James Munro Bertram - Prisoner-of-war

Prisoner-of-war

From January 1941 he also spent a few months as relief press attaché to the British ambassador in Chongqing, which involved bringing a British supply convoy over the Burma Road from Rangoon. He returned to Hong Kong and played a role in assisting Mme Sun Yat-sen and her sister Soong Ai-ling / Mme Kung to evacuate to Chongqing hours before Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. Captured by the Japanese as a volunteer gunner in December 1941 he spent two years in Hong Kong as prisoner-of-war during which time he caught diphtheria. This was followed by two more difficult years as a prisoner-of-war in the Omori camp in Tokyo Bay spent doing forced labour in railyards and on the Tokyo docks. Bertram witnessed first hand the devastating effect of the bombing of the Tokyo-Yokohama area, and saw the coming of the victorious Allies by air and sea after the Japanese surrender in 1945. In later years, rather than talk of his experience as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, he would direct people to books by Sir Laurens van der Post saying 'they are true, in a way few other books about the Japanese are'. He thought it unlikely that many of the 350,000 prisoners still held by the Japanese in 1945 would have survived had the war not been brought to a sudden end by the atomic bomb.