The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  It was a good arrangement for the Japanese Army because they were relieved of the day to day problems of dealing with a large group of prisoners and it was a good deal for us because we had faith in the ability of Black Jack to obtain the best conditions for us at all times.

  Initially, the Japanese housed the Australians in Selarang Barracks, the British in Roberts Barracks alongside it, and the civilian women and children in Changi Gaol – until May 1944. By that stage the population of 50,000 which had been on the Changi peninsula had been reduced to about 5500. The Japanese then moved all the huts and reconstructed them around the Gaol, but they only occupied that area for about 15 months. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan was made the senior Australian commander after the Japanese removed all senior officers and moved them to their own camp in Formosa, believing they were having an undue influence on their troops.

  In those early stages, the situation in Changi was tolerable, as most units retained their identity and functioned through their chain of command. The only direct contact most POWs had with the Japanese was when they were needed for working parties, which began as daily events into Singapore and then expanded to detachments being moved there for longer periods of work. Immediately, the Diggers’ penchant for adaptation and resourcefulness emerged, as Stan Arneil recalled:

  We loaded tinned pineapple for Japan and each man ate pineapple until he could eat no more. Nothing was given to us but within almost no time at all the troops became accomplished thieves. In eating food the trick was to use our army Jack-knives to open tins, eat the food immediately and replace the tin in the box. There were countless thousands of empty tins which were sent to Japan from Singapore.

  Stan also noted some early differences in attitude between the Diggers and their British fellow prisoners:

  I remember watching with amazement as a small group of Englishmen washed from a tin bucket not much bigger than a tin hat. The English had been working on a resin cargo, a dirty job, and had simply taken off their singlets to wash from the bucket.

  Within a few feet of them Australians were standing stark naked under the showers enjoying every minute of the cold water. We found it hard to understand but we were apart from them and made no comments to them about this. They were a cheerful bunch and we had no wish to offend them.

  Early on, Frank Jackson recalled a warning from one of his senior officers, which proved prescient:

  I for one was amazed at his pessimism when he told us in no uncertain terms that we could forget any chance of relief from the allies and to dig hard and to grow vegetables to supplement our rations which in his opinion would shortly become inadequate. He also informed us at the same time that we would not see Australia again for some years at the very least. Needless to say the remarks were a great shock to us all, but in due course we just realised how close to the mark he was.

  During the working-party period, relations between captors and captives were at their most reasonable. Frank Jackson recalled an experience, remarkable in the light of the subsequent tribulations to which he was subjected, which occurred while his working party was on a mine-salvage patrol at the Mersing Mine:

  As this was our last evening in Endau, the meal was our final party in the area. We sat down to an excellent repast, each Australian being seated between two Japanese, with Lieutenant Karkawici taking the head of the table. Each of us, in his turn, was required to sing a national or a folk song, whilst several of our officers sang verses from their old school songs.

  Our host, who had been a student at Tokyo University and, incidentally, had played Rugby against a Sydney University team which visited Tokyo in 1934, sang his old house song in Latin. He also produced a bottle of ‘Black and White’ Scotch whiskey, labelled with the Union Jack overprinted over the label with ‘Britain Delivers The Goods’.

  After the meal, cigarettes and coffee were enjoyed by all, and an interesting demonstration of ju-jitsu was given by several of the guards. This was followed by a short bout by a couple of our budding pugilists. The evening was quite the most unusual of my POW existence. War was far from us. The usual atmosphere between captives and captors was replaced with that between hosts and guests.

  But this incident was unique, and the atmosphere quickly soured back in Changi as the Japanese stepped up their work demands of the prisoners while, at the same time, resorting to threats and bashings to achieve their aims.

  Shortly after, the Japanese announced that they planned to make a propaganda film on life in the camp. Frank Jackson was there:

  They made it known they wanted the boys to sing as they went through the gate. They boys refused and things began to get electric. When it appeared obvious that something had to be done one bright spark suggested that they sing the unprintable version of ‘Bless ’em All!’ The suggestion caught on like a bushfire. Shouldering their tools they marched through the gate bellowing this parody. If the Nip ever attempted to screen that – well! He never succeeded in humiliating or cowing them no matter what he did.

  In April, the Japanese ordered ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan and his British counterpart to provide 7000 workers to be sent to an unnamed destination. Although they had no idea at the time, these unfortunates were the men of ‘F Force’, who were part of those sent to build the infamous Burma–Thailand Railway. Their treatment was unparalleled for its barbarity in modern warfare.

