We lived in a world of half-verified information, smuggled news and above all, of rumour. The stories that circulated around the camp added to our pervasive anxiety. Always you wanted to believe that the worst could not be possible.
The rumour coming back now was that these huge work-details were wanted for a grandiose scheme. The Japanese were building a railway. Some inhuman visionary on the Imperial staff in Tokyo had dreamed up a way of avoiding the Allied destroyers and submarines in the waters around Malaya. The Japanese needed, we could guess, a way of getting supplies from Japan to Burma and on to India, which they were surely planning to invade. So they decided to build a railway across the spiky mountain chain between Burma and Thailand, a route so terrible that our British colonial engineers, as I knew from my reading, had rejected it as too brutally hard. I could not believe it; nor could I believe that I had become a prisoner only to be sent to work on a road for the machines that had given me such intense pleasure when I was free.
The final emasculation of the army took place in the late summer. First we were beheaded. Lieutenant-General Percival and the Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, and all officers above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, were removed in a single transport; in all, four hundred top brass disappeared, sent to some mysterious destination.
There were now about 18,000 of us left. A new Japanese commander had been appointed, General Fukuye Shimpei, and he made his mark by issuing an order that every remaining POW had to sign a ‘non-escape form’. Only four prisoners signed. To show us that he meant to be taken seriously, Fukuye shot four prisoners on the beach near Changi. Allegedly, they had tried to escape. Of course we heard about all the cruel details; Fukuye intended that we should. He had ordered Colonel Holmes, our most senior remaining officer, to appear on the beach in the late morning of 2nd September with six of his colleagues. The four POWs were tied to posts in the sand; a firing squad of members of the Indian National Army, the renegade nationalist force supported by the Japanese, were led out in a calculated piece of political theatre. British soldiers were to be shot by their former subjects. The first shots failed to kill them; slow volleys finished them off as they lay on the bloody sand.
Less than an hour later, while this story was flashing around the camp, the Japanese ordered every single prisoner to move to Selarang Barracks, near Changi. The order added that anyone not there by 18.00 hours would join our comrades on the beach. In the blazing afternoon we walked two miles, carrying our sick, our heavy cooking equipment and our supplies, to this modern barracks built for a single battalion of Gordon Highlanders.
The barracks consisted of seven three-storey blocks around three sides of a parade ground. There were soon over 16,000 of us crammed into a space designed for 800; and 2000 seriously sick men were still in the big Roberts Hospital. Our discipline and organization meant that every unit was given a place somewhere. Every inch of space was occupied. Bodies covered the entire parade ground; sat hip to hip on the flat roofs, crowded on to balconies, stairwells and barrack-room floors. The latrines filled up. We dug through the tarmac of the parade ground to make more, but nothing could quench the overpowering smell of human excrement piling up, the congestion of sweat and discomfort. Fragmentary pieces of food were passed around. There were no proper cooking facilities, so we began to improvise them; there was one water tap for the population of a town.
On the second night, which was also the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Australians organized a concert, lit by oil-lamps, their ‘choir’ stood at one side of the parade ground and sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the lonely anthem of isolated men. Every voice in the square took up the refrain, a chorus of 16,000 sending the wistful, defiant air out past the barrack blocks into the darkness. ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ followed, and the recital finished with a crashing version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. What would Elgar have made of these thousands of voices rolling out to the beat of his surging march, as Japanese guards paced around the edge of the light with bayonets fixed?
The following day, our situation was clearly intolerable. Our medical officers pointed out the dangers; worse still, the Japanese administration announced that they intended to move all the patients from Roberts Hospital to join us. They were prepared to let loose epidemics among this mass of men and condemn the sick to death. Colonel Holmes issued an order instructing us to sign the piece of paper. We lined up in front of tables and did it. It read: ‘I, the undersigned, solemnly swear on my honour that I will not, under any circumstances, attempt escape.’
