Letter from a POW: Barney Byrne.

In 1941, my Uncle Barney, who had been reared in Kilgowan, was taken as a prisoner of war in the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese.

For a long time I've had a copy of a letter which Barney began writing after they got the word that the Armstice in Japan had been signed and they would soon be released.

It is an amazing chronicle, one which I resurrected recently and began to tidy up in minor ways. And I did some further research, finding out more about the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, and also which camp Barney had actually been in (it was never said in the letter).

An edited version of the letter was published in the 'Carlow Nationalist' newspaper in the same year that it was received in Kilcullen. But perhaps it is now time that the entire letter was put in the public domain, in the sixtieth year after it was first written.

— Brian Byrne.

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