by Eric Lomax
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 corners 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 friend, 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 from 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 alertness 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 dreadful proportions. The possibilities twisted off like threads into the future, each one more painful 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.
Early 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 fragments of furniture 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 wr
ong, the ‘other ranks’ closed firmly behind us and gave us unshakable support. All the prisoners in the vicinity of our hut waved us off. 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.
The guards conducted the five of us to the main guardroom where we were brusquely ordered to stand to attention, a few feet in front of the building and well away from any shade or protection from the sun. The guardroom was a flimsy three-sided wood and thatch structure, open in the front, with a table across the gap. A guard stood at attention on the side nearest the camp entrance; a few more were seated behind the table. Among them was a large, fat and rather elegantly-dressed white-haired man, who now proceeded to address us in fluent American English. He ordered us forward. His attitude was aggressive, sneering and hostile as he checked our identities, making contemptuous references to Western duplicity and cowardice throughout the short procedure.
He ordered us back into the sun. There we stood beside a long ditch, neatly spaced like five telegraph poles along a road. The time was ten o’clock in the morning.
The morning and afternoon dragged on, every minute almost an hour. When you are forced to stand stiffly to attention in a blazing hot sun you have nothing to do but think; yet thought is a process that should be directed by the will, and under extreme stress thoughts spin away on their own, racing faster and faster like a machine out of control, one that has lost the touch of a human hand.
There was nothing we could do about it now: we stood there, knowing it was coming. The wretched little guardroom was no bigger than a domestic living room, and the few guards sprawling inside it or on guard behind us controlled the lives of several hundred men. So few to hold so many.
We stood for twelve hours with our backs to that hut. The nerves and flesh of the back become terribly sensitive and vulnerable when turned to an enemy. At any moment I expected to feel a rifle-butt on my spine, a bayonet thrust between my shoulder-blades. All we heard was their talk, their occasional rough laughter.
The intense heat of the sun, the irritation of flies and mosquitos feeding on sweat, itching skin, the painful contraction of eyes against the light and even the fear of violent death had been superseded, by the evening, by the even more powerful sensation of a burning thirst. They gave us nothing to drink, all day, but they allowed us occasionally to go to the latrine. On one of these visits I regretfully disposed of my diary. The flimsy pages covered with neat notes on books, on grammar, on lists of collectible stamps fluttered into the stinking trench.
As dusk fell the five of us were moved into a closer and more compact group in front of the guardroom. The darkness came on with singular abruptness. We were lit by a weak light from behind us in the guardroom. A time signal was heard as a noisy party of Japanese and Koreans approached through the dark from the direction of the camp offices. They looked like NCOs, their uniforms dishevelled, one or two of them unsteady on their feet. All of them carried pick-helves. They stopped to talk to the guards, as though exchanging ideas about what to do with us.
Major Smith was called out in front of our line, and told to raise his arms right up over his head. His tall, gaunt figure, his thin arms held out like a scarecrow’s, looked terribly weak and pitiful. He stood there on the edge of the circle of light. I thought for a moment – a last gasp of hope – that this was the beginning of an advanced form of their endless standing to attention. A hefty Japanese sergeant moved into position, lifted his pick-handle, and delivered a blow across Smith’s back that would have laid out a bull. It knocked him down, but he was trodden on and kicked back into an upright position. The same guard hit him again, hard. All the thugs now set to in earnest. Soon little could be seen but the rise and fall of pick-helves above the heads of the group and there were sickening thuds as blows went home on the squirming, kicking body, periodically pulled back on to its feet only to be knocked down again. Bill Smith cried out repeatedly that he was fifty years of age, appealing for mercy, but to no avail. The group of attackers seemed to move in concert with their crawling, bloodied victim into the darkness beyond the range of the miserable lighting from the guardroom, but the noises of wood on flesh continued to reach us from the dark of the parade ground.
