Ispab - Trying some research for my Grandfather. My grandfather, Sydney Frederick Thompson ("Syd", from East London), was a regular corporal in the Royal Engineers at the fall of Singapore, having just arrived from Bombay with the 18th Division.
Following incarceration in Changi, he was shiped to Taiwan/Formosa. He kept a simple pictographic diary of part of his imprisonment there, and made notes of christmas activities etc He remembers being incacerated in a camp near a large city; from his descriptions, I believe it was Taihoku (Taipei) Number 6.He was bussed daily to field to work, until he fell too sick. Along with a number of other sick prisoners he was moved to a bus garage to repair a fleet of buses. The story goes (not sure how much is myth) that the batteries were removed and hidden by the prisoner mechanics, and these non-functioning buses were then used as a ruse to give prisoners too ill to work a chance to recuperate at least partly.
At the end of the war, he remembers supplies being dropped by the Americans, but these were delayed with the result that several prisoners were killed when crates fell on them (wrong place, wrong time). At liberation, he was evacuated to Manila to a US hospital; he says he was one of the last 2 from this particular hospital (doesn't say which) to be sent home. He travelled via Australia, where he had to be debriefed as a witness to a war crime (2 RAF fitters, brothers, who had attempted to escape, were caught and executed), and then Canada and eventually England.
Does any of this make sense to anyboy, and does anyone recall my grandfather?
henry - Arthur Robinson - Prisoner Kinkaseki.
Did anyone know my father-in-law ?
