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.