From the BBC:
“VJ Day: How a Belfast doctor
used Irish to keep WW2 secrets”
He became known as the Belfast
Doctor and his medical expertise, leadership and guile helped protect the lives
of hundreds of Allied prisoners of war in Japanese prison camps. Frank Murray
was born above the family spirit-grocers shop on north Belfast's Oldpark Road,
growing up in a nationalist area of the city in a family with a strong Catholic
faith. Like many of his contemporaries, as a schoolboy he spent the summer in
the Gaeltacht in Donegal learning the Irish language, something he would later
use to his advantage thousands of miles away in the Far East during a world
war. His son Carl recounts how his father and mother first met among the
peaceful and picturesque rolling hills of County Donegal before the outbreak of
World War Two.m"My father met my mother Eileen O'Kane in the Gaeltacht
area in Ranafast when they were both school children in 1929," he said. "She
was from the Springfield Road and he was from the Oldpark Road in Belfast. "He
asked her to dance at a céilí and fell in love with her. "They kept up
contact thereafter and both went to Queen's University but in 1937 she broke
things off and they had no further contact until he found himself in Rawalpindi
in what was India at the time, where he was serving as an Army medical officer.
"He sent her a Christmas card with a picture of the officers' mess on
it."
'Secret diaries' The two began corresponding again and this
continued when he was sent to the British garrison at Singapore. All of her
letters were lost when Dr Murray burnt them just before the Japanese invaded
and took him prisoner. However, the family have all the correspondence he
subsequently wrote to his sweetheart while he was in captivity and it is these
"secret diaries" that make such a fascinating story. Carl explains
that his father kept writing to her in the form of a diary but in order that he
didn't incur the wrath of the Japanese guards he did so in Irish, safe in
knowledge that the chances of any of them being able to translate were slim in
the extreme. "Sometimes he would write in English but disguising it using
old Gaelic script. "I remember when I did Irish at school there were text
books that had the old script in it which meant there was that extra level that
you had to translate from the script and then translate the Irish. "And he
would write about how the war was going but by doing so in Irish he knew that
even if the Japanese found it, there was very little chance of them being able
to translate that he was recounting events that were happening during the
war."
'He never forgave' Keeping diaries of this kind was strictly
forbidden particularly as the enemy soldiers were wary of prisoners recording
incidents of brutality or war crimes against them. Prisoners caught in breach
of the regulations were liable to severe punishment in many instances. Carl
says after the war his father would not have anything Japanese in the house. "I
know it's fashionable to talk about reconciliation and forgiveness but I don't
really think he ever forgave the Japanese, not for what happened to him but for
the way the prisoners were treated. "However, he distinguished between the
Japanese military and the Japanese people. "You have to respect that
having been through what he went through. My father couldn't forgive and I
think that's important." The Murray family has collated as much
information as they can about their father's time as a PoW.
'He wanted to do his bit' He was the medical officer in a number of
camps eventually becoming the most senior officer commanding in one prison. His
ability to argue or negotiate with his captors about who was fit and who wasn't
fit to join the work details meant the difference between life and death for
many Allied captives. His bravery and service during this time was later
recognised with an award from the US military and an MBE.
So how did a Catholic nationalist
from north Belfast end up a major in the British Army? "As children we always wanted to know
why he joined up," recalls Carl Murray. "My father felt that the
Nazis could easily have invaded Ireland at that time and later we discovered
there was a plan to do that. "He felt that as a northern Irish Catholic he
wanted to do his bit in the war effort. I think he wanted to go to France but
he ended up in India, the Malay peninsula and eventually Japan. "It wasn't
what he expected but he did his duty."
Astonishingly, the batch of almost translucent papers with tiny spidery
writing that make up the doctor's daily diaries - which he kept right under the
noses of his Japanese guards - was eventually delivered to Eileen at the end of
the war. When he was repatriated, the couple were married.
^ This is very interesting. Not
only was he a Northern Irish Catholic (meaning he couldn’t be conscripted into
the British Military) but he also knew and used Irish for fear of what the
Japanese would do if they found his writings and could understand them. ^
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.