Sacrifice, Captivity and Escape, page 11
As far as I can remember, it was on the fifth day that we walked, or staggered, into what appeared to be a half-finished camp. Some huts had roofs but no walls, others walls but no roofs. This, we were told, was our destination. Our party was delegated to two huts with a roof on each. The guards told us that some locals would come later to finish the huts off. The huts followed the usual construction of a rough timber frame with the roof and walls covered with palm leaf thatch. On either side of a central gangway there was a raised bamboo platform about 60cm off the ground where we had to sleep. There was no ceremony about choosing a place to sleep; we just moved into the huts and flopped down in the first available space. Once we had settled ourselves down there was a total of ten men in my bay, including myself.
After I had rested for a while, two other men and I decided to explore the camp, not that there was much to see, just a collection of huts in various stages of construction. A short distance away from our huts we could see what appeared to be a more substantial building and we could see some soldiers moving to and fro. I could also hear the sound of a generator or motor. I was later to discover that it supplied lighting for them and also worked a water purifier. We also found out that the camp was built adjacent to a river. We were quite pleased about the river as we hoped it would enable us to bathe and wash what little clothing we had.
We met inmates and chatted about our journeys. One of the men had spent a period of time in Thailand and he estimated that we had walked about 180km through the jungle. He also thought that we were not too far from the Burmese border. A short time after we had met the other men, a couple of the Japanese must have seen us moving around. There were shouts and gestures making it quite clear that we were to go back to our huts.
Evening came and once again we were fed, but this time the ration was a lot smaller. As we queued for our food we were told that in the morning we would start working. I slept fitfully that night as I was feeling pangs of hunger and was worried about what awaited us in the morning. Dawn came and soon the Japs made us parade for our food, which was less than we had been given on the march. We still had not been given any opportunity to clean ourselves up so we looked and felt terrible. The British and Australian officers looked no different from us so it was obvious the Japs made no distinction between them and us, the other ranks.
As was the usual practice the Jap guard came and sorted us out into groups for working parties and as far as I could see no-one was excused, not even the really sick or lame men. The guards chose men at random and my party consisted of myself and five other men. None of us knew each other and our guard did not allow any of us to speak. We formed a line and were issued with shovels, picks, crowbars and other tools. I thought to myself, ‘This is it, I’m going to die on this bloody railway.’
Several of the other parties had already moved off and in the distance we could hear the shouts of the Japanese and the clang of tools striking the ground. Our guard motioned for us to follow him and we moved off in a different direction from the other parties. I soon realized that we were going towards their living quarters. He stopped us some yards from the house and we were overwhelmed by a terrible stench – the latrine. It consisted of an open trench roofed over by thatch, and a long pole on which to sit.
Our guard, whom we called Jappy, split us up into two groups of three and through signs made us understand that one group was to fill in the old trench and the other group was to dig a new one. Unfortunately, I was chosen to dig the new trench. Admittedly the old one stunk to high heaven but at least it was easier to throw soil in than dig it out. Anyway, it didn’t take too long to fill the latrine. Then Jappy went off, came back with a can of disinfectant and watered the ground with it. This made the work more bearable. We now had six men digging and we took it more or less upon ourselves to do a bit and rest a bit. As long as we kept going at a steady pace he seemed quite happy.
I judged it to be about midday when Jappy told us to ‘Yasmay’ (knock off) and signalled for us to follow him. He took us around the back of their house and motioned for us to wait for him. We waited a few minutes and he came back carrying a container made from half a 4gal petrol can. He put it down on the ground. It was filled with cold boiled rice with what looked like vegetables mixed into it.
He chattered away in Japanese and I caught the words mishi (rice or food) and taxan (a lot) and yasmay (stop work). I gathered from his signs that the food he had brought out to us was leftovers and was a reward for working hard. We pointed out that we had no plates or utensils to eat with. His answer to that was quite simple; he just put his hand into the tin and scooped out a handful and ate it from his hand. After wiping his hand he pointed on the ground and drew a half-circle in the dirt with a line down the centre, which we took to mean half-an-hour. With that he disappeared back into the hut. The other men and I said to hell with hygiene and were soon scooping out the food from the tin. It tasted all the better because this was an unexpected bonus.
True to his sign language, Jappy appeared again in about half-an-hour and took us back to our job. We kept working steadily the rest of the day and must have made a satisfactory job of the trench as he indicated that the next day our job would be to shift the wooden superstructure and place it over the trench we had just dug. We went back to camp once more and queued up for our meal – again, it was small.
I spoke to the other men who were my neighbours in the hut and they told me they had spent the day working on the railway. They were absolutely exhausted as it entailed a lot of heavy lifting and the Japanese kept bullying them. They also told me they had had no midday break and the only thing the Japs had given them were drinks of water. I told them what I and my gang had been doing but didn’t dare mention the food. That would have been very cruel and also the whole camp would have tried to take the job my party was doing.
The next morning Jappy came to collect us. We gathered our tools and hey-hoed off to work. We did the job of shifting the shelter quite satisfactorily. Unfortunately, there was no food. Instead he brought out a bucket of tea for us to share. Later he shared out a packet of English cigarettes.