We walked back to our quarters in Changi. For over a month I regained a measure of freedom and space, but Selarang had been a watershed. It was an important twist in the spiral of capitulation and cruelty. Nothing was ever quite the same again. Then on 25th October, after watching thousands more men leave for what we were now certain was a vast railway project, I joined the exodus myself.
I was ordered into a covered goods van with about twenty-five other men, the big door of the van open for air as we rolled through the vivid green and mud of the fields. Occasionally we would pass through miles of that depressing neatly-planted rubber. We sat on the steel floor or on our kit, talking and dozing. The train rumbled north up the west coast, with occasional stops for what we coyly termed ‘essential purposes’, and as we crossed over into Siam on the east coast the beaches came into view. Out in the water were chimneys of rock covered with greenery standing erect like great mouldy teeth.
On our slow journey up that neck of land twice as long as England, I read Olaf Stapledon’s essay in prophecy Last and First Men, written in 1930. Its oratorical flights of scientific fantasy were hard going in that hot, crowded wagon, but Stapledon’s vision of global conflict ending in ‘a crescendo of radio hate, and war’, of Europe destroyed and of a cycle of Dark Ages, was full of strange premonitions. He wrote the book in the person of one of the Last Men, speaking across the ages to us in our chaotic century in a voice of warning, at the moment when the earth is doomed by the radiation of a ‘deranged star’. It was easy to imagine apocalypse in those years, but living it was turning out to be painful and squalid.
At Prai station, when we halted for food, I went up to look at the engine and discovered that it was a Japanese class C56 locomotive. I knew a little about it; knew it had been built in Osaka, and that it would have had to be altered to the narrower metre gauge for service on the tracks of Malaya and Siam. The Japanese were clearly here to stay, if they were shifting their trains to their new empire. I found myself, despite my aching limbs and tiredness, despite the grinding uncertainty about where we were going, admiring the quality of the engineering and the finish of the big engine with its smoke deflectors around the front of the boiler, and its six magnificent driving wheels. I couldn’t deny my fascination even now.
On a long stretch between Sungei Patani and Alor Star, in the north west of Malaya, I realized that I needed a latrine very urgently. My purpose was becoming extremely essential. We had not got so much as a bucket in our wagon. I told my immediate neighbours, and within minutes I was being held out of the open door of a moving goods wagon by four British Army officers while I relieved myself. I was not a hearty physical person, and this public intimacy was unbearably embarrassing. I still remember it as the most undignified experience of my life.
After a journey of more than a thousand miles from Singapore, the train ran into Ban Pong station. We were ordered to disembark, horribly stiff. I was now a railway man whether I liked it or not.
* * *
Ban Pong was a big village which had the merit, for the Japanese Army, of being the closest point on the Siamese railway system to the coastal plain of southern Burma, more than two hundred miles away over the mountains. It had become the nub of the planned new Japanese railway system, connecting Singapore with Bangkok and on to Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi and China. All these lines would be linked up to Burma, and ultimately to India. The village was now a boom town, with extensive camps and
hutments, its railway station jammed with trains, the river clogged with boats. Nearby at Nong Pladuk there were sidings, shunting engines, strange four-wheeled bogies and a lot of activity around the station.
So much became clear to us as time went on. At first, all we saw were open-fronted shops in buildings made of teak and mahogany, attap huts and stone colonial houses. Children and chickens ran about the streets, small elegant women in bright clothes tended little stalls piled with vivid red and green chillies, mangoes and pawpaws. We passed one such market under some trees near the station. Ban Pong seemed to have one long main street, with some other streets zigzagging off it. On the outskirts were the usual cultivated areas, patches of wild scrub, and the forest.
We were marched along a road for a little way. There was a camp of long, low huts of attap, and it was obvious even from the road that the end of each hut sloped down into a muddy lake of floodwater. The far end of each hut must be a stinking malarial pool. We were allocated among these huts, in which men crowded into the higher parts, their sleeping spaces reduced to a couple of feet, in order to get away from the water. This was named, with deadpan banality, the Wet Camp. It was obviously a lethal place.
