Cyril William
WALLIS
1918 - 1944
Early Life
CYRIL WILLIAM WALLIS was born on the 9 January 1918 in Great Waltham. He was one of four children born to Christopher William and Rosalie Wallis (née) Wood. His parents were married in the Parish Church at Great Waltham on the 31 July 1915. Christopher was a Horseman for Mr R Dannatt at Hyde Hall and had served in WW1 in France for the 34th Battalion Royal Fusiliers.
Rosalie May, their firstborn daughter, was born on the 6 May 1916 when the family lived at Breeds, Great Waltham. His younger brother Bernard David was born on the 21 May 1920. Cyril’s youngest daughter, Pansy was born on the 16 April 1922.
In 1939 the family were living at 14 Council Houses, Barrack Road, Great Waltham, Christopher was now a builder’s labourer and Cyril a slater and tiler.
Cyril Wallis Essex Regiment
Military Life
Cyril joined the Essex Regiment after the outbreak of war on the I September 1939, when he was about 21 years old. Service no. 6019286. He probably signed on at Chelmsford and possibly, after camp training transferred to the 4th Suffolk Regiment in the Army, a Territorial force, performing home defence, guard duties and training within the UK. In 1941 the Regiment moved to just outside Hereford living in wooden huts on an old brickwork site.
Whilst on embarkation leave, he married Ethel May Willis on the 4 October 1941at the Parish Church in Great Waltham. His profession in the Marriage Register is given as a soldier.
Cyril and Ethel
Marriage of Cyril & Ethel at Great Waltham
The Regiment embarked from Liverpool, as part of the Convoy William Sail 12X in November 1940, travelling with American troop ships, cruisers, destroyers and the aircraft carrier, Ranger. The Convoy passed through the Mona Passage and arrived at Trinidad in mid-November, where the troops changed to tropical kit.
After crossing the Equator and a month at sea, the Battalion received the news of the attack on Pearl Harbour, which redirected their deployment to the Far East.
The convoy sailed onto Cape Town in South Africa, berthing on the 9 December 1941 for three days stay and shore leave was granted. The Japanese had invaded Malaya the day before the convoy reached Cape Town.
At this point the convoy was split, with one part going to Mombasa and then onto Malaya. The 54th Infantry which included the 4th Suffolks stayed at Ahmenager for three weeks, then back to Bombay and joined the Wakefield, another ship, and sailed for Singapore arriving just as the causeway was blown between Malaya and Singapore.
Singapore by this time was under siege and the battalion found themselves in old tents in a rubber plantation. Orders were to defend the Golf course, which was bombed directly it went dark.
Orders were given to retreat to the outskirts of Singapore and just as they arrived at their destination on the 15 February 1942, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival surrendered to the Japanese. Percival’s surrender to the Japanese was a significant event in British military history. Despite his military experience and the fact that he had been awarded numerous military honours, including the Military Cross, Percival’s decision to surrender was a result of a combination of factors.
The Japanese forces, led by General Isoroku Yamamoto, had advanced rapidly and were able to capture key positions in Malaya, leading to the defeat of British Commonwealth forces. His surrender was a result of the Japanese military’s superior tactics and training, which allowed them to push the British back to Singapore in a rapid and efficient manner. The surrender of Singapore was the largest surrender in British history, with Percival’s force of 85,000 men being defeated by just 35,000 Japanese troops. This defeat had a profound impact on British morale and the prestige of the British Empire in the region.
POW CARD FOR CYRIL WALLIS
Cyril was captured in Singapore on the 15 February 1942 and went to Thailand with Letter Party R leaving Singapore on the 31 October 1942 and was attached to Group 2 on Train 7.
He worked on a section of the 258 mile long, Burma-Thailand Railway, known as the ‘Death Railway’, from Chungkai to Wang Pho and then up to Tha Khanun.
Aerial view of Chungkai POW Camp
Chungkai POW Camp layout
Chungkai POW camp grew from seven to twenty atap huts and included a hospital. It was shaded by the trees and had no fence; paths led to it from the surrounding villages although visiting them was forbidden. The prisoners at Chungkai worked on the line north to Wun Lu. This was through common land with bamboo thickets. Group II worked on the bridges at Tamarkan, Chungkai being their headquarters. Tamarkan was about 4 kilometres away.
