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THE EVENING SENTINEL The Potteries own regional newspaper. |
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A FORMER Special Forces soldier from Stoke-on-Trent who was held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese has died aged 82. Arthur Christie, who grew up in Burslem, was recruited to Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive after the outbreak of the Second World War, but later fell into the hands of the Japanese in Singapore. Mr Christie was born in Cobridge in 1921 left school at 16 to be a miner at Sneyd Pit, attending night classes at college to learn how to place explosive detonators at the coal face. In 1937, he joined the Territorial Army as a Sapper, before enlisting in the regular Army almost two years later and training to be a medic in the Royal Army Medical Core. |
But it was his background in explosives that saw him summoned to the War Office to join MI6 'R', Winston Churchill's secret special operations organisation. Based at the Aston House laboratories, in Stevenage - known as Churchill's toy box - Mr Christie worked to supply the gadgets and explosives used in special operations. He helped put together the explosives used in Britain's first strike of the war against the Nazis, in Operation Claymore, Norway. It was following this successful mission that Mr Christie was asked to travel to Singapore to provide equipment and expertise at a training school for resistance fighters. But when Singapore surrendered to the Japanese, Mr Christie was taken captive and was to spend three long years in the Hoten prisoner of war camp, in Manchuria. While at the camp he had his appendix removed without anaesthetic, and saw many of his friends and comrades die. The Americans took control of the camp at the end of the war, and after several weeks of treatment to help him regain weight, Mr Christie returned home to the Potteries. |
Within a year he had re-enlisted in the Army and went on to serve in Korea, helping restore order there in the latter stages of the Korean War in the early 1950s. After retiring from the Army in the late 1960s, Mr Christie started a new career as a postman in the Potteries. But tragedy struck when he collapsed at work suffering severe dehydration, and was left completely disabled. He moved to Porthmadog, in Wales, with his wife and carer, Eileen, to try to improve his health, and lived there until his sudden death last month. Mr Christie's son, Maurice, has written a book about his father's remarkable life, He said: "Dad was a very strong and determined man. He had to be to get through all that he did. "He seemed fine physically when he returned from the war, but from that time until the day he died he was still fighting the Japanese in his mind. He used to have a lot of nightmares, and he was never quite the same person."
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