Jack Jennings, POW who helped build the Burma Railroad, dies at age 104

Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and Oscar-winning film “The bridge over the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.

His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on January 22 that he had died in a nursing home, although the exact date of death was unclear.

They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian soldiers captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.

As a soldier in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr Jennings spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war, first in Singapore's Changi Prison and then in primitive camps along the route of the Thailand-Burma (now Myanmar) railway. .

To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 POWs – and thousands of other local prisoners – were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build dikes, and driving stakes into the ground. .

In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, in which a heavy weight was hoisted by the men to the top of a wooden frame.

“Generally two men led the pile from a perched position at the top,” he wrote. “This was a slow, hard job, with your whole body shaking as the weight suddenly dropped and the stack sank lower.”

He survived the scorching heat of the Indochinese jungle; a daily diet of rice, watery porridge and a teaspoon of sugar; and a range of ailments: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required skin grafts, which were performed without anesthesia.

“At least fifteen soldiers died every day from malaria and cholera,” Jennings told the British newspaper The mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in the camp and counting the days I had left to live. I didn't think I would ever get out of there alive.”

The brutality of the Japanese soldiers during the railway work was at least as bad as in the camps.

“If you didn't work the way they thought you should, you got a stick or the butt of a gun,” he added. “But I had to keep going. I had a friend who slept next to me. I woke up one morning and he was dead.” Four men who tried to escape were beheaded.

“My feelings for the Japanese guards who were with us, and for anyone who allowed them to commit such barbaric crimes, remain the same,” Mr. Jennings wrote. “I will never forgive or forget.”

In the midst of these torturous conditions, Mr. Jennings, who had worked as a woodworker in England, used a pen knife to carve a chess set from wood he found in the camps. He carried the chess pieces home.

Jack Jennings was born on March 10, 1919 and grew up in the West Midlands, England. His father died of cancer when Jack was 8; his mother, who had worked in a foundry before having children, took on laundry to earn money after her husband's death. She also picked hops in the summer, together with Jack and his sisters.

At his mother's request, Jack left school at the age of 14 to earn money for the family. He did poorly as an office intern before finding his profession at a local carpentry shop. Eventually, he enrolled in cabinet-making classes at a local art school.

Mr Jennings was drafted into the British Army in 1939 and, after extensive training, traveled by boat to Singapore, arriving in January 1942. The British army was soon overwhelmed by the Japanese and surrendered Singapore on February 15.

“They knew where to strike, and they struck hard,” he wrote in his memoirs, adding that “there was nowhere to hide or retreat. We were trapped, civilians and soldiers.”

The Japanese herded about 500 soldiers, most of them from the Cambridgeshire regiment, onto a tennis court. A Japanese soldier with a machine gun stood guard on each corner. The prisoners drank dirty water and ate “hard army biscuits and rationed chocolate” that their captors threw at them, Mr. Jennings wrote.

After five days they were marched to Changi Prison and later to prison camps where the prisoners themselves had to be cut from the jungle. Mr. Jennings said he spent his time building bridges and treating his illnesses. An estimated 12,000 to 16,000 prisoners of war died during the construction of the railway. Many civilian prisoners also died.

Mr. Jennings learned of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 through leaflets dropped in a prison camp that read: “To all Allied POWs: The Japanese forces have surrendered unconditionally and the war is over.”

He came home in October and married his girlfriend Mary two months later. Three days later, he celebrated his first Christmas with his family in six years.

In 1954, Pierre Boulle, a former French soldier and secret agent who had served in China, Burma and Indochina, published The Bridge Over the River Kwai, a novel about the construction of a bridge by Allied prisoners. It was made into a film in 1957 starring Alec Guinness, as the delusional colonel in charge of the British prisoners in a Japanese prison camp, and William Holden, as a US Navy commander who escapes the camp and joins a commando mission to destroy the bridge. The film, directed by David Lean, won seven Oscars, including best picture.

Complete information about survivors besides Mr. Jennings' daughters was not available.

Mr. Jennings wrote his memoirs in the early 1990s, although they would not be published until years later. He made several trips back to Singapore and Thailand.

One was paid for in 2012 by the UK National Lottery, which produced a TV advert featuring Mr Jennings for a campaign called 'Life Changing'.

In it, he appears to be walking slowly with his walking stick through a jungle battle scene, which turns into a visit to a cemetery for the Allied soldiers who died during the construction of the railway.

In an interview for the National Lottery, Mr Jennings said the Thailand he visited was “totally different” to the Thailand he remembered. “So the old dreams just faded away, you know – so I was quite surprised and relieved,” he said. “It is now a really nice tourist area.”