The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (10 page)

After a journey of more than a thousand miles firom Singapore, the train ran into Ban Pong station. We were ordered to disembark, horribly stiff. I was now a railway man whether I liked it or not.

Ban Pong was a big village which had the merit, for the Japanese Army, of being the closest point on the Siamese railway system to the coastal plain of southern Burma, more than two hundred miles away over the mountains. It had become the nub of the planned new Japanese railway system, connecting Singapore with Bangkok and on to Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi and China. All these lines would be linked up to Burma, and ultimately to India. The village was now a boom town, with extensive camps and hutments, its railway station jammed with trains, the river clogged with boats. Nearby at Nong Pladuk there were sidings, shunting engines, strange four-wheeled bogies and a lot of activity around the station.

So much became clear to us as time went on. At first, all we saw were open-fronted shops in buildings made of teak and mahogany, attap huts and stone colonial houses. Children and chickens ran about the streets, small elegant women in bright clothes tended little stalls piled with vivid red and green chillies, mangoes and pawpaws. We passed one such market under some trees near the station. Ban Pong seemed to have one long main street, with some other streets zigzagging off it. On the outskirts were the usual cultivated areas, patches of wild scrub, and the forest.

We were marched along a road for a little way. There was a camp of long, low huts of attap, and it was obvious even from the road that the end of each hut sloped down into a muddy lake of floodwater. The far end of each hut must be a stinking malarial pool. We were allocated among these huts, in which men crowded into the higher parts, their sleeping spaces reduced to a couple of feet, in order to get away from the water. This was named, with deadpan banality, the Wet Camp. It was obviously a lethal place.

After a few days, a group of about a hundred of us were sent a quarter of a mile away to another camp. This turned out be a workshop, staffed by Japanese mechanics and engineers, and we would be assisting them with repairs. It was a respite for us.

There were four officers in our group: Major Bill Smith, Captain Bill Williamson, a lieutenant called Gilchrist and myself. There was also a senior warrant officer, Sergeant-Major Lance Thew of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

We were not an especially well-knit group. Smith and Gilchrist were much older than us, members of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force, raised from among the planters and merchants of Singapore and their employees. Many of them played brave parts in the fighting, but there was always a certain reserve between them and the regular army, a feeling that their enjoyment of the good life had made them careless about the defence of Singapore, and I never found much in common with these two with whom I was now forced to share a hut.

Major Smith had been a low-grade Colonial Service officer and was the kind of character whose lack of intelligence is cruelly punished in extreme conditions. A tall, angular figure, he had difficulty understanding what was happening to him, and was excluded instinctively from any decision-making. We took to calling him 'Daddy'. Gilchrist was a very small person in his fifties, and had no worthwhile military experience or other skills; he was one of those men who in the harsh conditions of captivity could quickly and unfairly be judged not much good at anything.

With Bill Williamson I hit it off much better. He was a pleasant, unassuming and very competent person, and acted as the camp adjutant. He got things done, and when I saw he was learning Japanese I knew we could get along. He lent me his Japanese grammar and helped me to identify some of our gaolers' basic vocabulary as they walked past our hut or shouted at us in the open areas of the camp. I made sure that Williamson and I were in adjoining bed-spaces.

Sergeant-Major Thew was an extremely capable technician, for whom the army was merely another outlet for his lifelong passion for mechanics. He had a little radio shop back in Sunderland, and he made and repaired radios for the Ordnance Corps before his capture. He was well built, a powerful looking man, and had a scarred face, but he had acquired the scar in a wartime accident and the streetfighter's appearance belied his other-worldly character. He loved the craft of radio telegraphy, and dreamed of radios as I did of trains. He was an extraordinary and luckless man.

Our single long hut could hold about a hundred men and was little more than ingenious tents made from local vegetation: bamboo and attap, a big leaf-palm, tied together with a rope-like creeper. The floor was trodden earth, which became hard and solid, but under each bed-space was still raw clay, which sprouted even in the dark and weedy things poked up through the planks of the bed. The cool dark spaces also sheltered wriggling and crawling life, of which the most terrifying were scorpions and snakes. Williamson and I used to walk around the camp, talking about books and languages, and I once idly tugged on a creeper hanging from a tree; the snake I found myself holding was luckily some harmless python.

