Four Fires (83 page)

So Hoshijima starts this harangue at the first tenko which, because of what I've just said was so funny, I don't remember all of, but

I remember the one bit.' Tommy's voice changes so that none of the words are pronounced quite right, like he's having trouble getting his tongue around them. '"Japan will be victorious even if it takes a hundred years!" Albert cLeary's standing next to me and he says out the corner of his mouth, "And that's just about how bloody long it's gunna take you, mate!"

The camp working routine really starts from after that tenko, and at first it ain't too bad. The guards can't help themselves, they'll give you a whack with a pick handle soon as look at you, but the work is no worse than we done back in Singapore. We construct a bridge across the creek that runs past the compound, build these deep monsoon drains because the monsoon season is on its way. We go as working parties into town to load bags of rice and other heavy goods. We work on the guards' and Japanese officers' quarters in town, which must have once been private homes. And the one thing that never stops is_ the wood detail. The old boiler at the camp is responsible for sterilising the drinking water and driving the generator and it never stops, and needs constant feeding. The cooks go through a fair amount as well. With the monsoon coming, we need to build up supplies of wood, so we're always out in the jungle chopping and carting.

'That's also the time that Hoshijima makes his smoking rule. He would decide every week when smoking could begin. He'd start and stop it on a whim so you'd never know when it was going to happen. I think he thought it was a constant demonstration of his power and influence and I reckon he was right. Not being able to have a gasper when you had tabacca in your pocket was a real bastard! Not only that, but smoking could only take place in specially designated "smoking places", which were small pits about the size of your mother's double bed and dug about a foot deep in various places around the compound. They were all clearly marked and after the weekly smoking permission was issued, you'd grab your ashtray and run for one of these pits. If a prisoner was seen smoking outside a pit or if he forgot to bring his ashtray, which was a cut-down tin filled with a little water to catch his cigarette ash, he was severely beaten.

The smoking pit would be jammed tight with blokes, each holding his ash tin close to his chest, with the other hand holding the cigarette,

thumb and forefinger up to his mouth, his elbow tucked firmly into his side so as to allow space for the bloke next to him to do the same. To get a smoke in was bloody hard work and there'd always be blokes waiting, lining up outside the pit, to take your place the moment you'd finished.

The men would keep a pin or a bit of wire, which they'd stick through the end of their fag so they could grab a hold of the pinhead and they could smoke the butt down to the very last puff possible. The only good thing about the smoking pit was that the little tabacca you had lasted a while and smoking was a true luxury.

The officers received permission from Hoshijima to start a vegie garden outside the compound.

He also gave them an advance on their pay to start an officers' canteen and the canteen officer was allowed to go into Sandakan to buy stuff. This allowed the beginnings of an intelligence ring in the camp. Getting information in and out of the camp was a great morale boost to the men.

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We felt we were still in the war doing something useful, this was more true when we began to build the airfield.'

'Pay? The Japanese paid you?' I ask.

'Yeah, occupation money, the men got ten cents a day and the officers twenty-five. We called it banana money because there's this picture of a bunch of bananas in the centre of the notes. Don't sound like much but it could buy the odd necessity that made a lot of difference to our general state of misery.

'It was the fifteenth of August that we finally got told what we come there for. Hoshijima calls us altogether for another tenko, he's just been promoted to captain and at the same time his position as commandant has been confirmed, so he's full of himself and polished from his bootcaps to eyeballs.

'"You have been brought here to Sandakan to have the honour to build for the Imperial Japanese Forces an aerodrome. For this you will be paid ten cents a day. You will work. You will build this aerodrome if it takes three years!"

"Shit, what are we gunna do for the other ninety-seven years?" Cleary says next to me.

There's laughter among the men, because we don't reckon the war will last another three years.

Hoshijima waits for our laughter to cease

then starts to rave in Japanese. Mr Ozawa gets out his first words which are, "I tell you . . ." But then Hoshijima, who's pretty bloody upset, stops him with a wave of the hand, takes a step forward and, waving his finger at us, says in English, "I tell you! I have the power of life and death over you. You will build this aerodrome if you stay here until your bones rot under the Borneo sun!"

