A MAN SENT FROM GOD

     This is the story of a true hero of World War II - the Canadian doctor Major Ben Wheeler, who gave himself to help his fellow prisoners of war in the infamous 'Kinkaseki' Japanese prisoner of war camp on the island of Taiwan (formerly known as Formosa).

     Here is what Sgt. Thomas O'Toole of the British Army said about  Ben Wheeler in a letter he wrote after the war, "Now that the world knows of the murders, atrocities and hardships suffered by the POWs in Japanese prison camps, I consider it my duty to bring to the attention of the people of Canada and England, the story of a man who was sent from God and placed among us in our prison camp as a medical officer. A man who has won for himself the love and esteem and respect of hundreds of men with whom he was imprisoned. His name - Major B. M. Wheeler, IMS. He will remain inscribed on the hearts of these men for the rest of their lives."

     A liberated prisoner of war said of Major Wheeler when he proposed a toast, "To the finest man I have ever met and the greatest doctor."

     It was the re-discovery of the former Kinkaseki prisoner of war camp in 1996, and this story of Dr. Wheeler and his courage, that started the movement in early 1997 to remember the men of Kinkaseki and the other POW camps on Taiwan. From that humble beginning, the Kinkaseki / Taiwan POW Memorial was built and dedicated in November 1997.

     Subsequently, under the auspices of the TAIWAN POW CAMPS MEMORIAL SOCIETY, all of the other former POW camps on Taiwan have been found and thirteen memorials have been erected at ten POW sites around the island, plus two in the UK and one in Hawaii.

     In addition, more than 500 former survivors of the Taiwan POW camps have been found and now know that they and their mates and what they suffered has not, and will not, ever be forgotten.

     This story appeared in The Readers Digest in Canada in August of 1983, and subsequently in other international versions later that same year. The Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society has been given special permission by Reader's Digest Magazines Ltd. to use this article on our website, and we gratefully acknowledge their support for our cause and their acknowledgement of our work to remember the POWs who suffered so much for our freedom.

We hope you will enjoy this wonderful story . . . and as Dr. Wheeler said, "May we not forget it ever."

[The Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society]

A MAN SENT FROM GOD . . . by Robert Collins

(C) 1983 BY THE READER'S DIGEST MAGAZINES LIMITED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION FROM THE AUGUST 1983 READER'S DIGEST.

     For more than three years Major Ben Wheeler kept a secret diary of life in the infamous Japanese prison camps of World War II. To keep such a record was to invite savage punishment but to the young Canadian doctor it was a risk worth taking. The diary was his sustenance, a lifeline to his beloved wife, Nell. In turn it helped him sustain the hundreds of fellow prisoners under his care, some of whom were to call him "a man sent from God".

Entries from the now-yellowing pages of the diary form the heart of this story of Dr. Ben Wheeler's life - a moving testament of one man's courage in the face of inhuman odds, of incredible feats of medicine and of a love so true that the very worst of war could not destroy it.

Jan 13, 1943
Time passes somehow, the days very quickly but the weeks like months and the months like years. It is hard not to become discouraged. My job is so hopeless without medicine. Cases of beriberi and other avitamine diseases are increasing.
It has been bitterly cold with snow on the high hills. Many men are working in shorts, and the hut they are not allowed to lie down or wrap a blanket about them, and if they do they get bashed about, sick or not sick. Every day one, two, three or more faint from sheer weakness and exposure. The rice has been about one-half for the last ten days, sometimes only a small teacup full. We just cannot exist this way for long.
God, when will the end of all this be in sight. What will it be like when the end comes? Still, we can only live from day to day and never lose hope or heart.

In a bleak, drafty bamboo hut on the Japanese-held island of Formosa (now Taiwan), Major Ben Wheeler huddled over the illicit diary that he kept hidden from his jailers. These were the darkest days of World War II. Germany still dominated most of Europe. Japan had overrun East Asia. Here in Taihoku prisoner-of-war camp off the China coast, the diary was the young Canadian doctor's lifeline to sanity and hope.

His wife, Nell, back home in Edgerton, Alta., had heard nothing of him - nor had he received a letter from her - since his capture at Singapore 11 months before. Then, and for long after, the outside world was locked away from him. Outwardly, his hope never wavered; deep down he knew he might never see his wife or home again.
So, night after night, he talked on paper to Nell as though she were there. He poured out his love, his hurts, his yearnings and the day's happenings in small, lined note-books, scribbling in pencil or in pen with ink concocted from lugs, mud and leaves. Keeping a diary was punishable by, at the very least, a savage beating, so Wheeler hid his among the medical records that his captors allowed. The diary and Nell were his sustenance. In turn, they helped him sustain the hundreds of fellow prisoners under his care.

Ben Wheeler was 32 that night in 1943, a soft-spoken man with steady gray eyes and slightly receding brown hair. He was five feet ten, normally 160 pounds but now growing more emaciated by the day, like every other man in that brutal camp.
By a quirk of the Great Depression, he was the lone Canadian in Taihoku among hundreds of English, Irish, and Scottish prisoners. In 1936, newly graduated from the University of Alberta but without a cent to set up a medical practice, Wheeler went to England with his pregnant wife to become an officer in the Indian Medical Service. In London he studied 18 hours a day to pass a short, intensive course in tropical medicine. By early 1937 he was on his way to India.

Nell - or Nettie, as he often called her - followed with their newborn son, Harry. She was a slim blue-eyed blonde, a cheery extrovert who charmed their fellow expatriates. For a while life was good in the foreign officer's community near the Indian military hospital at Karachi. Two more sons, Kenneth and Alan were born. As was the custom for officers in those dying days of the Empire, the Wheelers had a bungalow staffed with servants. When World War II broke out in 1939, it seemed strangely remote in far-off India.
The idyll ended in 1941. Japan was making warlike moves in Indochina. In March, Wheeler sailed with a British contingent to Kuala Lumpur while Nell prepared to sail home with their sons. On December 7, the Japanese declared war on the Allied powers with a devastating sneak-attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Through the winter and spring, the enemy swarmed over the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong and the islands of Wake and Guam. Singapore was impregnable, the British thought, with its mighty, immovable guns pointing out to sea for the expected attack. But the Japanese swept in from behind, overland, crushing and humiliating the defenders in a matter of days. Wheeler had been posted there just two weeks before.

February 13, 1942
The Japanese are closing in, in a semicircle around the main harbor, with fire and flashes of shellfire showing up all around, especially at night, and in the daylight an immense column of black smoke rises and mushrooms out from the burning naval base to finally hang over the whole island.

WHEELER and two friends tried to escape in a stolen boat. Before they reached the water one friend was killed and the other shot through the arm. Even so, he and Wheeler tried to launch a boat but the wind and tide were against them. Glumly they crept back to await the surrender.
It was a terrifying time. The conquerors were marching from village to village, beheading senior Chinese in each place and mounting the heads on poles as an object lesson to survivors. In Singapore, Japanese troops burst into a hospital and bayoneted some 200 helpless patients and staff, claiming they had been fired upon from the building.

