Cavan's slave prisoners of war

I was herded into a barbed wire circle... with men, women, and children. Forty of those who were imprisoned were Australian nurses. They were all sorted out and taken away out of the compound. That was the last journey 39 of them made. During the night, we lay on the grass of this island and listened to their screams and cries for help as they were raped and ravaged by the Jap troops. It was the worst night of my life." Cootehill-born Corporal Terence McGahan wrote this nightmarish recollection of his introduction to a Japanese run prisoner of war (POW) camp in February 1942. Corporal McGahan, along with four other Cavan men, features in a new book by English author Robert Widders called The Emperor's Irish Slaves, which aims to tell for the first time the story of 650 Irish men and women who were captured by the Japanese and exploited as slave labour. Colonel McGahan, a member of an RAF technical unit, was captured after the fall of Singapore. The mass rape of the nurses he was forced to witness was sickeningly predictable to those in the camp; Japanese soldiers had done it before. When the Japanese invaded Hong Kong less than two months earlier they laid siege on the hospital at the front line - St Stephen's College - with horrific results: "They took a group of nurses and tied them down on a bed of British and Canadian corpses and they gang-raped them, and butchered them to death afterwards," Robert told the Celt. "This was known so they [the allied authorities in Singapore] didn't want to leave the nurses behind. They were evacuated, against their wishes - the nurses didn't want to leave their patients." For more on this story, buy this week's Celt...