Cruiser (66 page)

But Galleghan was a martinet, inflexible and intolerant. One of his soldiers, Russell Braddon, author of a bestselling prisoner memoir,
The Naked Island
, variously described him
as a vain and conceited egomaniac, who ‘became quite hysterical if he were denied by anyone, even officers, the military courtesies'.
¹²
Other men, more generous, swear it was Galleghan's iron will and discipline that kept order where there might have been chaos. ‘You will march out of here as soldiers, not prisoners,' he told his men, and it is true that many of them admired him for it. It was legend that he stood up to Japanese threats and bullying time and again, at great personal risk. But Galleghan, too, despised the Java Rabble. They would be required to join his Armistice Day parade, but they would bring up the rear.

This was not well received. The navy regards itself as the senior service. By tradition, it has always marched at the head of any service parade, and the men of HMAS
Perth
, however shabby, were not about to surrender this ancient right and privilege to a mere army half-colonel, or temporary brigadier, or whatever he might happen to be at the moment. The senior
Perth
officers in Changi were the ship's two Commissioned Gunners, George ‘Johnny' Ross and Frank Hawkins, both of them Royal Navy men on loan to the RAN. Ross, 47 years old, had served at Gallipoli and, as gunners notoriously are, was a salty custodian of naval custom as laid down in
King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions
. Hawkins stood staunchly by him. The two men firmly informed the Brigadier that they and the ship's company would take their proper place at the front of his parade or not at all. They refused to budge. Black Jack had met his match. With ill grace, he backed down and the Java Rabble led the march.
¹³

There the dispute might have ended but for one more hilarious misunderstanding. The Australian Army salute is made with the palm of the hand outward and visible. The naval version is different, with the hand horizontal, the palm down. As the
Perth
sailors swung past Galleghan, Johnny Ross barked the customary order, ‘Eyes right!' and snapped off a tiddly salute. The Brigadier exploded. ‘Who is that man giving me the Japanese salute?' he bellowed. ‘Report to me at once!'

Ross wheeled his men around to the back of the parade ground and stood them rigidly to attention, all pusser-like, as he explained to the barking Brigadier that he had been in the Royal Navy for 25 years and had never saluted any differently. ‘I am sorry that you know the Japanese salute better than ours, sir,' he said. Eventually, some army officers managed to convince Galleghan that the navy salute and the Japanese Army salute were identical.

But that would not be Black Jack's last absurdity. In January 1943, another shipload of prisoners from Java arrived at Selarang in the same wretched condition as the earlier lot who had so outraged the Changi officer corps. They were commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Dunlop, a Melbourne surgeon turned army doctor who had been captured with Brigadier Blackburn in Java. In the years ahead, ‘Weary' Dunlop and his feats of courage and compassion, his medical miracles, would attain a golden renown in the memories of the Allied prisoners whose lives he saved. For now, he was just another object of Galleghan's disdain.

Again, the Brigadier complained that he had not been saluted properly, and, by some men, not at all. The reason was, plainly, that this new instalment of the Java Rabble was led by a mere medico. Discipline had broken down. Galleghan wrote a stiff note to Dunlop instructing him to step aside and to hand command to the senior combat officer, infantry or artillery.

At first, Weary was amused and willing enough to comply. He did not particularly care either way. He had not been impressed by the Changi lot to begin with – ‘officers neatly dressed, carrying canes, blowing out puffy moustaches and talking in an “old chappy” way,' he noted sarcastically in his diary.
¹⁴
But in the officers' mess, when someone chipped him about the Java Rabble, he rocketed into cold fury. The men he had brought with him, he pointed out icily, had fought in the Battle of Britain, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, in Greece and Crete, in the Western Desert of North Africa and in Syria, and in the Java Sea itself. The clear implication – it
must have hung in the air like a thundercloud – was that the 8th Division had not done quite so well in its brief and disastrous months in Malaya and Singapore.

More angry notes flew back and forth. Galleghan had to retreat again when he found himself trumped by Brigadier Blackburn, who was senior to him and who took Dunlop's side. Weary remained in command. But Black Jack exacted his revenge. When the 895 men of what became known as Dunlop Force were ordered off to Burma a few weeks later, Galleghan and his staff ensured that they went without the boots, clothing and medical equipment Dunlop requested, even though these were in sufficient supply in the Changi Quartermasters' stores. And, in a final insult, he insisted that Weary should pay, in Dutch guilders, for the few medical items he was given. It was petty, it was vicious. It may well have cost men's lives. Galleghan was knighted and lionised after the war, but his dishonourable behaviour towards Weary Dunlop and the Java Rabble is an indelible stain on his reputation. Nor was it forgotten. The
Perth
men took it particularly hard, for they had not surrendered; they had gone down fighting, and lost everything with it.
Java Rabble
was the title Fred Skeels gave to his memoirs.

