The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  The POWs battled a deadly range of diseases and sickness which threatened their weakened constitutions, including beri-beri, malaria, dysentery, tinea and the constant scourge of tropical ulcers. George Aspinall worked as a medical orderly, helping in the medical huts on the Railway where doctors like Bruce Hunt heroically struggled to keep the ulcers under control:

  One of the methods used to treat them was to scoop out the bad flesh of the ulcer with a spoon sharpened on one side. It was desperation treatment really. The idea was to get back to the good flesh, in the hope that it would heal. I used to sharpen spoons for one of our surgeons, Major Bruce Hunt. I had a little honing stone, and would get hold of a solid tin spoon and sharpen the edge on one side, right around the handle. This sharp edge was used as a scalpel. Major Hunt became quite adept at using this spoon. He would cut by moving the spoon backwards and forwards, at the same time scooping out the bad flesh from the ulcer. It was an excruciatingly painful procedure, of course, and there were virtually no anaesthetics. I sometimes used to help to hold blokes down on the operating table while their ulcers were scraped, so I couldn’t help but see what was happening.

  As a last resort, if the horrible progress of the tropical ulcers could not be successfully arrested, the doctors were forced to amputate the affected limb, a terrible operation often witnessed by George Aspinall:

  I only know of one man who survived an amputation under these conditions. As far as I know he’s alive today, but most died from the shock of the operation. Even so, many of the ulcer sufferers would be begging the doctors to amputate their legs. Some of the bad cases had the shin-bone exposed. You could see their tendons clearly. Sometimes the bone would go black and start to break down and rot. Then the flies would get in and lay their eggs, and the maggots would actually be in there, feeding on the bone marrow. They would start to work up, all the way up the leg. It used to drive blokes off their heads with the pain.

  The doctors who tended to the desperate needs of the POWs have emerged as the often unsung heroes of the period. The great Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop is perhaps the best known of them, but many POWs speak of the West Australian Dr Bruce Hunt and Drs Albert Coates and Roy Mills in the same revered tones they reserve for Weary Dunlop.

  After he retired from his career as an engineer in the Australian Army, Colonel Terry Beaton became the curator of the Hellfire Pass Museum on the Railway. His work there inspired him to make a detailed study of the Railway and of its impact on those who were forced to build it:

  Dr Bruce Hunt saved countless lives at Shimo Sonkurai with F Force. When he arrived, 155 Australians had already died, mainly from cholera, and had been buried at the cemetery called ‘Cholera Hill’. He did something incredible: he got the Japs to stop work for two days to clean up Shimo Sonkurai. Everyone pitched in and they cleaned up the camp, dug new latrines, fly-proofed them and they had no new outbreaks of cholera in F Force.

  Even digging a grave was an overwhelming task for the severely weakened POWs, Terry Beaton says:

  The graves were about five metres long, by about a metre wide, by about 75 centimetres deep and you put up to five into each grave. The normal thing was to try to burn and cremate the remains but if you didn’t have timber for fires you had no other choice but to bury. Some POWs told the guards they’d make a funeral pyre and put their mate on but they didn’t have enough timber so when they knew the Japanese weren’t looking they’d build the funeral pyre over a grave and when the timber burned through he would fall into the grave and they would bury him, partially cremated, rather than leave him for the animals.

  Terry Beaton has calculated that, on the Railway, the Australian fatality rate was 18 per cent, the British about 22 per cent and the Dutch 16 per cent.

  The reason the Dutch had the lesser rate was that they came from the tropical climate (it was the Dutch East Indies) and many of them knew tropical medicine and which plants to use. On every working party they would come back with some greenery.

  Weary Dunlop worked on the Thai side of the Railway, Albert Coates was on the Burma side. Both did an incredible job. Albert Coates amputated 120 legs using a borrowed butcher’s meat saw because he had almost no instruments and the anaesthetic was often physically knocking the men out or putting some leather between their teeth to bite down on while their leg was sawn off.

  Even with tropical ulcers: four men would hold the victim down as the doctor scraped out the ulcer each day with a spoon to try to clean the wound, create blood flow and regenerate it. When that didn’t work, the last resort was to take the limb off.

  Terry Beaton discovered one of his relations, Frederick Michael Beaton, suffered that fate: ‘Albert Coates took off his leg but toxic shock and toxaemia took him.’

  All the while, under the brutal direction of Japanese engineers, the building of the Railway continued. In total, the POWs and the Asians who laboured with them built an astonishing 688 bridges (8 steel and concrete, 680 timber), a total of 14 kilometres of bridges alone, for a railway that extended about 400 kilometres through the jungles of Burma and Thailand. F Force started with about 7000 men. In nine months, 3096, or 44 per cent, died during the construction. Many more died in the following months from disease or the impact of their privations.

