During the period of incarceration, the flag shown above was kept over the altar in the bamboo church in Chunki POW camp, one of the camps housing prisoners from this Battalion. It is currently on display in the Long Shop Museum, Leiston, Suffolk, as a memorial to the members of the 4th Battalion who died in Japanese POW camps.
AA Johnson served in the army with the Suffolk Regiment from 1916 until 1948. After attending Cranleigh School in Surrey he went on to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, leaving in the summer of 1916 as a 2nd lieutenant. He joined the Suffolk Regiment and was sent to France, although it is not certain whether or not he was over 19, the legal minimum age for armed service overseas at that time. If not, he was not alone, as an estimated 250,000 underage soldiers fought in World War I . (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29934965#)
He was stationed in Felixstowe from 16th of May 1916, sailing from there to France where he was stationed from 22nd June 1916 until 17th November the same year. At this time he returned home to recover from severe shrapnel wounds to his legs and right shoulder, received in the battle of the Somme. He was back in “France, Flanders and Germany” according to the B.199A between 12th April 1917 and 16th March 1919, and was mentioned in dispatches (Dec 1918) and awarded the Military Cross (Mar 1919) during these campaigns. By the end of the war he was an acting Captain. Between the wars he had several postings overseas, including India, where he met and married his wife, Phyllis.
In June 1939, after 9 months in Malta, he was stationed at Devonport. By then AAJ and Phyllis had two daughters, Wendy and Tessa; the whole family had been with him in Malta. They now settled in a house in Bickleigh, not far from Devonport. Following the outbreak of war, AAJ was sent to France on a campaign which lasted from October 1939 until January 1940, when he was returned to England for an emergency appendectomy, the recovery from which caused him to miss Dunkirk. He soon rejoined the war effort, and in early 1942 was in Singapore when the British surrendered there and were taken captive
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Other family members had extraordinary war experiences too; AAJ’s brother Trevor was also a Far Eastern Prisoner of War, although we don’t believe their paths crossed during their incarceration.
In the next generation, Phyllis’s nephew John was one of a select few Oxford and Cambridge students who were sent on an intensive Japanese language course. After 6 months he was posted to a listening station in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) to join a team intercepting enemy wireless messages. In this role, he intercepted critical communications leading up to the surrender of Japan and retaking of Singapore.