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Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of conflict throughout World Conflict II who labored as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese navy development mission 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 the demise, in a nursing facility.
His household believes that Mr. Jennings was the final survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who had been captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.
A personal within the First Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the following three and a half years as a prisoner of conflict, 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 at the very least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and 1000’s extra native prisoners — had been pressured to chop down and debark timber, noticed them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to construct embankments, and drive piles into the bottom.
In his memoir, “Prisoner With out a Crime,” revealed in 2011, Mr. Jennings described the harmful strategy of driving the piles, utilizing a heavy weight raised by the boys to the highest of a timber body.
“Two males usually guided the pile from a perched state of affairs close to the highest,” he wrote. “This was a sluggish, punishing job, jolting your entire physique when the load immediately dropped and the pile sank decrease.”
He survived the searing warmth of the Indochinese jungle; a each day weight loss program 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 had been carried out with out anesthesia.
“At the least 15 troopers died every day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings instructed the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I bear in mind sitting in camp simply counting the times I had left to reside. I didn’t suppose I’d ever get out of there alive.”
The brutality inflicted by Japanese troopers was at the very least as unhealthy throughout the railway work because it was within the camps.
“In case you weren’t working like they thought it is best to, you’d get a stick or the butt of a rifle,” he added. “However I needed to preserve going. I had a good friend who slept subsequent to me. I awakened one morning and he was lifeless.” 4 males who tried to flee had been beheaded.
“My feeling for the Japanese guards who had been with us, and all who allowed them to commit such barbaric crimes, stays the identical,” Mr. Jennings wrote. “I’ll by no means forgive or neglect.”
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 kids, took in laundry to earn cash after her husband’s demise. She additionally picked hops throughout the summer time, together with Jack and his two sisters.
At his mom’s request, Jack left faculty at 14 to earn cash for the household. He fared poorly as an workplace trainee earlier than discovering his métier at an area joinery works. He finally enrolled in courses in cupboard making at an area artwork school.
Mr. Jennings was drafted into the British Military in 1939 and, after prolonged coaching, traveled by boat to Singapore, arriving in January 1942. The British Military was quickly overwhelmed by the Japanese and surrendered Singapore on Feb. 15.
“They knew the place to strike, and strike arduous,” he wrote in his memoir, including that “there was nowhere to cover or to retreat to. We had been trapped, civilians and troopers.”
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 “arduous Military biscuits and ration chocolate” tossed at them by their captors, Mr. Jennings wrote.
After 5 days, they had been marched to Changi Jail and later to jail camps that the prisoners themselves needed to hack out of the jungle. Mr. Jennings stated 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 development 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 stated, “To All Allied Prisoners of Conflict: The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered Unconditionally and the Conflict 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, revealed “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a novel concerning the development 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, gained seven Oscars, together with for finest 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 Nineteen Nineties, though it might not be revealed till years later. He made a number of journeys again to Singapore and Thailand.
Certainly one of them, in 2012, to Thailand, close to the Burmese border, was paid for by Britain’s Nationwide Lottery, which produced a tv commercial that includes Mr. Jennings for a marketing campaign known as “Life Altering.”
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 reminiscences to him, which fades right into a go to to a cemetery for the Allied troopers who died throughout development of the railway.
“We left him to have his personal non-public time amongst the huge cemetery,” John Hillcoat, who directed the commercial, wrote in an e-mail. “It was daunting what number of died. Jack appeared to have carried lots of guilt being a survivor.”
In an interview for the Nationwide Lottery, Mr. Jennings stated that the Thailand he visited was “fully totally different” from the one he remembered. “So the previous goals simply pale, you understand — so I used to be fairly shocked and relieved,” he stated. “The place is mostly a good vacationer space now.”
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