POW Found a Way to Forgive his Japanese Captors

Phil Egan, special to The Sarnia Journal

(2016) For most of the men and women of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who answered their country’s call, the Second World War was the grand adventure of their lives.

For Bill Gunter, it was a terrifying and punitive hell on earth, the emotional and psychological scars of which would endure for six decades.

Living in Britain in 1939 at the outbreak of war, 17-year-old Gunter had tried to enlist determined to fight the Germans who started the war by invading Poland. But Japan had also declared war, and was threatening British possessions in the Far East.

Finally signing up at age 19, Gunter found himself dispatched to that theatre of war, serving as a leading aircraftsman on an RAF ground crew.

In the days just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, British defences in the Far East quickly fell after of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse were sunk.

Captured by the Japanese with a number of his fellow airmen, Gunter found himself in the hands of a violent and repressive Japanese Imperial Army. Contemptuous of prisoners who they viewed as cowards for not fighting to the death, the Japanese subjected many of them to a brutal life of slave labour in Malaya.

Fed a diet of maggot-infested rice, green water and gruel, and housed in a crowded cage with forty other prisoners with a hole in the ground for a toilet, Gunter spent three and a half years in heavy toil, patching runways and filling bomb craters. The hard labour was aggravated by head lice, bed bugs, and deteriorating health. If you were too sick to work, you didn’t get fed.  Some men just lay down and died.

Gunter had no idea of the war’s progress, hope dissipated and men shut down emotionally. Survival became an unconscious instinct driving the unending, painful monotony.

Incredibly, he survived malaria, dysentery, beriberi, jungle ulcers, dengue fever and yellow fever.

Awakening one morning to find the guards had fled, the emaciated prisoners ventured out of the camp to the harbour. A Red Cross ship found them here. Rescuers cried when they saw the condition of the starving, half-naked survivors.

Repatriated to Britain, Gunter moved to Sarnia in 1957 and became a technical editor at Polymer. He also nursed a lifelong hatred of the Japanese.

That finally changed in 2002 when the Japanese government invited Far East POW’s to Japan on an all-expense-paid pilgrimage of reconciliation. Filled with trepidation, Gunter found forgiveness in the incredibly heart-tugging welcome and the abject apologies of the people he met.

Much had changed in Japan since Bill Gunter’s war had begun. He spent much of the three-week visit in tears as six decades of hatred and vitriol finally melted away.