Larrikins in Khaki

by Tim Bowden

  During the day the airless steel wagons were intensely hot, but at night they cooled quickly and the fleshless men had the unusual experience of feeling cold. The food they had taken with them was rancid within a few hours of leaving Singapore and little was issued on the way. One section of F Force went 40 hours without a meal. When food appeared it was likely to be a bucket of rice swarming with flies. Excretion was as difficult as ingestion.

  ‘There were no toilet facilities whatsoever,’ said Stan Arneil. ‘Now you may not believe it in these modern days, but the average Australian is a very modest person. So without toilet facilities they had to be held out from the side of the steel wagons.’

  Two of the stronger men braced themselves and took an arm each while the straining operator prayed that he would not be paraded past a platform of the bewildered Thais or whipped by branches. Most prisoners waited in hope for a moment of greater comfort, as Don Moore explained:

  As soon as the train would stop, they’d come out and all you’d see were thousands of bare bottoms as they’d go down. Then there’d be a blast on the whistle and some fellows used to shout out mockingly, ‘Cut it short! Cut it short!’ They’d come back pulling up their trousers and attending to what hygienic arrangements they could while racing for the train. I felt sure that some would be left behind. God knows what would have happened to them.

  A little later the 7000 men of F Force, made up equally of British and Australian prisoners, left Bampong on a horrific forced march. The prisoners on the last train had no chance to rest before the guards were shouting orders, and as the men milled in confusion, the shouting turned to hysterical screaming. Exhausted men were slapped and kicked into conformity. The march began at 10.30 pm. Stan Arneil recalled:

  We marched for 190 miles. The first night wasn’t too bad, it was on a sealed road. The Thais were like scavengers buying things from us, and we were so exhausted we were selling everything we had, jumpers or anything like that, for a fraction of their worth. We marched all night and lay down like dogs in the morning alongside the river. We went into the river and out again. But, of course, the heat was well over 100 degrees and without shade there was very little possibility of sleeping. That went on night after night.

  They marched at night, but heavy rain turned the track into slippery mud. ‘It was a waning moon which meant that we finished up in pitch black most of the night,’ Arneil said. ‘I don’t know how the guards found the way. The sandflies almost bit us to death. Men cut their hair off to keep them away, and most of us carried a piece of smoking bamboo and waved it around our heads with little effect.’

  At some of the daytime camps there was no shelter and shade, and the men just lay on the open ground. At Wampo an Australian officer attempting to buy additional food approached a Thai woman, who found some sago and moistened it with her own breast milk. For F Force the march ended in May 1943 at Songkurai, close to the Burmese border.

  By mid 1943, 12,000 Australian prisoners of war were scattered through camps in Thailand and Burma. They were just part of the 61,000 Allied prisoners and 250,000 Asian labourers in the workforce that built the Thai–Burma Railway. The Japanese had undertaken a massive engineering task and almost the only energy they would use to clear, dig, bridge, ballast and lay tracks was human. The only incentive for the humans was that they would suffer more if they didn’t work. The first task for many of the prisoners was to build their own camps. The fortunate ones found tents and atap thatched huts to house some of them; the rest started with a clearing in the jungle and their camp was what they could make of it.

  Men worked in gangs. On the railway embankment some prisoners would be using a chunkel, the large Asian hoe, or a shovel; another group would have wicker baskets or stretchers made of rice bags slung between two bamboo poles to carry the freshly dug earth; and a third gang would be levelling the soil when it was dumped on the pegged line of the railway. Creeks were bridged with tiers of sleepers laid in pairs across each other—effectively giant matchstick mazes of wood. Prisoners who prided themselves on their own capacity for hard work and ingenuity were constantly surprised at what the Japanese aimed to accomplish with little more than sweat, hand tools and materials found on the site. According to Hugh Clarke:

  The men could not believe the Japanese engineer when he told us they were going to dig and dynamite their way through the cutting which became known as Hellfire Pass. It was to be over 500 yards long and 25 yards deep. Before explosives could be used, the hammer and tap men had to drill into the rock, one man holding the drill and twisting it after each blow and the other man swinging the heavy sledge hammer. The hammer man could rest briefly while his partner scooped shattered rock dust from the drill hole with a piece of hooked metal.

