William Drower; Interpreter in Japanese PoW camps
amelia...@gmail.com
September 3, 2007
William Drower
Interpreter in Japanese PoW camps who deftly negotiated the uneasy
relationships between prisoners and captors
Bill Drower was an outstanding interpreter in Japanese prisoner of war
camps on the Thailand-Burma Railway during the Second World War.
Forced to relay the orders of the Japanese camp authorities and the
railway engineers to the Allied prisoners of war, the interpreter's
role was an unenviable one. "All the time with the Japanese we would
be obliged to negotiate, procrastinate, plead, haggle," Drower
explained. He was beaten frequently and spent the last 80 days of his
captivity in a cell from which he was rescued, unconscious, by British
officers of Force 136 who liberated the camp on August 16, 1945, the
day after the Japanese surrender.
Subsequently Drower felt no bitterness towards the Japanese. He
appreciated the art and literature of Japan and was delighted to
accept an invitation to visit the country in 2002 under a scheme
initiated by the Japanese to promote reconciliation between former
PoWs and their captors.
As a diplomat in Washington between 1964 and 1973, Drower played a
role in moulding British perceptions of the US during a period of
considerable legislative importance.
William Mortimer Drower was born in Southampton in 1915, the elder son
of Sir Edwin Drower, KBE, a judicial adviser to the government of
Iraq, 1922-46, and his wife, Ethel Stefana Stevens. Drower's mother
became an authority on the Mandaean Gnostic sect which inhabited the
marshlands south of Basra. Drower and his siblings were brought up by
their paternal grandparents in Streatham, their mother returning each
summer from Iraq. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and at
the age of 17 was awarded an exhibition at Exeter College, Oxford,
spending six months in Heidelberg before term began. At Oxford Drower
read PPE but, by his own admission, he neglected his studies and
failed to appreciate the available extracurricular activities.
Drower's lack of achievement at Oxford ruled out an immediate start to
a diplomatic career. By chance, he heard that the Japanese Embassy in
London was looking for an English secretary and between 1936 and 1938
Drower attended the House of Commons, reporting orally to the
Ambassador, Shigeru Yoshida, on debates of particular interest to the
Japanese and assisting with official correspondence.
In 1940 he was commissioned in an artillery regiment but the
elementary knowledge of Japanese acquired at the Embassy enabled him
to transfer to the newly reformed Intelligence Corps. In June 1941 he
was one of a small party of Japanese-speakers sent to Singapore. There
he lectured on interrogation techniques at Malaya Command
Headquarters. At the surrender of Singapore on February 15, 1942, he
became a prisoner of war.
In May 1942 Drower was appointed interpreter to an Australian force
ordered by the Japanese to leave Singapore for Burma, initially to
repair bomb damage and build airstrips, but later to begin work on a
railway to provide the Imperial Japanese Army with an overland supply
route to Burma.
There, Drower was assigned to a battalion of about 700 Australians
under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel C. G. W. Anderson, a grazier
from New South Wales who had won the Victoria Cross during the Malayan
campaign. "Anderson Force" began work on the railway in October 1942
and reached the border with Thailand 11 months later, depleted by
malnutrition and sickness, and exhausted by the brutality of their
captors. Drower and "the coolly imaginative" Anderson often worked
together, sharing the view that dialogue with the Japanese was more
effective than stubborn resistance. At the beginning of 1945 the
Japanese, alarmed by the probability of an Allied invasion of Thailand
and the discovery of clandestine links between the prisoners and the
outside world, confined the captive officers in a closely guarded
compound at Kanchanaburi, to the northwest of Bangkok. After one
furious altercation with the camp commander, Captain Noguchi, Drower
was consigned to solitary confinement, first in an underground shelter
and later in a minute cell next to the Japanese guardroom.
Malnutrition and blackwater fever lowered his resistance and he
struggled to retain consciousness, aware that he might betray
involuntarily the identities of those fellow officers involved in the
intelligence network. While a resourceful fellow officer secreted
vitamin tablets in his rice, Drower attributed his survival
principally to a mind that could recall the plots of books, films and
plays and the music of favourite composers such as Handel. "I
realised," he wrote later, "as others have so often done in similar
circumstances, the reserve value of an extended and liberal
education."
After the war Drower entered the diplomatic service. He served as a
vice-consular assistant at the British Consulate General in Batavia
(Jakarta) where he shared lodgings with Laurens van der Post, and
later in Cairo and the Canal Zone. From 1959 Drower was based in
Geneva as a British delegate to international conferences.
Here his qualities impressed Lord Harlech, who left to take up the
position of British Ambassador in Washington and later invited Drower
to join him. Between October 1964 and January 1974 Drower worked at
the British Embassy in Washington under four ambassadors. His brief
was, he wrote, to provide accurate assessments for Whitehall "of the
proposals, reservations and sometimes prejudices to be found among
members of the Congress and Administration". His close friend, the
political scientist Nelson W. Polsby, wrote: "Bill Drower grasped
nuances about America and made friends among Americans with a
virtuosity that must have been a great professional asset."
In 1974 Drower retired from the Foreign Office and settled in
Somerset. In 1981 he became a Liberal county councillor, serving for
seven years (including three as chairman). In 1993 his autobiography,
Our Man on the Hill, was published. Music was important to him, and
besides the violin he learnt to play the flute and piano. In 1946
Drower was appointed MBE for services as a prisoner of war.
His wife Constance died in 1997 and he is survived by a daughter.
William Drower, MBE, diplomat, was born on January 25, 1915. He died
on August 7, 2007, aged 92