Jack Jennings, P.O.W. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of warfare throughout World War II who labored as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese navy building venture that impressed a novel and the Oscar-winning movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died on Jan. 19 in St. Marychurch, Torquay, England. He was 104.

His son-in-law Paul Barrett confirmed his dying, in a nursing facility, in an electronic mail.

They mentioned they believed their father was the final survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who have been captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.

A personal within the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the subsequent three and a half years as a prisoner of warfare, first in Changi jail in Singapore after which in primitive camps alongside the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).

To construct bridges, Mr. Jennings and a minimum of 60,000 P.O.W.s — and hundreds extra native prisoners — have been compelled to chop down and debark bushes, noticed them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to construct embankments, and drive piles into the bottom.

In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the damaging technique of driving the piles, utilizing a heavy weight raised by the lads to the highest of a timber body.

“Two men generally guided the pile from a perched situation near the top,” he wrote. “This was a slow, punishing job, jolting your whole body when the weight suddenly dropped and the pile sank lower.”

He survived the searing warmth of the Indochinese jungle; a each day eating regimen of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar; and a battery of illnesses: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required pores and skin grafts, which have been carried out with out anesthesia.

“At least 15 soldiers died each day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings informed the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in camp just counting the days I had left to live. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”

The brutality inflicted by Japanese troopers was a minimum of as dangerous in the course of the railway work because it was within the camps.

“If you weren’t working like they thought you should, you’d get a stick or the butt of a rifle,” 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 males who tried to flee have been beheaded.

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

Amid these torturous circumstances, Mr. Jennings, who had labored as a wooden joiner in England, carved a chess set out of wooden he discovered within the camps, utilizing a pen knife. He carried the chess items dwelling.

Jack Jennings was born on March 10, 1919, and grew up in West Midlands, England. His father, Joseph, a brickworker, died of most cancers when Jack was 8; his mom, Ethel (Dunn) Jennings, who had labored in a foundry earlier than she had youngsters, took in laundry to earn cash after her husband’s dying. She additionally picked hops in the course of the summer time, together with Jack and his two sisters.

At his mom’s request, Jack left college at 14 to earn cash for the household. He fared poorly as an workplace trainee earlier than discovering his métier at a neighborhood joinery works. He ultimately enrolled in lessons in cupboard making at a neighborhood artwork school.

Mr. Jennings was drafted into the British Army in 1939 and, after prolonged coaching, traveled by boat to Singapore, arriving in January 1942. The British Army was quickly overwhelmed by the Japanese and surrendered Singapore on Feb. 15.

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

The Japanese herded about 500 troopers, most of them from the Cambridgeshire regiment, onto a tennis court docket. At every nook a Japanese soldier stood guard with a machine gun. The prisoners drank soiled water and ate “hard Army biscuits and ration chocolate” tossed at them by their captors, Mr. Jennings wrote.

After 5 days, they have been marched to Changi jail and later to jail camps that the prisoners themselves needed to hack out of the jungle. Mr. Jennings mentioned he spent his time constructing bridges and being handled for his sicknesses. An estimated 12,000 to 16,000 P.O.W.s died throughout building of the railway. Many civilian prisoners perished as properly.

Mr. Jennings realized of the Japanese give up in August 1945 from leaflets dropped in a jail camp that mentioned, “To All Allied Prisoners of War: The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered Unconditionally and the War is Over.”

He arrived dwelling in October and, two months later, married his girlfriend, Mary. Three days later, he celebrated his first Christmas together with his household in six years.

In 1954, Pierre Boulle, a former French soldier and undercover agent who had served in China, Burma and Indochina, printed “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a novel in regards to the building of a bridge by Allied prisoners. It was become a movie in 1957 starring Alec Guinness, because the delusional colonel in command of the British prisoners at a Japanese jail camp, and William Holden, as an American Navy commander who escapes the camp and joins a commando mission to destroy the bridge. The film, directed by David Lean, received seven Oscars, together with for greatest image.

Mr. Jennings is survived by his daughters, Hazel Heath and Carol Barrett; three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Jennings wrote his memoir within the early Nineties, though it will not be printed till years later. He made a number of journeys again to Singapore and Thailand.

One of them, in 2012, to Thailand, close to the Burmese border, was paid for by Britain’s National Lottery, which produced a TV commercial that includes Mr. Jennings for a marketing campaign referred to as “Life Changing.”

In it he seems to stroll slowly together with his cane by a re-enactment of a jungle battle scene that was meant to be haunting recollections to him, which fades right into a go to to a cemetery for the Allied troopers who died throughout building of the railway.

“We left him to have his own private time amongst the massive cemetery,” John Hillcoat, who directed the commercial, wrote in an electronic mail. “It was daunting how many died. Jack seemed to have carried a lot of guilt being a survivor.”

In an interview for the National Lottery, Mr. Jennings mentioned that the Thailand he visited was “completely different” from the one he remembered. “So the old dreams just faded, you know — so I was quite surprised and relieved,” he mentioned. “The place is really a nice tourist area now.”