  Donald Stuart, who had learned a bit about hard rock mining on his travels in Western Australia, deplored the waste of human energy but admired what could be achieved with primitive machinery.

  I’ve seen them when they were short of dynamite, fill the drill hole with water, drive wooden rods into it, and leave it overnight. If you’ve got enough of the rods and they’re close enough together, the swelling of the wood will bust the rock a bit. Then you get in with blunt picks and crowbars that bend like sticks of solder, and you niggle and you gouge. And gradually we got those damn cuttings through.

  In Burma the men of A Force began pushing the railway south-east from Thanbyuzayat. At some of the early camps the Japanese exhorted the men to work with signs: WORK CHEERFUL AND WORK DILIGENT. At first the daily work targets weren’t excessive, Arthur Bancroft said:

  We fell for the three-card trick fairly early in the piece. The Jap said, ‘You have one cubic metre of sand to dig and when you finish that you can go back to camp.’ Some of the energetic ones thought, ‘This is good, let’s get rid of the sand and we’ll be back at camp by noon.’ And, of course, it was a piece of cake. Our officers were saying, ‘Don’t go rushing into this because they’ll only give you more to do.’ And that’s exactly what they did. They just added and added and added. Eventually they got to the stage of keeping us out all night!

  Basically the Japanese didn’t care how many workers died, providing the railway was built. This was not efficient. To this day, no one knows how many Asian workers died, because unlike the prisoners of war, they had no organisation. The figure is generally thought to be in excess of 350,000, but with no marked graves it could be more. The prisoners of war were starved not only of food, but of basic medicines. Had they been better fed and given simple vitamins, not only fewer would have died, but the railway would have been built more efficiently and quickly. They did at least have competent doctors who did marvels with very little, even amputating gangrenous limbs, and handy POWs even managed to make some primitive artificial limbs. The Australian doctors also improvised tubing for saline drips to treat cholera patients, and saved many lives. The Asian workers had no chance.

  Just when the POWs thought that life on the Thai–Burma Railway could not get any worse, they were due for a shock.

  Early in 1943 the Japanese were becoming increasingly worried about the vulnerability of their army in Burma. After a review of the Burma area army’s position, Imperial General Headquarters decided that their troops could not survive if they waited to be attacked—the Japanese in Burma must go on the offensive against the British poised on the northern border. In 1943 the Burma front was one of the few places where the Japanese could still hope to advance. But the success of the Japanese offensive depended on the Burma area army being reinforced and better equipped in time to campaign in the coming dry season. The overland supply route, the Thai–Burma Railway, would have to be completed ahead of time. The tactical decisions taken by the Japanese had profound effects on the Allied prisoners of war and the Asian labourers who were the tools of Japanese policy. If the railway were to be built more quickly, then the prisoners and labourers would have to work harder and longer, wet or dry, sick or well, fed or starved. It was true that the Japanese had some
elephants but, as one prisoner observed, the elephants were better than men in demonstrating that if they didn’t eat, they didn’t work.

  The difficulties of the prisoners had already increased when the wet season set in. The sky was a massive cloud sitting at bamboo top. The rain came as a waterfall. Kevin Fagan remembered it as continuous, penetrating everything, squelching underfoot and rattling down the back of his neck. Hugh Clarke recollected:

  The ground turned to mud, your clothes rotted away, your boots, if you had any boots at that stage, rotted off. The six-foot latrine pits which we had dug filled up with water and in no time the whole camp area was crawling with maggots. In the cemetery the graves filled up with water and the bodies came to the top. But none of this affected the progress of the railway. You were just living in a watery world, and after a while it didn’t occur to you that there was anything unusual about it being wet all time.

