Five
Hellfire Pass
On that first morning they split us into two groups. Half of the POWs had to finish building our sleeping quarters, while the rest of us cleared trees at the camp. As a guard thrust a pickaxe into my soft hands, I could not remember the last time I had endured any hard labour. And this was going to be a far cry from hoisting cast-iron bathtubs on to lorries bound for Highland mansions.
I positioned myself near the trees, away from the guards, and took a moment to watch the other men in action. Some of them were already getting stuck in, swinging their chunkels, heavy Thai hoes, with apparent ease. They were flailing into the earth, digging up roots and rocks. It looked easy enough and after a few awkward swings, some of which grazed my bare shins, I quickly got the hang of it. It was rhythmic toil and I became almost mechanical in my movements. But within an hour bubbling blisters started to appear on my palms. By lunch my thumbs felt painfully disconnected from their sockets and my back ached at its base from all the unnatural movement. There was no respite. The Japanese had no consideration for our poor health or hunger and beat men across their backs with bamboo or rifles regularly enough to make us keep our heads down. It was a long first day and if I had realised then that it was just the first of 750 days I would spend as a slave in the jungle, I would have broken down and cried like a baby.
After another night sleeping in the open with restless centipedes and soldier ants, we went back to work. Through some ingenuity I managed to get selected to help construct the huts. The work was no less frantic but it was less physical and gave the balloon-like blisters on my hands a chance to subside. The only dangers lay in the fact that nobody knew what they were doing. I felt that my Boy Scout knowledge of knots and the outdoors would be useful. Instructing us through an interpreter the Nippon Army engineers spelled out what they required. The huts were to be very basic A-frame structures, using lengths of bamboo for the frame and support struts, and the point of the roof raised to about twenty feet high. We would use slivers of tree bark, or rattan, carefully cut with parangs, Burmese knives about eighteen inches long, to lash the bamboo together. You dampened the rattan before tying it around the bamboo and as it dried it would shrink, providing an amazingly tight fastening. The floor, made with bamboo split in long half-lengths, would have a corrugated effect and be raised about three feet off the ground. We were to sleep on either side of a gangway that ran the length of the hut, which was open at both ends but at least closed at the sides with walls of bark. I volunteered to make the roof, which involved thatching it with atap leaves. It was a good job, not least because I was out of reach of the guards and their vicious tempers.
When I had finished it looked great. But it provided little more than shade; these huts really only created shelter for mosquitoes and disease-carrying flies. During the monsoon season, when the rain pelted down in stair-rods, the water cascaded in and we may as well have not bothered with our roofing efforts. We were permanently damp, working, eating and sleeping in the rain. As result we lost a lot of men on the railway to pneumonia. For many the disease known at home as the ‘old people’s friend’ would become the ‘prisoner’s friend’, offering a relatively peaceful and unconscious end.
This camp would become known as ‘Kanyu’. I thought of it as ‘Can-You’, which I often found cruelly ironic. As the line progressed it would become Kanyu I, when Kanyu II and Kanyu III were built further up the railway that snaked its way through the dense jungle of Thailand towards Burma.
After three days the Japanese considered our huts to be completed. They told us we could add finishing touches in ‘our own time’.
On day four we were to begin construction on the infamous Death Railway, the 415-kilometre Burma – Siam Railway through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. The British engineers who had scoped out the possibility of a railway in 1885 were quite right to warn of the massive loss of life it would entail. The construction of the Death Railway was one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century. It was said that one man died for every sleeper laid. Certainly over sixteen thousand of us British, Australian, Dutch, American and Canadian prisoners died on the railway – murdered by the ambitions of the Japanese Imperial Army to complete the lifeline to their forces in Burma by December 1943. Up to a hundred thousand native slaves, Thais, Indians, Malayans and Tamils also died in atrocious circumstances.
Even Japanese engineers estimated that the railway would take five years to complete. The Japanese Imperial Army would prove them wrong, however. It had a secret weapon: slave labour. In just sixteen months a railway linking Bangkok with the Burmese rice bowl and its vital oil fields would be completed at a terrible human cost. The single-track narrow-gauge line, just over a metre wide, allowed rice and raw materials to be looted from Burma and Japanese reinforcements to be sent from Thailand for the planned invasion of India.
At first only prisoners of war were put to work at both the Burmese and Thai ends of the railway, with the object of meeting in the middle at Three Pagodas Pass, where the ancient Burmese and Thai civilisations had clashed three hundred years earlier. Then following the United States’ success at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the seas around Burma and Malaysia became a vast hunting ground for American submarines and the pace of work was quickened by working us prisoners to death and drafting in two hundred thousand coolie labourers.
Over sixteen months we would hack our way through hundreds of kilometres of dense jungle, gouge passes through rocky hills, span ravines and cross rivers, building bridges and viaducts with rudimentary tools. It was a huge civil engineering project that would be lubricated with our blood, sweat and tears. But most of all blood.
On starvation rations and with no access to medicines of any kind, we lived in camps buried deep in the remote jungle where Red Cross inspectors or representatives of neutral foreign powers could never find us. A whole army of sixty thousand men had vanished into the jungle at the mercy of our Japanese masters.
On that first morning the guards woke us by rattling canes across the bamboo walls at dawn. It was a sound that would become all too recognisable to us.
‘All men worko! Speedo! Speedo!’
A chorus of ‘Aye, aye,’ rang around the awakening hut. One brave lad replied, ‘Keep your head on you Jap bastard, it’ll be knocked off soon.’ This sort of bravado would fizzle out later when we discovered that many of our guards could understand English.
There was no time, facilities or desire for a wash and shave; it was straight out to form the line for breakfast.
