Joan Bamford Fletcher

The 2001 documentary Rescue from Sumatra commemorates Fletcher's actions.

After fleeing Poland, Fletcher rejoined her family in Canada who, by this time, lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. She kept in touch with her Japanese translator, Art Miyazawa. She died in 1979 in Langley. Following her death, Miyazawa wrote to her sister, telling her about a reunion with the veterans she had led. He wrote:

In 1950, Fletcher was caught up in a political controversy where a former British attaché, Group Captain Claude Henry Turner, had been accused of persuading a young Polish girl to leave the country illegally. In May, Fletcher reportedly received a phone call informing her that the secret police were after her. She quickly burned her address book and fled the country in a Royal Air Force courier plane. She later told reporters she believed she had “escaped the Communist dragnet by six hours.” Details of Fletcher's duties during that period are protected by the Official Secrets Act.

Fletcher had learned Polish while she was stationed with the Polish army in Scotland. In 1947, she travelled to Poland where she served with the Information Section of the British Embassy in Warsaw. By this time, however, the Cold War had intensified and foreign embassies in Poland had become targets of suspicion by the Polish secret police, as they were thought to be shelters for spies and saboteurs.

In 1946, Fletcher was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services in the Far East. The MBE medal was presented to her by the British ambassador to Poland.

In 1945, as the war was drawing to a close in Europe, Fletcher was assigned to Southeast Asia to help evacuate Allied captives. She arrived in Calcutta, India in April 1945. She left Calcutta on a hospital ship that crossed the Bay of Bengal and sailed through the Strait of Malacca toward Singapore. Her convoy slowly made its way single-file through mine-invested waters and Fletcher did not arrive in Singapore until September 2. From there, she travelled to prison camps to care for sick internees and was appointed personal assistant to the brigadier in command, with the rank of lieutenant. In October, Fletcher was dispatched to the Dutch East Indies – now Indonesia – to evacuate the civilian internment camp at Bangkinang.

After a week in Padang, Fletcher flew to Singapore and was assigned to Hong Kong at the end of November 1945. Three weeks later, she was admitted to hospital with a severe case of swamp fever. She returned to England in July 1946, but the disease resurfaced, spreading to her jawbone. Half of her lower teeth were removed and part of her left jawbone was replaced with plastic.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Fletcher trained as a driver in the transport section of the Canadian Red Cross and studied motor mechanics in the Saskatchewan Auxiliary Territorial Service, a women's voluntary wartime organization. In early 1941, paying her own expenses, she travelled to Britain and joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). Fletcher was stationed with other Canadian FANYs at Moncreiffe House in Scotland, where she drove cars and ambulances for the exiled Polish army.

Fletcher approached the local headquarters of the Japanese 25th Army and persuaded the Japanese army to provide her with an interpreter, 15 trucks, and an escort of 40 armed soldiers. She was able to increase the convoy size to 25 vehicles after she salvaged some broken-down trucks from the camp. The route from Bangkinang to Padang involved a hazardous journey through 450 kilometres of rugged jungle and mountains as high as 1,525 metres. Because of the limited number of vehicles, convoys could transport only a small number of internees at a time. In all, transporting the 2,000 internees would require 21 trips over a six-week span. Each trip took approximately 20 hours.

Joan Bamford Fletcher MBE (July 12, 1909 – April 30, 1979) was a Canadian member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. In 1945, Fletcher commanded a force of surrendered Japanese soldiers and used them to escort 2,000 Dutch civilian captives from a civilian internment camp at Bangkinang, Indonesia to safety. Fletcher was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services. The 2001 documentary Rescue from Sumatra is based on her actions.

Fletcher was born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1909, the daughter of British immigrants. Her father's family had been successful cotton merchants and she was sent to a boarding school in England. She later studied at Les Tourelles in Brussels, Belgium, and also in France.