February 16, 1942
Confusion and more confusion. The first Japanese appear, little, untidy, short-legged men, each officer with a sword as long as himself. Even yet it is hard to realize that they have well and truly beaten us, so efficiently and quickly.

SOMETIMES, longing for Nell, he looked across a narrow channel to the mainland and wondered whether to make a break for it by night. The swim to shore seemed manageable but beyond lay two thousand kilometres of jungle. He scrapped the idea, tried to think less about Nell and resolved to live one day at a time.

April 20, 1942
Wonder what some of us will go through before all this is over? I for one feel that the most unpleasant things are yet to come. Still, there is no use becoming morbid over it. Wonder what Nell is doing.

MORE and more his diary spoke of Nell. Then he began speaking directly to her in his jottings. Often he dreamed of her at night. In June the prisoners were permitted one brief postcard home. He wrote: "My own Nettie - am being treated as prisoner of war. In excellent health and not wounded. Send my best to the family. Kisses to each of our boys and to you, dearest, all love. As ever, Ben"
He hoped it would reach her by Christmas. It took a year.

Voyage by Cattle Boat

BEN WHEELER and Nell Pawsey were 12 years old when they met in Edgerton, 246 kilometres east of Edmonton. She was from a big, happy, well-to-do farm family. His itinerant father had held an assortment of jobs, but his mother, a teacher, had ingrained in him a respect for learning. Already Ben knew he wanted to be a doctor.
The first day Nell laid eyes on him, he was doing a kindness. She was visiting her cousin Philip, an invalid who soon would die of a heart ailment.
"I have a really good friend," Philip told her. "Look, there he is now!" And Ben, who was caring for Philip's Shetland pony, brought the animal close to the window so his friend could see it.
From then on, Ben doggedly courted her. He was excruciatingly shy, she was outgoing and vivacious, with many boyfriends, but soon their personalities meshed. Every summer through high school he worked on the Pawsey farm. When he needed money to get through university, she persuaded an uncle to give him a loan.
By 1932, when they were 21, Ben and Nell knew they couldn't wait any longer to be together. In those times living together unwed was taboo, so one rainy July day they borrowed a car, drove 95 kilometres north to Lloydminster and were secretly married. They lived apart, except for surreptitious weekends, for almost three years.
After graduation, Ben interned at the University of Alberta hospital. Then they struck out together on the path that would lead him to Formosa.

September 27, 1942
Nell is 32 today, my darling. If I could only be with her…..It is hard to stop tearing one's hair and cursing when I think of all this time cut out of our lives, the best part of our lives. I am really fortunate in having a placid nature and I am seldom really moody but, God, it isn't easy to go on like this and look out on months and more months coming with no end in sight.
I gave my honey's and the boys' photos a thorough cleaning yesterday, all fresh for Nell's birthday. How much longer?

It would be much longer, and much worse. In October, Wheeler and 1,100 British troops from the 11th Indian Division were crammed into the four bottom holds of a decrepit cattle boat. It stank of manure. There was barely enough space for each man to lie down. Rain poured in every day and their clothes turned moldy. The Japanese took away their life belts, forbade music or singing, and rarely allowed the prisoners on deck. Food was a gallon of watery soup and a gallon pail of rice, twice a day, for 20 men.
For three weeks they stifled in the holds. Everyone was covered in prickly heat. Every day or two a man died of dysentery, a debilitating disease of the large intestine. Diarrhea was rampant. There were no bedpans or containers of any kind below decks, and "with men going, up to 20 times a day, it was a bit of a mess." Wheeler did what he could with no medicine.

November 13, 1942
Friday the 13th. We disembark tomorrow. The typhoid case died last night. We buried him at sea. Only one man now who might not make it through the night. I am hoping and trying. Nothing could be worse than this Nettie; I begin to wonder for the first time if I will ever see you again.

They landed on Formosa in pouring rain. After a five-kilometre march to Taihoku camp, they were poked, screamed at, ordered to strip in a cold wet wind, sprayed with disinfectant and reissued their wet clothes, and given the wooden clogs that Wheeler wore almost continually for the next three years. Somehow he managed to hide and retrieve his diary.

The prison huts housing 80 men each were of mud and bamboo, open at the bottom and at every joint, with bamboo-laced doors and windows. The wind howled through remorselessly. Each man had four threadbare blankets and less than two feet by six of sleeping space on a raised platform.
Discipline was harsh. On meeting a guard, a prisoner had to snap to attention and bow. A slow or sloppy bow drew an immediate slap and punches. Every three weeks and change of guards brought a fresh wave of beatings until the novelty wore off. One sentry spent most of the morning slapping men whose bows did not please him. These were, Wheeler recorded, "no love taps." One prisoner had a tooth knocked out.

November 21, 1942
Gleaming bayonets, screaming guards, men getting beaten up, for what!
I am very busy, half the camp has diarrhea or laryngitis, but it keeps one from thinking. Here's a day:
06:30 a.m. - bugle, make beds properly, and wash.
07:00 a.m. - roll call, standing for one half-hour and all counted, must salute officer twice and then the Imperial Palace.
07:00 a.m. - breakfast, boiled rice and barley, green boiled leaves and vegetables.
8:00 a.m. - working parties out, I to hospital to see the sick until noon.
12:30 p.m. - dinner as per breakfast.
1:30 p.m. - back to hospital and to sick in barracks.
6:00 p.m. - dinner as per breakfast.
6:30 p.m. - roll call, another half to one hour standing and bowing. Then I do night rounds at the hospital.
8:30 p.m. - lights out.
Sentries come through all, night and outside there are floodlights. It is hard to get a sound sleep, and on bamboo mats. The bashing is so severe it is only by the grace of God we have escaped broken limbs so far…
I dislike the bowing as much as anything.
How good little old Edgerton would look now, and how one has been made to realize that the greatest of all things is freedom and all that it means.

The hospital was merely a hut, with no drugs, no equipment, not even a bedpan. A score of men were always jammed into this tiny space and another 100 or so reported for the sick parade every day. Some were losing sensation in their hands and feet, a symptom of beriberi, a nerve inflammation caused by vitamin deficiency. Others developed metatarsalgia, a bone ailment marked by intense burning of the feet at night.
Most men suffered from what Wheeler called "shotgun diarrhea." Pharyngeal diphtheria, a severe throat infection, hit camp. There was no antitoxin, but Wheeler and his POW orderlies swabbed every throat in camp with iodine and lost only 5 out of 30 patients. Scores of men had famine edema, marked by swollen limbs and bloated abdomens. By drawing off excess fluid with a syringe - a most painful procedure - Wheeler could relieve some. Most of them died.
Between times, since there was no dentist, the doctor pulled teeth. "Another satisfied customer, guess I missed my calling," he wrote one day. His dental tools were two pairs of forceps. Lacking anesthetics, he would make an elaborate show of filling a syringe (actually, with distilled water) and give his patient a needle. After ten minutes Wheeler would tap the tooth: "Can you feel that?" Often the answer was "No."
His assistant, regimental medical orderly George Harrison was privy to the secret. Once he needed an extraction.
"Would you like the anesthetic?" Wheeler said straight-faced.
"No thanks, Major." Harrison grinned. " I'll have it without!"