‘Cheer up lads, it’s ham and eggs this morning,’ one prisoner offered from the front.
‘Naw it’s no. It’s porridge the morning,’ said another.
Some of the men in the queue cursed the early-morning jokers for mentioning such fantastic delicacies. Thinking and talking about food had become a form of torture – it just drove you mad. We all knew it would be plain rice, just rice. Just like every other stinking day.
The cooks had already been up for a couple of hours – about the only downside of being a camp cook – to heat two 12-gallon cast-iron saucer-shaped pots of rice, ‘kualies’, and boil drinking water in cauldrons over an open fire. The cooks were fed last, and best. But sometimes when the cooks had had enough, I would manage to get the burned skin of the rice scraped from the kualies. It may have been burned but it tasted so much better.
After breakfast we were paraded in the half-light outside our huts for the count. It was a full squad, a kumi, on the railway today. Tenko, roll-call, was conducted by guards and overseen by the Japanese version of a drill sergeant, a gunso, who made the RSM from the Bridge of Don barracks seem like a playful puppy. It all took time and was done in Japanese. The camps all operated on Tokyo time. Not that it made any difference to us; the bayonet and the boot were our timekeepers.
The count, or bango, was conducted in Japanese with numbers one to ten being ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, ju. Number eleven was ju-ichi, which took the tenth number and the first, while number twelve was ju-ni, and so on. It took some longer than others to get their head around. But you learned seemingly impossible tasks very quickly under the threat of a rifle smashing into your face. The Japanese had especial trouble understanding some of the Scottish and English accents and when inadvertently we offended them they would go berserk. If someone stumbled and forgot what number they were, someone would shout it out for them but it didn’t always work and the guards would give the man a beating. Sometimes several beatings would be administered and the count could take up to an hour, which would result in further blanket punishments or reduced rations. I quickly learned that it was best to avoid being in the front rank at tenko, where most beatings were handed out.
In the vast sprawling camp at Changi it had been easy for me to keep out of the way of our troublesome and irritable captors but on the railway they stalked our every move and it was necessary to fully learn the humiliating kow-towing protocol that they insisted upon. If we failed to bow, salute or stand to attention at the approach of a guard, a beating would be administered.
Once the count was complete we formed a line for our tools. Picks, shovels and twin baskets on bamboo yo-ho poles that you carried across your shoulders were all laid out. The saws, chisels and anything else that was sharp and could have been used as a weapon were always kept down at the railway. I could not understand how the Japanese never saw a pickaxe as a potential weapon but I never came across it being used as one, so maybe they were right after all.
As I was handed my pick and shovel a Japanese guard whacked me across the legs with a strop, urging me to follow the men into the jungle. We followed a rough path, weaving through the trees. The only men left behind at camp were a handful of officers, two Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) officers and their assistants and four cooks. There were only six officers and they all shared one hut with the NCOs. Since the Japanese had removed anything that signified rank it was difficult to tell who was an officer and who was not. They had to convince others that they were who they said they were. But I could usually tell after hearing them speak. Most of the officers spoke a different language from the rest of us. And it was not just their posh accents; it was their vocabulary too. Farm labourers and factory workers did not call each other ‘old boy’ and describe things as being ‘quaint’.
It took about an hour to reach our destination, nothing more than a rare and slight gap in the jungle with a rocky cliff just visible ahead in the distance. Later the Australians would dub it Hellfire Pass and I could not have thought of a better name for it myself. The Japanese engineers told us that we had to clear everything between the white markers already pegged into the ground. The pattern was set. Trees would be chopped down by hand, huge tree roots ripped up, boulders shouldered out of our path and great thickets of towering, spiky bamboo cleared.
They divided us into squads. I was on pick and shovel, clearing all the vegetation and boulders in a thirty-foot width. In the middle of the space, where the railway sleepers and eventually the tracks would go, we had to dig down to a depth of about three feet. There we dug up the earth in a twelve-foot-wide strip, which others with baskets on yo-ho poles hauled to one side. After digging down a foot or so we invariably struck clay, which made for even tougher going.
Another squad were tasked with removing the rocks, trees and debris, another separated the roots to dry them out and later burn them. Meanwhile on the pickaxe party some men were going hammer and tong. I said to one chap near me who was slugging his pick as if in a race, ‘Slow down mate, you’ll burn yourself out.’
‘If we get finished early,’ he said, puffing, ‘maybe we’ll get back to camp early.’
But the soldiers would only find something else for us to do. And then the next day Japanese expectations would be higher. Personally I tried to work as slowly as possible. The others would learn eventually but I soon discovered ways to conserve energy. If I swung the pick quickly, allowing it to drop alongside an area I had just cleared, the earth came away easier. It also meant that while it looked as if I were swinging the pick like the Emperor’s favourite son, the effort was minimal. Nevertheless under the scorching Thai sun and without a shirt or hat for protection, or shade from the nearby jungle canopy, the work soon became exhausting. Minute after minute, hour after hour, I wondered when the sun would drop and we could go back to camp.
Around midday the Japanese called for yasume. We downed tools and sat and ate rice, which we had taken with us from camp in the morning. When I opened my rice tin I found the contents had begun to ferment. It was almost rice wine and tasted horrible. But I ate it anyway. Lunch usually lasted for around thirty minutes at the railway, depending on the officer in charge. If he were sleepy or tired, it might be longer. We used to love it when he fell asleep!
After lunch we carried on. Our progress became bogged down by a huge boulder semi-submerged in the soil and right in our way. We had to pickaxe around it and try and lever it out with pick handles. It took five men to prise it from its hole and once it was out we rolled it down the hill towards the river. It was the river Kwai that flowed south to join with the Mae Klong, which we had followed during the death march. It remained to our left for the duration of my time on the railway and I never once went in it.