As 1942 came to a close, the
Perth
survivors found, to their regret, that fewer and fewer of them remained together. Jan Tyrrell and Tag Wallace, with the group from the timber lifeboat captured in Sumatra, never saw Changi. They ended up in a camp at a place called Sungei Gerong, near Palembang in southern Sumatra. There, Wallace, among others, nearly succumbed to the ravages of beriberi. The officers who were sent directly from Java to Japan spent the rest of the war there. Those of the ship's company shipped from Java to Singapore were frequently separated, as the Japanese allocated them to different work groups and took them away from Changi at different times and in different directions.

But when they did manage to stay together, and the more heavily their captivity pressed upon them, the more their bonds of mateship strengthened. Men who had not known each other in the ship instinctively formed partnerships for their mutual survival. The fit and able cared for the weak and sick, realising only too well that one day they might have to rely on the kindness and concern of others. If they became delirious with malaria, or too feeble to get to a latrine unaided, or a bout of amoebic dysentery left them covered in their own filth, help came unasked, and there was no shame in accepting it.

Some stayed in Singapore for only a few days. In October, Blood Bancroft, Elmo Gee, Frank McGovern and Gavin Campbell were among the
Perth
men shipped out of Changi in Williams Force – a group of 884 men named for the officer in charge, Lieutenant-Colonel John Williams, who had commanded the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion in the Middle East and in Java. Another hell ship, the
Maebashi Maru
, carried them to Rangoon. From there, by a second ship and then by train and a long march, they journeyed deep into the Burmese jungle. Williams, a good man and a fine officer, had been tortured in Java by the Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo. He would earn the deep respect of his men in the three long years ahead.

Fred Lasslett went in a different direction. There was no rhyme or reason for this; it was just the luck of the draw. On 26 October, he was loaded aboard another rust bucket, the
Tojuku Maru
, which sailed with some 1200 Australians and Americans for Saigon and then Japan. Notices posted on board these hell ships left the prisoners in no doubt of the severity of the regime:

Fred and his mates spent their first captive Christmas at the Ohasi POW camp near Tokyo, shivering with fever as they broke rocks outdoors in the snow. In Changi, the prisoners did their best to whip up Christmas cheer. After another successful operation to remove the remaining piece of shrapnel from his leg – this time under an anaesthetic – Buzzer Bee was out of hospital, recovering well, and back with his shipmates. To everyone's surprise, the Japanese released a cargo of frozen Australian lamb from the Singapore docks and sent it over to the camp to be made into a broth to go with the staple issue of rice and a few vegetables from gardens the prisoners had grown. Fred Skeels found the food a bit rich after the thin diet of the past nine months:

Two weeks later, Buzzer and Fred were loaded into trucks with what became known as the Java Number Five Group, of 456 Americans, 385 Australians and 1159 Dutchmen. From the Singapore Railway Station – now renamed, as they noted, the Syonan Railway Station, Syonan being Japanese for ‘Light of the South' – freight wagons carried them to the port of Perai on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. There, another convoy of hell ships was waiting. The Australians and the Americans were crammed into the holds of the
Moji Maru
, a rust-bucket freighter that had obviously seen better days. They, too, were on their way to the Railway of Death.

Short and almost comically rotund, swaggering in immaculately pressed uniform, mirror-polished jackboots and clinking medals, toting an enormous samurai sword, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoshitada Nagatomo was a man very pleased with himself. The prisoners, drawn up under a burning sun, watched impassively as he mounted a dais to harangue them:

‘This place' was Thanbyuzayat, a jungle outpost south of Moulmein in Burma and a prison camp that would become infamous as the northern terminal of the Burma–Siam Railway. Nagatomo rejoiced in the title of chief of the No. 3 Branch, Thailand POW Administration, Nippon Expeditionary Force, which meant that he was, in effect, the jailer and persecutor of an army of slaves.

It was 28 October 1942. In the world beyond, the Battle for Stalingrad was raging on land, and at sea the Royal Navy and
the Kriegsmarine were locked in their titanic struggle in the Atlantic Ocean. On the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Afrikakorps had been routed, just days earlier, at El Alamein. Not a year after Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy had checked Japanese naval expansion in the Pacific, and the Solomon Islands hung in the balance at Guadalcanal. The IJA had encountered its first defeat at Milne Bay in New Guinea – a bloody triumph of Australian arms – and the epic battles for Kokoda were under way. Slowly, the war was turning against Japan. The rising sun had reached its zenith. If the strutting Nagatomo knew of this, he gave no sign as he warmed to his theme: the Emperor would graciously permit the prisoners to erase the infinite shame of their capture by working obediently for the glory of Greater Nippon. Anti-Japanese ideas would be corrected. The prisoners should weep with gratitude.

Waving his arms for added emphasis, the Colonel barked this drivel in an odd mixture of Japanese and heavily accented French. It was said that he had a French wife, obtained in Saigon. His words survive because they were translated and printed for circulation along the railway. He continued:

Blood Bancroft, one of those on parade, recorded that there was a ripple of laughter from the ranks at that last remark.
Nagatomo ignored it. He gathered up his sword and strutted off the platform to his car. Blood was amused to see that someone, perhaps the wife, had stitched two decorative patches of coloured fabric on the ample seat of the Colonel's trousers. They looked for all the world like bullseyes.

Thailand had fallen to Japan, like rotten fruit, in late 1941. The Thai Government and Army had put up only token resistance, and what was virtually a puppet government in Bangkok formally declared war on the Allies in January 1942. This was trumpeted in Tokyo as a triumph of the Emperor's arms and diplomacy towards the goal of establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Burma fell next, in the first months of 1942. The Japanese took the capital, Rangoon, in March, expelling the British with relative ease, thereby confirming the wisdom of John Curtin's refusal to allow the 7th Division to be diverted there and squandered in another futile defence.

Rangoon, though, was a problem. For the conquerors, it was hard to get there. The sea route to and from Singapore, now the principal Japanese base, was a round trip of some 3700 kilometres – a precarious journey when the Japanese Merchant Marine was already struggling to supply and maintain this far-flung empire. There was, however, a working rail line from Singapore up through the Malay Peninsula to Bangkok. Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo believed that building a new line to link Bangkok with Rangoon – a distance of only 560 kilometres – would solve a great many difficulties.

The project, though, was more than formidable – an idea that British colonial governments and investors had invariably abandoned as impossible. While the route was short as the crow flies, track would have to be laid through virgin jungle and across razor-backed ridges, with some 13 kilometres of bridges built to span ravines and rivers. Approximately three million cubic metres of rock and earth would have to be dug or dynamited
away. And this monumental feat of engineering would need an enormous labour force, to be housed and fed and shielded from the ravages of the tropical climate and its diseases.

Here, the Japanese had a singular advantage that the British did not. The conquest of South East Asia had given them a bottomless pool of coolie labour, of Burmese, Thais, Chinese and Indians, who, for all the protestations of Asian brotherhood, could be conscripted for the task of railway building. And there was a welcome bonus in the tens of thousands of Allied prisoners, who, as Colonel Nagatomo had so floridly explained, had shamed themselves by being captured alive and were therefore slaves to the Emperor's will. Accommodation, food and medical care would therefore not be a priority.

Japanese engineers had spent time before the war planning the course the railway would take. Its southern terminal would be at Ban Pong in Thailand – a nondescript town about a hundred kilometres west of Bangkok and already on the line that ran up from Malaya. From there, it would run north-west through 50 kilometres of relatively flat jungle country along the northern banks of the Maekhlaung River to another provincial town, Kanchanaburi. That part of the construction would present no great difficulty. But, just beyond Kanchanaburi, a large bridge would have to span the Maekhlaung, which swelled into a raging torrent in the monsoon season, and from there the way would get progressively harder. The line would more or less follow the eastern bank of the Kwae Noi River, made famous as the River Kwai in the classic but factually inaccurate film by the British director David Lean. After almost 300 kilometres, it would cross from Thailand into Burma at Three Pagodas Pass – an ancient waypoint about 300 metres above sea level. From there, it would descend through more jungle, but along easier foothills and then coastal plain to Thanbyuzayat. The total length would be 421 kilometres. With little in the way of heavy machinery, the Japanese engineers would have to rely on the only two resources in plentiful supply: jungle timber and slave
labour. Camps for prisoners and the conscripted Asian labour would be placed along the route, some named for a local village or town, others simply known for their distance along the way: the 100-Kilo Camp was 100 kilometres from Thanbyuzayat.

Construction began in June 1942 under the command of the Southern Army Railway Corps, based in Thailand at Kanchanaburi. The 5th Railway Regiment would build southwards from Burma and the 9th Railway Regiment would head north from Thailand to meet at a halfway point by December 1943.

The first Australians to work on the line left Singapore in May 1942, drawn mostly from the AIF's 22nd Brigade – some 3000 men in all. They were led by Brigadier Arthur Varley, a militia officer who had been a stock and station agent at Armidale in the New England region of New South Wales and who had commanded the AIF's 2nd/18th Battalion in Malaya. Their first job was to build an airfield at Tavoy on the Burmese coast, but by October they were at Thanbyuzayat and in the less than gentle hands of Colonel Nagatomo.

As construction gathered pace, so the labour force grew. The puppet governments of Burma and Thailand conscripted tens of thousands of their people to work as coolies, and these were supplemented by many more Chinese, Malay and Tamil Indian prisoners taken from Malaya and Singapore – some 180,000 Asians in all. More and more Allied prisoners of war – British, Australian, American and Dutch – were transported in the hell ships from Singapore and Java.

Buzzer Bee was in the hold of the
Moji Maru
, chatting with his mate Ron Sparks, one of
Perth
's bandsmen, when they heard the roar of aircraft engines overhead and saw, through the open hatch, a flash of wings. It was early afternoon on 15 January 1943, and their small convoy of hell ships, with its destroyer escort, was lumbering through the Bay of Bengal just a day
away from the Burmese port of Moulmein. Fred Skeels was on deck with another group of prisoners who had been allowed out for air. No one recognised the aircraft; they were two American B-24 Liberator bombers, which had come into service a few months after
Perth
had been sunk. As there was nothing on the ships to indicate they were transporting prisoners of war, the Americans made their run.

There was the whine and crump of bombs landing in the water near the
Nichimei Maru
, the ship carrying the Dutch prisoners, then the rattle of the Japanese returning fire. On the
Moji Maru
, they fired its only weapon – an ancient field gun mounted on the stern. The barrel burst at the first shot, killing the gun crew just as Buzzer clambered on deck. In the confusion, he thought that if he could get to the bridge he could grab a signal projector to warn the American pilots they were bombing Allied prisoners:

The other ship, the
Nichimei Maru
, began to sink. The Japanese and some prisoners jumped from her decks, but some 40 Dutchmen died. On the
Moji Maru
, a fire broke out near the shattered field gun, threatening the ammunition lockers, but it was put out by the prisoners with buckets of
water. The two aircraft disappeared over the horizon, leaving the Australians to count the damage done.

Seven prisoners had been killed by stray shrapnel on the
Moji Maru
, with more injured. Fred Skeels's best mate from Inglewood Primary in Perth, Wally Johnston, had copped some nasty little shards of metal in his back and face, injuring an eye. Two other
Perth
sailors were more badly hurt. Steward Rob Smith, from Toowoomba in Queensland, had an arm nearly severed, and Stoker George McCredie, from Chatswood in Sydney, was wounded in the stomach. Commander Epstein, the surgeon from the
Houston
, organised an emergency Sick Bay, and their shipmates did what they could to ease their suffering, but both Smith and McCredie would die in hospital in Moulmein. The Japanese buried them there in a cemetery run by French missionaries.
³
To be killed by friendly fire was a special cruelty.

Weary Dunlop's mob was sent to the southern beginnings of the railway. On 19 January, they left Singapore in a train that ground through the Malay Peninsula – some 900 hungry and thirsty men crammed into steel freight cars that were ovens by day and freezers by night. After four days, not long after dawn, they were unloaded at Ban Pong. Weary had brought along a haversack with a few basic surgical instruments and medical textbooks, and he clutched it closely as the prisoners were packed into open trucks. Their guards tossed a few hands of small bananas into each truck, and they jolted out of Ban Pong along a dirt road that soon had them covered in a layer of fine white dust. That night they spent in a bamboo compound at Tarsau, further along the route of the line, where they were refused permission to wash in the river and were left to sleep, shivering, on the bare earth under the stars. Back in the trucks the next morning, after a thin breakfast of rice and salt fish, they wound upwards through jungle towering over them, its impenetrable walls of spiky bamboo interspersed with stands of teak and hung with tangled vines. Several times, they were ordered out of the trucks to push them, but after three hours
they came to a halt in a clearing, where a great fire of bamboo was burning. Here they would stay, but they would have to build their own huts. Fortunately, it was the dry season.