"Lucky"
'The Jap' officer walked in. He spoke to me first, held a pistol at my temple and asked me what was wrong with me and I told him. I thought, this is it. Good-bye Mum and Dad. Nothing happened. I opened my eyes and he [the officer] was doing the same to the next guy. And he did it to everybody and finally before he walked out, he said, "You are prisoners of war from now on". I suppose in some ways we were lucky, but that was mental torture. We were lucky.
Laurence Hurndell was just 19 years old, that day, early in 1942 in Sumatra when he had a gun held to his head and was told that he was a prisoner of Emperor Hirohito. It would be almost three years before he would be a free man once more.
Born in mid-September 1922, Hurndell joined the NZ Division of the Royal Navy in May of 1941 and after a few months of basic training sailed to Singapore the spring of that year for further training at the Royal Navy Base there. After his arrival in Singapore he was duly drafted to GRASSHOPPER, a minefield patrol vessel which kept an eye on the harbour and was, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, standing by with DRAGONFLY to take off survivors from Singapore. Hurndell still has vivid memories of the night - 13th February 1942 - that Singapore fell:
'... it was terrible, the fire. Singapore at night was just a red fire. We were ... I suppose about five or six miles out and we could see the dive bombers just machine gunning and dive bombing around the city. There was no air opposition at all and it was just chaotic. The fires were burning and all the oil tanks were burning and Singapore was a massive glow at night... the Japanese by that time were just down the road about half a mile away.'
The DRAGONFLY and the GRASSHOPPER loaded to the gunnels with evacuees faced air bombardment off the coast of Sumatra by 127 Japanese planes. The DRAGONFLY sunk quickly and the GRASSHOPPER was severely damaged with many deaths and injuries occurring onboard. Hurndell himself was badly wounded in the hip and groin area by shrapnel and unable to walk. When DRAGONFLY was heroically beached on an island by its captain, Hurndell had to be bodily thrown in the water. The survivors were machine gunned by the Japanese as they came ashore.
The prisoners, both military and civilian, were held on Singkep, where there was a Dutch tin mine and a rudimentary native hospital, at which Hurndell and the other wounded were treated. Hurndell's wound, unsurprisingly under the conditions, became infected and required surgery to remove the shrapnel infected tissue.
Eventually the POW's were sent north to the capital of Sumatra, Medan where a large camp had been established in the requisitioned Dutch army barracks. The camp population which numbered an estimated 3,000 souls, consisted of a cross section of the war's various and multifarious refugees, including a substantial number of Dutch civilians. Many of the prisoners at Medan were earmarked to be sent to labour on the Burma Road however due to submarines in the Malacca Straits, this plan was thwarted.
Life in the camp at Medan was extraordinarily harsh. Hunger, disease and the sheer amount of work that was expected of them, took many lives long before their time. Detainees were regularly tortured for stealing food, the most fundamental of commodities. Fish, rice, vegetable, tapioca and the odd snake if they were lucky enough to catch one, was what the prisoners subsisted on day after day.
For two years POW's including Hurndell worked variously, loading ships in the Medan port, building a race course and carving cattle grazing land out of the jungle. News of the war and the outside world filtered in to the camp, in fragments via a single crystal radio set which the Japanese knew existed and in spite of repeated searches, never found.
In early 1944, 1500 detainees including Hurndell walked for a week through the jungle, travelling further north to supplement the Chinese and Indonesian labour building a railway line there. The Atcheh railway line traversed 200 miles of mountainous, jungle clad country, from the coast to a coal mine in the hills. Hurndell distinctly recalls the building of a viaduct without a single nail. Ironically the Atcheh job was completed a week after the end of the war.
Upon the return to camp at Medan it became quickly apparent that "something was up". Within days the Japanese had deserted the camp, silently in the night.
Soon after help arrived in the form of food and medical supplies at first, which were parachuted in by aircraft, then the liberating forces themselves. Even Edwina, Lady Mountbatten paid a visit.
On September 16th 1945, after an arduous three years as a prisoner of the Japanese, Mr Hurndell, one of the "lucky" ones was repatriated back to New Zealand.