Kennedy Ballybunion to the River Kwai

An Irishman's Story of Survival on the Death Railway
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80458-333-3
Verlag: Gill Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 282 Seiten

Ballybunion to the River Kwai is the remarkable account of Don Kennedy's harrowing experience as an Irish prisoner of war in Singapore and Thailand from 1942-45. Vividly narrated by Don's son Fergus, this is the first account of an Irish citizen as a POW along the infamous River Kwai, offering fresh insights into a chapter of history that the world presumes it knows. More than a biography, this is a journey through the darkest times to find light and love. It's a story that promises to touch hearts, provoke thought, and, perhaps most importantly, remind us of the enduring strength and resilience of the human spirit.

Fergus Kennedy is a retired family doctor with a lifelong passion for history. He was born and raised in Waterford and received his medical degree from University College Dublin in 1977. He emigrated to Canada in 1982, and for over thirty years has lived on Vancouver Island with his wife and family. He has been researching his father's experiences as a prisoner of war in Singapore and Thailand throughout his adult life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kennedy, Fergus

Leseproben

PROLOGUE

I have a confession to make. For over 40 years, I’ve been dealing with an obsession. In medical circles, obsessions are often labelled as persistent or recurring unwanted thoughts which intrude into daily life and cause significant distress. In contrast, my personal obsession, while time-consuming, has been a source of pleasure and joy over many years. It’s called genealogy: the study of family history.

Let me tell you why it’s so important in my life and how it all started.

In February 1981, my wife, Maggie, and I – along with our newborn son, Stephen – were living in a beautiful, 100-year-old cottage on the outskirts of Wexford. The cottage boasted three-feet-thick stone walls and lovely views of the lush green surrounding countryside. I was employed as a young doctor in the local hospital. Our lives were very happy – and very busy.

When our home phone rang one evening, I anticipated that the call would be from the hospital or from one of Stephen’s proud grandparents. I was wrong, on both counts. A lovely lady introduced herself as Olive Dawson née Kennedy. She lived in Wexford with her husband, Barry, and five children. She told me that she was my second cousin. I was ashamed to admit to her that I barely knew all my Kennedy aunts and uncles (there are 10 of them), only some of my first cousins (31 in total, I now know) and none of my second cousins. Olive finished the call by saying that she would help me to learn more. She was true to her word.

A week later, we visited her home for a delightful dinner. We were joined by her aunt, Sr Barbara Kennedy, a Catholic nun in Bunclody, Co. Wexford and an expert in the family history of my Kennedy clan. She entertained us with lots of stories of her childhood growing up in Eglish, a rural townland near the town of Borrisokane in north Co. Tipperary. Near the end of dinner, Sr Barbara presented me with a beautifully hand-drawn family tree, along with the names of my great-grandparents and a depiction of many of their descendants.

I was determined to know more and so began researching. Soon I learned that the original Kennedy (Cinnéide in Irish) was the father of Brian Boru, the famous High King of Ireland who defeated Viking invaders in the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. This and many other discoveries were pleasing and exciting to me. Many of the skills involved in family research were also appealing. For example, I had always enjoyed working out puzzles, ever since my father had taught me how to do cryptic crosswords as a boy. In school, I had loved learning about history and studying maps. In medicine, I enjoyed the art of differential diagnosis – that is, considering multiple possibilities and carefully analysing data to arrive at the right conclusion. These talents, it seemed to me, were at the heart of genealogy. As a result, I was hooked.

We emigrated to Alberta, Canada in 1982; however, if anything, my passion for family history only increased, as Maggie and I both wanted to ensure that our children did not lose their Irish roots. Stephen was joined by Deirdre in 1983, Aisling in 1985 and Mary Clare in 1987. We made sure to return to Ireland for family holidays as often as we could. On each of these visits, I would try to set aside a day in Dublin to search for family records. This involved visits to reading rooms in the National Archives, General Register Office, National Library, Royal Irish Academy or Trinity College Library. Later, I found even more information by meeting and corresponding with relatives interested in family history. There seems to be one keen genealogist in each clan. It was wonderful to share knowledge with like-minded enthusiasts. The arrival of the internet, and, later, of affordable DNA testing, made searching even easier.

After 40 years, I now have a large family tree, depicting both my roots and Maggie’s Gleeson ancestry. In total, there are over seventy thousand names. However, as time has passed, I’ve come to realise that I’m now less focused on expanding that family tree and much more interested in family history.