  About 62,000 POWs worked on the railway. Of these 30,000 were British, 18,000 were Dutch and 13,000 were Australian, plus a little-known group of about 700 Americans. More than 200,000 forced Asian workers, who were originally promised high salaries and lured there by Japanese propaganda, were also ultimately made to join them. Stan’s diary records their arrival in Thailand:

  1st May 1943. Arrived at Temple Camp after a wicked night. Half the chaps have dysentery and stomach pains to say nothing of blistered feet and must be carried with their gear. Doug vomited all night and the effort of carrying his gear left me too exhausted to even talk this morning. We are right on the river and the Thais are trading here so instead of sleeping (I defy anybody to sleep during the day-time in Thailand) we bought some sago and had a swim. My boots are in a bad condition and I have to tie a piece of rubber beneath the sole of the boot.

  4th May 1943. Horrible march last night arrived exhausted at a big base camp to which the railway has penetrated. We met D Force who told us that they were transported here in trucks. We are exhausted and our bodies are crying for sleep. We move on again tonight. It is an effort for us to keep our eyes open.

  17th May 1943. Today we arrived at the Mecca of our dreams, Shimo Sonkurai the land of milk and honey, the end of the journey. We have travelled 190 miles and finished up in old bamboo, roofless huts and with a diminutive creek like a buffalo wallow in which 2000 men will eventually bathe, draw water for drinking and wash clothes.

  Soap is a thing of the past and food is fairly tight. The food consists of rice and a little onion and towgay gravy. No roofs on the huts and the heat is terrific.

  With F Force was another remarkable character from the 2/30th Battalion, the famous ‘Changi Photographer’, Private George Aspinall, a 26-year-old motor mechanic from the Riverina. In one of the most remarkable feats of the many accomplished by our Changi POWs, George Aspinall managed to take an extraordinary series of photographs with a cheap Kodak folding camera which he kept hidden in a belt around his waist with the camera in the small of his back. After his initial film supply ran out, he used cut-down X-ray film and developer from a disused X-ray machine at the camp hospital. His images provide the most vivid record of our Diggers’ horrific experiences and span the period from the surrender to near the end of the railway when, with no more film likely and ever-increasing searches, he broke up the camera and threw the pieces down a well. George Aspinall later wrote of Shimo Sonkurai (or No. 1 Camp):

  The camp commander Lieutenant Fukuda lined us all up and left us in no doubt as to intentions and our future. The railway would be built, he
said, and every available body would be used to build it. It didn’t matter about anybody’s life, Japanese or Australian. ‘If Australians have to die, if Japanese have to die, the line will be built.’

  Under the Geneva Convention, officers could not be forced to do manual labour. This led to some differences in the performance of some officers, as George Aspinall noted:

  Some of them took their badges of rank off and went out on work parties to take the place of sick men. But others stayed in camp all the time. One senior officer in particular was famous for sitting under his mosquito net and doing nothing. He lay back there issuing orders and making life difficult for his own officers, and for the rest of us. He’s dead now, but I won’t name him.

  It is a known fact that very few officers died on the Railway compared with the one-in-three death rate of the men. But most behaved well – even taking bashings from the Japanese for insisting that conditions be improved. All the doctors were magnificent. You won’t find any ex-prisoner-of-war who has anything but the highest praise for the way the medicos looked after us.

  The POWs’ lives soon revolved around food, or the lack of it. They found that necessity dictated that any kind of sustenance was better than nothing. George Aspinall wrote:

  Occasionally we would get cases of prawns, sent unrefrigerated of course. They would just be putrefied shells, eaten out by maggots. Our medicos said that if this mess was thoroughly boiled it could be eaten and would give us some protein. So that was made into what we called prawn soup. At least it gave the rice a prawny flavour … or more likely the boiled-up maggots provided the flavour, because they had been living on the prawns. We ate anything we could get our hands on, it didn’t matter how bad it tasted, as long as you could eat it.

  The Japanese had a peculiar attitude to our rations. We always had a number of men who were too sick to go out to work. So the Japanese would count the number of men not working and subtract that number from the issue of rice or vegetables or any foodstuff made available on that day. Their idea was that if a person was sick, he didn’t require food. So if there were fifty men sick on a particular day, we were fifty men’s rations down. That’s where our internal organisation took over. The cooks would be told how many men had to be fed and some people we called rice quality experts would look at a dixie or bucket of rice very closely and say, ‘There’s enough for three-quarters of a pint, or half a pint per man’, depending on how many had to be fed.

  The Diggers banded together for survival. Malnutrition, overwork, the punishments of the guards and the climate combined to batter the constitution of even the most robust into submission. Under these conditions, all privacy and any pretence vanished and men saw deep into each other’s hearts and lives, as Stan Arneil recalled:

  Thailand was a time when all artificiality disappeared and men saw themselves and others as they really were. It was a time of kindness to one another which would have to be seen to be believed but the circumstances engendered a mutual co-operation as a means of life preservation.

  Thailand was a bitter experience with almost no light patches. The dense bamboo jungle with its cruel thorns crowded us into the narrow strips on which we were working. The sun rarely ever shone during that wet season. I never heard a bird sing.

