Willie Kitwood From the Goole Times Thursday January 9th 2014. Goole’s “Railway Man” remembered in new film. The release on January 10th of the film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, will recall the brutalities endured by Allied prisoners-of-war when they were forced to build the Burma-Siam railway. Some Goole men were among those prisoners, and, as Mike Marsh recalls, one of those who survived was Willie Kitwood. Willie Kitwood died in 2008. He was then 88. Even in his eighties, at his home in Hook, Near Goole he would tell you that he had had a good life. Yet his life, like so many of his generation, was indelibly touched by the terrors of World War II. Thus, even in his later years, rarely a day went by when he did not privately give thanks for surviving the horrors of working on what became known as the Railway of Death. Called up in 1940, Driver Kitwood, of the RASC, was posted to Singapore in January 1942, a month before that seemingly-impregnable Allied fortress was over-run and captured by the Japanese. At that time he was a healthy 12 stones. When he finally got home to Goole in 1945, released from captivity after the war’s end, he weighed just six stones. Willie was among 60,000 Allied prisoners and 300,000 Asian labourers forced to work on the creation of the infamous 250 mile rail link between Burma and Siam. More than 90,000 of those enslaved workers died. Though captured in Singapore, Driver Kitwood was soon on the move. “We were taken to Thailand by rail-in cattle trucks with an open door. There were 50 men to a truck. There was no room to lie down-we could only sit. The journey lasted for days and our only food was a bowl of rice twice a day. By then disease was beginning to take hold, including dysentery. The trucks had no sanitation-only the open door”. In Thailand Willie was among prisoners put to work on building the railway bridge over the (Kwae) Khwae Yai river and was compelled to work 10 to 12 hours a day with only two short breaks-the prisoners had to endure appalling living conditions. In a camp of huts with open sides, they slept on bamboo platforms with no protection against mosquitoes. After the Khwae Yai bridge was completed the workers were then engaged on building the railway line which the Japanese regarded as vital to their supplies. As Willie would later recall, work was the prisoners’ only hope of survival: “We were up at first light-if you couldn’t work, even if you could persuade the Japs that you weren’t fit, they would cut your food”. Eventually the camp’s Japanese guards were replaced by Koreans: “They were the worst of all. You took care never to look a guard in the eye. They would take eye contact as a criticism or a challenge, and then the cruelty would start”. For a prisoner deemed to have transgressed, punishments ranged from a kick or blow with a rifle butt to being made to stand for many hours in the heat of the day, holding a brick above his head. Sometimes that punishment lasted into the following day. Willie Kitwood never suffered that kind of treatment because he quickly learned how to stay out of trouble. But disease, especially cholera, was a different threat altogether. “At one point 3 men were found to have cholera and then the next day there were 15..the Japs had no doctors or medication for prisoners. But one of our men was a doctor. He came to an arrangement where he passed on some of his medical knowledge to the Japs in return for medicines for the prisoners”. Willie managed to avoid cholera but had many difficult moments with malaria and dysentery. “You had to rely on your willpower to get through. Hundreds died through diseases related to hunger. But many of our men died because their willpower, their desire to continue, just ran out”. The adopted son of Mr and Mrs F Kitwood, Willie and his fellow prisoners were freed at the end of the war and he returned to Goole in the autumn of 1945. Recovery from his ordeal took more than 3 years. In 1948 he married Barbara Crawley of Airmyn, and 25 years later the couple celebrated their silver wedding anniversary by visiting Thailand and Singapore, and some of the places which had witnessed his years as a prisoner-of-war. But visiting the Khwae Yai bridge, the scene of so much cruelty and suffering, he went alone: “I spent some time sitting quietly on the bridge and thought about what happened there. Then I went to the huge cemetery nearby and recognised so many names on the gravestones”. Predeceased by his wife, Willie Kitwood died in April, 2008
good day 4jonboy.m.yesterday.03:39pm.re:willie kitwood of goole,p.o.w.a story of a very brave man,may he rest in peace.also his fellow prisoners that did not make it home.they went through hell.regards bernard85
A bit here about the new film The Railway Man. Anyone going to see it? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25659156
