In memory of my father, I am recording his wartime service.
Harry Buckley first became involved in militarism in 1936 at Cambridge University, where he joined the Officer Training Corps. He was studying mechanical engineering and mathematics, so naturally joined an engineer unit. After university he worked for Mather and Platt, an engineering company in Manchester and was in a Territorial Army engineer unit as a reservist.
With the dark clouds of war on the horizon he was fully mobilized before the outbreak of war in 1939 and deployed to France with the British Expeditionary Force as an engineering officer. It was in France that he met his future wife Margaret who was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and was deployed to France as a ’passive air defence instructor’. Prior to deployment she had held the rank of corporal but had had to relinquish it to private for deployment purposes.
The stories of their meeting are entirely from my mother and can be related on another occasion. I attempted to engage my father on numerous occasions with questions like ’Tell us a story from the war’. He was always reticent and sometimes counter attacked with grizzly descriptions, to try and silence my questions. He would relate that war involved long periods of boredom. From my mother I learnt that he, alongside her, were posted to a factory where maintenance was carried out on the tanks. On one occasion intelligence had determined that the factory was vulnerable to German bombing, so my father organised the demolition by explosives of the factory chimney to make it less recognizable from the air.
Strategic withdrawal was the main action for this army and as a child I gleaned from my father that an army in retreat was not a picnic. He related that there were people being shot for lacking discipline in retreat. Relating this story to an ex-British Army regular he said - in the first war yes, but not in the second world war. All I can do is relate what I heard him say. As an engineer he was in the rear party in retreat, blowing up bridges and other installations to slow the advancing Germans. They retreated to St Nazaire where Harry was again ordered to stay back to fill up the harbour with the abandoned vehicles used in the retreat. He was the last to leave and left the port on a motorcycle. He had been given money and was able to pay for passage to the UK on a fishing boat. The fisherman were suspicious that they would be impounded if they put into a port, so they landed Harry on an isolated beach.
On return to the UK Harry discovered that his new love’s family lived in a large house. The story goes that he joined the British Indian army as the pay was better and would enable him to afford his unfolding future. It is my belief that in the retreat many of Harry’s unit members were lost, probably on the Lancastria, a troopship sunk in St Nazaire bay with the loss of approximately 4000. The army realized that he would be of greater use in the far east than in a re-hash with the Germans.
He sailed for India and became established with the British Indian Army in Rawlpindi. He was then posted to staff college in Quetta, Pakistan. Before boarding the train he was instructed to phone HQ at each stop as the situation was deteriorating. He never arrived to start the course and instead was deployed to Malaya to command a unit of the Royal Indian Army Ordinance Corps - primarily staffed by Indian troops. He was in the jungle to face up to the advancing Japanese army. Comments gleaned from my mother were that he learnt to feel safer during the night - ‘the only time he ever felt safe’; and that there were problems with communications. This latter information has been well documented in analysis of the reasons why Singapore fell.
With the fall of Singapore Harry passed the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Changi POW camp. My father was an excellent bridge player. The story I was brought up on, was that he made up a bridge foursome together with a senior British officer, and that this officer did not want to break up the bridge foursome - so my father was not sent to work on the Burma-Siam railway. ‘He played bridge to save his life’. A more realistic explanation I think is that he was not sent to work on the railway because he was an only son of a widowed mother. My father explained to me that it was the task of the senior British officer of the camp to select people to meet the demand for workers on the railway. The casualty rate on the railway was much higher than in the camp. The Japanese worked people to death - similar to the German concentration camps.
For the first year of captivity, officers were not required to do manual work. After that he was put to work digging and growing potatoes. Apparently this helped him survive as some of the more lenient guards would allow them to eat the roots, which are of course similarly nutritious to a potato. He would have been severely disciplined for taking a potato. Also during captivity he traded his watch with a guard for some ducks. Enterprise is necessary to survive the POW experience.
After liberation he was returned to India and apparently reunited with his non-field kit. Upon return to the United Kingdom he was admitted to the royal naval hospital in Greenwich to recover from a large boil caused by years of malnutrition. He was also suffering from the after-effects of Malaria. While in hospital he learnt watch repair as a hobby, a form of therapy. He was demobilized from the army and moved forwards with life working as an engineer, marriage and raising children. He died in 1975 at the age of 58. He worked a full working life up until he was given a year off for medical reasons six weeks prior to his death. It is believed that his demise at a fairly young age was partly caused by consequences of his wartime service. I also believe that he worked fully to the last in large part because that is what his fallen comrades had done in the Japanese POW camps, and it was his way of maintaining solidarity. Twenty-five years after his death my mother was given a lump sum by the British Government as compensation. Survivors are annoyed that the Japanese government has not paid compensation, has not admitted responsibility of any kind, or offered any apology. Harry now has a grandson named Harry.