'You don't forget words like that and suddenly there ain't no more laughter and that's when our miseries truly began.

'Some of us had already had a taste of what was to come. I was a member of a working gang who first brought back the news of the proposed airfield. So, when Hoshijima finally announced it, all he did was confirm what we'd already known. How we found out was like this: two days after we'd arrived in the camp, those of us younger, fitter men were roused at dawn, then marched off, supposedly to build a road, a road, which at that time seemed to lead nowhere.

'I remember it was bucketing down, but this made no difference to the Japs. The rain wasn't any worse than the first two days in the camp, just wet, miserable and steady. At first we slogged down a track in the jungle that wasn't much more than an overgrown path that soon petered out, ending nowhere we could see that was important to anything. Then the guards handed out parangs and told the front blokes to start cutting the path onwards and the rest of us slosh along behind. It's all going reasonably well when the worst thunderstorm I have ever witnessed in my life hits us.

'The bloody sky opens, there's thunderclaps to take your head off and lightning bolts hitting the earth with a fizzing sound, all of it fused together so we know it's striking down real close, maybe onto us. Giant trees that have stood fifty years come crashing down in the forest . around us, the lightning splitting them like matchsticks, leaving only their splintered stumps standing.

Mate, I kid you not, it was worse than any of the fighting I'd been through in Malaya and Singapore and I'm certain this time I'm gunna die. We're lying in the mud, holding onto bushes for grim death as a torrent of water sweeps down the path. 'The storm don't last that long but it's done more damage in ten minutes than a heavy artillery battery could do in ten days.

Suddenly, for distant rumbling thunder and a few sharp flashes of lightning. With the storm passing, the rain eases off and there's even a bit of blue sky above.

'Now there's more water around than the earth can absorb and the path we've cut turns into black mud that sucks the boots off our feet, but the Japs make us get on with the job. It soon
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becomes apparent we can't continue. We've stopped at what looks like a large clearing in the jungle about two miles from the camp. "No more!" the Jap sergeant in charge of us yells, waving his arms. "Stop now! We work aeroplane

place!"

That was the first time we realised that we'd come to Sandakan to build an airfield. The Jap sergeant decides if we can't work on the path we might as well get started on the aerodrome. It doesn't look much like a place to build anything, much less an airfield. The ground undulates ahead of us like a series of soft-backed waves.

'Each of us is given a hoe known as a "chonkol" and a wicker basket. The sergeant positions himself on the top of one of these undulations and issues his instructions. The sun has come out but that only makes things worse. Steam rises from the ground and the sergeant, half-obscured in the rising steam, uses a pick handle to indicate the area he wants leveled. "Hill here go in valley over there!" he shouts out. He speaks pretty good English for a Jap sergeant. Most of them haven't a clue, they know one or two words and work on the principle that he who shouts loudest is best understood and, with a pick handle in his hands, he speaks perfect English anyway.

'We get stuck in, first clearing the tangled mess of secondary growth and discover the ground underneath is composed of a coral-like substance, probably some distant volcano eruption that deposited its ash in this area. The ash has become a form of white porous rock which we learn is called "tufa". It's hard to see how it can sustain any vegetation.

'It turns out tufa is easy to work when it's hard but when it's wet it's a real mongrel. It becomes jelly-like, so when you scoop out a bit, the hole you've just made fills up again, a bit like a kid digging a hole on the beach with the waves pushing in every few seconds and washing the sand back into it.

'We're now standing up to our ankles in this white jelly-like substance and spend the next three hours trying to scoop it into our baskets. The work is backbreaking and we're tired and haven't eaten nothing all day because we've been marched out of camp before breakfast.

'The idea is to chop at the tufa with the chonkol and then scoop it up and into the baskets with our hands and carry it over to the sergeant's valley then tip it out of the baskets again. But the valley doesn't fill, the tufa simply disappears, washed away by the run-off from the storm. After several hours the world around us remains exactly the same. The only way you'd know we'd been there is the pile of secondary growth we've hacked down. The Jap guards get real angry and we're taking a hiding from their swinging pick handles.

