Lomax with Takashi Nagase, his former Japanese torturer, on the bridge over the River Kwai. Nearly 50 years after the war the two men met and were reconciled
Eric Lomax and other Allied prisoners of war worked on the Burma – Siam “Death Railway”.
Wartime prisoner of the Japanese who recounted his appalling experiences in a sensational memoir in 1995
Captured by the Japanese while in charge of a signal section in the Royal Artillery as Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942, Eric Lomax was sent to work as a PoW on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway. There, with other captives, he suffered severe privations, including torture and beatings, until his release in the summer of 1945.
The story of his sufferings, ghost-written by Neil Belton, caused a sensation when it was published as The Railway Man in 1995. That year it was made into a television drama entitled Prisoners in Time, starring John Hurt as Lomax, and the book went on to win the 1996 NCR Book Award and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography, though several authorities on the experiences of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPoWs) were to query the accuracy of some of its details.
In the meantime Lomax had tracked down and met one of his former torturers, a Japanese interpreter named Takashi Nagase, and had had a reconciliation with him on the banks of the River Kwai where he had been imprisoned. The reconciliation and the Japanese apology had been filmed as the documentary, Enemy, My Friend, in 1995, directed by Mike Finlason. Lomax was subsequently to describe how this meeting and Nagase’s apology had purged him of a long-nursed anger at his treatment, and restored him to wholeness and peace.
Eric Sutherland Lomax was born in Edinburgh in 1919, and when war came he was called up and commissioned into the Royal Signals in 1940. He was serving as a Royal Signals officer attached to the 5th Field Regiment Royal Artillery in Singapore early in 1942 as the Japanese closed in on the city.
After periods in various camps he was among the thousands of prisoners selected to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, constructed using forced labour by the Japanese to support their forces in the Burma campaign. Of these, around 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied PoWs died through malnutrition, disease and maltreatment, as well as being shot out of hand or beaten to death.
In his own account, Lomax and his fellow prisoners came to the attention of their guards in August 1943 when a radio they had assembled from silver paper, wire, aluminium and wax, so that they could monitor the All India Radio broadcasts from New Delhi, and follow the course of the war, was discovered by the authorities at their camp at Kanburi on the River Kwai. Lomax had, too, made a map of the area which was also found. From that moment, as Lomax described it both in The Railway Man, and in a short account Beyond the River Kwai, published in a collection, Soldier Stories, in the US in 2006, their lives became a living hell.
The five men suspected of being involved in the construction of the radio, who included Lomax, were beaten with pick-axe handles until two of them died. Both Lomax’s arms were broken, and he was subsequently subjected to a form of “waterboarding” when a brutal NCO forced the torrent from a high-pressure water hose into his nose and mouth. In this torment the perpetrators of these evils came to be symbolised by the constant voice of the interpreter at his ear, urging him to confess and reveal information about anti-Japanese activities within the camp of which he actually had no knowledge. Periods in the camp hospital, so that they might become “well enough” to endure further torment, were followed by a renewal of the physical violence against the men.
Eventually news that the war was going against the Japanese began to filter through to the camps. Finally, in the summer of 1945 came the information that an astonishing new bomb had brought the Japanese Empire to its knees, and one day an American B29 flew over the camp dropping food packages. After gaining his liberty Lomax was mentioned in dispatches for his resolute conduct in the camps.
After recovering he was able to return to work, and for some years lectured in personnel management at Strathclyde University. But mental flashbacks, particularly the low whispered voice of the interpreter repeatedly assuring him “Lomax, you will tell” continued to dog him. To find this man became something of an obsession.
As he recounted, Lomax eventually had a stroke of luck when a British Army chaplain who had been in contact with former Japanese soldiers told him he had located the interpreter and found out that he lived in the city of Kurashiki. His former tormentor had apparently become active in charitable causes and had built a Buddhist temple of peace close to the river and railway at Kanburi, as an act of atonement. Lomax’s sufferings ran too deep for him to be convinced at that stage, but eventually, in 1991, he was persuaded to read a book written by Nagase, in which the former interpreter mentioned him and expressed deep remorse for his sufferings.
Eventually Lomax felt he could face meeting Nagase and he and his wife, a nurse, flew to Thailand, to take a train to Kanburi, where the two men at last met and were reconciled. Nagase, it transpired, had devoted his life since the war to campaigning against militarism and working for reconciliation. As he recalled in Beyond the River Kwai, Lomax was able to assure him of his total forgiveness.
In the year following its publication The Railway Man was criticised for the inaccuracy of some aspects of its account of what had happened at Kanburi and other camps, by relatives of other survivors of the experience and professional historians.
The book is currently being made into a film directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and starring Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine as, respectively, the older and younger Eric Lomax, and with Nicole Kidman playing Patti, who befriended and married Lomax as his second wife.
Lomax is survived by his wife, Patti, by a daughter from his first marriage and by four stepchildren.
Eric Lomax, prisoner of war and survivor of the Burma-Thailand Railway, was born on May 30, 1919. He died on October 8, 2012, aged 93
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