  It was in this grim daily fight for existence that Stan saw the differences in approach between the Diggers and their British counterparts begin to clearly emerge:

  The British, who comprised approximately half the force, were a happy go lucky lot who did not have the apparent determination either to live or to take preventative action to reduce disease. Whereas the Australians were fanatical in their efforts to prevent the blowflies contacting the rice and depositing the cholera germs, the British regarded such efforts as something of a joke. The Australians scrupulously collected each single grain of rice which may have dropped on the ground when the rice was issued and at meal times sterilized their dixies [food containers] in cauldrons of boiling water before receiving their rice. The British rarely bothered to sterilize their personal food containers and allowed rice dropped at meal issues to ferment on the ground providing breeding grounds for the cholera carrying blowflies. The British died at the rate of almost two to one of the Australians.

  The Railway cost more than 100,000 lives – around 245 lives for every kilometre. Some 10,549 POWs died during construction, most of their graves were found when the Allies searched along the railway afterwards. A further 2000 died in captivity during the two years following the completion of the Railway, predominantly from the illnesses and injuries from building it, even though life became much easier for them once the Railway was completed. Unbelievably, an estimated 90,000 Asians died building the Railway and most were not Thais. (Some reports claim Thais built the railway but Thailand had signed a pact with Japan granting them right of passage and the Japanese were anxious not to disturb the arrangement. Thais working on the Railway worked as contract labour and the Japanese rarely beat them because of their nebulous political alliance.)

  One of the main causes of death was cholera, which struck with devastating effect at Shimo Sonkurai. Once cholera took hold among the wasted bodies, it cut a deadly swathe through F Force. Those who contracted it were isolated from the main body of the men, placed in a special area which soon became known as ‘Cholera Hill’. For most, being moved there was a death sentence, and its inhabitants died with terrifying swiftness. George Aspinall saw it first-hand:

  Cholera is an awful business. A man can be dead within hours, as the body just hurls out all its fluid in violent explosions of vomiting and diarrhoea. A cholera patient can lose half his body weight in hours, and become totally unrecognisable, even to his friends.

  Stan Arneil recalls that the Last Post was being played so often at one stage that they decided to restrict it to once a week because of its impact on morale (during a period where half a dozen POWs were dying each day at Cholera Hill):

  26th May 1943. Do not consider me relishing the gloomy side of affairs, but since yesterday afternoon five chaps have died from cholera, three of them from our unit. The situation is going from bad to worse and fifteen chaps were admitted to the cholera tents this morning. I just saw a cove carried from one of the huts, grey of face and limp of body. The ground is becoming covered in slime where these have bogged or vomited.

  2nd June 1943. Six deaths in 24 hours, three admissions only. We may have the cholera beaten. Malaria now almost as the cholera was. Tip work party today of all the fit men. 240 men went to work, we marched in here 2000 strong.

  20th August 1943. Eight more dead. More rain, more mud. Rumours of the camp shifting on Sunday. Starting to get tinea and beri beri again. The former from the continuous wet feet and the latter from this awful diet.

  Later in that entry Stan again refers to the difference between the British soldiers and the Diggers:

  Nine out of ten people dying here are Englishmen, even though the Australians outnumber the Chums by three to one. They seem to give up the ghost without a fight at all. I cannot understand it at all because the spirit of the English at the start of the war was so brave.

  Even allowing for the natural ‘team’ bias that may have accompanied Stan’s view, it’s clear there was a difference in the way the Diggers and the Tommies dealt with their time in captivity. Many dispassionate sources have mentioned the way the Australians banded together and the positive impact that mateship had on their chances of survival. Stan’s proud boast was: ‘No Digger died on the Railway without his mates holding his hand.’ Years later, whenever he spoke in depth of his fellow POWs, manly tears welled in his eyes and he spoke of them with love and respect. He had no doubt that the mateship and love with which they cocooned each other was a major contributing factor to their subsequent survival. He saw this mutual protection as acting as a spiritual and psychological safety net, which allowed them to draw strength from each other so that those bending under the strain could be supported by others with greater resilience at that tim
e. They would repay the debt at some later stage, when the tables might have turned.

  3rd September 1943. Four years today! [since Stan joined up] In the last two days three of the finest chaps in our unit have died, Tucker, Hurry and Guy, all from A Coy. Malnutrition and cardiac beri beri is doing most of the killing now.

  I worry about the Englishmen under my care. They practically walk to the cremation pyre. They stop eating, lay down and refuse to live. It is incredible, instead of hanging grimly on to life with both hands they start to criticise their meals and that is the finish. Meals here, particularly breakfast is almost revolting but most of us regard it as a legitimate ticket home and religiously poke it down. I must get home.