By Jeremy Lovell

Owen Eva found God while crammed with 700 other prisoners of war into the hold of a rusting freighter in February 1945, caught up in the Japanese army`s retreat from Singapore under relentless assault by the returning Allies.
"Three days out, two of the three ships full of prisoners were torpedoed by the Allies and we were told the waters we were entering the next day were even more dangerous," he said.
The Japanese evacuation ships were unmarked and thousands of allied POWs died locked in their holds, as unsuspecting Allied submarines wreaked revenge on their retreating enemies. "It was an awful experience. But it was in part responsible for my decision to join the Church of England," Eva said during a reunion of veterans to mark the 60th anniversary of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese army on February 15, 1945.
Two years after World War Two ended with U.S. atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the defeat of Japan, Eva was ordained a priest and went on to spend most of his working life in the English port city of Liverpool.
But his experiences as a Japanese POW building the infamous 415-kilometre Burma railway, where on average one person died for every 28 metres of track laid, changed his life for ever.
Captured just 10 days after arriving in Singapore when the British island fortress fell to the advancing Japanese, Eva spent a year on the "death railway" which took only 13 months to build. "Conditions were bad. Food was very low. But we were in Kinsayok camp in the middle of the line. The further up the line you went the worse the conditions became," said Eva, now 84.
There was just one doctor for 1,000 men in the camp, and each day 500 men had to drag themselves out to work on the railway.
There were no facilities, little food, and no medicine. Diseases such as malaria, dysentery and cholera were everywhere, adding to the miseries of malnutrition, exhaustion and brutality. Forgive but never forget

"At any one time half the people were in the camp hospital and too ill to move, let alone work. But for each person who was sent to the hospital, one person from there had to come out and join the work party," said Eva, who retired as a canon in 1986.
"We learned how to support each other. Even though you knew there might be worse to come you would still get through," he added. "There was humanity in the face of complete inhumanity."
More than 100,000 Indian, British and Australian troops were taken prisoner by the Japanese when General Arthur Percival unconditionally surrendered Singapore.