Catalogue description War Office: Allied Prisoners of War Hospitals, Registers and Papers, Second World War

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Details of WO 347
Reference: WO 347
Title: War Office: Allied Prisoners of War Hospitals, Registers and Papers, Second World War
Description:

Most of the records in this series consist of admission and discharge registers, alphabetical sick registers and death registers, kept by prisoners of war.

These are divided into three subseries:

  • Nong Pladock Camp and its Ubon or Oubone satellite, in Thailand
  • Tanbaya Hospital Camp in Burma. This includes an account of the move from Singapore to Thailand, and a War Office PoW Casualty Section file relating to the registers, and an official war diary and death register of the camp
  • Registers, numbers by book (1-50) of camp hospitals in Batavia, Osaka, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other camp hospitals in Thailand and Burma.

There is also an index for the books 1-50 (WO 347/14-59), arranged by surname. Each card/slip notes (in the bottom left hand corner) the book number and the page number - for example, 1/13 would designate Book Number 1, page 13. In this case, 1/13 would indicate page 13 of WO 347/14.

Books numbered 2-6 are contained within WO 347/15

The contents of each of these registers are diverse and complicated in arrangement, which has necessitated detailed collation in each. To assist searchers details of the collation are filed at the front of each piece.
Date: 1942-1947
Related material:

For files of the Medical Historian dealing with camps in Thailand and relating to Japanese PoWs, see WO 222
Held by: The National Archives, Kew
Legal status: Public Record(s)
Language: English
Creator:

War Office, Adjutant General, Directorate of Prisoners of War, 1940-1945
Physical description: 200 cards and volumes
Access conditions: Open
Immediate source of acquisition:

In 1988-2015 Ministry of Defence
Custodial history: All the records in this series were maintained by the prisoners, who used whatever they could come by to keep a medical record. It is conceivable that, at the end of the War, these particular records by-passed the medical historians whose materials appear in WO 222, and were diverted instead to the War Office PoW Casualty Section and various Allied authorities who were assembling data on those who died in the camps, and only came to light shortly before 1988.
Accruals: No further accruals are expected

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