December 2, 1942.
I wonder how much older I am? Mentally, years, I know. Still, one must not let it get you down. Nell, that day will come. You and it are always in my thoughts and I am one of the lucky ones, having so much to live for and look forward to… Pray God I don't go mental. I won't, but even for my nature this is hard to take.

Nell never stopped hoping or waiting. Long after, she recalled, "We had a very strong marriage." But for her, too, it was hard to take.
In Edgerton her father had rented for her the familiar house that Ben's family had once owned. Around her, Canada was caught up in the frenzy and strange exhilaration of war. It was a sad-sweet time of sudden friendships, hasty, courtships and tearful farewells in cavernous railway stations. Every woman seemed to be "Knitting for Britain or the servicemen in Europe.
Yet the men in the Far East were largely forgotten except by their families. To most Canadians it seemed like America's war. It was hard for Nell to picture where or how Ben might be - if he was still alive.
She received a small monthly allowance from the British government, and took in a boarder, schoolteacher Edith McRoberts, who became one of the family. Every mail day one of them went to the post office. For a long time the only letters from Asia were Nell's own returned unopened. Sometimes Edith wept for her friend, but Nell never broke down.

How I Love You!

It was better that she couldn't know what Ben was going through. His guards kept the prisoners forever off-balance - inexplicably switching back and forth between savagery and near-kindness. In early December they permitted another postcard home. On Christmas Day they issued cigarettes and gave the working prisoners - who normally slaved at road building and other construction, nine days out of ten - the afternoon off.
Christmas breakfast and lunch were the usual rice and vegetable tops, but for dinner each man had a few ounces of fatty pork, a feast by Taihoku standards. Wheeler dreamed of home, tried to picture his sons opening their presents, and promised his darling Nell that they'd spend the next Christmas together… maybe.
Then, abruptly, Taihoku was back to its bad old ways. Twenty hospital patients were jammed into a room fit for six; Wheeler had to crawl among them on his rounds. No recreation of any kind was allowed. Sick prisoners - unless officially bed cases - were not allowed to sit or lie down; for a while they were even put through stiff physical training.
Always, orders were delivered in nerve-grating shrieks. Slappings and beatings were routine. Yet Wheeler grudgingly understood the Japanese behavior. To them the British prisoners were less than men. Instead of fighting to the death or committing hara-kiri, as the Japanese code of honor required, they had let themselves be captured. This was incomprehensible to the Japanese. Wheeler's understanding did not lessen his pain nor that of his fellows; it simply strengthened his stoicism.

January 24, 1943
Still, they cannot stop thoughts of home and of my love. How often I try to put myself across all those miles and sometimes I come very close. Oh, well, the only thing to do is to take everything they hand out and keep the chin up eh, Nettie dear. We cannot be kept apart forever. How I love you.

"Ben was very much in love. That's one thing that kept him alive, "fellow prisoner Ben MacKenzie remembered after the war. "He had tremendous faith, and could transmit it. He would speak to a chap for hours and you would see the man recover. No medicine, nothing at all. But it took a hell of a lot out of him."
Wheeler's weight now hovered around 120 pounds. He, too, had burning feet and symptoms of beri-beri. Sometimes he ached too much to sleep. Diarrhea sent him to the latrine five or six times a day and at least twice a night. Yet he rarely missed a day with his patients. He had been in prison one year.

February 15, 1943
The anniversary of the day I shall never forget. Pray God we don't see another. I am thinking of you more than ever today, Nell dear. If only I could have a note from you even…
Freedom. How little it meant when we had it, how much now. To go where you please, to say what you think, to step outside without bowing and scraping or getting slapped, to go to bed when you wish, to have enough and reasonable food.
Anyway, I have a year of this behind me, still more or less whole and in my right mind, and I honestly feel now that we have at least one-half our time in. It has been the worst and longest year I have ever put in.

His time was far from half over, of course, but in the late winter of 1943 the guards abruptly cut down on the beatings. Had Japan suffered a setback? It had: In February, Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands fell to the U.S. Army and Marines after six bloody months of jungle warfare.
But the prisoners in Taihoku could only guess. Occasionally their jailers gave them Japanese newspapers printed in English, but so heavily laced with propaganda that it was difficult even to read between the lines.
Life was often brightened by the work of camp artist George Harrison, who was a wizard at mixing inks of various colors from mud, charcoal, insects, grass and flowers - handy for sketches, letters or homemade greeting cards.

March 1, 1943
You are going to have a busy time keeping me full when I get out, Nell. The funniest thing, and luckiest, is that one doesn't grow to dislike rice. There are, I'm sure, few foods that one could eat almost to the exclusion of all else so long. But, oh! I would like some real food - meat, fat, milk, bread, and - still no meat since New Year's, not a taste.
Have baby ducks in camp now but 28 out of 100 have died so far. Maybe they don't thrive on rice either.

When his first Red Cross parcel finally arrived, Wheeler recounted the contents in loving detail: two small tins of sugar, a small tin of cheese, one-quarter pound of chocolate, eight ounces of margarine, one tin of condensed milk, a small tin of syrup, eight ounces of canned meat, a tin of meat and vegetables, eight ounces of bacon, one tin of tomatoes and a tin of creamed rice pudding. He planned to eke it out over many days, but ate the chocolate in one sitting and felt sick.

March 22, 1943
A lot can and must have happened in the last 1½ months but the end is not yet in sight. I know, and hard as one tries it is getting more and more difficult to be cheerful. I want to go home to my Nettie.

At Home - partly for the money, mostly to ease her loneliness - Nell played piano four nights a week with the Spornitz brothers' local five-piece dance band. While happy couples jitterbugged, or snuggled cheek-to-cheek in the waltz, she played " In the Mood" and "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me," and "I'll Be Loving You Always" - and tried not to envy the lucky ones who had their men.

Her sons were her anchor. She talked of their father every day and was able to keep his memory bright. Then at last, in February 1943, a letter arrived from London via Canada's Department of National Defense:"… Major B. M. Wheeler MZ/15941, has been officially reported to be a prisoner of war in Japanese hands…"

Finally on June 7, Ben's first postcard came. Its stilted phrases indicated that it had been written under enemy eyes, but the signature was clear and strong. His address she knew only as Malaya Camp. She sent parcels but they vanished into the void.