  Terry Beaton has created a magnificent tribute to those who gave their lives on the Railway. During his time as curator of the Hellfire Pass Museum, he painstakingly researched and drew a map of the Railway and all the camps and cemeteries along it. It shows the scale of the suffering and the sacrifice of those forced to build it:

  When you walk the Railway in many places the dry-stone rockwork that these men made is incredible. I am an engineer and, looking through dispassionate eyes, I have to take my hat off to the Japanese for their surveying skills and their ability to build a railway. And whether the POWs like it or not, it was an achievement to build the railway in seventeen months – but at a huge cost.

  The speed with which the Railway was built was all the more remarkable because previous British surveys had concluded it would take five years to build. In addition to the POWs, the Japanese used Malays and others, originally as volunteer paid labour. But where people wouldn’t volunteer the Japanese would go into a village saying they were going to put on a film night. The naive local Malays would turn up expecting a movie, and the Japanese would surround the gathering, drag out all able-bodied men, put them in trucks and send them to the Railway. They were originally told they’d be gone for three months. When they hadn’t returned after five and no money was forthcoming, not surprisingly the ‘volunteers’ dried up. That led to the press-ganging. More than 90,000 of these Asian peoples perished building the Railway because their Asian masters treated them far worse than even the POWs. They had to conform. In some areas they worked alongside the POWs and many believe they brought in the cholera. When that was suspected the Japanese shot them, threw them into rice sacks and into the river, thus spreading the disease down to the lower camps.

  Both POWs and Asian workers suffered from the physical cruelty of their captors, as George Aspinall attested:

  There was a lot of corporal punishment. A senior officer would slap or belt a junior officer. That officer would bash a sergeant who would bash a three-star private and on to the lowliest private. He would take it out on a Korean guard who would then bash the prisoners-of-war! We were the last cab off the rank in status although the poor Asians used as forced labour were even worse off than we were. They died in tens of thousands on the Railway. At least we had our military discipline. They had nothing.

  Terry Beaton analysed the causes of death on the Railway and concluded the vast majority seemed to have died from dysentery:

  But what was the main cause of death? Really it was malnutrition. The fact that they had a poor, small diet meant they didn’t have the natural ability to resist infection. So when these diseases came along and most prisoners would have multiple diseases – malaria combined with dysentery and beri-beri, etc. It was rea
lly a guess as to which killed them but really it’s likely to be the dysentery.

  Outsiders have asked the POWs why they built the Railway so well. The POWs have always maintained they built it to the minimum standards the Japanese would accept: anything less and they would make them tear it down and start again and would punish them mercilessly. To save their lives, they simply built it to the minimum standards they could get away with and that depended largely on the standard of the guards and engineers at any time. ‘They could only be concerned with their survivability and their five-kilometre section of the railway,’ Terry Beaton says.

  Most lost their lives on the Railway from May to September 1943, when the Japanese High Command cut three months off the completion date – from 18 to 15 months. This was the infamous ‘speedo’ period, and it occurred during the wet season. The men went from working a normal day, from 8 am to 5 pm, to working 16 hours a day for 100 days with sometimes a Sunday off. No wonder, as the rain and the constant damp combined with cholera, they dropped like flies.

  As the Railway neared completion, the Japanese started moving men through from Burma, the sickest first, then the less sick, until all the POWs were actually brought into Thailand where they went into one of three ‘fattening camps’. There they were given improved food and the fitter men were put on rust-bucket ships and sent to Japan to work in the coal and copper mines and factories. From 1942 to 1945 more than 30 ships were used by the Japanese to transport about 30,000 POWs to various locations. Ironically, 15 of those ships were sunk by Allied action – including two that were carrying 1500 prisoners who had survived the Railway which were sunk by the USS Pamponito. The US ship went back, searching for what they thought would be Japanese survivors, and found Australian and British POWs. Just 177 were rescued out of the group. The others perished.

  Sadly, of a total of around 15,000 POWs sent by sea, only 5000 made it safely. Some 10,000 were lost to friendly fire.

  Back in Changi, life was more tolerable and the POWs had some degree of control over their lives. Here, they drew on their spread of individual skills and their collective powers of ingenuity to do what they could to improve their situation. They established a ‘limb factory’, which made artificial limbs for their amputee mates. The factory also repaired their precious surgical instruments. A ‘rubber factory’ extracted latex from local rubber trees to make sandals, to repair clothes and even to make dental plates. Some POWs used lightning conductor wire to make nails to repair boots, and others repaired clothes by building machines to unravel old socks to create cotton thread. Grass extract was used as a remedy for vitamin deficiencies.

  At Changi, the POWs fell back on discipline to avoid idle minds. They organised an extensive variety of study courses, concerts and sports. Laurens van der Post noticed that the Diggers’ attitude to these courses also set them apart:

  And their intellectual curiosity, love of learning and discussion, which sometimes would continue long into the day and night as a private argument in the barracks, was endless and, for me, one of the most marked and endearing characteristics of the Australian soldier.

