Rear-Admiral James Harkness - Telegraph Rear-Admiral James Harkness, who has died aged 92, returned to a conventional naval career after the horrors of being a prisoner of war in the Far East. Harkness was deputy accountant in the heavy cruiser Exeter at the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942 when his ship was badly damaged and limped to Surayaba, Java, for temporary repairs. Two days later, steaming south west through the Sunda Strait (between Java and Sumatra) with an escort of two destroyers and at reduced speed, Exeter met a superior force of Japanese cruisers. The battle lasted two hours, but at 1130 on March 1 Exeter was on fire and sinking and the order to abandon ship was given. Harkness recalled that naval discipline held until the end, sailors lining their shoes in pairs on the quarterdeck before they launched themselves into the warm water. All the ship's boats and Carley floats were destroyed in the battle and Harkness spent the rest of the day and the next night clinging to a net suspended by buoys. Caring less and less whether he lived or not, he was drifting into unconsciousness only to be roused by swallowing a mixture of oil and seawater as he passed out. At 0900 the next morning he was picked up by a Japanese destroyer and taken to Makassar to begin three and a half years as "guest of the Japanese". At first Harkness and his fellow prisoners were cramped into police barracks where the accommodation was sparse – but luxurious by the standards of what was to come. Under the terms of the Geneva Conventions to which Japan still paid lip service at this early stage of the war, ratings were set to work, stealing whatever they could to improve their conditions, while Harkness had to arrange a loan from a Dutchman for the officers to buy small luxuries such as tobacco. Fenced in by the sea, escape was not an option. Three men who tried were betrayed, brutally beaten and beheaded. In January 1943 Harkness was transferred to Pomalaa, where he was made to dig clay out of a mountain to reclaim the harbour. He was not ill-treated but poor sanitation, starvation, and diseases such as malaria, dysentery, beriberi and pellagra (vitamin B deficiency resulting in diarrhoea, dermatitis and dementia) killed a man a day. So bad were the conditions that even the Japanese decided to withdraw from the island. Harkness and the survivors were returned to Makassar, where a half dose of quinine helped cure his malaria. In another move the prisoners were taken to Batavia (Djakarta), where the food was no better or more plentiful; but the change cured Harkness's pellagra. In camp he became a toolmaker, manufacturing his own implements to fashion pipes, lighters, files and other useful items. When two Australians invited Harkness to join them in cultivating a garden, they grew tomatoes and spinach to supply thousands of fellow prisoners. A few mangoes became the gardeners' perks. By the summer of 1944 the officer prisoners were sent to an inland camp at Bandoeng which lacked all sanitation; Harkness's survival skills included digging wells in water bearing gravel beds and making soap from coconut oil. His last beating was early in 1945, after which he volunteered to work in a factory making tyre valves. As the parts could not be machined accurately, Harkness was satisfied that they were useless to his captors. On hearing news of the war's true progress from RAF prisoners who had clandestine wireless receivers, he began to fear that an invasion of Japan would lead to their summary execution. But one morning, a day after the prisoners learned of the Hiroshima bomb, the guards showed Harkness and others pathetic politeness and gave them little gifts, such as small china tea cups. By the time of his release Harkness, 6ft tall, weighed 6 stone. He remembered two guards, Yoshida and Mori, as exceptionally cruel. He forgave their disgraceful behaviour, recognising that he did not suffer as much as others, but he approved the death sentences meted out to them after the war. James Percy Knowles Harkness was born on November 28 1916, a few months after his father was killed at the Battle of the Somme, and James joined Dartmouth in the Exmouth term of 1929. His cadet's and midshipman's sea training was spent in the cruiser Frobisher, in Hood, and the cruiser Norfolk. His first appointment was as a captain's secretary in the battleship Barham, where each morning at 0930, as he took the papers in, he was offered a glass of sherry. He next became secretary to (then) Rear-Admiral Max Horton, but when offered in 1940 the chance to hitch his star to Horton and go with him to the submarine command (as Flag Officer Submarines), Harkness preferred a seagoing appointment to Exeter. After months on convoy work in the Indian Ocean, Exeter arrived in Singapore shortly after the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse, when Harkness was responsible for "clothing, rumming and feeding" the survivors. Immediately after the war Harkness was confirmed in rank as a lieutenant-commander. There were refresher courses at HMS Ceres in Wetherby, Yorkshire, and his career followed a conventional route until he retired in 1972. He became a planning inspector, and put his skills as a handyman to work renovating a house which he inherited, where he wrote his private memoirs. In 1933 a cruise in a college yacht to Brittany inspired a love of sailing and Harkness lager purged his memories of prison by some solo voyages. In 1949 he married Grace Sulivan, an admiral's daughter who crewed for him in dinghy races in Malta. James Harkness, who died on June 7, is survived by his wife and their two daughters.