Food, Food, Always Food

At TAIHOKU, life ground on in dreary monochrome. The guards assumed nicknames and personalities: "Moon-Face" was almost human: "Trotsky" was invariably vicious. One commandant, "a complete sadist" once ordered dysentery patients handcuffed together, for the sin of being sick. When he was finally transferred to another camp, he harangued the assembled 600 prisoners in farewell, then solemnly presented them with two ducks as a token of the Emperor's generosity.

Still in beneficent mood, the guards allowed the prisoners to play musical instruments for two hours each evening and permitted a concert on Easter Sunday. Two days after that they threw eight men into detention for various trivial crimes and banned smoking in the entire camp for four days.

May 6, 1943.
The sick parade was a bit bigger than average but all genuine and number of very sick men. Along came the Lance-Corporal, absolutely white with rage, screaming at me then lined them up shouting In Japanese, then gave each a good slapping with a long wooden roller. He picked out some of the sickest, an acute gastritis, and struck him until he collapsed. The prisoners were lined up in the mid-day sun without hats. One officer with malaria collapsed with a temperature of 105.5 degrees.

The men clung together and tapped resources they didn't know they had. On their days off they shaved with a communal straight razor used for skinning pigs. They turned a hut into an ecumenical chapel, adorned with a tinfoil cross. When cigarettes ran out, they smoked tealeaves, sometimes rolled in pages from Bibles.

The Japanese regularly cut the food allowance for sick men by one third, on the premise, that sick men couldn't work so didn't deserve normal privileges. The other prisoners simply shared with the sick, on the sly.

"Everything was shared, the medicine, the food, even the ground where you were buried," remembered Jack Edwards, a Welsh sergeant in the Royal Signal Corps. "It was the ultimate socialist society, if you like. There was no talk of women, no need of women. The sex urge had gone long ago. With us the first thing was food, food, always food, and the hope of survival."

May 20, 1943
Red Cross runs out on May 27. Rumor is that we are getting more, and mail. Nell, Nell, how I wish I knew how you are, let alone to be with you. Every night the thought I try to go to sleep with is one of you and arriving home, but it is so hard to make it seem real in these surroundings.

The tiniest incidents triggered waves of homesickness. At intervals the men were issued small sums of Japanese yen, to be deducted from their military pay if and when there was a postwar settlement. From this the jailers held back sizable portions for themselves to cover the food and clothing allegedly supplied. In fact they often charged money for any "extras" above the basic diet and wooden footwear. One day they offered undershorts made from flour sacks, for two yen apiece. Wheeler bought a pair and, with a rush of nostalgia, read a faded imprint: "Ogilvie Flour Mills - Medicine Hat, Alta."

Hard though it was to conjure up images of home, he always remembered birthdays and anniversaries in his diaries. His friends remembered, too, and on his wedding anniversary gave him a cigar or two, a banana, a tin of meat and vegetables, all hoarded for the occasion, and handmade greeting cards.

July 5 1943
Eleven years ago today and I wonder if you, too, dear, are thinking of that day Lloydminster. The rain and the mud and the worries, not the kind of wedding day one would pick. But no two could be happier than we, if we could only be together. I have grown to love you more, and you fill more of my life each year, even in this God-forsaken place. Freedom and life and everything I think of are in terms of my Nettie.

More news filtered in: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had been forced out of office (true). Hitler was dead (false). Russia was at war with Japan (false). America had won back the Aleutian Islands (true). A top Japanese admiral had been killed (true); American P-38 fighter planes had shot down an aircraft carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet.

The prisoners didn't know fact from fiction. For Wheeler, a greater reality was his sudden transfer with 120 others to Camp Kinkaseki, also on Formosa.

Razor-Blade Scalpel

August 10, 1943
Up at 0400 hours and lined up at 0600 hours with lots of shouting. I was made to carry 40 pounds. The whole camp gave us a good send-off. Marched about three miles, then entrained, and at about 1200 hours arrived at a station. Ahead was a six to seven mile climb on a rough, rocky mountain road. I shall not forget it. The last long climb I started to stumble and fall - leg, just gave out - however, I was able to pass on some of my kit and got there in a vertical position. We only had one five-minute rest the whole day.

"We were exposed to the ridicule of the population all the way, and beaten and kicked by our guards," Sergeant Edwards testified years later at the war-crimes trials. "Men dropped and were forced on. One man, Griffiths of my signal section, had to be half-carried between Cpl. Len Salvage and Signalman Leslie Davis. He died that night. In the following two months, more men died. I maintain that ten of them died as a direct result of this march."

Taihoku had been bad; Kinkaseki was a nightmare. It perched on a rocky hillside - gloomy wooden huts jammed close together on a rubble of stone, surrounded by a brick wall. The prisoners slept on bare boards about 18 inches wide. Most men were crawling with lice, and bedbugs were so thick that some prisoners made their blankets into a kind of sleeping bag with a drawstring at the neck.

During the four or five months of the rainy season, no one was ever dry. Rerouting roof leaks became a high art. One prisoner, Capt. Mike Brown devised an intricate drainage system of bamboo pipes but at night, rats chewed up the supporting strings and brought the contraption splashing around his head. Rats were everywhere, and ate everything: soap, corks out of bottles, bloodstained clothing. Once they carried off two sets of false teeth.

The new arrivals, although frail and undernourished, were suntanned from Taihoku's outdoor labor. The pale sick men of Kinkaseki - remnants of Britain's 155th Field Artillery Regiment and 80th Anti-tank Regiment - were like walking dead. The killer, literally was a copper mine where the more able-bodied worked each day. To reach the mine workings they had to stumble up and down as many as 1,730 uneven roughhewn steps. Underground they carried small carbide lamps, but oxygen was so scarce that the flames burned pencil-thin. Sometimes a man blundered into a darkened shaft and fell ten metres onto rock. Often the roof caved in. Again and again broken bodies came up on blankets, in lieu of stretchers.

Those who escaped serious injury were racked with bronchitis and stained from constant exposure to the copper sulfate (formed by water interacting with the ore). Their sore cracked feet never healed. As the mine went deeper it became harder to lug ore to the surface, but the prisoners had to meet a daily quota, or be beaten with hammer handles.
Captain Peter Seed, Royal Army Medical Corps, was already at Kinkaseki and welcomed Wheeler with open arms. Wheeler was the more experienced surgeon; Seed generously acknowledged it. On Ben's arrival the guards confiscated all his medical records, meticulous charts of patients, neat little sketches of the Taihoku camp and its people and his diary. Fortunately the last also contained many medical references, and was often hastily scrawled. The guards - most of whom read little or no English - couldn't distinguish the diary from the rest and eventually returned it.

As in Taihoku, Wheeler steadily fired off courteous but persistent letters to the commandant, describing the miserable conditions, requesting more medical equipment and drugs. The letters invariably enraged the Japanese orderlies, one of whom described in graphic pantomime how he proposed to cut the doctor's head off for his impertinence.
Occasionally a Japanese medical officer came by to patronize the prisoner-doctors. For the rest of the year, Wheeler and Seed coped with ignorant Japanese NCOs who, initially, had the power to rule whether a man was sick. Since the Japanese recognized only the obvious - a wound - the doctors sometimes made small incisions with razor blades on sick men, just to get them off work.

