After five years in the works, a memorial to honour the American and British POWs who were held in the Toroku POW Camp from November 1944 to April 1945 was dedicated on Saturday June 6th 2009. The memorial is located inside the grounds of Gou-Ba Elementary School in the village of Gou-Ba - a suburb of Douliou City in South-Central Taiwan.
Until 2003, two of the former old Japanese school buildings which the POWs inhabited still stood on the grounds – they were thought to be the last remaining POW buildings...
(CP-Taiwan) Michael Hurst, the Founder and Director of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, traveled to London England in October 2002 to receive a very special award - the Member of the Order of the British Empire. His long and tireless efforts to remember the former allied prisoners of war in Taiwan have been recognized. Michael was the original founder and first Chairman of the Kinkaseki Memorial Committee in 1997, and later he founded the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, to carry on the work begun by the original committee when it closed down...