By mid-afternoon we had finally completed the first section. Despite enormous toil and effort over the previous ten hours, our progress had been incredibly slow. We had managed to clear the required thirty-foot width for only about twenty feet. It was the beginning for us of what would become the most notorious railway construction that the world had ever seen. The Japanese engineer came over to inspect our work. He studied the clearing from several angles, using various surveying instruments, before declaring, ‘No gooda! Do again! Deeper!’
Utterly demoralised we had to go back to the beginning and manually dredge another foot of soil. We were all in various stages of beriberi, pellagra, malaria, dengue fever and dysentery. A new illness had also started to ravage some unfortunate prisoners. Called tinea, it was nicknamed ‘rice balls’ because the hideous swelling had the tormenting tendency to attack, crack and inflame the scrotum.
There was never any warning when the dysentery might come on. You could be on a pick when the urge would hit you, sending you scuttling into the jungle to do your business. You might get away with it or you might just get a beating to add to your woes.
A Japanese officer sat on a rock in the shade, overlooking proceedings. If he saw something that he didn’t like, he would shout to guards who would come running into the area. You might be working away, completely innocent, and get an indiscriminate beating because of someone else’s minor misdemeanour. I came to know which POWs were the ones always getting into trouble and I steered clear of them as much as possible. I thought it took a strange man to always be at the receiving end of beatings and never learn to avoid them. Those men were usually the ones trying to hide in the shade or those who would see a native walking through the jungle and try to barter with them. Always looking for an angle. I did not need those kind of people around me.
By the end of the day we still had managed only a distance of twenty feet. But we had finally dug to the depth the engineers wanted, and just before dusk we wound our weary bodies back through the jungle to camp. I got my rice and water and went straight to the hut and collapsed, my whole body aching with pain. Hands, feet, back, arms, legs were all so sore, especially my back and legs. Eventually out of sheer exhaustion I fell asleep. But when I woke it didn’t feel like I had slept at all. I was incredibly lethargic and the pain had increased overnight. I was expecting a long sleep to rejuvenate me, to help me through the next day, which I had envisaged as bringing just the same amount of torture, if not worse. But I felt horrific and that is when I realised I was at rock bottom. I felt lower than the rats that had scuttled through our hut during the night. The whole camp was completely demoralised and dejected; you could see it in the empty darkness of men’s eyes. I was glad there were no mirrors – I really did not want to witness the state of my face and read the story of my own eyes.
Nevertheless I heaved my ravaged body out of the hut and got my food. I half-ran to the queue for tools, desperate to be given a pickaxe and shovel once again. I had seen the poor devils struggling on the baskets the previous day and while I was in agony from a day on pick duties, at least my muscles would become accustomed to it. Better the devil you know.
On the hike back to the railway the enormity of our task suddenly dawned on me. During the first day I remembered seeing a great expanse of solid rock in front of us. Only now did I realise that we were going to have to make our way through that slab of rock.
The Japanese never allowed us to speak while working. You had to speak with your head down, in hushed tones, to someone, ‘Hey, slow down mate. You’re making it worse for all of us.’
While I could successfully fake the amount of effort I was putting in on pick and shovel duty, I couldn’t escape the toil of carrying rocks in the baskets. It was the most difficult task. You had to be on the move all day, knees buckling under the weight, often down steep inclines. It was especially difficult during the monsoon season and caused more injuries than anything else.
Each day the Japanese increased our task. We had managed twenty feet the day before so today they wanted twenty-five feet. I whispered to the guys in my work party, ‘Let’s not do it. Let’s go slow.’
They all agreed. We went on a go-slow all day, chuckling to ourselves as the shadows lengthened. By the time it got dark we were a little over halfway through what they wanted us to do. But the plan backfired. Instead of returning to camp at 6 p.m., the soldiers set up arc and carbide lamps, bamboo fires, containers filled with diesel fuel, oil and hessian wicks, anything they could lay their hands on, to keep us there well after nine in the evening, until we had finished the task.
No matter what time of the year, summer or winter, it was always dark by the time we got back to camp. Most evenings men would gather outside the huts and chat before they hit the hay. I would occasionally join them but I would stand on the fringes and not say anything. There was not much to chat about, although a lot of men were married and would talk about their families back home. These slightly older men in their thirties and forties seemed to survive in much greater numbers. Surprisingly it was the young men who died first on the railway. Perhaps the older ones were stronger emotionally. Perhaps with families they had more to live for. I sometimes wondered if I would die without having a family and without having had the chance to live a life, and then quickly try to banish these thoughts before getting my head down.
The huts teemed with bloodsucking bed bugs that would emerge just before dawn to torment us. We could never eliminate them; we had no chemicals or anything like that. When you caught them and crushed them they smelled absolutely disgusting. After a few weeks of being eaten alive by bugs while sleeping on the floor of the hut, I decided to try a night sleeping outside. I did not know what would happen to me if I did but I judged it was worth the chance of being bashed by the guards. I always slept near the front of the hut, third man in on the right, and sneaked out during the night, careful not to make a noise, around the side of the hut. I lay down in the dirt. It was undulating but soft and cool. The stars were out and the high sky seemed to muffle the constant malariainduced moaning of men and the tormented cries brought on by nightmares. The jungle noises by now had lost their edge for me and I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke I joined the breakfast queue, feeling much more sprightly and relaxed than I had after sleeping in the packed and restless hut. The unbroken rest would pay dividends during a day on the railway. I slept outside most nights from then on. Strangely nobody commented on it and no one copied me.