After a few days, a group of about a hundred of us were sent a quarter of a mile away to another camp. This turned out be a workshop, staffed by Japanese mechanics and engineers, and we would be assisting them with repairs. It was a respite for us.
There were four officers in our group: Major Bill Smith, Captain Bill Williamson, a lieutenant called Gilchrist and myself. There was also a senior warrant officer, Sergeant-Major Lance Thew of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
We were not an especially well-knit group. Smith and Gilchrist were much older than us, members of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force, raised from among the planters and merchants of Singapore and their employees. Many of them played brave parts in the fighting, but there was always a certain reserve between them and the regular army, a feeling that their enjoyment of the good life had made them careless about the defence of Singapore, and I never found much in common with these two with whom I was now forced to share a hut.
Major Smith had been a low-grade Colonial Service officer and was the kind of character whose lack of intelligence is cruelly punished in extreme conditions. A tall, angular figure, he had difficulty understanding what was happening to him, and was excluded instinctively from any decision-making. We took to calling him ‘Daddy’. Gilchrist was a very small person in his fifties, and had no worthwhile military experience or other skills; he was one of those men who in the harsh conditions of captivity could quickly and unfairly be judged not much good at anything.
With Bill Williamson I hit it off much better. He was a pleasant, unassuming and very competent person, and acted as the camp adjutant. He got things done, and when I saw he was learning Japanese I knew we could get along. He lent me his Japanese grammar and helped me to identify some of our gaolers’ basic vocabulary as they walked past our hut or shouted at us in the open areas of the camp. I made sure that Williamson and I were in adjoining bed-spaces.
Sergeant-Major Thew was an extremely capable technician, for whom the army was merely another outlet for his lifelong passion for mechanics. He had a little radio shop back in Sunderland, and he made and repaired radios for the Ordnance Corps before his capture. He was well built, a powerful looking man, and had a scarred face, but he had acquired the scar in a wartime accident and the streetfighter’s appearance belied his other-worldly character. He loved the craft of radio telegraphy, and dreamed of radios as I did of trains. He was an extraordinary and luckless man.
Our single long hut could hold about a hundred men and was little more than ingenious tents made from local vegetation: bamboo and attap, a big leaf-palm, tied together with a rope-like creeper. The floor was trodden earth, which became hard and solid, but under each bed-space was still raw clay, which sprouted even in the dark and weedy things poked up through the planks of the bed. The cool dark spaces also sheltered wriggling and crawling life, of which the most terrifying were scorpions and snakes. Williamson and I used to walk around the camp, talking about books and languages, and I once idly tugged on a creeper hanging from a tree; the snake I found myself holding was luckily some harmless python.
For nausea, little could surpass the big hairy centipedes which seemed about a foot long, if you could imagine them ever lying still and straight enough to measure instead of undulating and trembling. Lesser creatures we learned to take in our stride: cockroaches scurried like metal mice and if you stepped on one with a calloused bare foot it burst with a sound like a plastic bottle. The thatch was riddled with beetles, ants and spiders, dropping on to our sleeping bodies at night.
Since Nong Pladuk was the point of origin of the new railway, the yards were full of track-laying equipment which needed constant repair at Ban Pong, given the breakneck speed at which it was being used. The equipment consisted of road-rail lorries, which could run on flat road surfaces or on railway tracks, and what at first looked like long low wagons on which rails were stacked. In fact these wagons were a couple of four-wheeled bogies held together by bolting in position two ordinary steel rails. This created a rigid eight-wheeled wagon body on which rails and sleepers were loaded, and pushed up the line behind the tracklaying gangs. When they had emptied it, they would dismantle the two rails holding it together and lay the bogies by the side of the track, and the inexorable tractor would push up another wagonload until all the wagons were empty. The bogies would then be replaced on the track and pulled back to Nong Pladuk for the next load.
