Colonel John Harold Henry Coombes CBE (1906–1978) was the first principal of Cadet College Petaro, one of the earliest public schools built in Pakistan in 1957. During his military career, he served in the British Army and fought the Second World War on the Malayan front.
Education and early life
Coombes was born on 28 December 1906. His father was a fisherman in Guernsey, the second largest of the Channel Islands. His mother died in 1918, when he was 12 years old. As a teenager, he secured a scholarship to Elizabeth College, Guernsey as a day scholar. At college, he was captain of athletics and gained colours for football and hockey. He also played cricket and took part in shooting, besides being a school prefect and sergeant in the Officers Training Corps from 1918 to 1924.
Coombes then won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford University in Mathematics (1924–28). Excelling in sports once again, he gained college colours for hockey, football, and cricket, and was the Oxfordshire hockey captain from 1926 to 1928. At the same time, he was commissioned as second lieutenant in 1st Battalion of the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry. There was conscription in Guernsey, and he did his two-month annual training during his vacations. He was a member of the British Army of the Rhine when Britain occupied Germany after World War I until 1931.
In 1928, he contracted double pneumonia and was unable to sit for the Degree Examination. Instead of returning for a fifth year at Oxford, he took a job as an inspector of cotton plantations in the Sudan, where he stayed from 1928 to 1932. There he learnt to read and write Arabic and decided to join the Sudan Civil Service. He also became a volunteer officer in the Sudan Defence Force.
In 1935, while teaching part-time, he obtained his BA degree from Oxford, and became married to Alice. He gained his MA in 1939 while working as senior geography master, with French as his second subject, at a public school.
World War II
Coombes was called up in August 1939 and went to France with the advance party of the British Expeditionary Force as a captain in the Royal Artillery. He was later transferred to the R.A.F. He was captured at Dunkirk but later escaped to England and remained with the 4th Squadron till 1941.
In late 1941, Coombes was posted to command 330 Artillery Battery of 137 Field Regiment and sent to join the 11th Indian Division in Malaya. His regiment reached there in time to be in the first Indian battle against the Japanese at Jitra on the Siamese (Thai) border. Capt. Coombes's last battery position was on the beach at Singapore when this "Gibraltar of the East" fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. He remained a prisoner of war till August 1945.
Prisoner of war
Coombes recorded his memoirs as a prisoner of war in his book Banpong Express, which provides a vivid narrative of the Malayan Campaign and of life as a prisoner of war under the "death shadow" of the Imperial Japanese Army. This book was written in the prisoner of war camp at Nangpladuk (Siam). It was hidden in the lining of a one-gallon thermos container which, being in use in the cook house, was never detected by the Japanese.
His regiment fought for nine weeks and suffered in a lost cause. Out of the original 700 who came to Malaya, three Officers, including the C.O., and 28 men were killed in action and 184 died a miserable death as prisoners of war. In December 1946, Coombes was Mentioned in Despatches in recognition of his conduct in this campaign. In the concluding paragraph of Banpong Express, Coombes writes "Those of us who remained have experienced the bitterness of defeat and the humiliation of captivity under conditions as macabre as any in the history of warfare. We were indeed lucky that the end came when it did. Now we can live again and hope that out of our experiences we may fashion a philosophy of life dynamic enough to be effective in a war-weary world. It must not happen again".
Post World War II
Coombes returned to the UK in May 1947 and wanted to join the Royal Artillery in the Regular Army. He was turned down due to his age, so he took down his lieutenant colonel's badge of rank and instead joined the Royal Army Education Corps as a captain on a short service commission.