There were some, however, who got up in the night to stretch their restless feet. It was quite normal for men to walk outside and find a cool spot, some wet leaves or damp soil, to cool their ‘happy feet’ – the name we gave to the very painful burning sensation caused by beriberi, which was brought on by acute vitamin deficiency.
A full-time burial party of six men now worked in the camp. It was comprised of the same six souls, who never went out to work on the railway. While digging graves in the jungle was by no means easy work, it was easier, physically at least, than being on the railway. But seeing those poor dead men must have taken a lot of strength and will from the gravediggers.
Just to face the next day required a huge effort for all of us. You did not have the energy to do what our captors demanded. On around a thousand calories a day it was completely beyond our physical being. But it did not matter to them. There were thousands of POWs, not to mention the tens and hundreds of thousands of natives, waiting to replace us. We were slaves to the slaughter and utterly expendable to them.
But even the Japanese eventually realised that some tasks were becoming beyond our physical capabilities. For the previous few months we had been manually dragging huge teak logs to be used as railway sleepers. When we first arrived it would take eight to twelve men to move these hardwood trunks but as we became weaker it took twenty or thirty men to edge them into place. After a while the soldiers introduced two elephants to take over that task, to increase productivity. I had seen elephants when the circus came to Aberdeen and up close these beasts were equally impressive and intimidating. It was pleasing to see them in action, knowing our backs were being saved for another day, but their presence only added to the overall danger of railway life. The logs hung on steel chains around the elephants’ necks. The animals moved them easily but they would swing around dangerously, causing a lot of accidents and broken bones and taking out plenty of men.
My army-issue clothes, shorts and shirt had long since rotted from my frame. In a bid to retain my remaining dignity, I resorted to wearing a ‘Jap-happy’, a simple loincloth that had become popular among the men. It consisted of a long piece of white linen approximately six inches wide. Two pieces of tape or string attached to the ends meant you could tie it around your waist, while the rest of the material was drawn from behind under your groin to cover your bits. The loose end just flapped down in front of you. It would win no fashion awards but it did the job and was surprisingly comfortable. Otherwise I was naked. The more naked I was, the cleaner I felt. But the filth, dirt, crawling lice, the itch, smell and loss of all freedom and dignity were hard for any proud man to bear.
The wall of rock that had started off four hundred yards in front of us was getting closer every day. The thought of using pickaxes, hammers and chisels on this great slab of limestone gave me the horrors. I knew people were dying around me on the railway but I didn’t really want to know. It was too dispiriting. It was difficult to judge the full toll of casualties and by this stage I had become so self-obsessed, in a true mental battle just to get through each day. I had very few friends at Hellfire Pass and most of us were the same. We all worked so hard that, just trying to survive, each person became more and more insular as it became more difficult. It required a superhuman effort to make it to the end of each day. Strangely the less we talked to each other, the more we talked to ourselves. Nearly all of the prisoners talked to themselves and I was no exception. Every morning I would tell myself over and over, ‘Survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day.’
Occasionally, often with bizarre timing, I would have flashbacks to funny incidents from my childhood. Several men reported the same thing. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, we would be transported back in time, an astonishing and vivid experience. It must have been the mind’s way of coping with the extreme stress. In my case Auntie Dossie would often appear. Images of Dossie doing crazy things would prompt me to great outbursts of hilarity to the point where I would be laughing out loud, tears tumbling down my cheeks. Even though most prisoners talked to themselves, men stared at me in alarm.
‘What the hell are you laughing at?’
‘Nothing,’ I would reply, trying to regain my composure.
‘There’s nothing funny about this place.’
By this time mental health had become a major issue on the railway. We all suffered from depression. Men were taking their own lives. All along the railway men cut their own throats, put their heads on the railway line and simply walked into the jungle to die. Many developed the ‘atap stare’ and just looked intently at the thatched roof of the hut – death soon followed. Others went mad because of medical conditions caused by vitamin deficiencies and some just gave up, losing their minds and their self-control. They would fight with anyone over nothing at all, throwing punches, biting and kicking. They needed to be controlled physically but just could not be calmed down. It came to the point where something drastic had to be done to prevent innocent men being killed by deranged fellow prisoners, some of whom had reverted to animal instincts. The decision was made to build our own lunatic asylum to cage these poor souls.
With the agreement of the Japanese, the burial party built two six-foot-square bamboo cages. The ‘madmen’ could stand or lie down in these, just ten feet from my hut, and they had a bench to sit on. They received food and water but sadly were largely ignored. At night it was awful to hear them in the darkness jabbering and screaming, throwing themselves at the cage sides. The men who went in there never came out alive. Death would have been welcome for them. It was a dreadful thing to see our fellow beings caged like animals but what else could we do?
By now the lack of food at Kanyu I had become a major issue. Only those on work parties received rations. The sick were not given any food so ours had to be divided up so they could have some. The more sick men there were, the less food I got as a worker. It was a terrible situation.
The Japanese decided how many bags of rice we required but the way in which it was distributed was up to our officer. I didn’t know how he came to his decisions; we just hoped he was fair.
When the Japanese felt we had been especially disrespectful or dishonest, we would be punished collectively with further reductions to our meagre rations. This happened only on rare occasions, not through any good grace on their behalf, but because the human body simply cannot operate on anything less than the rice we received.
I was really beginning to struggle. While my muscles had become used to the rhythm of work, I had become very ill and weak. Due to the lack of vitamin B in our plain rice diets, all of us had fallen victim to beriberi. In the long term it could be worse than dysentery or malaria. In the short term it gave me a swollen tummy and a tremendous pain in my joints, like a very bad toothache. My eyes too were beginning to give me trouble, stinging from the constant glare of the sun on the dirt and clay. The lack of vitamins entering my system worsened their state and I was lucky not to go blind, as others did. We called the blindness that sometimes came with beriberi, ‘camp eyes’, and lived in terror of going blind. At first men noticed their range of vision reduce to around ten metres and that everything was blurred. Then they would go blind altogether. The medics assured us it was temporary but I did not want to discover for myself. I also had very little chance of getting a proper sleep and the nightmares of surrender at Fort Canning continued as terrifyingly real as ever.