They were using pickaxe-shafts: like solid, British Army issue handles, and perhaps that is indeed what they were. The guards behind us did not move. There was no expectation that we ourselves would move, intervene, run away: merely the slack, contemptuous knowledge that we were trapped. That first blow: like a labourer getting into the rhythm of his job, then the others joining in, a confused percussive crescendo of slaps and thuds on flesh and bone. They kept kicking him, getting him up, putting him down – until he stopped moving altogether, unconscious or dead, I could not tell. Nor could I tell how long it all took. How does one measure such time? Blows had replaced the normal empty seconds of time passing, but I think it took about forty minutes to get him to lie still.
The gang came back out of the night. My special friend Morton Mackay was called forward. I was next in line. As they started on Mackay and the rain of fearful blows commenced I saw to the side another group of guards pushing a stumbling and shattered figure back towards the guardhouse. Smith was still alive; he was allowed to drop in a heap in the ditch beside the entrance.
Mackay went down roaring like a lion, only to be kicked up again; within a matter of minutes he was driven into the semi-darkness and out of the range of the lights, surrounded by the flailing pick-helves which rose and fell ceaselessly. I remember thinking that in the bad light they looked like the blades of a windmill, so relentless was their action. In due course Mackay’s body was dragged along and dumped beside Smith’s in the ditch.
The moments while I was waiting my turn were the worst of my life. The expectation is indescribable; a childhood story of Protestant martyrs watching friends die in agony on the rack flashed through my mind. To have to witness the torture of others and to see the preparations for the attack on one’s own body is a punishment in itself, especially when there is no escape. This experience is the beginning of a form of insanity.
Then me. It must have been about midnight. I took off my spectacles and my watch carefully, turned and laid them down on the table behind me in the guardroom. It was almost as if I was preparing to go into a swimming-pool, so careful was the gesture of folding them and laying them down. I must have had to take a couple of steps backward to perform this neat unconscious manoeuvre. None of the guards made a move or said a word. Perhaps they were too surprised.
I was called forward. I stood to attention. They stood facing me, breathing heavily. There was a pause. It seemed to drag on for minutes. Then I went down with a blow that shook every bone, and which released a sensation of scorching liquid pain which seared through my entire body. Sudden blows struck me all over. I felt myself plunging downwards into an abyss with tremendous flashes of solid light which burned and agonized. I could identify the per
iodic stamping of boots on the back of my head, crunching my face into the gravel; the crack of bones snapping; my teeth breaking; and my own involuntary attempts to respond to deep vicious kicks and to regain an upright position, only to be thrown to the ground once more.
At one point I realized that my hips were being damaged and I remember looking up and seeing the pick-helves coming down towards my hips, and putting my arms in the way to deflect the blows. This seemed only to focus the clubs on my arms and hands. I remember the actual blow that broke my wrist. It fell right across it, with a terrible pain of delicate bones being crushed. Yet the worst pain came from the pounding on my pelvic bones and the base of my spine. I think they tried to smash my hips. My whole trunk was brutally defined for me, like having my skeleton etched out in pain.
It went on and on. I could not measure the time it took. There are some things that you cannot measure in time, and this is one of them. Absurdly, the comparison that often comes to my mind is that torture was indeed like an awful job interview: it compresses time strangely, and at the end of it you cannot tell whether it has lasted five minutes or an hour.
I do know that I thought I was dying. I have never forgotten, from that moment onwards, crying out ‘Jesus’, crying out for help, the utter despair of helplessness. I rolled into a deep ditch of foul stagnant water which, in the second or two before consciousness was finally extinguished, flowed over me with the freshness of a pure and sweet spring.
I awoke and found myself standing on my feet. I do not recall crawling out of that ditch but the sun was already up. I was an erect mass of pain, of bloody contusions and damaged bones, the sun playing harshly on inflamed nerves. Smith and Slater were lying on the ground beside me, blackened, covered in blood and barely conscious. Mac and Knight were in a like state a few yards further away. We were only a few feet from the guardroom, close to the point where we had been standing the previous night. Slater was nearly naked; a pair of shorts and some torn clothing lay on the ground behind him, mud-stained and blood-stained.