The Jack Ford Story NEWFOUNDLAND POW IN NAGASAKI (book). In 1942, Jack Ford was
captured in Malaya by Japanese troops and somehow survived three years of
hellish treatment as a slave labourer in Japan, only to narrowly escape death
from the American atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki. His remarkable saga is well
told by Jack Fitzgerald, a Newfoundland journalist and radio broadcaster.
When World War II began, Ford was a 21-year-old mechanic for the Newfoundland
Railway, who in those pre-Confederation days felt dual loyalty to both Britain
and Newfoundland, so he eagerly volunteered for service with the Royal Air
Force. He was in far-off Singapore when the place was overwhelmed by Japanese
forces in 1941. Surrender of the British garrison pitched more than 95,000
prisoners of war into a three-year-long nightmare of relentlessly cruel
treatment by Japanese soldiers who inflicted beatings, torture, and starvation
amid a regimen of exhausting physical labour. Often told in Fords own words,
Fitzgerald relates Fords dreadful existence in a matter-of-fact style that
somehow makes his experiences all the more harrowing.
For most of this period, Ford was kept in a prison camp, allowed out each day
only to toil in a naval shipyard, where he and his fellow prisoners had no
knowledge of how the war was progressing. When the A-bomb exploded over
Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, all the POWs witnessed a bright flash of light, a
distant thunder of noise, and a billowing mushroom cloud. It was the signal for
their joyous liberation soon afterwards.