Two Japanese officers were in charge of the work on the railway. Instructions for the day’s work were given by these two and a guard was then in charge to make sure it was carried out. The British officer looked after the welfare of his men.
A typical day went as follows: up at daybreak, had rice breakfast, walked the half mile and paraded outside the Japanese tool shed. Collected tools and metre measuring sticks, changkuls, picks, spades, baskets and stretchers (for carrying the earth). Then walked to the railway trace, where a thirty yard across stretch of the jungle had been cleared by earlier prisoners.
The embankment ran along the centre of the clearing and the Japanese had put a bamboo stake structure to get the proposed embankment height right; this varied between four and twenty feet. The day’s work load was to build the embankment; this was made by splitting the men into three groups. One third of the prisoners dug out the earth on each side of the railway trace and put the earth in the baskets or on the stretchers. The next group carried the earth to the embankment where it was off-loaded. The final group spread and trimmed the earth into the embankment shape. Every metre of height had a strip of grass planted, to hold the embankment together.
The hospital consisted of two long atop huts and an atap operating theatre. The illness varied, from scabies to malaria, the bamboo bed shelf was full of bugs and lice as there were no disinfectants. Treatment for all forms of dysentery was salts and starvation for three days on tea and then a further two days on fluids only. The sick from Chungkai and camps further up the country began arriving and started to take over the camp, leaving three out of the twenty huts for fit prisoners. Diphtheria hit the camp and even tropical ulcers were infected with it.
Chungkai was rated by Group 11 as the best camp in Thailand. This was the first and oldest of the Group 11 camps. In 1944 it flooded twice with th monsoon and when it was at its worse only 2 acres of the camp were dry. The POW worked up to 18 hours a day, the men faced inhumane conditions, malnutrition and relentless forced labour. Being cut off from supplies, many POWs starved while being worked to death.
The Burma Railway was completed in October 1943, but at an appalling cost. Of the 60,000 Allied POWs forced to work on it, over 12,000 had died.
Early in 1944 ‘fit’ men were chosen to be sent to Japan from Thailand, Java and Singapore to work in coalmines, factories and shipyards.
-Maru%20ship.jpg)
The Hohuka Maru (The Toyofuku Maru)
Death and Memorial
In 1941, the Hohuka Maru was requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Army for use as a ‘Hell Ship’ for the second World War. She took prisoners of war to do forced labour I hellish conditions up until September 1944. She sailed from Singapore to Miri, Borneo, as part of a convoy of ten ships, five of which carried, in total, 5000 POWs, all in poor conditions.
At Borneo, because of engine trouble she left the convoy and sailed on to the Philippines, arriving 19 July. She remained at Manila whilst the engines were repaired, the prisoners remaining on board, suffering from disease, hunger and thirst.
On the 20 September 1944, at 10.35 am the Hohuka Maru and ten other ships sailed from Manila to Japan. The following morning the convoy, which had no markings necessary to denote that it was carrying POWs, was attacked 80 miles north of Corregidor, west of Luzon Island in the Philippines, by more than 100 American aircraft-carrier based aircrafts of the 2nd wave of the US Task Force 38.
Cyril died on the 21 September 1944, when the ship was sunk, one of 1,039 men who lost their lives from the ship at sea and their bodies were never recovered.
Of the 1,289 men aboard the Hohuka Maru in the hold, only about 200 survived by swimming to the nearby shore and 50 others were picked up by Japanese escort ships and taken to Taiwan, where they were interned for a time in Heito Camp. Some of these men were later sent on to Japan, and a number remained on Taiwan till the end of the war. The men who swam to shore were put aboard other hell ships later that fall and many of those would die as well.
Private Cyril William Wallis is remembered on the Singapore Memorial, Kranji, North West. Column 56
Singapore Memorial
He is also remembered on the War memorial at Great Waltham.
Cyril left an estate of £190.2s.8d to his father, Christopher Wallis. Cyril’s widow, Ethel married Ernest Lapwood on the 26 April 1947 in Great Waltham and they had a daughter Ann, born in 1950.