Jack Edwards (British Army soldier)

Jack Edwards, OBE (24 May 1918 – 13 August 2006) was a British World War II army sergeant and a POW, most well known for his dedicated efforts of tracking down Japanese war criminals and his determination displayed in defending the rights of Hong Kong war veterans.

Jack Edwards was born in Cardiff, Wales on 24 May 1918, in the suburb of Canton, joining the Territorial Army just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Edwards was an army sergeant in the Royal Corps of Signals when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942.

He was interned for some time by the Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison before being transported to Taiwan, then the Japanese colony of Formosa.

Edwards was put into the Kinkaseki POW camp, a mountainous region near Jiufen, where he and 525 other inmates were forced to work the copper mine daily in tropical heat.

To get to the mine, parties had to walk up 250 steps to top of a ridge, then down 831 more to sea, and then descend a further 800 steps inside the mine to the working face on the lowest levels.

So ever day before, and then again after work, the men had to walk up and down 1,881 crudely cut steps (by way of comparison there are 1,665 steps to the small platform on the top of the Eiffel Tower).

His team was required to bring out 24 bogeys of copper every single day, if not, they were then beaten.

As men died, or were transferred to other camps because they were too weak and ill to continue working, replacement contingents were drafted in to make up the numbers.

From the initial contingent of 525 only 120 remained in Kinkaseki when the camp was abandoned between 16 and 30 May 1945.

Edwards was moved to a remote jungle camp called Kukutsu in the Taihoku Heights about 12 mi from Shinten (now Xindian District).

He was in the first party to arrive on 1 June 1945.

Their first task was to construct the camp as the site was a derelict tea plantation with no facilities.

All materials for the construction were carried by the prisoners who were forced to carry 40 to 60 kg each.

On 28 August 1945 the USAAF started to drop food supplies on the camp and on the afternoon of 5 September American Marines arrived at the jungle camp.

He and others were so emaciated that their eyes were sunken and their bodies mere skeletons of their former selves.

He was featured in the open forum "Hong Kong - A Matter of Honour" which organized by RTHK in Hong Kong and the BBC in Britain, during which showed a Union Jack flag which was hoisted in Hong Kong during 1945, and defended the contributions from the British Army and local veterans in the program.

Edwards spent a year recuperating in Britain, then in 1946 he returned to Asia to help in the apprehension of Japanese war criminals and to give evidence at their trials as part of the war crimes investigation team in Hong Kong.

While visiting Kinkaseki he found Document No. 2701 — the only surviving copy of the Japanese order to massacre all prisoners of war if the Allies landed on the Japanese home islands — and an important piece of evidence at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

On his return to South Wales Edwards worked in local government.

There, he felt an active discouragement from talking about the horrors he experienced as a POW.

Unable to settle, he left for Hong Kong in 1963.

Edwards took up a post as a housing officer in the housing department of the Hong Kong administration, later becoming a senior housing manager for Hongkong Land.

There, he was actively involved in the Hong Kong Ex-Servicemen's Association as well as the Royal British Legion, becoming later on its chairman.

He was also president of the St David's Society of Hong Kong.

In 1989, after the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, Edwards started to help the Hong Kong people with British Dependent Territories Citizenship (BDTC), to fight for the recognition as British Citizens with the right of abode in the United Kingdom from the British Government.

In 1990, he married Polly Tam So-lan, a former member of a Chinese People's Liberation Army dance troupe whom he met in 1974.

They lived in a flat in Sha Tin in the New Territories.

Both he and Polly loved dancing by practising to the tunes of Taiwanese songs in their small living-room.

Edwards spoke fluent Cantonese.

He was survived by his wife and her daughter by her first marriage.

The Allies rebuilt Japan and Germany and Italy.

Nobody rebuilt our lives.

The tears and nightmares will remain 'til death.

I'm willing to forgive.

None of us should forget.

Through his efforts as the chairman of the Royal British Legion (Hong Kong and China branch), in 1991 Edwards succeeded in winning monthly pension awards from the British government to ethnic Chinese veterans and their widows.

A greater triumph came in 1996 when Edwards fought and won the granting of British citizenship to wives and widows of those veterans.

He spoke out for the many in Hong Kong who during the occupation, had been forced to sell their businesses as well as property to the Japanese in exchange for the worthless Japanese military yen.

Edwards's first marriage ended because of the war.