'A guard comes up to me and he's jabbering away, "More! Work more!" and he lets go and cops me in the ribs with his pick handle. I fall to the ground, more angry than hurt. I point to where I've been working, "You have a go, you bastard!" I shout at him, "See fer yerself!"

'He must have worked out what I'm saying, 'cept he probably don't know the word "bastard"

yet, or I'd have got more than a pick handle in me ribs. He throws down the pick handle and grabs the chonkol and sets to work. Whack goes the chonkol and its head sinks into the tufa up to the shaft. He tries to pull it out but the suction in the tufa holds it firm, just like our boots in the black mud a bit earlier. In a minute or so, he's puffing like a sumo wrestler and he hasn't got any tufa in the basket yet. He grunts and throws down the hoe and tries to scoop the stuff up with his hands. It's no good, it's like picking up that stuff Sarah sometimes makes when your stomach is crook.'

'Blancmange?'

'Yeah, it's like that. Then the guard throws down the chonkol, picks up the pick handle and storms off. It must have done some good, because pretty soon he's consulting with the sergeant and some of the other guards and there's heads shaking in agreement. Then the sergeant gets up
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on the rise that's not grown any smaller and waves his arms across his chest. "Fineesh! No more!" he yells, "All mens go back now!"

'Some of the blokes who saw me get clobbered, shout over, "On ya, Tommo!"

'So having done bugger-all except find out that we're here to build an airfield, we trudge back to camp down the muddy black path we'd previously created through the jungle.

'So, I suppose I can claim I was one of the first to start on the new Jap airfield in Sandakan. Not that that's an honour, far from it. We know we're building an airstrip from where the Jap aircraft can bomb and strafe the Allies. That's gunna be our job for the duration of the war, that's why we come to Sandakan in the first place. But we're not proud of what we're doing and it's common practice to steal tools and material and bury them in the fill to slow things down and sabotage progress any way you could.'

Tommy looks at me. That's a funny thing, some of the blokes on the Burma Railway were dead proud of their achievement. They suffered something terrible, we all did and in the end, ours was the worst fate of all. Some of the Brits who built that bridge on the River Kwai were dead chuffed at what they'd done, bloody engineering marvel, they boasted. What we done, building an airfield in the middle of the jungle, was maybe just as remarkable. It's now the Sandakan civil airport but nobody even fucking knows how it's come about!'

Tommy's voice is suddenly bitter, 'Sandakan is the war's best-kept secret, there's families don't know what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons. They just disappeared into thin air, it's as if they never existed. I once asked our local member to find out about Sandakan. He come back to me and says nobody knows anything, nothing he can do, it's government policy and he's hit a brick wall. It's a bloody conspiracy of silence if you ask me. All the families know is that they get this telegram, "Your husband is missing, believed dead", nothing more. Can you imagine how they feel?

'Anyway, we wasn't none of us proud of the so-called engineering feat we performed even though it was thought to be impossible to do in the time. I'm just bloody sad that nobody gives a bugger for the men that died. Because there's nobody to march on Anzac Day, the public don't even know about us, about me mates, who, in the end, were as good as any Aussie soldiers who ever fought. There's lots should have got medals, the ME, even the VC, for what they done but because they all died there's nobody to do their citations. Can't be giving medals out, can yer, people

would start asking why, wanting to know the full story, so the government put it in the too-hard basket and forgot all about the families.'

Tommy stops a while, hanging his head, thinking, not wanting me to see how upset he is, trying to regain his composure. Eventually he speaks.

'You see, the Japs need oil and they come to Borneo eight days after they attack Pearl Harbor because they need the oil that's buried along the island's west coast. Oil means fuel for their tanks, trucks and planes, they can't fight the war without it. Besides this, their aircraft 'can't fly non-stop between Singapore and the Philippines, or even to the most distant part of the Dutch East Indies. They have to stop to refuel and Sandakan is gunna be one of the places they'll do it.