 Edwards was an army sergeant in the Royal Corps of Signals when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942.He was interned for some time by the Japanese in the notorious Changi jail before transported to Taiwan, then the Japanese colony of Formosa.Edwards was put into the Kinkaseki POW camp, a mountainous region near Jiufen, where he and 525 other inmates were forced to work the copper mine daily in tropical heat.