Hirohito’s Slaves

On 3 September 1939, when war with Germany broke out, despite no conscription, around 65,000 men and women from Ulster volunteered to join the British forces.On 7 December 1942 the Japanese attacked the British Colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore. Within three months they had taken over almost all of the Far East.Some 730 men women and children with Ulster origins, including the authors father, were in the Far East at that time. One in three were to die over the following three and a half years.It was not until the dropping of the atomic bombs in August 1945 that those interned realised, they might see their families again and have lives to look forward to. Hugh Lowry told his son that when the news filtered through to his camp:_‘It was greeted with a mixture of emotions from the boys, some of them clapped and cheered, some knelt down and prayed, some wept openly and others too weak to cheer, just smiled. Handshakes and embraces swept through the camp. My thoughts turned back to my family in Downpatrick, the Mourne Mountains and of course a pint of Guinness with a Bushmills whiskey. I just stared at the floor with my eyes closed’._On returning to their Ulster homeland, the surviving prisoners wanted to put their dreadful experiences behind them and move on with their lives, often bottling up their feelings and unwilling to talk about what they had been through. This book tells their story.