a doing off them. It was a funny atmosphere."
Was there any temptation, once they’d acknowledged that the war was over, to beat up the guards?
"Yeah, I would have liked to … that little bastard, he give me a doing a few months before with a bamboo stick. I thought he broke my bleedin’ back, gave me such a bleedin’ whack. Oh dear. Once their officer came in and told everybody the war is over, three or four of the Japs that were bastards in the camp got off their mark. This little bastard I wanted to get hold of, he got off his mark. At the time I think I would’ve loved to have got stuck into him because I had a bleedin’ sore back for weeks afterward, little bastard. But then you quickly forget about all this wanting revenge, you were so pleased to be free again. Then the aircraft came over and dropped the leaflets down to tell us the war’s over. It was a funny atmosphere that week.”
There was no counselling, no diagnosis as post- traumatic stress disorder. Everyone was told not to talk about it and just get on with life. Worse for those from the Far East was that there were long delays in getting them back home, compared to those from the European theatre, where the German surrender had come earlier in May, 1945.
Many POWs — listed ‘missing presumed dead’ — arrived home to find their girlfriends had married someone else, compounding their misery and detachment. Such was the case with Dick. The thought of returning to his girlfriend was what sustained him all those years ... they'd loved motorcycle rides in the countryside pre-war.
In other more confusing cases, one POW’s fiancée had two children with another man but was still "waiting" for him, and another POW’s girlfriend had married his father!
Proving that the suffering never ends with the surrender.
80 years since VJ Day — hear the voices of those who lived it.
Download your FREE 15-page PDF of surrender stories from POWs in the Far East and keep their memories alive.
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