Cruiser (67 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
They would come to know this place as Konyu No. 3 Camp â a name that would become synonymous with misery, sickness, brutality and death. A suave young Japanese Army lieutenant, Eiji Hirota, gave them the customary lecture about the joys of working obediently for the Emperor and allowed them to wash in the river before bedding down in the dirt. It was 26 January, Australia Day.
In their first months on the railway, the Australians found that the work was not too heavy. To excavate a cutting, the Japanese engineers set up quotas that required each prisoner to shift a cubic metre of earth per day â well within the capacity of a man in reasonable fitness. Foolishly, some of the men began to race through the job so they could return to camp in the early afternoon, which prompted the Japanese to up the quotas, first to two cubic metres and then to three. The tools were flimsy shovels, the occasional crowbar and what were known as chunkels, which were a cross between a wide-bladed hoe and a mattock. The dirt was carried away on baskets or rice bags slung between bamboo poles. Normally, around 25 men worked in a
kumi
, the Japanese word for group, commanded by a
kumicho
, an officer prisoner whose job was to see that the work was done. A good
kumicho
would try to prevent his men being beaten. Officers were not required to do manual labour. In theory, they were paid the Japanese equivalent of their Australian pay, but they rarely saw anything like that and were, in a grim irony, charged a fee for board and lodging. Enlisted men were paid on a daily scale of 25 cents for private soldiers or ordinary seamen, 30 cents for NCOs and 40 cents for warrant officers or chief petty officers.
4
But that was only if you worked. Sick men got nothing.
As the months rolled on, more and more Japanese terms entered the Australians' vocabulary. â
Kiri
' was the order to salute or bow, barked in a guttural snarl. â
Kurra
' meant almost
anything from âstop' to âcome here' and was often a sign that a bashing was on the way for some offence real or imagined. And then there was âSpeedo!', which became almost a mantra as the Japanese grew more frantic for the line to be finished.
In January 1943, Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo decreed that the railway should be completed by the end of May, before the summer monsoon arrived. Construction, already difficult, would be immensely more so when the rains turned jungle streams into raging torrents and hard-baked earth into a sea of mud, rendering roads impassable. But there was another, more urgent, consideration. More and more Japanese merchant ships were being sunk. The armies in Burma, at the end of a very long lifeline, were being slowly choked at a time when an Allied counter-attack seemed ever more likely. The British 14th Army, under what would become the inspired leadership of Major-General William Slim, was gathering strength over the Burmese border in eastern India. An early finish to the railway was imperative.
So began the Speedo period. Their work became harder, over longer hours, from dawn until well into the night. The men would be woken before sunrise for a breakfast of thin soup or a handful of rice before the interminable
tenko
and an issue of tools. They were then marched, most of them near-naked and many without boots, sometimes for kilometres, over flinty gravel or through deep mud, over high and rickety bridges or waist-deep through rushing streams, to the place where the day's work would be done. The march would be an ordeal in itself, and the journey back to camp at night was even worse â a pathetic spectacle of exhausted men, filthy and sweaty, stumbling through the dark. The evening meal would be a lump of gluey rice the size of a tennis ball. There might be time for a wash in a river before lights-out at around 11 pm and a sleep before the whole ghastly cycle began again.
Brutality multiplied. Bashings became ever more common. The guards, Japanese and Korean, were given nicknames:
Boofhead, The Boy Bastard, The Prick, The Turd, Blubber Lips and The Grub.
At the 40-Kilo Camp, A.B. Keith Mills, 21 years old, of Maroubra in Sydney, was beaten in an episode that would have been slapstick comedy had it not been so vicious. âFreddy' Mills was driving spikes into sleepers when one of the Japanese overseers saw he had struck one crookedly. The guard lunged at him with a crowbar but lost his footing and plunged, crowbar and all, down an embankment. Clambering back up the slope, bellowing with rage, he bashed the Australian to save face, and so did a nearby Japanese officer for good measure. Lloyd Burgess was the
kumicho
that day, and with some fast talking he managed to call off the assault, but only for the moment. Returning to camp that evening, Mills and Burgess were dragged into the jungle by three guards, who again bashed the young sailor, this time with their rifle butts, breaking his jaw in three places. They then fired a bullet, which narrowly missed his head. Again, Burgess bravely intervened, insisting that he be allowed to take Mills back to the camp hospital. The guards finally relented, but by then Mills was a pulped and bloody mess, his face and even the floor of his mouth covered in livid purple bruises. He was nursed back to health by Captain Rowley Richards, a young army doctor from Summer Hill in Sydney who, like Weary Dunlop, would come to be revered by the men whose lives he had saved.