Finally Wheeler persuaded his masters to give him 70 white cards, for men sick enough to be excused from work, and five red cards for men sick enough to lie down. These, added to the existing hospital population when he arrived, meant that about 100 men could be "officially" sick at one time.

Many more were always in need, so Wheeler and Seed rapidly shuffled cards and patients to help the optimum number. Diarrhea and fever patients were turned out in a day or two. Injuries rarely had time to heal completely.

To try to keep in touch with the outside world, the unquenchable Edwards organized a news service. The men stole Japanese news sheets in the mine and smuggled them back into camp. Edwards had managed to learn Japanese characters and at night he and a team consisting of Brown, Maj. Fred Crossley and Sgt. Jim Bingham, using a stolen dictionary, drew up their own bulletins. Sometimes these were illustrated with homemade maps of the battle zones, showing Allied advances in the Pacific and the Mediterranean.
"It gave me a terrific uplift to be able to give out good news," Edwards remembered later. You had to go on fighting, you see. The major fought his war by trying to keep us alive. I fought my war building up the news service. "Often it was inaccurate or woefully out of date, but it, too, helped keep men alive.

August 23, 1943.
Another death, Smith - beriberi, starvation, mental depression or what-have-you. Just gave up, and who can blame him? Only 37 but he was wasted away and his hair had gone white, he looked at least 67.

"BEN wouldn't say a problem was impossible," Seed said after the war. He would say, 'There must be an answer,' and would worry at it until he came up with a solution."
One man was covered in festering sores. Wheeler wrapped them in lichen he'd picked around camp ("There must be iodine and iron in those plants!"), and the sores vanished. Many prisoners suffered from jungle ulcers on their legs, which could quickly turn gangrenous. Wheeler seared them with a hot poker - almost as painful for him as for the patients - and cured scores of men.

A pneumonia patient had an accumulation of pus in the chest cavity. Wheeler made a small incision with a razor - without anesthetic, of course - and drained the pus with a catheter made from the rubber valve-tube of an old bicycle tire. The patient recovered.
A Royal Engineers lance corporal named McLoughlin had a shattered leg. Wheeler strapped on a hand carved splint with packsack webbing. The bone mended, but when the doctor tried to remove the splint he discovered, to his despair, that it had grown into the foot. He was so upset I almost cried for him," McLoughlin remembers.

"I'm still treating the heel," McLoughlin said after the war, " but thanks to the major I am able to run, walk, swim and even play golf."

Another rockfall victim, Docherty, was brought in paralyzed from the waist down. Wheeler eased him into a wooden cradle filled with sand, built to the doctor's specifications by camp handymen. Then he persuaded other patients to massage Doherty's legs daily to keep the muscles alive.

"We sat there hour after hour, day after day, massaging that man's legs," McLoughlin remembered. "Then one day his toe moved! I could have cried!"
Wheeler invented an exercise bike: just a wooden frame with a seat, and two planks counterweighted with concrete blocks to perform like pedals. Docherty "pedaled" every day - and eventually walked.

October 13, 1943
The last two accident cases have been fractured skulls, one extensive. We had to remove bone down to the brain over an area of about 1½ inches in diameter on the forehead. Our methods were very primitive, I'm afraid, but so far only two days after, he is doing well.
These injuries are certainly an experience, things one would not dare to touch normally, with the best of instruments, but I am continually amazed how good our best has been. I must say it will take a lot to shake me after this.

IN FACT, his only instruments on that occasion were a razor blade and a dentist's forceps. As usual, he operated without anesthetic. At least once, he circumcised a sick man with a razor blade to get him into hospital.

Each new day brought a lineup of filthy, beaten men shuffling in on sick parade, praying they would be given a red or white card. "I have to play God in this camp, and I hate it!" he said.

Once every two weeks, on average, a burial party trudged to the hillside cemetery with a body in a blanket. The Japanese, in keeping with their custom, issued gifts of fruit and rice biscuits to accompany the bodies of men killed in the mine. (The living prisoners swiftly shared the fruit.) Burial had to be quick; sometimes the bodies were disintegrating in the heat. The shallow graves on stony ground were constantly being washed up by rain. With each burial, the work party had the grisly task of re-covering older graves.
To many, death was welcome. "He's escaped in his sleep, Sergeant," Wheeler comforted Jack Edwards one morning as they grieved over the loss of yet another friend.
Another day Edwards asked, over another corpse, "What did he die of, Major?"
"Sergeant, he died of dysentery, malnutrition, famine edema - about most of all he died of disinclinitis."
"What's that, sir?"
"That's 'no more inclination to live.' And that's the most important disease in this camp"

Death Hut

CHRISTMAS DAY, 1943 restored a little of their will to live. The Japanese permitted carol singing and a concert. They even issued bananas, tomato catsup, stew with bits of actual meat, small cakes, a pastry with hot meat inside, and tea with sugar.

All day of course I have been trying to picture home. I got out your photo, Nell, and the boys, and rearranged yours. One corner had got wet and moldy but otherwise kept well. I keep it packed away. I somehow do not like the idea of these animals looking at you.
Not a happy day, I am afraid, for most of us - too many memories attached to it and perhaps it is better that it is not very much like Christmas to make those memories even more vivid.

Darling, I pray God all is well with this day, with our boys, with all the family. How I would like to have helped you fill the stockings. Still I must not dwell on such things too much, the only way to get through this is to be as near animal as possible and live from meal to meal. Good night, my love.

THE rumor mill said that Germany was asking for peace. It was wishful thinking: The Germans still held Europe, and the Allied invasion was still months away. But the prisoners believed what they had to believe. With as many as four roll calls per day, there were few attempts to escape. Two men were briefly on the loose - causing a terrible inquisition in the camp - but they were soon brought back, bound with wire and led on leashes like dogs, and they were later executed. Yet even if a man did get off enemy-infested Formosa, where would he go? Mainland China was also teeming with Japanese.

So, more and more, the POWs leaned on Wheeler, their rock of stability in a chaotic world, "He could get inside you." Prisoner MacKenzie remembered afterward. "And he would give you hope. Hope was his great theme. 'Don't lose hope!' He never did."
Only to his diary and Nell could he confide his moments of doubt.

January 4, 1944
New Year has come and gone… I have made no resolutions this year. What is there to resolve? The only thing is to live from day to day the best one can…This life has become real, natural: all else seems so far away, almost like another world or dream. One thinks of home and all the rest as much, but it is not so sharp, not so clear, as it was at first.

MAIL came in January but none for Ben. In February the Japanese for the first time allowed officers two sheets of paper for letters home. But what to say? If only a letter would come the other way.
And then it did, two years almost to the day from his capture.