For nausea, little could surpass the big hairy centipedes which seemed about a foot long, if you could imagine them ever lying still and straight enough to measure instead of undulating and trembling. Lesser creatures we learned to take in our stride: cockroaches scurried like metal mice and if you stepped on one with a calloused bare foot it burst with a sound like a plastic bottle. The thatch was riddled with beetles, ants and spiders, dropping on to our sleeping bodies at night.

Since Nong Pladuk was the point of origin of the new railway, the yards were full of tracklaying equipment which needed constant repair at Ban Pong, given the breakneck speed at which it was being used. The equipment consisted of road-rail lorries, which could run on flat road surfaces or on railway tracks, and what at first looked like long low wagons on which rails were stacked. In fact these wagons were a couple of four-wheeled bogies held together by bolting in position two ordinary steel rails. This created a rigid eight-wheeled wagon body on which rails and sleepers were loaded, and pushed up the line behind the tracklaying gangs. When they had emptied it, they would dismantle the two rails holding it together and lay the bogies by the side of the track, and the inexorable tractor would push up another wagonload until all the wagons were empty. The bogies would then be replaced on the track and pulled back to Nong Pladuk for the next load.

The pace of work was intense, the prisoners driven by Japanese guards under a hot sun on a patchy diet that was just about adequate in Ban Pong, where food was relatively easily available outside the camp, but got progressively poorer the further up the line you went. The tracklaying gangs were thus unknowingly working themselves to death.

A flat-bottomed steel rail weighed about 70 pounds per yard, and usually came in 24-foot lengths. A rail is therefore a massive thing for hungry men to lift and manoeuvre into position, and one rail followed another relentlessly on this criminal folly of a line. The steel rails were spiked directly to the wooden sleepers by hammering in big steel nails. This is brutally heavy work: exhausted and ill-fed city boys and dragooned Asian labourers did not have a chance. Rest periods were rare, and any slackening was met with abuse or violence.

Railways have always broken the bodies and spirits of their builders, I knew that already: the Panama Railway cost the lives of one in five of its workforce; the railroads across the Rockies had demanded appalling sacrifices; the Alpine tunnels were considered to be death traps, even for the well-fed peasant boys who built them. Yet the Burma-Siam railway was unique; to a mind haunted by images firom biblical times it recalled the construction of the Pyramids; it was not only the last cruel enterprise of the railway age, but the worst civil engineering disaster in history.

Of course I write this in retrospect, but even when I reached Ban Pong I knew there was something careless and therefore evil about the project. Though my own luck still held: all I had to do was to help repair the lorries, the bogies and the engines. We were working for Japanese railway fitters, turners, welders, most of them humane men interested in getting a job done, and their workshops were not cruelly managed. I could respect them and they let me and my comrades alone.

Some way out of camp, however, you could see the reality of a hand-built railway. Soon after I got there I walked out one day -1 had been appointed Messing Officer by Major Smith, or rather by Williamson acting through Smith, so I could move around fairly fireely in search of food - and came to a place where a gap had been torn out of a hill. Hundreds of half-naked men were passing the earth in baskets to one end of the cutting, and were using the soil to build an embankment on the far side, one big basket between two struggling men. There was scarcely a piece of machinery among them, they were working with saws and axes and picks. They were clearing bamboo clumps fifty yards wide, feathery bamboo with deep roots that had to be torn out by hand with ropes, and chopping out tropical hardwoods with blunt implements. I knew from Bukit Timah Hill what that was like: a fight with tools. Perhaps some of Stalin's canals were built like this; few railways have been.

In order to keep our group fed, I used some of the ten cents a day we were paid by the Japanese to buy food from the local peasants and traders. Rice, cooking oil, some eggs and bits of fish; firesh vegetables when we could afford them; and sometimes a few ducks or even a pig. Flesh could only be paid for in the wages of theft. I used a 44-gallon drum, with one end replaced by a door, as an oven; we had huge shallow iron bowls for cooking masses of rice.

