The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (13 page)

After about three hours Thew was called, a Japanese guard shouting his name. He went into the hut. We were dismissed, and turned to see piles of motorcar batteries, dynamos, boxes made of wood and tin, and an incredible variety of tools - all of them Japanese, and the remnant of what we had already sold to the local Siamese and Chinese villagers through the camp fence. A lorry drove up, and the whole heap of contraband was taken away. Thew was allowed to return to us; his shock was dreadful to behold. The guards had found the radio.

One of the men had been standing so that he could see inside our hut. The search party had seemed to take the whole business fairly casually, at first. They walked down the entire length of the dark space, picking up only a few odd articles. One Japanese, passing Thew's bed, saw something in the folds of a dark blanket. It probably looked like a tiny triangle of white paper, as small as a postage stamp in that weak morning light, but it must have stood out against the neatly-folded wool of Thew's bedding like a coy invitation to mischief: a little paper something out of place.

The guard, still possibly all innocence, flicked it with his finger and pulled. It was a small sheet of paper, and I knew it well. On it was a rather nice hand-drawn map of the Solomon Islands. We had copied it from an illustration in a Japanese newspaper which we had lifted from a guard, in order to help us follow the references on All India Radio to the savage fighting on Rendova, Munda and New Georgia in the Solomons. The blanket was whipped off the bed and there, stark and unmistakable, lay a pair of wireless headphones, the green canvas webbing and the black steel of the earpieces curled like a small sleeping animal.

In the ransacking they found, as we knew they must, not one but four small wireless sets in various stages of completion. We had kept busy, and lavished much care and attention on replicating our first success. Like the original one, the new sets were also neatly and beautifully made and fitted into cofifee tins. The bottom of each tin was detachable and formed the bottom of the radio. It all fooled the casual observer, but these observers had now become sharply focused.

When we got back inside the huts, we found them in chaos. Every man went to look for his particular cache of forbidden goods, and found it barren. Every bag and box had been turned over; every sleeping space inspected. Even the passion-firuit creeper outside the officers' hut had been pulled off the wall and torn apart.

The day had turned black. The pessimists, Jim Slater their gloomiest spokesman, said that the entire camp would be exterminated. The optimists hoped that the discovery by itself might satisfy the Japanese, but they looked haggard as they said it, and the camp went to work that day in fear and silence. Thew was the centre of a great fog of helpless sympathy as he worked, unsmiling and tense, on a diesel engine in the shop. There was very little sleep in the hut that night. Whispered speculation ran among the bed-spaces like the bugs as they dropped on to the wooden floor firom the roof thatch and scurried away.

Early next morning Thew and one other soldier, who was found to have more stolen Japanese stores than most of the others, were summonedby the Japanese Camp Commander and after a brief time inside his hut were seen to emerge into the sunlight, which was now 100 degrees in the shade. They stood to attention, a guard posted near them, and were still there a few hours later. This was standard punishment, we knew, and could last for a whole day or longer.

That afternoon, They disappeared for a little while, but reappeared carrying a heavy iron sledge-hammer. He was stationed out in the open again, far from the nearest shadow, beside a great block of wood and began to swing the hammer down on to the block, over and over again, blow after blow, hour after hour. The dull thud of metal on wood could be heard all over the camp, underneath all the other sounds, as men walked to and from the workshops. It was like a drum beat announcing some terrible, nameless event.

Thew was not a weak man, but none of us were fit, and certainly not fit for this kind of mindless mortar-and-pestling of a dead log. In the evening the officer in charge of the Japanese guards sent to the POW cookhouse for some food for Thew. The cooks did him proud: they prepared meat and vegetables representing rations for a number of men, raiding our meagre stocks of protein, and packed them into a large mess-tin, completely covered with a heap of innocuous boiled rice. The commander inspected the tin and passed it: the sticky white mass must have looked like additional punishment. Thew got his meal.

Late that night he was released, blistered, bruised and exhausted, and very burnt by the sun. How we saw so clearly that this was not the end of it I can't be sure - some instinct of foreboding, some accumulated knowledge of the Japanese habit of referring serious matters to new levels and departments, with each handing out its response - or punishment. This system, we thought, must now be in operation.