  The wet further disrupted the ration supplies—trucks bogged, the barge traffic was disrupted by floods, and even the carts were down to their axles in the mud.

  One hope had persisted among the prisoners—the monsoon would eventually force the Japanese to suspend work. In fact, with the rain came the demand that the railway be built with greater urgency.

  Ray Parkin recalled that a Japanese officer transmitted the instructions of the Imperial General Headquarters in stark terms:

  He gave a long speech and said we were doing a good job and the railway was progressing, but the railway must be completed—‘Nippon very sorry, many men must die.’ Well, that began at least 150 days without a day off. These days of feverish haste were known as the ‘speedo’—it came to be called that because the Japanese were always calling ‘speedo, speedo’ when they were hurrying us up.

  Ray was in both Hintok and Kinsayok camps on the railway:

  A split bamboo has an edge like a razor blade, and when it gets in the mud and you walk and you slip, you get slices in your feet. There’s nothing you can do about it, you just get absolutely fed up. This is when you’re at your most vulnerable, both physically and mentally, and you wince at everything. Then you just go on and on, 150 days without a let up. During that period was just a matter of getting out of the job and getting back, and getting out and getting back, that was all. You went, and then you flopped on your bunk at night. I was in a tent at one stage with 22 others, and I couldn’t have told you the names of three other people living there. We were like zombies, although on the job we were conversing and all the rest of it, but we were single-minded in just getting backwards and forwards. We were wrapped up in sheer survival.

  The Japanese engineers and guards, under great pressure themselves, tolerated no excuses for being absent from work, even if their workers’ bodies were grotesquely swollen with ‘wet’ beriberi. Stan Arneil said:

  If they wanted 200 men they had to have 200 men. The guards would deliver 200 men even if perhaps 30 of them might be on the backs of their mates. In the rain. So when we got there, if the beriberi was excessive, you might have to leave some of them on their backs with their feet up against the side of the embankment to keep the fluid flowing down through their legs into their bodies so their legs wouldn’t burst. They couldn’t work at all. We’d feed them at lunchtime when we had a break. They were looked after, hats placed over their faces to keep the rain out, and they were talked and joked to. They understood the position. We would carry them back at night. Usually one would die during the day.

  I remember a chap called ‘Butcher’ Smith. He was lying there like a hippopotamus. His testicles were so large they were just a little bigger than a normal soccer ball. My mate Doug Blanchard used to hold them in his hands and lift them up so we could turn Butcher Smith to wash and wipe him. He had no neck, just a head sitting on shoulders. He died—they all died with that type of thing.

  Prisoners no longer hoped for a ‘smoko’ and a man who asked to go to the toilet might be bashed. It was nothing, Hugh Clarke remembered, to be hit on the head with a drill-bit or whatever the guard had handy. Major Reg Newton calculated that 68 men were battered to death in the cutting of Hellfire Pass alone.

  Life was cheap in the cutting. Clarry McCulloch, who had become a prisoner of war after being off-loaded in Java with ‘Blackforce’ instead of returning to Australia on the liner Orcades, had survived combat in the desert war in Lebanon. But he came closest to death in Hellfire Pass:

  We had formed a human chain, passing the rocks hand-to-hand up the side of the cutting, but just above me was a man who had developed malaria and was really sick. Suddenly, from sheer weakness, he dropped a rock which rolled down and nearly injured the bloke further down. Our Korean guard at the time, a particularly noxious type we called ‘The Crow’ because of his constant harsh shouts, came rushing over and started to belabour the unfortunate sick prisoner, who by now was lying on the ground.

  I had heard the expression about someone seeing red, but up to that time had never experienced it. Suddenly what looked like a red mist came over my eyes and I raised the rock which I was holding with the full intention of killing the guard. Fortunately my mates saw what was happening and grabbed me and held me until the mist cleared. I was absolutely shaking with anger. It was very lucky for me that the guard was so intent on bashing the sick boy that he did not see me. Killing a guard would have earned me certain execution.