5
As the engineers of the railway regiments struggled to meet the deadline imposed from Tokyo, more and more sick men were forced out of the hospitals and into the
kumis
. Eventually, the Japanese realised it was impossible to finish the railway by the end of May, but there was no let-up in the pace of work or the ferocity of the guards, most especially the Koreans.
The monsoon broke upon them in late May, heralded by three days of rain so relentless that it seemed the air itself had turned to water. This compounded the prisoners' miseries. Bill Bee and Fred Skeels were both at the 100-Kilo Camp when the monsoon swept in, which Skeels recorded as follows:
As if the work side of life wasn't hard enough because of the rain, it was a disaster when the Japanese couldn't get any trucks up at all along the dirt track that had served so poorly as a road before the rain started. The whole countryside was now flooded and any roads became elongated waterholes. Consequently, the lack of transport meant a lack of supplies coming to the camp and our poor food supply became almost non-existent just as the work demands increased and increased. Torrential, persistent rain didn't stop for weeks, constantly wetting emaciated bodies through, and our lives became even more miserable as we were now sick, tired, wet and even hungrier.
Food remained our greatest need. We would pick bits of grass and stuff that we came across during the day and take it back with us to camp if it looked as though it could be edible and sprinkle it on our rice ⦠this was our vitamin supplement.
6
The four horsemen of the Biblical Apocalypse are pestilence, war, famine and death. The prisoners on the railway knew them all. Survival was an infinite trial for mind and body. If either were to fail beneath the burden of Japanese brutality, death was almost inevitable. The root of this ordeal was the cruelly inadequate diet provided for men performing back-breaking manual labour, over long hours, in tropical heat and driving rain. Inevitably, hunger and malnutrition grew, and diseases spread. After the war, Weary Dunlop compiled a detailed report:
During railway construction men worked under savage pressure up to sixteen hours a day for months without rest, so that they rarely saw their squalid huts and tents in daylight. Amid thorny jungle and rotting corruption, with ceaseless monsoon rain lashing their bodies and soaking their miserable accommodation, large numbers were soon bootless with practically no bedding, and reduced to rags about their loins. The heat was in general excessive and well nigh intolerable to bare feet in rock cuttings, but the greatest load on men's spirits was the pouring monsoon
rain, converting the whole area into a quagmire of evil-smelling mud.
Pellagra, diarrhoea, irritable bladders and massed overcrowding interrupted rest, and the urge was often uncontrollable as men floundered out into darkness, rain and mud. Hunger, food deficiency diseases, malaria, dysentery, ulcers and skin sepsis, and extreme exhaustion were woven into a dull fabric of suffering rent here and there by sharp outbreaks of cholera. Whatever reserves of physical strength or spirit a man might possess were in the long run exploited, so that the stronger suffered longer, only to pay the same relentless tribute in loss of life and broken health.
7
Some men vowed to eat everything put before them, no matter how vile or rancid it might be. One of the senior Australian doctors on the line, Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Coates, of Melbourne, used to tell his patients that:
The route home is inscribed in the bottom of every man's dixie. Every time it is filled with rice, eat it. If you vomit it up again, eat some more; even if it comes up again some good will remain. If you get a bad egg, eat it no matter how bad it may appear. An egg is only bad when the stomach will not hold it.
8
The son of a postman, Coates had been a young medical orderly at Gallipoli in the First World War, among the last Australians to leave that blighted peninsula. In his mid-40s, with a medical degree and a stellar career as a neurosurgeon under his belt, he signed up again for the Second World War. At the fall of Singapore, he had volunteered to stay with his patients rather than flee to Australia, as Gordon Bennett had suggested he should do. Over the years, Weary Dunlop has entered the public mind as the embodiment of all that was fine and noble about Australian POW doctors, but he was only one of many. Coates, short in stature, was a moral giant whose genius for surgery and bottomless compassion saved hundreds of lives.