As if all this was not bad enough I started to suffer from kidney stones, brought on by constant dehydration. I had first had an attack of those devilishly painful daggerballs during my early days in Singapore while still with the Gordons. Downtown when they struck, the pain doubled me over and caused me to actually shout out in public. I didn’t know what was happening so I paid a visit to the Alexandra Hospital. They told me to drink lime juice once a day and as much water as I could. Now with mere droplets dribbling past my cracked lips, the kidney stones struck often and with excruciating regularity. With no pethidine or morphine it was sheer hell. A worse pain I have never experienced.
Kidney stones tortured me for the next few years as a POW. The pain was so bad that I started to pray, the first time I had ever lent on God’s ear in earnest. Even though I had to attend Bible class with the Boy Scouts, I never believed in a divine entity and was especially sceptical since I was forced to go to the classes. Gradually the more I suffered and the more evils I witnessed, the more I began to believe. I turned to God several times. Often I felt my prayers went unanswered. But I somehow lived through this madness and I think that someone must have been listening.
Faith in God could not prevent the beatings on the railway, which were totally routine. The threat of a rifle butt across your head or bamboo cane across your body forever loomed large. For no reason at all wire whips would lash into our backs and draw blood. Some guards would creep up on you and strike the open tropical ulcers on your legs with a bamboo stick, causing intense agony. Often they delivered these beatings with such brutality and swiftness that you did not see them coming or even know what they were for. Sometimes you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Korean guards took a certain pleasure in the beatings. They had express permission to kill prisoners without any reference to higher authority. But most of them would be satisfied to stop at the sight of trickling blood. The beatings, no matter how frequent, never got any easier to take. In fact they got tougher. Each time I took a beating it chipped away, not just at my bones and waning muscles, but at my will to endure them. The dilemma was whether to swallow your pride by going down at the first blow or to retain some of your dignity by taking several blows and standing up to them. If you refused to show that their blows were hurting you, they would fly into rages and the beating could be severe, even fatal.
From an early period the Japanese camp commandant, whom I called the ‘Black Prince’, became ever more inventive with his punishments. I could not imagine a more sadistic and evil person on the planet. The more heinous the so-called ‘crime’, the sicker the sentence. Under his instructions the guards had free rein. If they felt you deserved something more than a beating, it meant taking you aside and making you pick up a large boulder. For the rest of the day you had to hold the rock over your head in the blazing heat. Within minutes your already weak and malnourished arm muscles would start to twitch and fail you. Before long you would have to drop the rock, usually the size of a rugby ball or football, mindful you did so without letting it fall on your own skull. When you let go the guards would pounce – fists, rifle butts and boots flailing into your body until you picked the rock up again. It would go on all day. And if the Japanese officer did not think you had learned your lesson sufficiently, the punishment would be repeated back at camp.
The Black Prince was a true bastard. Others called him the ‘Kanyu Kid’ but I thought my name suited Lieutenant Usuki really well. He was darker than the other Japanese soldiers and strutted around like royalty, his beefy gut protruding from beneath a shabby uniform. He despised us totally. We were scum to him. His absolute power over us and capacity for pitiless brutality made him so terrifying to me.
Long before our decision to incarcerate crazy men, the Japanese had built their own cages. The ‘black holes’, as they were known, were a higher form of punishment. Those unfortunate enough to be locked inside the semi-subterranean cages, proportioned so you could not stand, lie down or even kneel fully, would be kept in for a month typically. Corrugated iron and metal covered the bamboo to intensify the heat and deprive victims of air and any cooling breeze. Few who went in came out alive.
The Black Prince’s right-hand man was Sergeant Seiichi Okada, known to us Brits simply as ‘Dr Death’. Short and squat he took the roll-calls and carried out all of the camp commandant’s orders. Presumably he was more educated than the other Japanese or Koreans but he was evil to the marrow. Ruthless in the extreme he loved tormenting us. He especially revelled in a sickening brand of water torture. He had guards pin down his hapless victim, before pouring gallons of water down the prisoner’s throat using a bucket and hose. The man’s stomach would swell up from the huge volumes of water. Okada would then jump up and down gleefully on the prisoner’s stomach. Sometimes guards tied barbed wire around the poor soul’s stomach. Some men died and a few survived. I witnessed this disgusting display only once but it was once too often. Dr Death also took great delight in hurling stones and rocks down on prisoners from a lofty vantage point.
When a prisoner was caught stealing from the Japanese officers’ storeroom, or if a man turned on a guard, they received the next grade on the sliding scale of Japanese torture. I called it the ‘Indian rope trick’, one favoured by Indians in the old cowboy films. The helpless prisoner would be tethered spread-eagled to the ground. They wrapped wet rattan – the same string-like bark used to lash our bamboo huts together – around his ankles and wrists, and tied him to stakes in the ground. As the rattan dried, the ties would slowly gash into the skin, drawing blood and tearing into sinew and cartilage as it pulled limbs from their sockets. It reduced even the toughest men to agonised screaming, and they would be there all day. I would be almost glad to get out of camp in the mornings just to avoid hearing their cries of unbridled pain. It was a way of torturing all of us. Often when we returned from a day on the railway the men would no longer be there. Nobody asked where they had vanished to. I certainly did not want to know. After such a horrific ordeal death at the end of a Japanese bayonet would have been welcomed.
