PoW 1942, Indian Army Ordnance Corps

[Susan McEwen]

Letter to a PoW, from India addressed to him at Singapore.  Manuscript 26/8/42 refers to the date  it was written as there is a Bombay backstamp of 27 Aug 1942. British Indian Censorship and an Indian Postage due mark, not apparently followed up.
The addressee, Sgt S.E.M. Hilton, was Stanford Eric Masue Hilton, Indian Army Ordnance Corps, born  11th  November 1916 at Jhansi Bengal, he was captured in Malaya in 1942 and later shipped to Japan and held at Hakodate PoW camp. After the war he enlisted in the Royal Berkshire Regiment. The 2nd Battalion of the Royal Berkshires was stationed in India and served  in the Burma campaign.

[Peter Harvey]

Hi Susan,

Thank you for sharing this an interesting cover. As the handwriting is the same, I assume this was addressed like this because other that the Japan address, the writer did not know which camp, so the cover was forwarded directly by the Indian Postal Authorities to the IRC and tracing?

As it happens there was an interesting repeat on Radio 4 yesterday from their 2015 recording of discussion with Far east POW's, well worth a listen to understand life at the time and also the situation those lucky to survive and be repatriated, came back to in England - You can access this as a podcast or listen again at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05rl3j8

Regards Peter

[Michael Dobbs]

We also listened to "The Reunion" yesterday - very interesting and moving, especially when they talked about how they feel about the Japanese people "now" (the original broadcast was in 2015) and that since the original broadcast most of those taking part had now died.

Mike