Today marks the 60th anniversary of VJ Day - the end of the war in the Far East. But for thousands of British servicemen, their experience of war against the Japanese was in the horrors of prison camps. Nick Morrison meets a survivor.

HERBIE Barwick was sitting on his own in the sunshine halfway up Mount Pleasant, eating a tin of peaches and Carnation milk, when a Japanese soldier, "all of five foot nothing", appeared in front of him. If Herbie had known what lay in store, his reaction may have been different.

"He pointed his rifle at me, saying 'Shoot, shoot', so I offered him the peaches and Carnation milk and I said to him, 'Do you want some of this, mate?'," recalls Herbie, now 86.

He had gone on ahead of the rest of the Northumberland Fusiliers to take the range for his company's guns. Once captured, he was soon reunited with his comrades, also now marching at Japanese gunpoint.

It was early 1942, and Herbie, a fishmonger from Middlesbrough, was a recent arrival in Singapore. He had joined the Army at 20, on the outbreak of war, and was part of the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940. In the autumn of 1941, the Fusiliers were posted to the Far East, but had been there just a few months before Singapore fell.

Once in captivity, Herbie's regiment was marched through the blistering heat of the jungle to work at Singapore docks, before being sent inland to work on the notorious Thai-Burma railway.

The journey itself was an arduous one. At one point, they found a bridge had been swept away by the monsoon and they had to wait for 21 days while it was repaired. No provision had been made for food, however, and for three weeks they survived on sand-ridden water from the river and rice begged from locals. When their commanding officer protested, they were given four small tins of sardines, between 1,800 men.

But punishing as this was, it was as nothing compared with what awaited them working on the railway.

Conditions were appalling. After reveille at 6am and roll call, they would be taken to work, often a journey of around two hours, and then labour for 12 hours on the railway, backbreaking work in intense heat and humidity. They worked ten days on, then had a day off. To eat, there was rice, supplemented by whatever the men could catch in the way of insects, dogs and rats. Cholera was rife and many prisoners could barely stand, let alone walk.

Herbie was a member of a hammer gang, a team which would go ahead to break up the ground before the railway lines were laid. As a result, he would move camps every few days, as work on the railway progressed. These temporary camps were even more primitive than other, more permanent, ones.

"It was hell on earth. You daren't stand up quickly or you would faint, because you were starved that much," Herbie says. "The Japs gave me a rock to throw down into a pit for ballast, and I was that weak I threw myself down as well."

Injuries were also common. On one occasion, he was walking across a bridge in the dark, when he slipped and fell into the superstructure, made of wooden stakes.

"I had a bullet wound in my leg and I tore it open," he says. "I covered it up with a banana leaf, and when I looked at it, it was crawling with maggots. I thought I had gangrene so I went to the medical tent and they got some carbolic acid and put it in my wound. It was agony, but I've got marvellous healing flesh and it healed up."

But many succumbed. Disease, injury, starvation, exhaustion. The toll was frighteningly high. "When you got up in the morning, they posted up who died at night, and when you got back from work, the first thing you did was saw who had died during the day. They died like flies," he says.

Herbie regularly saw the cruelty of the guards at first hand. One RAF prisoner was set to work dismantling bombs, but when one blew up in his face he was blinded and lost both hands. The Japanese refused to repatriate him, even though he no longer posed a threat. Other amputees were similarly denied repatriation.

On one occasion, the Japanese demanded 400 men reported for work, but when the men able to walk were counted, there were just 360. The guards tied the commanding officer to a tree and said they would shoot him unless 400 men went to work.

"The amputees and the sick came out of the medical tent. They wouldn't be able to work, but they could lie down next to the railway. But they were still five or six men short, so they brought the corpses out," he says, choking back the tears.

"We just laid them by the side of the railway. The Japanese saved face, and at the end of the day we burned the corpses.

"At other times, they would try and be friendly, but we wanted nothing to do with them. We pretended we had bugs and fleas, and they soon left us alone."

In October 1944, the Americans invaded the Philippines, and began air raids on Singapore and Thailand. With the Japanese suffering a succession of defeats, work on the railway slowed, and Herbie was moved back to Singapore.

The prisoners were told they would have to dig trenches to protect them from American bombs - Herbie cut off the ends of his toes with a shovel in the process - but he learned from a sympathetic guard that the trenches had another purpose.

"He said we were going to be killed. He said I was a good soldier, and he would help me escape into the Chinese quarter in Saigon," Herbie says.

He told his camp commander of the plan, but the colonel refused to believe him, so instead Herbie asked to be transferred out of the camp. He was put on a train to Saigon, but it was ambushed, the Japanese guards on the train surrendered, and he was free. It was just weeks before Japan surrendered and the war in the Far East was over, and Herbie had been in captivity for three and a half years.

He arrived in Saigon in September, wearing just a loincloth, although it was to be another two months before he arrived home to Hilda, the wife he had married in 1940. Still living in Middlesbrough, his feelings about his captors have taken a long time to diminish.

"We went to buy a television and we were looking along the row and I said I didn't want to buy Japanese," he says. "The assistant said, 'I can't understand why you are prejudiced, the Japanese are so polite and obliging'. I said, 'I was a Japanese prisoner of war'. We bought a German set instead. We've got a Japanese set now, though."