On the third day our guard took us to a hut a little further away and showed us a large heap of gravel, the same type that they put down under railway tracks. We didn’t need to guess where it had come from. There were several paths round their quarters leading to latrines and other outbuildings, also a long one leading to our camp, which we used daily. These tracks were very rough and Jappy demonstrated that we were to level them and spread the shingle to make a better path. This was obviously going to be hard work but I was sure it was better than working on the railway where our friends had told us that the Japs were constantly harassing the workers and that a lot of the men were on the verge of collapsing.
We set to work and, as I said before, as long as we worked steadily Jappy seemed quite content. We called our guard Jappy because he never told us his name. He spoke no English, but I could pick out a few Japanese words which sometimes helped us to understand what he wanted. He did not like us talking to each other and so, other than the odd word here and there, we spent most of the day in silence. We carried on working with him for about five days doing the paths. It was a time-consuming job and he always gave us a break at midday and let us have some small item of food or a drink, or a cigarette. We were allowed to go to the river and wash ourselves and our clothing, which meant we could keep ourselves clean to some extent.
In the early hours of the sixth day we awoke to hear one of the men in our bay being violently ill. We just took it that he had eaten something that had disagreed with his stomach. A lot of the men had tried all sorts of berries and plants from the jungle with disastrous results. When morning came we realized that he was really ill and needed attention. The soldiers had allowed us to have a sick bay with a medical orderly, and so one of us went to report that our friend was very ill. Two men came and took him away on a stretcher.
That same morning Jappy came to take us to work and we thought he didn’t seem his usual self. We started working on the paths and it became clear that Jappy was also ill. He kept disappearing into the scrub and we could hear him being sick. Later, he became worse and he was frequently in the latrine. We couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, enemy though he was, and so we just kept on working as though nothing was wrong. Eventually he signalled to us to stop work and through sign language told us to go back to the camp on our own, which of course, we were glad to do.
I expected a new guard to come for us the next day to replace Jappy, but no-one turned up. This worried me as I thought it meant we would have to work on the railway. We talked it over and agreed that it would be best to carry on working on the paths as we were obviously meant to complete the job. We worked through the day and queued up for our food with the rest of the men. The next morning we had our breakfast, a small portion of rice and boiled beans with a little salt added, and were preparing to get our tools when one of our officers came and spoke to us about the job we were doing. One of the Japs in charge of the camp had told him that Jappy was very ill and that there were no other guards to replace him. As we were working in close proximity to their quarters we could carry on with what we were doing as it was important to get the paths done before the rainy season set in. The Japs must have been keeping an eye on us as a fresh pile of shingle had appeared overnight.
Of the ten men in my bay of the hut, my two friends and I seemed to be holding our own health-wise, but we were undernourished. Two men had gone into the Sick Bay seriously ill and others looked due to go at any time. The Japs were very tough and unless you were at death’s door you were forced to work. After about ten days in camp many of the men were really ill with vomiting and dysentery. It wasn’t only the prisoners who were getting sick but some of the Japanese as well. Finally, we realized that the camp was suffering a cholera epidemic.
As far as we prisoners were concerned, survival would depend entirely on the man’s constitution. There was no medication for us. I suspect that the Japanese fared little better. The few British and Australian officers who had come with us were no better off than were the rest of us. Admittedly they did not have to work as hard as the men; their main function appeared to be to issue orders on behalf of the Japs. As far as food and clothing was concerned, they had the same as us. In a very short space of time there were only three of us left in our bay of the hut: Joe, Taffy and me.
That night Joe and Taffy told me that they had made friends with a sergeant who was coming to visit us to talk about something very important. Morning came and Ian arrived. Before he started to tell us why he had come he swore us to complete secrecy. He said it was a matter of life and death. Things were bad in the camp. Men were being beaten up for having a piddle without asking permission. Even a look of disapproval or a muttered word was dangerous as the Japs were always in a filthy mood.
Ian started by telling us that he had been fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to have been shifted upcountry with his platoon officer and that they had been able to maintain a friendly relationship. Although the officers were segregated from the other ranks, as we were called, we were still able to visit them if we wished. Ian had been to visit his friend and found him very ill. Within a matter of hours his friend had died but he had entrusted his few meagre belongings to Ian. On looking through his friend’s pack Ian had found a few items of clothing and some personal letters from his family giving his address Also in the pack was a rolled up towel which contained a rolled up page of an atlas and an army compass, and also a broken watch. Had the Japanese found these things hidden in the officer’s belongings I am sure he would have been beaten up, or even killed, for they were prohibited for British or Australian prisoners.
Ian’s brother, Bernard, who was a corporal, was also in the camp. They had decided that it was prudent to keep the compass, watch and map a secret. Early one morning, when all was quiet, they had spent some time orienting the map and compass to find out where we were. The river we were near was of medium size and quite fast flowing which seemed to denote it had come some distance before reaching our camp. Orienting the compass due north showed that the river flowed south which meant, hopefully, that it was flowing towards the Gulf of Siam.