It is impossible to describe the emotional state of POWs at a time like this, as retribution gathered momentum. Work and feeding went on as if nothing had happened, but there was everywhere a desperate haunting fear, superimposed on the normal perpetual uncertainty which filled the mind of every prisoner. Little groups of men sat in odd comers of the huts or out in the yard, endlessly chewing over grim alternatives.

The first move was against Bill Williamson. He was summoned and told to accompany a party of men being sent up the railway. At the time it seemed he should be envied: the Japanese had clearly decided he was not important to our enterprise. He had been a good firiend, but partings in wartime had to be conducted according to rules that averted too much emotion. Reticence was safer.

A week later Thew was taken away firom the camp with all his kit. Though he had been allowed to go on working after the first round of punishment, he never for a moment imagined he was off the hook.

Two days after his removal a messenger from the main camp at Kanburi, about a mile away, came to the officers' hut. It had started, we heard, as soon as Thew got to the camp; a long interrogation followed by a terrible beating. He was then made to come to attention, barely able to stand, and forced to hold this position for fifty hours outside the guardroom, all day and all night for two days.

On 10th September, Fred Smith followed Thew to the airfield camp. He was not attacked violently, but he too was forced to stand to attention - for no less than four days, falling over asleep, kicked awake, and dragged upright again and again. Smith was an incredibly tough man, physically, but one hundred hours of agonizing forced alermess is more than any body can bear.

As always, this information came back in second-or third-hand form, made worse by distance. What we could not see with our own eyes took on dreadftil proportions. The possibilities twisted off" like threads into the fiiture, each one more painftil than the last, a maze in which there could be no good outcome. I have written of the uncertainty that eats at a prisoner's mind and fills his days with anxious tension: those three weeks were the hell of uncertainty - the only sure thing was that we were on the edge of the pit.

Any feeling of security was utterly false. We imagined them doing their paperwork, telephoning each other, wondering what to do next. It was like being on death row without a formal sentence. And in all this time, their curious mixture of carelessness and obsessive attention to detail revealed itself: there were no further searches. For all they knew, we had other radios and could easily have disposed of them during those weeks.

Nor could we forget the stories about Pomeroy, Howard and Kelly. In February two escape parties, one consisting of Captain Pomeroy and Lieutenant Howard, the other of three men led by a Sergeant Kelly, had left the railway near Kanburi. The two officers got quite far, but they would have had to walk through rough limestone country, stumbling over creepers, dense rough grass and thickets of bamboo. They probably did not have even a map as good as mine: what chance did they ever have?

Sergeant Kelly's group was the first to be recaptured, followed by Howard and Pomeroy. All six officers and men were then murdered, without any form of trial or court martial. We heard that they had been shot out of hand; we heard that they had been killed slowly, bayoneted to death one by one after being made to dig their own graves. No-one knew what to believe.

Day after day the officers in their hut in the Sakamoto Butai wondered and worried, inventing and cancelling different versions of the worst. I have often wondered why, under these circumstances, I kept my own map. It was now rolled up in a hollow bamboo tube in the back wall of our latrine behind the hut. It represented, I suppose, a slim chance - a remote glimmer of hope. It was the only carefully drawn general map of the area in the hands of any prisoner, as far as I knew, and I kept it in case we needed to run for it, in case we needed to set out on that thousand-mile walk to the Burma Road. And it was a beautifully drawn map.

On 21st September we found out what they intended for us.

Eariy in the morning four unshaven and untidy Japanese soldiers filed into the officers' hut. I recall that one of them was fat. One of the others said they were here to remove five officers to 'another camp'. There were nine officers living in our hut, and it so happened that seven of us were there when they came. This was what we had been waiting for; the end was coming with a group of squalid, indifferent camp guards. We did not need to speak among ourselves to feel intensely of the same mind about what was happening. I sat down. The fat Japanese read out the names of those he wanted: Major Smith, Major Slater, Major Knight, Lieutenant Mackay and Lieutenant Lomax.

