One thing that also would engage my attention all the time I was in that Camp and which fascinated me, was watching the Japanese farmers till their soil which was quite unlike anything I had seen in Ceylon or Australia and quite different to anything that I would later see in England . In the autumn at the end of the rice harvest, the dry paddy land would be ploughed and cultivated using rotavators . Then winter barley or wheat would be sown, which would grow quickly in the warm autumn air to about four or six inches in height, and then remain dormant during the really cold weather of mid winter. In March with the advent of bright sun and then in the warm April air the corn would grow fast and mature and be ready for harvesting by the end of May or early June. In the meantime however a small corner of one of the fields would be flooded in April and rice sown thick so that by the time of the June harvest, the rice in the seed beds was probably about eighteen inches high. The harvested land from the winter corn would immediately be re-cultivated, the land flooded, and whole armies of women and school children would come and help transplant the rice into straight lines about two foot apart. Once this was completed every available bare space such as the ridges between the paddy fields and the edges would be planted with soya beans. The rice would grow almost three foot high in the hot humid summer air, and each small plant would tiller to produce rapidly a bunch of stems about three inches across. The farmers in the early stages would pull a hoe between the rice clumps to weed them, but once the plants were so large and thick the blanket cover reduced weeds anyway. In September and October the rice would be harvested and the cycle recommence gaining two crops from the one piece of warm fertile volcanic land.
And so now we were in for our second Japanese winter, with limited heating that was only turned on in December for two months. Food was now getting scarcer and we tended to live on a thin gruel made from a long radish or turnip which would be hung on strings to dry in the cold winter air, and then sliced for our meagre soup. The taste was revolting, and every since then I have loathed anything to do with turnips or swedes.
At last ast the spring of 1944 approached, we could sense the Industrial might of America now about thirty months after Pearl Harbour coming into full production and fruition. The second World War for our younger readers who are not so well versed in the history of that time, was above all a war won by the material productive power of the United States. To give an example of the speed of the efficiency of this production capacity, at the battle of Guadacanal in the Solomons in autumn 1942, the Americans had only three carriers afloat. But a year later there were fifty, and by the end of the war there were over a 100 carriers in service. Cargo ships or “Liberty Boats” were mass produced at such a rate that one ship was leaving the Kaiser yards of the USA every three hours .
The war in the Pacific clearly demonstrated that the most important capital ship in any future navy was going to the aircraft carrier with its ability to project power across thousands of miles of ocean. The first stage of the eventual defeat of Japan was the steady progress made by General MacArthur in gradually conquering New Guinea, from which point finally on the 15th June 1944 the Americans landed on Saipan Island in the Marianas as part of their major island hopping plan to approach Japan with nearby bases. Saipan was the crucial focus for the whole Far Eastern war because once taken and only 1,300 miles from Japan, it could be used as a base from which to bomb her cities and industries for the first time. It was vital therefore that the Japanese stopped this action, and they threw everything possible into the attack but by the first week of July all of the Island had been captured and soon Palau and Morotai were to follow. It had been decided then to attack the large southern island of