The worst of the Korean guards was the ‘Mad Mongrel’. He was slightly more Western-looking than the rest, with a hard, angular face. A lot of prisoners struggled to tell the difference between the guards, who no doubt thought we all looked the same too. But I could tell and the more time you spent with them, the better you knew which ones to try and avoid. The Mad Mongrel patrolled the railway with a bamboo cane, striking out indiscriminately and often. He had been chosen by Dr Death and the Black Prince for his exceptional cruelty and sadism. On the railway their favourite punishment was getting us to kneel on gravel with ramrod-straight backs. If we sagged, blows to the kidneys straightened up our failing frames.
One day on the railway the Mad Mongrel saw something in my work party that riled him. Before I knew anything was wrong he charged up to me and slammed his rifle butt into my forehead. It knocked me clean off my feet. I was seeing stars but despite being dazed and shaken I got up quickly, to avoid being kicked to a pulp on the ground. I still bear the horseshoe scar, a lifelong gift from the Mad Mongrel.
Within those first few months my trusty army boots that had done me so proud since being issued back at the Bridge of Don barracks finally succumbed to the rigours of the railway. As I negotiated a slope with two baskets filled with rocks on my shoulders, the sole came away from the upper, sending me head over heels down the hill, rocks bouncing out of the baskets and crashing on top of me. I shielded my head with my arms and when I dusted myself off saw that both of my boots had split in two. Many of the men were already going barefoot and it was something I had long feared. I tried to repair the boots by lashing them together with a piece of rattan but it did not last.
My socks had disintegrated long before in the tropical sweat. Now in bare feet I had a new challenge. My feet were extremely soft from living in constantly wet boots and the ground was particularly unforgiving, the jagged volcanic rocks often hiding just below the surface of the topsoil. I knew that the soles would harden up but until then I would have to walk like a cripple. When using the spade I wouldn’t be able to use my foot to dig deeper into the soil and would require more upper-body strength. Having no boots also made the ever-frequent trips to the benjos, the latrines, even more unsavoury. They were revolting, vast open pits, later covered in after weakened prisoners began to collapse into them and drown. As you approached the benjos you had to wade through the mud layered with the excrement of those dysentery sufferers who had never quite made it. Flies and maggots swarmed and wriggled over this foul mush. It got so bad that we had a bucket of water at the entrance to our hut to wash our feet in. It all added to the misery.
In moments of adversity I would often think back to my childhood and I remembered going barefoot during the long hot summers we spent down at the Aberdeenshire fishing village of Newtonhill, where I was born. My mother’s parents had retired there and lived in a house called ‘Fairseat’, which we nicknamed ‘Sair feet’. My elder brother Douglas and I used to go to the beach in the morning. We stayed there all day until teatime, having great adventures that fortunately our parents never knew about. We explored caves, went cliff-climbing and dived off a breakwater that was probably fifteen to twenty feet high. One of the local families, the Cobblers as we called them, had two boys about our age. They would come down to the beach and do much the same stuff as us. But for some reason Douglas and I never really cared for those two lads. One day I remember we had fisticuffs over a burn – standing on either side of it slugging away at each other.
I remembered the magical summer at the age of seven or eight, when my mother’s brother, our Uncle Alfie, and Aunt Alice returned home from India, where he worked as a tea planter. They came to visit us at Newtonhill. We got home one day and were surprised to see our auntie and uncle. They took us through to the front room and I saw a white sheet propped against the sideboard. Uncle Alfie said, ‘Now boys, we have a surprise for you but you’re not going on the main road with these.’ He pulled off the sheet to reveal two sparkling, brand-new bikes. It was just amazing and beyond our wildest dreams. We went outside and tried to ride our new bicycles. Once we got the hang of it and mastered them, we went down to the village. The first thing we did was to ride past the Cobblers’ house and shout out. We were the only ones in the village with bicycles so you can imagine the reaction!
Reflecting on my happy childhood, my job and my family was a useful tool that I used to get me through some very hard times.
Just after losing my boots I noticed that some of the men were wearing ‘jungle slippers’ made of bark and leaves. I heard that one chap in my hut had discovered a particularly inventive way of making sandals from a jungle plant. After hobbling back from the railway I tried to find him. For a change I entered through the back entrance of the hut and noticed a chap from my work party lying alone in his bed-space.
‘Hello Bill,’ I said to him as I crouched down. He was from Northampton and had left his newly wed wife back in England after joining the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire regiment. I normally spoke very little on the railway but Bill had a friendly face and we always exchanged quiet words while working.
‘Hey Bill, it’s me, Alistair.’ He looked at me and tried to speak but nothing came out. I could tell that he was suffering from an acute strain of malaria. Through the fear in his eyes I could see that he was dying. I sat down beside him and took his hand. It was sticky but cool. His breath was laboured, life fading from him.
I stayed with Bill all night. I nursed him the best I could, giving him some rice and most of my water. As the night wore on he began losing consciousness. He was away with the fairies and by 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. he was gone. Holding his hand I felt it go limp. He twitched for some time after he passed away. When it stopped I fetched the medical orderly and left. When I returned he was gone.
I never went back to ask about the ‘jungle slippers’, even though I saw some men wearing them around the camp. They did not look particularly comfortable and were already falling apart so I left it. And besides, my experience with Bill in that hut had left me hollow. I even castigated myself for getting involved with another prisoner’s problems. Once you got started with sentimentality and grief you were a goner. It was a selfish tactic but I was desperate to survive. I was refusing to let the Japanese win this.