If a man could get by on the rotten food, his next trial would be injury or illness. The lack of vitamin B led to outbreaks of beriberi, a disgusting disease where the body, especially the legs, filled with fluid and swelled like bladders. Your testicles puffed up to the size of tennis balls and you could put a thumb on your own bloated skin and leave a mark as if it were a rotten tomato. Amoebic dysentery was rife, an agony that saw men shrink to skeletons and which was often fatal. Cholera came and went in waves, especially in the monsoon season. You could be dead in 12 hours from cholera. Perhaps the nastiest affliction of all was the tropical ulcer, which could blow up from a grazed leg or a tiny prick from a bamboo thorn. A man would go to sleep at night with what looked like a harmless scratch; next morning, it would have spread into a mass of stinking flesh, gangrene so rotten that the doctors would scrape it from the wound with a spoon in an attempt to stop its advance. This was agony, and the wards would echo with the screams of men being treated. Billy Bevan, a Welsh-born A.B. from suburban Perth and a mate of Bill Bee and Fred Skeels, aged just 29, was struck in the leg by a small piece of rock that flew away from a dynamite blast. Fred Skeels described the aftermath:
It lacerated his ankle but we had nothing to cover the wound. It didn't incapacitate him as it hadn't broken any bones, but the wound was still exposed to whatever dirt and bacteria were in the air. Nevertheless, he had to gather the surrounding rocks with me and we carried them back to the line, not thinking much more about the ankle. We continued working for the next few hours before we could return to camp. Normally it would be a matter of dressing the wound and resting the foot until it healed, but Billy was dead within three days as a tropical ulcer went up to his knees and poisoned his system. He didn't even live long enough for the doctor to consider amputating his foot. He just died. It was very sad. A waste when a young bloke like him who had survived everything up to that time lost his life due to the lack of appropriate medicine.
9
The Japanese regarded sickness as weakness or a crime. Prisoners unable to work were useless to them. They were given less food, and, despite the best efforts of the prisoner doctors to protect them, they were often bashed if they were thought to be malingering. Little or no effort was made to provide drugs or even the most basic medical equipment. The doctors improvised with brilliance, helped by men with a talent for working with their hands. Bandages were made from whatever strips of cloth could be found, or sometimes from leaves. Old cans or bits of scrap metal became surgical instruments. Bamboo had a hundred uses: it could be fashioned into everything from artificial limbs to hypodermic syringes and medical cannulas, and at the Hintok Camp the prisoners built a system of bamboo pipes to carry water from a spring to the hospital and its kitchen.
A brilliant Dutch chemist, Captain C. J. van Boxtel, summoned up miracles by devising a spinal anaesthetic made from novocaine pills when they were available, and by creating surgical stitching from the stomach linings of pigs and cattle. Gavin Campbell also went down with pellagra and beriberi:
They sent me back to the 40 Kilo Camp and Colonel Coates. My body was swollen, the same thickness all the way from my ankles on up. I was so bloated there was a danger I would drown in my own fluid. But van Boxtel had developed an acetic acid from pomeloes, a local fruit. He got hold of pomeloes from the natives and somehow got an acetic acid out of it. They dosed me up with that, and fed me slivers of beef liver. That night I couldn't move, but I desperately needed to piss. I just rolled out of my bunk in the hospital and woke everybody up. They helped me out to take a piss and I just deflated. The fluid just flowed out of me, and it fixed me.
10
Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, rode close behind them. The typical hospital was a long hut, roofed with
attap
, the local grasses, open to the elements. Sanitation
was primitive; the filth of the latrine pits might be only metres away. A sudden flare-up of cholera or malaria would see emaciated men packed into these huts in rows, bodies tumbled together on rough camp stretchers or just the bamboo slats of the floor, faces twisted in pain, sunken eyes staring but unseeing. The orderlies would often be those patients less afflicted. Each morning, there would be a
tenko
of the sick and injured. Over the protests of the doctors, Japanese or Korean guards â perhaps illiterate peasants in civilian life â would decide if a prisoner was fit to be hounded back to the
kumis
. Ray Parkin found himself toiling in a railway cutting alongside two men with malaria and one in the early stages of cholera. He pleaded with a Japanese corporal to have them sent back to the camp and was bashed for his troubles, but he eventually got permission for them to leave: