Cruiser (68 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
I got the two malarias standing up, and then got the cholera between them, with his arms about their necks. They made a wobbly tripod. I asked the malarias to see if they could get him to the end of the cutting, about 500 yards away, where there was a cave. They could leave him there and go on into camp for help. If none came, we would pick him up as we came back from work.
I watched them go â the two malarias, with the cholera about their necks. They were bowed and sweating with pain and concentration, trying not to collapse. The man with cholera was limp between them with his head lifelessly on his chest, hanging like a crucified man. His knees were buckled and his feet dragged. His trousers, which were ripped across the back in two places revealing his skinny, fouled buttocks and stringy thighs, were unbuttoned at the waistband and, as the others dragged him along with slow, shambling gait, his pants kept falling about his knees. The two men had to stop and pull them up before they could go on. One of the malarias reached over to pull them up: they wobbled, then they all fell over. Slowly they dragged themselves up again and staggered along the cutting
until they came to the cave. Later, the stretcher party, making their fourth trip, came out and picked up the cholera.
11
One place on the railway would come to symbolise all its evils. The Japanese called it the Konyu Cutting. To the prisoners who worked on it, most of them Australian but some British, it was Hellfire Pass. This was in Thailand, not quite halfway along the line, on a rocky jungle hillside above the east bank of the Kwae Noi. Work there began on Anzac Day, 25 April 1943 â an irony not lost on the Australians. Logically, the engineers should have pushed a tunnel through this ridge of rock, but they had no equipment to do that, so the whole thing was blasted away in two sections. The first was about 500 metres long by eight metres high, and the second about 80 metres long by 25 metres high. The prisoners worked at âhammer and tap', forcing holes into the rock for the engineers to place gelignite charges. There would be fuses lit and a detonation, often without warning, and then the men would be sent back in to clear the rubble. As the pressure grew to get the line finished, the Japanese demanded that each man remove three cubic metres of earth or rock in shifts of up to 18 hours, long into the nights.
The pass got its name from the flames and smoke of burning diesel lanterns and bamboo bonfires that lit the cutting, which, seen by the men working above, was a vision of the jaws of hell below. Lieutenant Hirota, who commanded the engineering unit in the Hintok area, revealed himself to be a calculating sadist. Nicknamed the Konyu Kid, he derived a fiendish pleasure from kicks, punches and bashings given for no apparent reason, and he encouraged his underlings to do likewise, preying particularly upon prisoners who faltered through the ravages of dysentery or diarrhoea. Eventually, elephants were brought in to move some of the heaviest rock, but much of the work had already been done. The Australian official history estimates that of 1000 men who laboured for almost two months at Hellfire Pass, 68 of them were beaten to death or died of disease.
The killing was almost as bad a little further along the line at Hintok, at what became known as the Pack of Cards Bridge because it collapsed three times during construction. This bizarre structure, about 400 metres long and 25 metres high, was built of crazy, zigzag piles of green timber fastened with wooden wedges and bamboo lashings. Thirty-one men lost their lives falling from its tortured scaffolding to the rocks beneath, and another 29 were bashed to death there by Hirota's thugs. Hirota himself was hanged as a war criminal in 1947.
Elmo Gee discovered one day that he was starting to go blind. He was reading a book that he had brought from Singapore when the print began to blur. The doctors diagnosed it as retrobulbar neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve at the back of the eye that was a side effect of beriberi. As 1943 wore on, his sight gradually dimmed. For a man who loved reading, it was a chilling affliction, but he bore it with fortitude. His mate Macca McQuade was a senior NCO in the group led by Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, and he managed to wangle Elmo a job as camp barber, which helped get him away from the working parties. Hair-cutting was a novelty. Elmo had never done it before in his life, but nobody seemed to be too particular. Then Williams chose him to be the camp bugler. He would blow reveille and lights out, sometimes throwing in a bit of jazz to cheer everyone up. The Japanese made him play their national anthem, too, which he hated doing. But his saddest duty was to sound the last post at funerals â a task he shared with another of
Perth
's musicians, Tubby Grant, who, by coincidence, was also losing his sight.
Both men lost count of the number of times they sounded that most melancholy bugle call, but it seemed important to do it, to accord the dead some dignity amidst the crude tragedies of their passing. Sometimes, the bodies were buried in graves in the jungle or along the river flats. At
other times, they were cremated and their ashes stored in tubes of bamboo and labelled according to the day, in the hope that their remains would be repatriated. If he was there at a particular camp,
Perth
's surviving padre, Keith âThe Bish' Mathieson, would conduct a service, the ancient words somehow incongruous beneath the jungle canopy but never less than moving no matter how many times they were heard. In a small exercise book, he would make a careful note of those who died, like a parish register, often with a poignant comment. Able Seaman David Kitcher of Merrylands in Sydney died of dysentery at the age of 20, in June 1943. âA boy who would have gone a very long way,' noted Mathieson. âA thorough gentleman, most courteous, a good worker.' A month later, dysentery also killed Merv Scott, a 21-year-old cook from Bondi: âA nice lad in every direction, always scrupulously clean in body and mind.' The Catholics died without a priest to give them the last rites, but Mathieson the Methodist buried them too, convinced that their god would not forsake them.
Paul Doneley was only 19 when he died of cerebral malaria at the 55-Kilo Camp on 3 October 1943, his blond good looks reduced to a skeletal horror. âA shining example of a good fellow, only a kid but remarkable in spirit and everything else,' Mathieson jotted in his diary.
12
âA really popular little bloke,' noted Chilla Goodchap, one of his Queenslander mates.
13
His naval records show that his parents at Kangaroo Point were paid compensation of £540 after the war. The Doneleys lost two other boys killed in action in New Guinea in 1945: Austin, an army lance sergeant who had been mentioned in despatches at Tobruk, and Roy, an army captain who had won a Military Cross in New Guinea. Their father, Syd Doneley, died in January 1946, of a broken heart, everyone said. Merle, the younger of their two sisters, the WAAAF Sergeant who had farewelled Paul in Sydney in 1941, carried the sorrow of this loss all her days.
For all that death on the railway became a commonplace,
there were times when it hit especially hard. Elmo and Slim Hedrick were devastated by the loss of Able Seaman Ronald âSeamus' O'Brien, a shipmate since their sunny days together aboard the
Autolycus
. From Albert Park in Melbourne, Seamus had been a sailor's sailor. Before he joined the RAN in 1937, he shipped as a teenage foremast hand on the old salt clippers that had plied from Adelaide to Hobart, and they reckoned he knew every sea shanty ever sung. At the age of 22, his body ravaged by dysentery and beriberi, he died at the 30-Kilo Camp on 18 August 1943. Elmo sounded the last post for him, too:
Seamus had joined the navy about the same time I did. So many died I don't like to even think about it. This particular day I had buried quite a few people and I went over to see Seamus who was extremely ill.
âSeamus, is there anything I can do for you?'
âNo,' he said. âI am going to die tonight.'
We didn't have a Catholic priest, but a man called Mike Taylor looked after the Catholics. I asked Seamus if he would like me to get Mike over to see him but he said, âNo, Elmo, I would like you to talk to me about all the happy times we had in the navy, and the fun we had in Jamaica, and tonight I will die peacefully.'
I buried him about ten o'clock the next night and cried my eyes out. I will never forget that very cheerful, wonderful man ⦠I used to ask myself over and over, âGod, where are you now? How can I believe in you when you let this horror go on, day after day?' No wonder I came out of the war with my faith in religion severely shaken.
For the first time in my life I wondered if I was losing my mind. There was so much dying and death. We couldn't even bury people properly in the mud. All we could do was dig a trench and lay branches and leaves over them. The smell of the bodies was so bad sometimes we used to vomit. The worst part was when we were trying to bury the poor blokes with some sense
of dignity and ceremony and the Japs stood around laughing. I thought they were sub-human.