Like on the death march some men found the going easier by teaming up and making a close bond with another prisoner. They would fight railway life together, sharing whatever food or water they had, helping each other wherever they could and always having their back. They even took beatings together to share the blows and the pain. It was not the way for me. I watched the heartache of men losing their best pals and suddenly being left alone. They never usually lasted very long and soon followed their mates to the grave.
By now the cuts on my feet and legs had turned into painful – and dangerous – tropical ulcers. When I suffered scrapes on the railway, or had a rash, I could not tend to it until yasume-time or until I was back at camp. Then I wrapped leaves around the cuts at night to keep the flies off but it was useless, and the ulcers usually spread. They rotted your flesh, muscle and tendons; people were left with gaping holes as the flesh simply fell away. An ulcer would eat deep into your flesh, so deep you could sometimes see the white of bone. Even worse, if you were not careful they could become gangrenous, and many men lost legs that way – by improvised amputation, without anaesthetic or drugs.
I went to the medical hut for advice. In common with most of the men, tropical ulcers had engulfed my feet, ankles and lower calves. I had avoided the medical hut until that point. It was set aside from the sleeping huts and about the same size as ours. The RAMC officer in charge was Dr Mathieson, a likeable character from Paisley, just outside Glasgow, where he had studied medicine. He had come to Singapore about the same time as me and would later, in much different circumstances, save my life. On this my first encounter with him he would at least save my legs.
Sneaking under the cloud of black flies that circled outside the hut like a swarm of miniature vultures, I entered nervously. The overpowering stench immediately had me gasping. Stepping across the cadaverous forms of five or six men who appeared to be rapping on death’s door, Dr Mathieson introduced himself.
I had not spoken for so many days that when I went to reply my parched throat failed me.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a half-coconut cup of water, ‘get this down you.’
I sipped the cool water down and thanked him, asking how his patients were.
Dr Mathieson, in his mid-thirties at that point, appeared weary beyond his years. He was probably on self-imposed half-rations just to keep some spare for his patients. The men had spoken highly of him and many of our doctors were revered as saintly figures.
The doctor took me by the arm and led me down to the far end of the hut away from the men. In a soft west-coast accent, he said, ‘Half of these men will die within days. The other half? Who knows? If I had access to some proper clinical treatments, drugs or instruments, they might live but that is not possible as I’m sure you know.’
I could only nod in agreement. The squalor and stench of death inside the hut was appalling.
‘What can you do for them?’ I asked.
‘Quite simply not a lot. I try and give them some hope if nothing else.’
He pointed with his boot at a chap sleeping and said, ‘He’s got ringworm. On his testicles. I’m surprised he’s able to sleep. I’ve been applying a coating of wet clay to see if that helps.’
I nodded as he went on. ‘It’s easy for these men to give up and when they lose hope the fight just seeps right out of them. On countless occasions I have seen two men with the same symptoms and same physical state, and one will die and one will make it. I can only put that down to sheer willpower.’
I considered this for a moment and looked around the hut. You could tell the men who were dying by the look on their faces. Their gaze was lost before it reached their eyes and no amount of positive attitude and care from Dr Mathieson could change their destiny. It certainly was not the medical staff’s fault – their hands were tied. No, blood was firmly on our captors’ hands. I told myself right then and there that I would not stop fighting.
‘Do you have anything for malaria?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Don’t eat for a day. That may help for a bit. If you’re still sick, crush up three spoonfuls of charcoal and get that down you. Apart from that there’s very little I can do, even though the world’s largest quinine factory is over on Java. I don’t imagine any of it getting passed on to us, do you?’
He said, ‘The Japs think that poor health is a sign of weakness of the spirit. They think that beating us only makes us stronger. That is the kind of people we’re dealing with here.’
‘What can you do for this?’ I asked him, lifting a foot on to a bamboo chair.
‘Tropical ulcers. A disease of food, filth and friction. Do you know what maggots look like?’
‘Maggots?’ I asked, frantically inspecting my foot, praying that I was subject to some sick joke.
‘Yes, maggots. They’ll fix you right up. Go down to the latrines, find yourself a handful of those wee white beasties and sit them on your ulcers. They will chomp through the dead flesh and before you know it you’ll be right as rain.’
Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘Remember to count how many you put on carefully. You don’t want to forget one and leave it in there to eat itself to death.’
I left the medical hut, shaking my head, still wondering if I were being had. Letting maggots eat my skin did not sound particularly appetising but I was willing to try anything. I knew I had to stop the rot that was devouring my legs.
The latrines were nothing more than holes in the ground but now with bamboo slats across them. A bunch of jungle leaves usually lay piled near by or you took your own foliage or toilet paper if there was no river water collected for the job. I did not have to go far to find what I was looking for. I gingerly scooped up a handful of maggots, watching them squirm and wriggle. Without thinking about it too much I found a quiet spot near by and sat down, placing just two or three on a nasty ulcer on my ankle. The maggots, which were about a quarter of an inch long, instinctively knew what to do. They started gnawing away at my skin with the most minuscule of bites. The sensation was of tingling, unearthly yet not altogether unpleasant, until the realisation that maggots were eating your raw flesh came racing back to the forefront of your mind. I can still feel that sensation to this day.
But to Dr Mathieson’s credit it certainly worked. Within days the wounds had started to heal and new skin grew back. It was a trick that I persisted with throughout my time on the railway, passing it on to other men when I thought I could do so without being dismissed as a Jap-happy sicko.
No matter how much the Japanese increased our workload, or how hard they pushed us, we generally could not manage to progress more than twenty feet per day. After sixty straight days on the railway – with no days off; no public or bank holidays – we had reached the dreaded slab of rock that barred our path for the next five hundred or six hundred yards. The mere sight of that rock must have been enough for one prisoner, who made a bid for freedom.