February 18, 1944.
Darlings! The biggest day since I have been a POW. Three letters from you and two from mother - all of you well and, and - everything! Mother says you look younger and prettier than ever, dear. If only I could see you and hold you and kiss you, and we would play, too, honey, as you say, but Nettie, I would have to be fed on something more than rice.
I have only read the letters twice so far; I want the joy of nibbling at them over and over again. I have them with my photos, my treasures.

The letters had been written in mid - 1943. A month later he received another batch written in 1942. Now he knew where Nell was living. He pictured the yard, the fields around and Nell in the big front bedroom on her new soft mattress - a luxury he could barely imagine after months of sleeping on boards.

It lent new zest to his labors and fired his ingenuity. Scores of men still suffered from dysentery. Wheeler prescribed a diet of water from boiled rice: nourishing and gentle on the inflamed intestines. When the patients were ready for food again, he prescribed powdered charcoal to firm up the bowels and minimize the chances of diarrhea. Hour after hour he and his orderlies ground burnt sticks into powder.

"He was a genius" McLoughlin exclaimed afterward.

"You believed in him," Edwards said. "Even if it was just a bit of burnt rice rubbed together, powdered, it was medicine, you know. He was dispensing medicine the only way he could".

Roughly half the men in camp were infested with roundworms, often vomited up or passed through the bowels. Wheeler set aside one small room for the sickest of the men. Thirteen died there in one month; it became know as the death hut. When even the irrepressible Edwards became seriously ill, he begged, "For God's sake, sir, get me out of this place!"

"I'll do my best," Wheeler promised. And one night with the help of Cpl. David Donnelly, an orderly, he drew an enormous roundworm from Edwards' bowels with a piece of string.
"While I was in that death hut the major came every night, climbed up on those platforms and crawled along to speak to every man, " Edwards said afterward.

"Sometimes the only way you could give vent to your feelings was to cover your head with a blanket and have a damn good cry," added Sapper Fred Down, Royal Engineers, "One night just after I had a fit of crying, he came up on the bed space and talked to me. And from then on I knew I was going to get out of it. And I did."

Wheeler's words worked a kind of magic because he seemed invincible. No matter how much it enraged the Japanese NCOs, he kept on writing firm, reasonable letters to the commandants. Finally one visiting Japanese doctor accorded him the respect he deserved.

April 12, 1944
Had another medical officer yesterday - a treat. He was polite and seemed not only fairly reasonable but also intelligent, even said he would try to get us some of the drugs we are most in need of.

PERHAPS the Japanese, like the POWs, knew that Wheeler would never crack. He, too, was slapped. He, too, had to bow low, but he never lost his control or his dignity. One day he and Josh Thompson, a lance corporal in the Signal Corps, were examining a beriberi patient with badly swollen testicles. A passing guard on whim kicked the man in the groin, rendering him almost unconscious with pain. Thompson rose up in rage.
"Thomo, stay there!" Wheeler said sharply.
Thompson did, which probably saved his life. "Nothing seemed to bother the major!" he marveled later. " He strolled around as cool as though the Japs, weren't there. He didn't care about them. The men came first."

Scores of men shuffled up from the mine each night to sick parade, knowing they wouldn't rate a white card. Wheeler asked one why he kept coming back.
"Well, sir, it's like this," the man said, "We are down there all day feeling dead beat, maybe a little more diarrhea, maybe a little more swelling of the legs. We drop in here, you ask us how we are, maybe look at our legs, maybe take our pulse. Then if you say 'okay' we know damn well there are a lot of poor buggers worse than we are. And that makes us feel better!"

Incredible Gamble

July 5, 1944.
Twelve years ago today, my darling, and my only regret is that so few of them have been with you. Pray God that the next and every one after it we will be together….
Rumors good - we know that the invasion of France has begun… Am fit enough but, oh so fed up, and it becomes harder and harder to wait, now that we know big things have really begun and the possibility of an ending, perhaps in months, is not a dream.

INDEED, the Allied invasion of France was already a month old. On the eastern front the Russians were steadily driving the Germans back. Australian and U.S. forces were retaking New Guinea in the Southwest Pacific. But how much more could the prisoners at Kinkaseki endure?

They sensed that the war was coming closer. At night Kinkaseki enforced strict blackouts. Air-raid warnings sometimes shrilled by day. Food rations grew smaller: for officers, 390 grams of rice per day and a few potato tops; for the sick, the same "vegetable" and only 370 grams of rice.

Sometimes the prisoners stole and ate the swill meant for the occasional scrawny pig the Japanese kept outside the compound. One day Wheeler wrapped some sleeping pills in a handful of grass and his hut-mate, Capt John Badgett, Royal Army Dental Corps, tossed them into the pigpen. The pig ate the pills and died. The guards ordered an autopsy. Alas, Wheeler reported, the pig had died of some loathsome disease. Ah, so, sighed the jailers, then the prisoners could eat the tainted meat.
That night, scraps of good fresh pork were doled out from the communal stew. In one of life's little ironies, Badgett the dentist got part of the jawbone with teeth.

In October, the 100 sickest men were sent off to another, perhaps better, camp.

October 25, 1944
I don't want to see such a sight again…. Few had strength enough to be very excited about a new chance - broken-down, burned-out humans. The upper parts of their bodies were skeletons.
May we not forget it ever…

Back home, the headlines were shouting with optimism:
"MacARTHUR STATES JAP FLEET DEALT 'MOST CRUSHING DEFEAT' "
"NAZIS HURLED BACK 6 MILES"
"SOVIET TROOPS CROSS FRONTIER INTO NORWAY "
Some 1,200 bombers had hammered Hamburg, Germany's great port, and the Ruhr industrial area. Canada in its first two days of the Seventh Victory Loan campaign had poured more than $145 million into Victory Bonds. The country was beside itself with patriotism. Surely the war was nearly won?
At Kinkaseki, the prisoners slogged through another Christmas in a month marked by 100 inches of rain. (Wheeler found time to keep a careful chart of rainfall.) His friends gave him handmade Christmas cards with optimistic greetings, but he worked a full shift that day and even neglected his diary.

December 29, 1944
Christmas has come and gone, much the same as any other day. I tried to picture the tree I know Nell must have for the boys, and what presents I would like to give them all. Next year surely! Christmas dinner too - I could do a lot to one but I shouldn't complain. We had rice and boiled vegetable as usual, but also four oranges and a piece of battered pork.

Three deaths now from dysentery, two more cannot last more than a day, another three just touch and go. All have edema and they develop an acute watery diarrhea, absorb practically no food, are continually chilled in temperatures of 50-60 degrees F and absolutely no reserve. It is heart breaking to watch them.

We have 140 blankets  to use on them but they are continually wet and a Herculean task to try to wash them. No soap, no brush, no hot water, and even more difficult to dry them. Twenty-six inches of rain in nine days. Men die on bare and open boards. Man after man is going off food completely, partly mental I'm afraid, because so many felt we were near the end… now things go on unchanged.