Each individual in the tree has a life story. Almost all will have had some drama worth retelling, and a few of them are as dramatic as a Hollywood movie. However, I will leave that task to other family historians; instead, I’ve decided to focus on a single unforgettable story, one which is close to my heart.

Just before the start of World War 2, my parents met and fell in love in the beautiful seaside town of Ballybunion, Co. Kerry, in the south-west corner of Ireland. Within a year, they were engaged and expected to marry soon after. They were wrong. Because of the war, they became separated by many thousands of miles for over five years. For most of that time, my mother did not know if her fiancé was alive or dead. Though he was a citizen of a neutral country, my father had become a prisoner of war (POW) of the Japanese empire. In fact, he was a slave labourer working on a railway running from Burma (modern-day Myanmar) to Thailand. The railway is now better known as the River Kwai Railway, or, more ominously, ‘the Death Railway’. During this period, he endured conditions of cruelty and deprivation that are almost unimaginable, narrowly escaping death on several occasions. His incredible survival personifies courage, love, faith and tenacity in the midst of a prolonged nightmare – as well as some good luck. Luck that, incredibly, brings us back to Ballybunion.

This amazing story has not been easy to compile. My father, like many men from that era, did not like to talk about his war experiences and thought that silence was the best coping mechanism. If any of my six siblings or I asked him about those days, he, or my mother, would nearly always change the subject. Luckily, he did break his silence with me on rare occasions.

I remember watching the Oscar-winning film The Bridge on the River Kwai with him one Christmas when I was a boy. Afterwards, he told me that the Hollywood story was quite inaccurate, but he didn’t explain further. Similarly, on another occasion we watched a movie about an attempted escape from a German POW camp. Afterwards, he told me how barbed wire fences had been unnecessary on the River Kwai; if a prisoner escaped, he would either die in the jungle or be easily recognisable to the local population, who would return him to the Japanese for a reward.

He did, of course, share all his wartime experiences with my mother. While he was alive, she honoured his wish not to talk about them with anyone else. In hindsight, I believe that she was simply trying to protect his mental health. She saw up close the nightmares that had plagued him for many years after the war and did not want to rekindle them. The term PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) had not yet come into common usage. However, after his death in 1989, my mother provided me with a treasure trove of stories.

My parents were not my only source of information. I read many books and memoirs about the experiences of POWs in Asia, especially on the River Kwai. I also came across insights through more serendipitous means. In 1991, our family moved from Alberta to the small town of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, where I soon had a busy family practice. During this time, I became friendly with Dr Patricia ‘Paddy’ Mark, a family doctor in nearby Nanaimo. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that her father, originally from Northern Ireland, had worked as a medical officer on the River Kwai, and she willingly shared many of his personal memories with me.

In the early 2000s, an older man named Jack Farr became my patient. He soon told me that he had been a young pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) based in India in World War 2. During the last two years of the war, he and his colleagues became known as the Burma Bombers. He had personally flown combat missions over the Burma–Thailand Railway, and one of his Canadian friends had even been the one to destroy the real ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’. We spent a lot of time in my office chatting about his wartime experiences instead of his medical concerns.

By 2007, Maggie was a professor of nursing at Vancouver Island University (VIU) in Nanaimo. She and a colleague, Anna Grieve, were invited to present at a conference in Bangkok, Thailand, and kindly brought their husbands along for the trip. After the conference, we were able to arrange a minibus trip to Kanchanaburi, about 150km north-east of Bangkok, the site of the famous ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’. Not only were we able to walk across the bridge, but we rode the railway over the raised wooden Wampo (Wang Pho) viaduct that my father had helped to build. It was an overwhelming experience and a day I will never forget.

A couple of years later, I learned that the British National Archives in Kew, London was releasing military records of POWs of the Japanese for the first time. My sister Irene, who lives in London, kindly agreed to go to Kew to look for our dad’s records. Armed with only his military number, she soon held in her hands his British record written in his own handwriting, as well as a corresponding record in Japanese. Astonished, she emailed copies to me. I was incredulous. My father had provided me with a roadmap and exact timeline of his imprisonment – what a gift.

In 2022, my great-niece Sadhbh Murphy decided to write a high school history paper about my father’s wartime story. She interviewed me at length for her project, amazed to learn how much...