I was unaware that anyone had escaped until one morning at tenko a sorry-looking chap was dragged before us. He had been beaten horrifically, his swollen and bloody features virtually unrecognisable. The interpreter told us, ‘This man very bad. He try to escape. No gooda.’
Two guards threw down on the ground in front of us the battered wreck of a human frame and made him kneel. He did not plead for mercy or beg for assistance. He knew his fate and waited silently, resigned to it. The Black Prince, who seemed to have dressed up especially for the occasion, strode forward and unsheathed his long samurai sword. He prodded the prisoner in the back, forcing him to straighten up. Then the Black Prince raised his sword, its stainless steel glinted in the sunshine. It was a moment of such horror that I could scarcely believe it was really happening. I closed my eyes tightly. This was one of the many instances of barbarism on the railway that I would try to shut out of my mind. But I could not escape the chilling swoosh of the blade as it cut through the damp tropical air or the sickening thwack of the sword coming down on our comrade’s neck, followed by the dull thump of his head landing on the ground. I kept my eyes firmly shut but swayed on my feet and felt a collective gasp of impotent anger and revulsion. It was a scene from another age. I thought of the French Revolution when the crowds went mad for the guillotine. But I thought it so macabre, so chilling, that I failed to see how anybody could find that an enjoyable experience, no matter how much you hated someone.
There was an undercurrent circling among us men, a desperate feeling of wanting to do something. But of course we were powerless. By the time I opened my eyes the body and head had been taken away and only a pool of dark red blood remained, leaching into the Siamese soil. I fought the impulse to be sick as I felt the pit of my stomach rising. A feeling of hopelessness overwhelmed me. We were at the mercy of a barbaric madman who enjoyed killing for the fun of it.
I had been witness to some terrible things as a POW and apart from the spread-eagled torture this was the worst yet. I just thanked my lucky stars that I was not part of the burial party because that must have been extremely traumatic.
Without any further ado our stunned work party was shepherded back to Hellfire Pass. We walked in desolate silence, each lost in his own thoughts until we arrived at the Pass.
It was part of a two-and-a-half-mile curved section of railway that required seven bridges and five arduous cuttings. Ahead of us the Japanese took our sappers, the British Army engineers, to start blasting away at Hellfire Pass. They climbed on top of the rock with bags of dynamite, their job being to blast away sections of rock twice a day for the rest of us to pound and shatter with eight-pound sledgehammers. The Japanese never gave us any warning of an impending explosion and suddenly the whole ground would shake at the almighty bang. Brightly coloured birds of paradise would flee their roosts squawking and we would hit the deck to avoid the deadly spray of rock shrapnel that would follow. The Japanese always made the British engineers light the fuse. On more than one occasion the poor sod who couldn’t flee fast enough over the treacherous ground would be blown up with the rocks – much to the obvious delight of Dr Death, who found it hilarious.
Like the disposable and economical machines we had become, we hammered away at drill pieces to bore holes into the rock for the explosives and then smashed up the boulders and rocks, making them as small as we could. It was back-breaking work, made tougher by the harshness of our natural and unnatural environment, pathetic diet, and catalogue of diseases, illnesses and injuries, not to mention our general fatigue, depression and broken spirits.
The rocks, once splintered into semi-manageable pieces, would be picked up by hand and loaded into baskets. Other prisoners would then haul these away and dump them beside the railway, where the rocks had to be broken up further to be made into ballast for the railway sleepers. Eventually the guards pulled sick men out of hospital huts by their hair and dragged them down to work on the railway beside these piles of dirt and rock that needed breaking down. Using small hammers with twelve-inch handles they had to sit there and tap feebly away all day in the blazing sun. Nobody was immune from work.
I spent seven or eight months hammering away at that bloody rock. On top of the cutting Dr Death sat gloating and occasionally relieving his boredom by hurling stones and boulders at us slaving down below. Once again, failure to meet our daily quotas meant working on into the dark by firelight and the eerie glow of lamps, making the place look like hell. Until finally the only damage done by our falling sledgehammers was that caused by gravity rather than the force of our swing. We could not take any more and surprisingly the Japanese recognised that. Now just skin and bones we were so skinny that a scrawny guard could lift each of us with one arm.
If an exploring anthropologist had stumbled upon us in that jungle, he would have imagined that he had made a sensational new discovery: a prehistoric tribe, uniformly filthy with long hair and beards covering clapped-in cheeks and framing sunken eyes. He would have observed in wonder the curious tottering gait unique to the halfstarved tribesmen who worshipped and sacrificed their number on a giant slab of rock. And he would have been baffled by the absence of the female of the species.
Kanyu I and II, under the iron fist of the Black Prince, were among the worst of all the camps on the railway. The Japanese had reduced us to the stone age. There were no positives. No haircuts or pay, no days off, no trading, no vegetable stews or fried duck eggs, no pantomimes or song. There was not even a single book in the entire camp. It was work, work and more work. Speedo! It simply could not have been any worse.
Not through any sense of pity or guilt, certainly, we were to be moved to a camp further up the railway. It was named, predictably, Kanyu II, almost identical to our original camp – just further down the river.
At roll-call they told us, ‘All men march.’
The same thoughts went through my mind. We have been used up, we’re no use to them any more. We’re all going to be massacred. Whatever it is it’s not going to be better. It certainly won’t be a holiday camp!
Towards the end of April 1943 the Black Prince and his merry band of psychotic villains marched us into the jungle again. It took a solid day to reach our new camp and I heaved a sigh of relief to see that we did not have to build our own huts; presumably the POWs who had been there before us had been moved forward as well, on to Kanyu III. I would later learn that Australian POWs took our place at Kanyu I and with it the deathly task of completing Hellfire Pass. They were to pay a terrible price.