14
Some men died not because their bodies gave out, nor because they were particularly sick or wounded, but simply because mind and spirit could no longer sustain them. They lost the will to live. In bottomless misery, hope gone, men died because they believed they would. Death became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Izzy Herman, who had made a killing selling biscuits to the Yanks at the Bicycle Camp in Java, had been an apprentice cabinetmaker before the navy called him up. From a loving Jewish family in North Perth, he had enjoyed nothing more than a night of ballroom dancing or messing about in a band he had formed, where he played banjo and ukulele. His friends back home called him Spike, but his shipmates had christened him Izzy, and the name stuck.
He went slowly downhill on the railway, felled by dysentery. Ray Parkin visited him in hospital at the Tarsau Camp. His account of that day, from
Into the Smother
, tells it all:
He had just staggered from under the flap of the grey, mildewed tent which hung in strips and holes, letting in the rain on the miserable sick beneath, and stood, swaying, a dirty grey-yellow figure, ankle deep in mud. His G-string hung slack, exposing him, and his legs were streaked. The worried look had become desperate, disgusted and hopeless. He was black with mud down one side, and was looking about in a vacuous panic for a bamboo (the only bed pans available: cut about eighteen inches long and open at one end). I got one for him and held it while he sat on the six inch hole with trembling knees. His face screwed up; his body quivered and shrank in agony. His eyes opened and rolled shut again. I had to stand behind him and steady him with my hands under his arms and the bamboo between my feet.
He shook each time his skinny little body knotted up, and he groaned with a low intensity that made me feel hopeless. It was raining, and this helped me to wipe him down. Then I carried
him back to his split-bamboo bed, four inches above the mud. I pulled the remnants of a dirty blanket over him and sat on the end of his bunk.
He opened his eyes.
âHow are you, Izzy?'
âNot bad,' he said, with a weak whisper.
âYou'll be right. You'll get over it â just try and stick it.'
He gave me a weak, grey smile and faintly shook his head, as if he had entered a realm of understanding I should never know.
âYes you will,' I said, with a crude attempt to shake off this feeling of inferiority. Another weak smile denied what I had just said. âYou must be getting better.'
âI don't think so, Chief. Yesterday ⦠fifty-one times ⦠today thirty-nine ⦠so far â¦'
Not twelve hours of the day had gone.
âBamboos are awkward ⦠fall off ⦠bloody mess ⦠disgusted ⦠don't bother about 'em always.'
âYou'll be all right â just hang on.'
It came out automatically: just to comfort me.
Again he gave me that strangely calm look. His head was a shrunken skull covered with wrinkled parchment like a mummy: it was no bigger than a decent sized fist. He had become a shrivelled relic before he was dead.
15
Able Seaman Isaac Herman died just a few days after Seamus O'Brien, on Tuesday 24 August. He, too, was just 22 years old. As there had been no Catholic rite for Seamus, so there would be no rabbi, no burial Kaddish for Izzy. His navy record says the cause of death was avitaminosis. Dozens of their shipmates, much the same age, died in ways equally sordid. Those who lived tried to keep count but they were no longer a cohesive ship's company. You heard on the grapevine that so-and-so had bought it but the news had lost its capacity to shock.
The remarkable thing is not that so many men died but that so many did not. Sometimes, it was the strongest who
succumbed, big-framed men who needed a high-kilojoule intake to keep going. It seemed that nuggety little blokes got along better. And the mind played its part. An ability to transcend the daily pain and suffering undoubtedly saved lives by the hundred. Sometimes, it was enough to let the imagination run. Frank McGovern, still mourning the loss of his brother Vince, would dream of food. In a tattered notebook, he jotted down recipes for meals of âcheesed potatoes, honey and cocoanut tart, date and bacon roll', all to be wolfed down on his return to Australia.