  The prisoners, although numbed and exhausted, were still able to later recall a vivid picture of digging the cutting. Hugh Clarke wrote this description:

  It looked like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. The Japs decided we would work 24 hours a day, two shifts. One was the day shift and one was the night shift. Lighting became a problem but they are pretty resourceful people, and there was plenty of bamboo, so they formed a light party. Its job was to keep the fires burning all night. In addition to the bamboo fires which threw a fair bit of light, there were some bamboo containers with hessian wicks and a bit of dieseline and there were a few carbide lights. If you stood on top of the cutting you could see the burning fires at intervals of about 20 feet, you’d see the shadows of the Japanese with their Foreign Legion–style peaked caps moving around with their sticks belting men. We still had our slouch hats so you could distinguish the prisoners by being naked under the slouch hats, moving rocks around, hammering and clearing. There was shouting and bellowing. This went on all night.

  In its way, Adrian Curlewis said, it was a magnificent sight. ‘The flaring fires, the movement and the noise combining in an intensely dramatic scene confined by the blackness of the surrounding jungle.’

  Donald Stuart claimed, ‘Dante knew less about Infernos than we did. We could have given him lessons.’

  The reason why most men died is simple—they starved. The greatest atrocity committed by the Japanese against the prisoners was that they did not feed them. The Australian army ration of 1941 had given the men a daily intake of 4220 calories each—they could survive and do some work on 3000. In Changi they were getting just over 2000 calories and at that level they had been losing weight and suffering from deficiency diseases. In the railway camps, the few grams of rice, watery vegetable stew and infrequent flavouring instead of meat and fish was often giving them less nourishment than they got in Changi. This diet could not sustain men who were being forced to work at maximum effort. They were vulnerable to diseases that would not have killed, and perhaps not have afflicted, the prisoners had they been better fed.

  F Force, at the Three Pagodas Pass on the Burmese border, for some strange administrative reason, had their food supplied from Singapore. You can imagine the condition of cartons of unrefrigerated prawns after three weeks in the tropical heat. The medicos recommended that the men eat the boiled ‘prawn soup’ anyway with their rice, reasoning that the maggots would at least provide extra protein.

  Nearly all the men had amoebic or bacillary dysentery, or both. Some had contracted it before they left Changi, and they were to have it in varying degrees of intensity throughout their impris
onment—some all their lives! Dysentery was enervating and demoralising. Men were attempting to stumble to muddy pit latrines twenty times in one night. Nearly all prisoners had malaria. One of the medical officers, Dr Albert Coates, was later to say at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial that 95 per cent of the men in Burma suffered from malaria. Dr Rowley Richards, who was with A Force, observed the lethal effect of diseases in combination. A prisoner with malaria would go through the cycle of high temperature, sweating and shivering, and then while his resistance was lowered the dysentery would intensify.

  At times the doctors only had crushed charcoal in water to offer patients dying of dysentery when they knew that a little emetine would have saved them. The doctors were always searching at the margins of their professional experience, recalling lectures on the history of surgery so they could resurrect the techniques used before the equipment and drugs of the 1940s became became available, and pooling what they knew of the afflictions of poverty stricken and congested populations in the tropics.

  One form of insidious malnutrition worried the doctors. It was caused by a lack of niacin, one of the vitamin B group. Dr Rowley Richards said:

  We remembered from our textbooks that pellagra was something which occurred in some deprived areas where they had famine on a yearly basis. The first year was characterised by skin rashes on the face, legs, and on the scrotum. Next year the condition would manifest itself as diarrhoea. The third year as dementia, proceeding death. When we had a few cases of dementia we were facing the incredible prospect of half the men going mad. In addition to the pellagra problem we also had cerebral malaria which gave people hallucinations. It was a frightening concept.