Ian and Bernard had also heard the Japs mentioning Chiang Mai. From these clues they had deduced that we were possibly on the Me Ping River or, if not, at least a tributary flowing into it. This meant that if someone went against the current up the river they could eventually reach Burma or China.
The two brothers had also met a man named Eddie who in civilian life had been a civil engineer. He had worked in Thailand, Malaya and Indonesia. He spoke the local languages as well as a small amount of Japanese. Eddie had been a volunteer Singapore soldier and was captured in uniform. The other person whom they named was a private soldier named Fred; he had been batman to the deceased officer and knew something of his personal life. Ian, Bernard, Eddie and Fred had decided they had no wish to stay in the camp to die either of starvation, of overwork on the railway, or of cholera. A slight complication had arisen when a man named Jimmy was transferred to Ian and Bernard’s hut and overheard some of their conversation. He was a sergeant and on that basis they decided to include him if he wished. With regard to Joe and Taffy, they had known Ian in Singapore and as they seemed reasonably fit it was decided they too could join the group.
I was wondering why I was being brought into this crazy gang. This was simple: food. Taffy and Joe had known that my work around the Japanese quarters had given me a good knowledge of the camp layout. I had also been involved in making a path to a store where the food was kept. I had remarked that considering our meagre rations, there was enough loose rice lying around the store to feed an army. We had naturally assumed that it would be guarded day and night but I had noticed that the door had no bolt or padlock on it and swung to and fro with the wind.
It appeared that Eddie had overheard some Japs talking. They had said that many of their men were sick and they had only enough men to supervise the working parties. Another time he had heard that our Japanese soldiers were hoping to be relieved in the near future. We knew the only hope we had of getting away from the camp depended on getting supplies of food. We held a council of war and I was included in the group. We were all quite aware that our lives hung in the balance whatever we did.
It was decided that I should lead the way to the food store to test whether it was guarded. I warned whoever was going that whatever they did they must not tread on the gravel as it would crunch horrendously and would warn anyone around. Bernard and Taffy volunteered to go with me that night to see how things went. We each armed ourselves with a scoop. I had a mug, Bernard also had a mug, and Taffy a tin. We were going to use the dead officer’s pack to carry whatever we found.
Taffy and I lay on our beds waiting until the whole camp was quiet. I dozed off but Taffy shook me and said he thought it was moonlight enough to see where we were going. I agreed and so we went to the next hut for Bernard who was awake and waiting for us. There were rarely clear skies overhead, but the moon did give quite a good light. We set off barefoot on our mission. My heart was beating like a hammer. It seemed so loud, I was sure someone would hear it. Fortunately, the ground we walked on had been trodden flat so it was not hard on our bare feet. Even so, each step was agony as we tried not to make any noise. When we reached the shingle track that led to the storehouse I made sure that we kept on the soft ground at the side of the path. This proved more difficult walking as there were a lot of loose twigs and dirt around. Slowly, ever so slowly, hardly daring to breathe, we crept up to the hut. Finally, I got to the door and it swung loosely on its hinges. We stood motionless. There was not a sound, just dead silence.
We had made no plan of action but it just seemed natural that, as Taffy had the bag and I had tried the door, we both went in. Taffy held the bag and started to fill it. There seemed to be rice everywhere – sacks of it – I was actually kneeling in it. Meanwhile, Bernard was standing guard outside. Of course, I couldn’t see what I was doing, I could only feel the cup filling, and the noise of rice going into the cup and the bag seemed deafening in the silence. After a few minutes I felt Taffy’s hand on mine to stop filling the pack and he whispered, ‘Getting heavy.’ With that I gathered up one or two handfuls of rice and scattered them around hoping to cover up the mug marks in the heap. We got back to the hut without incident and parted company with Bernard. Back in the hut I was so exhausted I went to sleep almost straight away.
I awoke in the morning with a real fright as I could hear a Jap yelling and shouting outside our hut. At first I thought he had come for me or Taffy, but he was shouting at some poor devil who was too sick to even stand up. I got my breakfast and of the original six men I was working with there were now only four. Two were either sick or dead, we didn’t know as we were discouraged from going anywhere near the Sick Bay. In any case, the stench was enough to keep us away.
We drew our usual shovels, rakes and wheelbarrow and went off to our job. I thanked God the Japanese had a path mania for it seemed we had no sooner finished one than they needed another one. The Japs had now given us instructions that if they wanted a path made we would see some sticks with white cloth tied on them and that denoted where it would start and finish. This morning there was a whole row of sticks and flags leading from the main path to the long-drops. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘this will keep us busy for a while.’ We started levelling the ground and all the time I was watching out to see if there were any Japs around. I expected at any minute they would want to use the lavatories. I could hear the sound of men working in the distance and the Japs voices, but they didn’t seem to be as noisy as they used to be. At that moment I had a crazy idea and taking a rake went along the main path and branched off to where the rice store was. The path looked quite rough and so I busied myself raking and levelling it to look tidy. I deliberately made as much noise as I could, thinking that if there were any Japs around this should bring them running, but there was not one in sight.
