Jim Bradley MBE the last survivor of a party of nine British servicemen and an Indian civilian who made an audacious attempt to escape from Thailand – Burma Railway in 1943
Jim Bradley was the last survivor of a party of nine British servicemen and an Indian civilian who made an audacious attempt to escape from Thailand – Burma Railway in 1943. In May that year, Bradley was one of 1,600 British prisoners of war at Sonkurai, a camp just south of the Three Pagodas Pass on the Thailand- Burma border, 1,200 of whom were to die within the year. These prisoners, already in poor health after confinement at Changi in Singapore, had been forced to undertake a 200 mile march and then build the new camp in a jungle clearing hampered by the breaking of the monsoon.
Food and medical supplies were minimal which depleted their reserves of energy and resistance to diseases such as malaria, dysentery and cholera. The bridge rose 30ft above a fast flowing river and the huge logs had to be carried by the prisoners through knee deep mud. Work began at seven in the morning and continued under arc lights until far into the night, with no time to rest or wash. When progress fell behind schedule the prisoners were beaten by Abe’s engineers with whips made from strands of fencing wire. Morale collapsed.
Cholera broke out soon after the prisoners arrived at Sonkurai, and Bradley had the misfortune to be identified by the Japanese as a carrier. The carriers were ordered to live in isolation and Bradley was put in charge of the crematorium. Wood had to be collected to build the funeral pyres for the cholera corpses and then kept alight in the pouring rain. Death was so swift that men who helped in the morning could themselves be on the pyre by evening.
The Prisoners had been warned that any attempts to escape was futile because of the density of the jungle, the monetary rewards offered by the Japanese in Burma and Thailand for the handing over of escapers, the language problems and the lack of maps, food and medicines. The Japanese also threatened draconian punishments on camps from which anyone escaped. Nevertheless, Bradley and his friends reckoned that the likelihood of survival at Sonkurai was minimal and every effort should be made to alert the allied powers to the plight of the prisoners in the railway amps. The escape party was put together by Lieutenant Colonel M.T.L. Wilkinson of the Royal Engineers, Bradley’s Former company commander.
On July 5 1943, the ten men set out on a track through the jungle that Bradley had prepared near the crematorium, an area avoided by the Japanese. They had for guidance only a rough map of the Burma coast drawn on a silk Handkerchief, which suggested that the distance they had to cover objective, was about 50 miles. This they Hoped Accomplish on foot and by raft in about three weeks. to Ye their initial.
They had accumulated a quantity of rice, soya beans and fish and a few medicines such as prophylactic quinine, the rest of their equipment mounted to an axe, three parangs (knives), lighters and compasses together with blankets ground sheets and a few treasured personal possessions. Strict secrec ywas observed, Wilkinson Merel yleaving a note listing their name sbeside the bedspace of the British camp commander.
Covering their tracks by wading up a swollen river, the men set a course due west forced a path through dense undergrowth and initially made fair progress. The incessant rain hindered attempts to light fires, which were needed not only for cooking but also for warding off tigers at night.
Soon the country became hilly, the primitive map having given no indication of the range of mountains that ran in an unbroken line south of Moulmein. The jungle was so dense with interlocking fallen bamboos that even half a mile a day became a challenge. By July 25, food supplies were reduced to a little rice and a tin of pilchard. During the next fortnight, five of the party died, including Colonel Wilkinson. Of all the deaths, that of ‘Wilkie’ affected Bradley most deeply.
On August 18, having eaten nothing for three weeks and fully aware of the risks involved, the fiver survivors let themselves be taken into a village by two Burmese hunters. Their subsequent discovery that the headman of the village had claimed a large reward from the Japanese by revealing their whereabouts came as no surprise.
The Japanese initially refused to accept that anyone could have crossed the mountainous jungle, presuming that the men had landed by parachute. This factor almost certainly saved them from execution by bayonet of firing squad, the usual fate of recaptured officers. After formal identification and prolonged interrogation by Japanese military police, the five were informed that they had been sentenced to death. Allied officers brought by the Japanese from surrounding camps to witness the executions made every attempt to negotiate a reprieve.
Captain Cyril Wild, who was fluent in Japanese, managed to persuade Lieutenant Colonel Hirateru Banno to make an emotional cancellation of the death sentence by impressing upon him the disgrace that he would bring upon the. Emperor and the Imperial Japanese Army if he permitted the deaths of such brave men. Wild’s appeal was successful; years later Bradley was to pay tribute to him in a biography The Tall Man Who Never Slept (1991).
At the end of October 1943 Bradley was removed to Singapore for further interrogation by Japanese military police at Outram Road jail. Two months of this treatment left him unable to stand and he was sent to Changi, where he remained until 1945, except for an interlude in June 1944 when he faced a Japanese court martial and was sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude for his part in the escape. After the war, Bradley’s attitude towards the Japanese was always generous. In 1995 he shook hands with Abe after travelling to Tokyo to appear in a television programme to mark the 50th anniversary of VJ Day.
Abe recalled with great emotion Bradley burning the bodies of his comrades on the funeral pyre at Sonkurai and he offered an apology which Bradley accepted. “I still have nightmares” Bradley wrote in 1998 before the visit of Emperor of Japan to London. 2but these are not cause by the present or immediate past generation of Japanese. We have reached a time to forgive, if not forget”.
James Bottomley Bradley was born in Stalybridge, Cheshire in 1911, the son of Joseph Shaw Bradley, who worked in the cotton industry and his wife Sarah. He was educated at Arnold House, Llanddulas, Denbighshire (immortalised in the letters of Evelyn Waugh, who was at the time a reluctant member of staff) and at Oundle School. In 1929 he went up to Christ’s college, Cambridge, where he read engineering. Bradley joined the Territorial Army in August 1938. He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and posted to the 18th Division, arriving in Singapore in January 1942. He spent the first 14 months after the capitulation at Changi where his engineering skills were put to good use at Roberts Hospital.
His long cherished ambition to become a farmer was realised in 1962 when he bought apple orchards near Petworth, West Sussex. He retired in 1977 to Midhurst, spending the last seven years of his life in Winchester. His family life was singularly happy and he celebrated two silver weddings.
In 1949 Bradley was appointed MBE in recognition of his escape attempt. He published an account of his experience in Towards The Setting Sun (1982).
Bradley married Lindsay Walker in 1936. She died in 1969. In 1970 he married Lindy Gorfeld, who survives him, together with a son of his first marriage and a son and daughter of his second.
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