ARTICLES & STORIES

75th ANNIVERSARY END OF WW II FEPOW DAY AUGUST 15th 2020

     This year was the 13th time that FEPOW Day has been celebrated here in Taiwan. Once again we met at the   Spot Theatre - # 18, Zhongshan North Road Sec. 2 in downtown Taipei, on Saturday August 15th.

      Being the 75th Anniversary of VJ Day and the end of World War II, we expanded the day’s program to include two seminars relating to Taiwan in World War II, and these took place in the afternoon.

      The first was a special guest presentation on the bombing of Taiwan and...

TOROKU POW CAMP MEMORIAL DEDICATED

     After five years in the works, a memorial to honour the American and British POWs who were held in the Toroku POW Camp from November 1944 to April 1945 was dedicated on Saturday June 6th 2009. The memorial is located inside the grounds of Gou-Ba Elementary School in the village of Gou-Ba - a suburb of Douliou City in South-Central Taiwan.

     Until 2003, two of the former old Japanese school buildings which the POWs inhabited still stood on the grounds – they were thought to be the last remaining POW buildings...

TAIWAN POW CAMPS MEMORIAL SOCIETY DIRECTOR AWARED THE M.B.E.

(CP-Taiwan)     Michael Hurst, the Founder and Director of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, traveled to London England in October 2002 to receive a very special award - the Member of the Order of the British Empire. His long and tireless efforts to remember the former allied prisoners of war in Taiwan have been recognized. Michael was the original founder and first Chairman of the Kinkaseki Memorial Committee in 1997, and later he founded the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, to carry on the work begun by the original committee when it closed down...

The RAKUYO AND KACHIDOKI MARUS

     In the spring and early summer of 1944 a large group of so-called “fit” POWs were returned to Singapore from Thailand upon completion of the Death Railway. They were destined for shipment to Japan.

     On September 4th 1944 a convoy of several Japanese transport ships set sail from Singapore. There were two ships carrying POWs - the Rakuyo Maru with 1,317 POWs and the Kachidoki Maru with 900 POWs aboard.

                           The Kachidoki Maru           ...