YET sometimes now they could hear bombs dropping in the distance, Although the POWs could not know, planes from the U.S. Third Fleet destroyed more than 100 Japanese aircraft in and around Formosa in January. Russia had launched a lethal new offensive all along the eastern front. In Europe the balance was slowly tilting toward a final Allied push. And in early March, 279 U.S. Superfortresses rained incendiary bombs on Tokyo, killing more than 80,000 persons in one night.

But in Kinkaseki, Wheeler asked himself: Is there really a world outside? His last letter from home had been dated a year before. By Valentine's Day, he had watched 18 men die in six weeks. One patient went insane, singing and shouting day and night in a hut packed with 45 others. Wheeler hoarded a tin bottle of liquid opium, dispensing a few drops to dying men to ease their final hours.

Peter Seed, the other doctor, was seriously ill and had lost 40 pounds over four months. Could they keep him alive? Captain John Badgett, the dentist, pulled a tooth for a guard and was rewarded with a delicious piece of cooked meat. "I thought of Peter, swollen up and needing protein, and took it back to him," Badgett related afterward. "But on the way, I must say, to my shame, I licked it!"

By March, Seed was so close to death that Wheeler played his last card, a series of small blood transfusions - an incredible gamble under the circumstances. His only equipment was a syringe. Every other day for two weeks, he took 1000 millilitres of blood from a POW donor, added a citrate solution to prevent clotting and injected it into Seed's veins. It saved Seed's life.

Two weeks later both doctors and 86 sick men were shipped out to another Formosan camp. At first Wheeler was reluctant, but his friends urged him on.

"You'll kill yourself if you stay here," MacKenzie warned. Some of the prisoners devised a hand-tinted card with a crest incorporating symbols of Kinkaseki: a tin of cocoa, a mess table, primitive tools, barbed wire, the bamboo compound. On it they wrote: "Better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad."

Just Hanging On

Camp Shirakawa was roomier, with grass and trees. Seven other medical officers were already manning the hospital, so Wheeler was given light duty. It was a letdown. For the first time in nearly three years he was not working full tilt. Prison tedium began to gnaw at him.

Here there were only two meals a day and the food was even worse than it had been. Wheeler grew increasingly irritated by the selfishness of certain fellow officers who, he thought, should be setting examples.

Prison brought out the worst as well as the best in men. In an earlier camp, when a rare allotment of powdered milk came in, Wheeler persuaded the able-bodied to give up their share for the sick - but only after much arguing. When he obtained some vitamin B tablets, paid for from the officers' stipends, some of the healthy officers refused to turn over their share.

April 23, 1945
Rather fed up these days I am with homo sapiens. So much "bugger the other fellow, I will get what I can." Absolute callousness to death or so it seems. Is the veneer so thin? A few months or years of this and the majority seem to go back to the lower mammals.

VICTORY DAY in Europe came on May 8. The POWs heard a rumor of it one month later. American P-38s machine-gunned Shirakawa one day; miraculously, no one was hurt. The prisoners listlessly wondered when the war would be over for them, and how the Japanese would behave. A few POW officers - Wheeler was one - knew of a Japanese High Command directive (later confirmed at postwar trials) that in the event of an Allied victory, prisoners of war were to be exterminated.

Even if the men had known of that plan, it would have paled beside the sheer desperation of their situation in the summer of 1945. They kept all bones boiled dry from the stew pot, and dragged them around the camp perimeter on a string. "As soon as a dog came into that camp after the bone he lasted approximately 4 ½ minutes before he was in the stew, recalled MacKenzie. "Very good flesh. When you're hungry, it's as Ben used to say 'Well, boy, its all protein!"

July 9 1945.
Again what to say, as the days and weeks and months go by? I cannot think of years anymore. I had my first attack of malaria fever, and my temperature climbed to 106 degrees….
The 5th, dear. No, I didn't forget. Got out your photo and the boys, and stuck them up on the table and thought of many things. Time though, dear, seems to have stopped. Just can't push the days on and the more we think the end is very near, the harder it becomes.

JAPAN was obviously hurting. Discipline became so fierce that it was dangerous to step outside: Guards would slap or beat men without the slightest excuse. The daily ration had dwindled to a watery green stew and 300 grams of rice - with an additional couple of spoonfuls of sweet potatoes for the workers only. Men were steadily dying, their reserves gone.

August 4, 1945
Each day somehow goes on with everyone just hanging on.. Surely we are on the last stretch but are not sure how long it will be, weeks or months? And not sure that we will be able to make it… There is a definite limit how far each of us can go on this diet.

TWO days later the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, obliterating two thirds of Hiroshima. Three days after that, the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. On August 15, Japan surrendered.

August 19, 1945.
Is the war over? Very strong rumors the last two days. Still, we are wise old birds now and we believe nothing.

IT WAS his last entry. His weight that day was just 100 pounds - 60 below normal. Three days later the camp commandant issued an official statement. The war was over: "No longer are we enemies but friends."

Within days B-29s swooped low over a prison compound and dropped 40-gallon drums loaded with supplies. They were too low: The chutes did not open. The first fell directly into the hospital, killing 3 men and injuring 21. One survivor went temporarily berserk: It was the ultimate insult - to be killed or maimed by one's friends after enduring so much from one's enemies.

The prisoners distributed the riches - chocolates, cigarettes, tinned food, enormous quantities of everything from bountiful America. Major Crossley and others disarmed the now-docile Japanese, then gave them back their rifles to stand guard until the Americans arrived.

Late that night Crossley sensed an unearthly quiet. A day before his men had vowed they'd cut the Japanese into little pieces when power changed hands. Where were the guards now? Crossley found them, sitting in little groups with the prisoners, sharing cigarettes and sweets.

Ben Wheeler sat quietly with a few friends. The reality of peace was slow to sink in. Finally one said, "We're free now! Let's sing our national anthems!" The majority joined in "God Save The King."

When Wheeler's turn came, he said diffidently, "I'm no singer." But he stood up ramrod-straight and sang "O Canada." The others clapped long and hard.

Never Go Back

IN ALL those years, Nell never knew exactly where Ben was, nor received more than five of his postcards. Now a telegram came: He was alive! Letters followed. Wheeler stayed in Formosa aboard a British cruiser until the last of his men was evacuated. His own troopship was scheduled to reach Esquimalt, BC, the Canadian naval base near Victoria, some time in November. Nell and the boys went to Ben's parents at Ladysmith, 87 kilometres up Vancouver Island from Victoria.

She planned to meet his ship at the dock, but at the last minute was housebound with flu. One afternoon an army truck full of men paused at the front gate. Ben climbed down. He lingered saying good-by to new friends he'd made on the troopship. And then - a little shy, shockingly thin and with a strange, haunted look in his eyes - he came to put his arms around Nell for the first time in nearly five years.