  But one of the most difficult hurdles faced by the POWs was the isolation: from the war, the outside world and particularly from their families. As this entry from Stan’s diary shows, mail from home arrived sporadically, if at all:

  18th April 1944. Twenty bags of mail at the gaol, almost double the last quantity and all Australian. We have not obtained permission to sort it but that should come any time and then, if my luck holds, I may receive a letter from Ruby. The latest date of the mail is September ’43 which would be now thirteen months older than I have received up to date.

  The POW experience brought out the best in most and the worst in some. Many used the experience positively, reasoning that if they could survive it, they could survive anything that life was going to throw at them. Terry Beaton interviewed many ex-POWs:

  It wasn’t just the Railway but also afterwards. Some went into conditions in Japan and were looked after very well by the Japanese people in their area. Others, one I know of, received more beatings in Japan. A lot of the beatings were issued by Korean guards, who were the most brutal. The POWs will say that while they were captured and held by regular troops, there was very little animosity and very few beatings. But when they were handed over to the POW branches, the Japanese became more brutal but the majority of the severe beatings they had came from the Korean guards when they arrived on the Railway. Many accounts of the Japanese absolutely laying into the Korean guard who lost face and would then lay into the Australian who had caused the problem in the first place.

  While mateship was crucial in the survival of the Diggers, an equally important factor was luck. For a start, you had to be lucky in the group into which you were placed. For example, Weary Dunlop’s group on F Force lost perhaps 10 to 20 per cent while another group lost 200 of 600. Again, one group was kicked off the train and forced-marched to their camp – 20 kilometres a day for two weeks and three days until they made 295 kilometres and then put straight to work. Another group was sent by truck. The British camp at Sonkerai had cholera and huge losses; another camp had almost no cholera.

  But perhaps the POWs’ greatest luck came when the Japanese finally surrendered. Originally, all internees were to be exterminated if the unthinkable happened and the Japanese were defeated. But because it was Hirohito, the God-Emperor himself, who announced unconditional surrender, the blind obedience of the guards saved the POWs. The Japanese people had never even heard the Emperor’s voice before.

  When General Blamey accepted the surrender at Morotai on 9 September 1945 from Lieutenant General Teshima, the commander of the Second Japanese Army, he said:

  In receiving your surrender I do not recognise you as an honourable and gallant foe, but you will be treated with due but severe courtesy in all matters.

  I recall the treacherous attack upon our ally, China in 1938. I recall the treacherous attack made upon the British Empire and upon the United States of America in December 1941, at a time when your authorities were making the pretence of ensuring peace.

  I recall the atrocities inflicted upon the persons of our nationals as prisoners of war and internees, designed to reduce them by punishment and starvation to slavery.

  In the light of these evils, I will enforce most rigorously all orders issued to you, so let there be no delay or hesitation in their fulfilment at your peril.

  So how did those shadows of Diggers who remained alive survive their unspeakable ordeals? Overall, it was a combination of mateship and willpower. Their determination to never give in was critical. An indomitable spirit sustained them individually and as a group. And, while they looked after each other, they had a low tolerance for those among them who failed to pull their weight or who only thought of themselves. Terry Beaton has explored the subject:

  There was a term on the Railway, ‘White Nips’ – either someone who collaborated or those who were ‘Jap happy’, meaning those who tried it on for their own survivability or conning their way out of work or taking advantage of their privileges, which made it easier for them but harder for their mates. But today the survivors will never ‘dob’ on their mates, even when they go through obvious turmoil in the decision.

  George Aspinall agreed:

  I think we survived because we were determined that we were going to get home and that we could put up with anything the Japs threw at us, no matter how hard or tough it was, in order to get home. Everyone helped each other as much as he could, and that was one of the things that got most of us through. There were one or two cases of men behaving selfishly, like trying to get more food than the others, but these incidents were rare. If something like that did happen, the individual concerned would be singled out and given a quiet talking-to by one of us – not necessarily an officer or NCO. He’d be told to pull himself into line or he’d get a belting from his own people. But that wasn’t necessary very often. Most did the right thing, and that’s how we
kept together and survived.

  Stan Arneil turned his suffering into a positive force:

  Those terrible years though were good to me; they taught me of values which are not usual in civilian life. The co-operative principle of sharing good things and bad together, of respect and love for one another, despite differences in (pre-war) social scale, are attitudes which shaped my life.

  I do not personally regret having been a prisoner of war, perhaps it was a privilege, but the years will not ever go away and a memory trigger, such as the death of a former comrade, recalls incidents so vividly.

  I can still feel the blazing heat on the ‘drome’ or the sweat running from my body as we worked in the foetid heat of the tunnels of Johore.

  I can feel the biting cold of the rain in Thailand pelting ceaselessly on to our near naked bodies and I will never forget the sinking feeling of hearing the dreaded cry of ‘Currah! Currah! Speedo! Speedo!’