The pace of work was intense, the prisoners driven by Japanese guards under a hot sun on a patchy diet that was just about adequate in Ban Pong, where food was relatively easily available outside the camp, but got progressively poorer the further up the line you went. The tracklaying gangs were thus unknowingly working themselves to death.
A flat-bottomed steel rail weighed about 70 pounds per yard, and usually came in 24-foot lengths. A rail is therefore a massive thing for hungry men to lift and manoeuvre into position, and one rail followed another relentlessly on this criminal folly of a line. The steel rails were spiked directly to the wooden sleepers by hammering in big steel nails. This is brutally heavy work: exhausted and ill-fed city boys and dragooned Asian labourers did not have a chance. Rest periods were rare, and any slackening was met with abuse or violence.
Railways have always broken the bodies and spirits of their builders, I knew that already: the Panama Railway cost the lives of one in five of its workforce; the railroads across the Rockies had demanded appalling sacrifices; the Alpine tunnels were considered to be death traps, even for the well-fed peasant boys who built them. Yet the Burma-Siam railway was unique; to a mind haunted by images from biblical times it recalled the construction of the Pyramids; it was not only the last cruel enterprise of the railway age, but the worst civil engineering disaster in history.
Of course I write this in retrospect, but even when I reached Ban Pong I knew there was something careless and therefore evil about the project. Though my own luck still held: all I had to do was to help repair the lorries, the bogies and the engines. We were working for Japanese railway fitters, turners, welders, most of them humane men interested in getting a job done, and their workshops were not cruelly managed. I could respect them and they let me and my comrades alone.
Some way out of camp, however, you could see the reality of a hand-built railway. Soon after I got there I walked out one day – I had been appointed Messing Officer by Major Smith, or rather by Williamson acting through Smith, so I could move around fairly freely in search of food – and came to a place where a gap had been torn out of a hill. Hundreds of half-naked men were passing the earth in baskets to one end of the cutting, and were using the soil to build an embankment on the far side, one big basket between two struggling men. There was scarcely a piece of machinery among them, they were working with saws and axes and picks. They were clearing bamboo clu
mps fifty yards wide, feathery bamboo with deep roots that had to be torn out by hand with ropes, and chopping out tropical hardwoods with blunt implements. I knew from Bukit Timah Hill what that was like: a fight with tools. Perhaps some of Stalin’s canals were built like this; few railways have been.
In order to keep our group fed, I used some of the ten cents a day we were paid by the Japanese to buy food from the local peasants and traders. Rice, cooking oil, some eggs and bits of fish; fresh vegetables when we could afford them; and sometimes a few ducks or even a pig. Flesh could only be paid for in the wages of theft. I used a 44-gallon drum, with one end replaced by a door, as an oven; we had huge shallow iron bowls for cooking masses of rice.
Occasionally I would have to go down to the town with a couple of men and a Japanese guard. He turned these occasions into an outing for a different kind of sustenance. He would stop us at a coffee shop and hand me his rifle and disappear into the back of the shop. I would stand there in the shade at the front of the store, a prisoner holding my enemy’s loaded rifle as he visited a whore. Out in the hot sun, Siamese villagers walked by, the street stretched away to the edge of town. The guard knew and I knew there was nothing I could do with his gun and that I had nowhere to go.
It was at Ban Pong that I discovered an uncanny bureaucratic oddity. Bill Williamson and I were called to the Japanese administrative office one day. The Japanese officer had a huge stack of POW registration forms, several thousand of them, piled on his desk. I saw that mine was on top of the heap. I had been allocated Serial Number 1; the numbers allocated ran well into the 20,000s. It made me feel exposed, important in a way that I would have shunned. In the lottery of war soldiers talk about their numbers coming up and this singularity was an unpleasant joke.