She had worried whether his sons would welcome him. Alan was five, Ken was seven, and Harry, nearly nine, had been man of the house for years. But they ran to him instantly, as though he'd been gone only overnight. And after a rest at Ladysmith, the Wheelers went back to Edgerton to pick up the pieces of their lives.

Since he had not served in the Canadian forces, and did not accept an invitation to return to the Indian Medical Service, Wheeler received no pension. His final gratuity payment from England - including 12 months leave but excluding money Nell had been paid during his absence - was 146 pounds, about $588 at that time. Subsequently, Britain made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire. From Canada he received only a letter granting him treatment in a veteran's hospital for one year for any illness arising from his years of captivity.

But his rewards came in other ways. Soon after their release in 1945, three ex-POWs wrote a letter about Wheeler to a Canadian newspaper, dubbing him "a man sent from God." He had saved so many lives and lifted so many hearts with his quiet strength and his feat of medicine that scores of survivors spoke - and still speak - of him with awe and reverence. "I look back and wonder if I've ever met anybody as good as him" says Fred Down, now retired in Essex. "I'd have gone anywhere with him, done anything for him," remembers George Harrison, now a commercial artist living in Sussex.

LONG after his return, Ben Wheeler would gnash his teeth in his sleep and had to rise to take showers to regulate his body temperature. Periodically he visited hospital with the burning feet that had tortured him and so many others in Formosa.

At first he talked a little to his mother of the prisons. Nell sometimes listened from the kitchen, heard him grow agitated, and resolved never to question. Once he told her, "The diaries are there for you to read, they were meant for you." But at the time she could not; the stories within were too tragic and the emotion ran far too deep. Yet Wheeler seemed to bear no lasting grudge against the Japanese. "They were under orders just like us," he would say. "And their way of life is so different to ours."

In 1946 he was invited to testify at the war-crimes trials in Tokyo. One evening, Ben's family discreetly left him alone to think it over. They returned to find him at his desk, deeply distraught, sketching faces, his POW papers strewed about him. A brother-in-law, Dr. Havelock Maclennan, talked through the night with him. When it was over, Maclennan was sobbing.

The night Wheeler made his decision. He would never go back, never leave his family again. He rarely mentioned his ordeal after that.

Golden Years

WHEELER once told a colleague that the year after this return was one of the hardest of his life. He had fallen behind in medicine which, like so many sciences, had leaped ahead during the war. For example, he knew nothing of penicillin until his return.

But at 35 he could not afford the time or cost of a university refresher course. He moved his family to Edmonton, joined Dr. Maclennan and others in the Baker Clinic and studied on his own late into the nights for a specialty in internal medicine. At the end of a week he would be exhausted. "Why don't you pack it up?" Nell sometimes urged. But, of course, he persevered. His POW friend Jack Edwards once said that men came out of prison camp like pieces of wood battered by the sea: their soft parts washed away, their hard cores intact. It was true of Wheeler. Nothing would ever be too difficult for him again.

At 38 he went east for six weeks of intensive study, followed by oral and written examinations, to become a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. It would be a great accomplishment, accrediting him as a specialist - if he could pass. He phoned Nell the night after the exams. "I made it," he said offhandedly.

Daughter Anne was born September 23, 1946. Ben was delighted; he had always wanted a girl and to see one of his children grow up from babyhood. All through her childhood she never knew exactly what her father did in the war. It was never discussed in his presence, and only obliquely at other times.

Yet bits of evidence were all around her. A big trunk in the basement held a uniform, a ceremonial sword, Japanese money, a worn black medical bag with a pair of dentist' forceps, a box of notebooks and sketches, and a pair of hand hewed wooden clogs. One of Anne's brothers once lost one of the clogs, and Ben, deeply distressed, sent everyone on a fruitless search of the house and even the garbage.

Her father abhorred waste. He would pick the meat from bones until they shone, and was stern with children who left meals unfinished. One night at dinner, the boys turned up their noses at potatoes and boiled cabbage.

"That's it, no more supper!" their father snapped. "And nothing but porridge for the next three days! Thereafter they never left a morsel on their plates.

Each Christmas, cards poured into the Wheeler home from Britain, with notes saying, "If it were not for you I would not be here," or, "To you I owe my life." Anne went to the library for books about concentration-camp torture, tried to imagine her father's suffering and gave herself bad dreams.

But for Ben Wheeler these were mostly golden years. He had everything he had longed for while in prison: Nell, the children, peace, his work. He became a founding member of the Alberta Society of Specialists in Internal Medicine, president of the Edmonton Academy of Medicine, clinical professor of medicine and chief of medicine at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.

He was the kind of doctor everyone wants: patient, honest and tireless. He worked all day at the Baker Clinic, made house calls after supper and sometimes in the night, an did hospital rounds on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Sunday afternoons were always for the family. Often they went driving. Sometimes they went swimming. The children teased him about his physique (skinny legs and in later years a bit of a paunch), and Ben always humored them by striking a body-beautiful pose in his bathing suit.

Sometimes he took his little blond daughter fishing. " We'd sit all day with lines in the water, hardly saying a word, but with this great bond between us," Anne remembers.
When she was 12, her father bought her a mare. Two years later, the mare foaled one night at the farm where they kept her. Anne, 14 and without a driver's license, took her mother's car without permission and sneaked out of the house to be with her horse. As she drove up, her father unexpectedly walked out of the barn. ("I almost fell out of my shoes!") But Ben merely smiled and murmured, "Beautiful colt, dear, beautiful colt!" He never mentioned her escapade again.

Through all those happy years he cautioned Nell, " We must make the most of our time. POWs die young." He did, at 53, of a heart attack (induced in part by his wartime ordeal) while attending a patient in his office. It was the day after Anne's 17th birthday.

YEARS later she pored though her father's yellowing notes and realized what a true hero he had been. Somehow, she resolved, she would use the diary to tell his story. Finally, with the National Film Board in Edmonton, she found a way. In 1980, working as producer, director and writer, she completed the award-winning film A War Story, a sensitive 82 minute documentary on Ben Wheeler's ordeal.

When the script was finished, Anne sent it to Hollywood to Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, whom she'd never met. Would he narrate it?

Within a week her phone rang. Sutherland like his proposed role: reading from the diary the first-person excerpts that carry the story line. When his first reading sounded too angry, he did a gentler rendition. In the film, Anne says, his voice is remarkably like her father's.

NELL Wheeler Homer, remarried now, has never been able to read the diary through. Even after 40 years, Ben's words touch her heart too deeply. And for Anne, one distant memory is etched in her mind forever: the summer day in childhood when Ben was driving her home from a church camp. Bubbling over with her newest religious discovery, she cried, "Daddy, did you know that unless you were baptized under water, you'll go to hell!?"

"I've already been to hell, my dear," Ben Wheeler said gently.