Occasionally I would have to go down to the town with a couple of men and a Japanese guard. He turned these occasions into an outing for a different kind of sustenance. He would stop us at a coffee shop and hand me his rifle and disappear into the back of the shop. I would stand there in the shade at the firont of the store, a prisoner holding my enemy's loaded rifle as he visited a whore. Out in the hot sun, Siamese villagers walked by, the street stretched away to the edge of town. The guard knew and I knew there was nothing I could do with his gun and that I had nowhere to go.

It was at Ban Pong that I discovered an uncanny bureaucratic oddity. Bill Williamson and I were called to the Japanese administrative office one day. The Japanese officer had a huge stack of POW registration forms, several thousand of them, piled on his desk. I saw that mine was on top of the heap. I had been allocated Serial Number 1; the numbers allocated ran well into the 20,000s. It made me feel exposed, important in a way that I would have shunned. In the lottery of war soldiers talk about their numbers coming up and this singularity was an unpleasant joke.

We were surviving, but that was not enough. All that energy which the surrender had stifled was still there, we were rebellious and eager to know what was happening in the war. We wanted to know if the tide had been turned; we wanted to win, even if only vicariously. Since we were young and clever and knew about machines, since most of us had been reared on enthusiasm for popular mechanics and loved the idea of transport and communication, we did the logical thing, and started to build a radio.

Enthusiasts had taken bits of radios from Changi, broken down and scattered among a number of men so that each had only a tiny piece to be responsible for. We also had headphones. But making one was still like assembling a mechanical jigsaw puzzle. We settled on an incredibly modest attempt to build a battery operated set that could receive All India Radio from New Delhi. But even this was a tall order. We had to reinvent wireless telegraphy, scouring a tropical prison camp for the materials we needed. We bartered stolen Japanese tools with a local trader for valves. I worked out the optimum length for an aerial for receiving the correct wave-length of the station; but we could not afford to display a full length antenna, so we had to make do with a 'quarter-wave aerial*. Men would be given strange tasks: to find flat unfolded silver paper, or small pieces of flat aluminium; or lengths of wire of a certain gauge; or quantities of wax. No-one asked any questions; the prisoners' discretion was wonderful.

Thew was our radio maker. He was in many ways a dotty amateur scientist, absent-minded and insensitive to risk. Making a radio at that time required a lot of soldering, and arrangements were made in the cookhouse for the soldering iron to be heated under conditions of great secrecy. But how can you carry a red-hot iron in secret? Thew once solved the problem simply by forgetting where he was. He walked across the main square holding the glowing iron, as though for a prisoner-of-war the most natural thing in the world was to be wandering around with this essential tool of electronics in his hand.

We arranged a security system in the main hut. POWs apparently engaged in reading or doing their woodwork were stationed in strategic places, on the lookout for guards, while Thew worked in his bed-space with assistance from the others. We finished one night, and Thew crawled under his blankets and tuned his primitive detector. He had a pencil in his hand, I remember, and he emerged smiling from ear to ear with some scribbled notes. It had worked beautifiilly. He had heard the crisply modulated English voice of the announcer cutting through the static.

The radio was primitive, little more than a crystal set, tuned to a single frequency and incapable of sending a signal; it was also a simple masterpiece. It was about 9 inches long by 4 inches wide, and fitted snugly into a coffee tin with a false top, which we filled with ground nuts. It sat there innocently by Thew's bed, a rusty silver tin can hiding the valves and condensers.

The routine was the same each evening. Prisoners would be detailed to stand around the camp and warn us about the approach of any Japanese, many of them not even being told why they were doing it. Thew would couple the set to the aerial, which was hidden in the rafters, switch on the apparatus and burrow down under his blanket with the headphones on. He was always the operator, since he was by far the best person to deal with any tuning problems if the signals were lost or distorted. The news bulletin took about ten minutes, and he would note down the main items with his pencil as he listened. The precious scrap of paper was handed around a small group afterwards, as Thew dismantled the set and placed it back in its hiding place. I still remember his strong, careftil handling of the crude little machine, the tenderness of the true craftsman.