Lieutenant Desmond Campion (1919-2016) served in the British Army from 1939 to 1945. In January 1940 he joined the intelligence corps. In that capacity he was employed in the cipher office at Dover Castle and at Lower Hare Park near Newmarket, with very brief expeditions to Norway and France. In November 1940 he was sent to Singapore to serve in the British Far East Command. He sent the coded message from the British HQ in Java to Bletchley Park in England, informing the British government of the British surrender in the Far East. He was a Japanese prisoner of war from March 1942 to August 1945, and for most of that time he was held at Kuching in Borneo.

He was born and grew up in England, in rural Bedfordshire, lived in Bristol from 1946-1968 and 1987 to 2016, and Suffolk from 1968 to1987. In 2005 I (Nicholas Campion) interviewed him about his war years. After his death in 2016 we discovered that he had kept a diary from February 1942, just before his capture, until after liberation in September 1945, with a gap from January to September 1944.

The diary is a very rare account of life in an officer’s prison camp under the Japanese. Together with the interview it provides a vivid account of one person’s real experience of the war. We offer it here as a resource for all who are interested in life in the war.

It is dedicated to all who suffered.

Nicholas Campion and Stephen Campion