From Richard Wood Penn (Northampton) adio Rockall Bill’s Bridges From the Rockall Pirate Conflict often focuses around bridges, those narrow stretches of communication, which may become immortalised: The Bridge at Remagen, A Bridge Too Far, The Bridges of Madison County. Most famous, perhaps, is The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Curiously, this infamous railway bridge, which still has spans completed in 1945, was not built over the Kwai but when the tourists came searching for it after the famous film, the Thais with ingenious lateral thinking simply re-named the river. The more difficult search for peace often involves building another bridge.
Bill joined the Beds and Herts Regiment as a patriotic, rightwing 20 year old in 1941. By 1943 he was a prisoner at Kanchanaburi building a railway bridge over a river. He saw it completed and felt the excitement of seeing the first steam locomotive coming up through the jungle like Colonel Nicholson in the film. Bill’s bridge held but he almost broke, when having been tortured by the Japanese he experienced the one thing he said was worse, ‘Seeing and hearing your friends being tortured.’ The translator at the torture sessions was a Korean, Takashi Nagase, whom the prisoners grew to hate as much as their Japanese captors.
In 1944, at the Changi camp in Singapore, Bill heard a man praying for their captors and preaching, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who ill-treat you.’ Bill began to change and started to learn Japanese in order to be an interpreter.
He said he owed his survival to the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan in 1945, but by now he was, ‘a peacemaker and a socialist, believing in the basic equality of all human beings, of whatever, race, religion, country or class’. Then he began to feel ‘survivor guilt’.
Meanwhile, following the Japanese defeat, Nagase had guilt feelings. ‘I decided to judge myself and expiate the crimes we committed during the war.’ Once again he became an interpreter, but this time for the Allied War Graves Commission set up in September 1945.
He felt intimidated by the victors, but also by thousands of graves and unburied bodies. Over the years he visited the line many times and said he gradually ‘felt calmer.’ To express his ‘reverence for life and to relieve suffering’, Bill decided to study medicine, specialising in psychiatry: still in the beds and hearts. He regarded war as a disease and he joined the Quakers particularly because of their Peace Testimony.
In 1976, over 30 years after the war, Nagase planned to ‘build a bridge’ between old allied prisoners and their old Japanese captors.
Resistance was formidable but Bill was one of the first to respond positively. Official groups ignored the plan but on 25th October 1976, 3 British, 18 Australian, 2 American and 51 Japanese, walked the whole of the Bridge on the River Kwai – and back. Bill was in London organising a parallel event in Westminster Abbey.
Bill and Nagase met many times in Japan and England but especially in Thailand, building their bridge from opposite sides and finding the peace both desired.