As he spoke, a truck drew up outside. In the background. Captain Hawley and Lieutenant Armitage sat still. They said nothing for there was nothing that they could say or do. The Japanese gave us instructions to pack up at once and to get into the truck waiting outside. Beyond the reference to another camp we hadn't a clue where we were going.

The next few minutes were quiet panic. I dismantled my battered mosquito net and my old canvas camp bed and rolled them up. Everything else went into my kitbag, with some clothing and smaller things in a big shoulder pack and a haversack. The firagments of fiimiture made and collected over such a long period were discarded in the space of a moment; the rickety table, the bamboo stool, the clothes line and hooks and shelves: they had all become useless. The only thing of interest now was survival.

While bustling about I had to do some very quick thinking, which is not always good thinking. Since we were now in very great danger the prospects for us were poor, if the initiative was left in the hands of the Japanese. I knew that there was a good chance of a firing squad or hanging party at the end of the road they would bring us down. I considered - if you can call such an impulsive decision considered - that if we were going to make a break for it and head northwards, up country towards the Burma Road, then we would be better off with a map than without one. I decided to carry it with me, wherever we were going. It was my talisman of certainty; it gave a sense of direction to the blind steps we were now taking.

I asked permission to use the latrine and walked back to the attap and bamboo shelter around the hole in the ground. In my shirt pocket I had my 'diary', notes on books and incidents since the fall of Singapore written in minute script on small pieces of toilet paper, and I thought about throwing it down the latrine; but it seemed a pity to lose it, and it was so harmless. I could not think straight. After peeing for the sake of appearances, I reached into the hollow bamboo in the back wall where I kept the map. It came out without difficulty, and with it a black scorpion, very irritated, darting and wriggling. I shook it to the ground from the folded edges of the paper and it lunged at nothing with its venomous tail. The black ones were more dangerous, I'd been told. I have often wondered what would have happened to me if I had been stung by that insect.

No one saw me retrieve the map, which I tucked into my shirt. When I returned to the hut I slipped it into a Royal Signals instrument mechanic's leather bag in which I kept the smaller items of my kit. The scruffy guards kept a little way off. Their lack of interest in us screwed the tension up even further. It was as though we were being called by some large and slovenly organization for a job interview.

The five of us boarded the truck and sat on our untidy heaps of baggage. Japanese guards came and sat very close to us; they made us understand that any attempt at escape would have fatal consequences. The truck banged into gear and pulled off.

POWs moaned and groaned about everything, all day and every day; probably the whole British Army complained endlessly. It was a way of getting through the boredom of warfare and the worse tedium of captivity. Our men were nevertheless very much aware that their officers did the best they could, and that officers often had to take real risks on their behalf in standing up to the Japanese camp administration, and of course they knew about the discovery of the radio. When something went wrong, and they knew that something had now obviously gone very wrong, the 'other ranks' closed firmly behind us and gave us unshakable support. All the prisoners in the vicinity of our hut waved us ofif. Some saluted raggedly; some saluted us magnificently. Most of them never saw us again.

We were driven quickly out past the guardroom, the hard wooden seats of the lorry jolting us around, and then to the right, along the main Kanburi road. Driving panic and tension seized me; you feel as you approach extreme danger a throbbing in the head and a heaviness in the limbs, the impulse to flight being held down by a weight you can't shift. We barely spoke to each other; we barely had time. After a mile we were driven through the entrance to the main camp at Kanburi, where they had taken Thew and Smith. This main camp held several hundred men and the Japanese military here were in charge of all the POW camps on the lower stretch of the railway.

The truck pulled up just inside the main camp entrance, near the guardroom. We were ordered down and our kit was dumped on the ground. They told us to sort it out, and we gathered our pitifully shabby belongings and took responsibility for every piece of baggage. After a long delay some Korean guards searched our kit, but there was now little left which would be of interest to even the most diligent searcher - except for one thing. The Korean who rummaged through my kit failed to find it.