THE JACK FORD
STORY
Newfoundland's POW in Nagasaki
By
Jack Fitzgerald
The Jack Ford
Story: Newfoundland's POW in
Nagasaki is an amazing story of
endurance, courage and survival. In
1940, Jack Ford was an employee of
the Newfoundland Railway in a remote
settlement of Newfoundland. Having
volunteered for service in World War
II at the age of twenty-one, Ford
encountered the realities of war
when the troop ship he was traveling
on to England was attacked several
times by German U-Boats. When the
atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki
on August 9, 1945, Jack Ford was
there - in a prisoner of war camp.
In this riveting story, he shares
his memories of that horrific time
in his life, his rescue and his
long-awaited journey home.
We had to
get up at 6:00 a.m. to get ready,
because it was absolutely mandatory
that we turn up on parade at 7:00
a.m., when the Japanese made the
first count of POWs for the day.
Nobody wanted to start the day by
getting the guards angry because we
knew only too well what would
follow. Then we had to give
ourselves a rubdown, just to get the
circulation going, so we could walk
the nearly one and a half miles to
the Mitsubishi Shipyard. To do
this, we stripped to our waist and
rubbed our bodies with a srcubbing
brush. We were walking skeletons;
the conditions at the camp had
brought us to that because they were
so horrible. Sometimes on the way
to and from the shipyard, Japanese
civilians living on the island would
stare at us as we passed, but at no
time did they bother us. We knew
they were having a hard time too,
and we thought that most of them
didn't want the war any more than we
did. |