by Damien Lewis
At places the river appeared almost to disappear entirely into the earth, only to gush forth again like a giant geyser farther downstream. At one stage a dark, bat-infested cave led off from the river valley some four kilometers into the stony heart of the mountains. At first it seemingly offered the Dutch engineers the promise of a route to push the railway through the worst of the terrain, only for all further progress to be blocked by a massive underground lake.
W. Ijzerman, the Dutch engineer leading the perilous expedition, never had a chance to see the fruits of his labors realized. He was standing in shallow water in the Kuantan with his measuring instrument in hand, when all of a sudden the sand beneath his feet gave way and he was sucked into a swirling subterranean abyss. His body was never found.
Subsequent surveys confirmed that the route Ijzerman had pioneered—from the riverside town of Pakan Baroe southwest to Moera via the Kuantan gorge—did offer the possibility of driving a railway through this daunting terrain. But still the Dutch government balked at the prospect: it would prove staggeringly expensive, there was no guarantee of success, and the railway would have to penetrate an area largely uninhabited by man but rife with wild animals and diseases like malaria and typhoid. Such an undertaking would very likely prove costly in human lives, and so the project was abandoned before it ever really got up a head of steam.
For the Japanese in 1944, however, there were to be no such limitations, blessed as they were with thousands of Allied POWs making up a free—and wholly dispensable—labor force. As the fortunes of the war began to turn inexorably against Imperial Japan, she was in ever more desperate need of natural resources. In particular, the Japanese motherland was bereft of reserves of raw energy, and many of the older ships feeding her war machine were coal-fired.
The untapped coalfields of the central Sumatran highlands were capable of producing 500,000 tons of the finest black gold a year. So it was that the Japanese, in extremis, resurrected the long-abandoned colonial Dutch railway project. Their aim was to open up a rail and river route into the Sumatran highlands so the rich coal reserves could be dug out of the ground and shipped east to fuel their ships, first in Singapore and then to all corners of the Japanese conquests.
By far the largest contingent of forced—slave—labor earmarked for the railroad were locals, the so-called romushas. Romusha is the Japanese word for “laborer,” and tens of thousands were forced to work on the railway at the end of the barrel of a gun. But on Friday May 19, 1944, the first contingent of Allied POWs arrived in Pakan Baroe to join the romushas driving the iron rails into the jungle. Frank Williams, Les Searle, Jock Devani, Judy of Sussex, and their fellows from the SS Van Waerwijck shipwreck were only a few weeks behind them.
The SS Van Waerwijck survivors reentered Sumatra on July 27, 1944, following a route that all but mirrored many of the prisoners’ first forays into this harsh but beautiful land. The main difference was this: now their journey’s end would be the remote settlement of Pakan Baroe, surrounded on all sides by a seemingly endless expanse of swampy, malaria-infested jungle—as opposed to potential escape via an Allied ship from the port city of Padang on the coast.
Upon arrival at Pakan Baroe, the Van Waerwijck survivors were met by the Japanese camp commandant, Lieutenant Miura, who informed them of their fate. To that point they’d been led to believe they were being sent to work on a fruit plantation. Lieutenant Miura rapidly dispelled all such misapprehensions. The prisoners were to have the “honor” of building a railway line for the emperor of Japan. When finished, they would all receive a medal from the emperor for their efforts.
From the muttered comments of those gathered to hear the lieutenant speak, it was clear where they felt the emperor could stick his medal. Luckily, neither Lieutenant Miura nor his fellow officers understood enough English to catch the under-the-breath remarks. The Japanese—and Koreans—in charge of the railway construction were experienced in such work, most coming directly from the infamous Thai–Burma railroad. They’d grown accustomed to seeing thousands of Allied POWs worked to their graves.
Peter Hartley had made it to Pakan Baroe, and before leaving River Valley Road Camp the Japanese guards had procured for him an English Bible. It was darkly fortuitous, for now more than ever before the make-do padre would need it, as he was called upon to officiate over the burial of the dead in droves.
The Van Waerwijck survivors were placed temporarily in Camp 2, about five kilometers along the route of the proposed railroad. Camp 2 was supposedly the hospital camp, but it would soon become known as the Death Camp. There they fell under the leadership of Wing Commander Patrick Slaney Davis, himself only recently arrived in Sumatra from the prison camps of neighboring Java.
The Japanese had appointed Wing Commander Davis as the Allied commander responsible for all POWs laboring on the railway. Tall, emaciated, and with dark rings around his sunken eyes, he would forge for himself a somewhat conflicted reputation. While some of the POWs saw him as distant and aloof, he would earn unsurpassed renown for his fearlessness in the face of Japanese brutality and for his courageous and wily negotiations to manipulate and compel the enemy on behalf of his human charges.
But the task facing this twenty-eight-year-old RAF officer was a nearly impossible one. Wing Commander Davis would have thousands of Allied POWs under his purview, spread across a 220-kilometer stretch of railway traversing horrendous terrain that was served by as many as seventeen separate camps along its length. Out in the far jungle, where the word of the sadistic and brutal guards would be law, there was precious little the wing commander could do to protect his POWs.
After resting up in Camp 2 for just long enough to prove they were—in the eyes of the camp guards—fit, the shipwreck survivors were sent down the line into the jungle. Their destination was Camp 4, at Tera Takboeloeh, some twenty-five kilometers along the route of the still barely nascent railway.
The Japanese had fitted an old diesel truck with steel railway wheels for shuttling prisoners to and from the camps. As the truck chugged its way along a perilously thin knife cut slashed through the jungle, towing two railcars in its wake, the atmosphere among the prisoners was at its darkest. Like many of his fellows, Les Searle sensed that their fortunes had reached their very nadir.
All had heard stories of the terrible privations and degradations of the Thai–Burma railroad. There was every reason to fear that this would be as bad and possibly worse. Les Searle was sure that ahead of them, to paraphrase Churchill, lay only blood, sweat, and tears, but here they would be shed not to defend Britain from Nazi domination but to further the war effort of the hated Japanese. To be used as slave labor of the most expendable kind and all to fuel the enemy war machine—what fate could be less enticing?
As the converted truck motored down the line, Judy and her fellows felt utterly forgotten—lost men in a lost world. Most had accepted that their chances of survival were at best slim. Perhaps the most awful thing of all was that to the outside world they were already dead. They’d received not a postcard or letter from Britain, and the few official cards that the Japanese had handed out for them to write home had been burned on the camp fire. As they were sucked into this wilderness without end, a place utterly lost in time, the sense of being dead to the world was all-consuming.
Yet in the midst of this truckload of the damned sat an emblematic figure—the erect and apparently undaunted figure of Judy. Dogs have long been bred to embody particular traits, one of the most important of which is to be man’s best friend. Their faithful companionship is a quality that we value in them possibly above all others. Over the millennia they have become extraordinarily well attuned to human emotions. In that cursed rail truck rumbling through the wet, rotting heat and the suffocating riot of vegetation, Judy’s companions could sense that she knew how they were feeling.
Her gaze fell upon them, and it was full of a gentle warmth and empathy. One look from her long-suffering but caring eyes spoke volumes. It spoke of compassion a
nd understanding. More than that, there was something in her panting, open-mouthed smile that was utterly maternal and reassuring. It was if she was saying, I know how you’re feeling, but trust me—we’re going to be fine. Judy’s very presence among them, plus her indomitable spirit, gave these men the strength to face whatever lay ahead with shoulders just a little more squared.
Of course, Judy would be sharing the same fate as they, and indeed her chances of survival were arguably less than those of her fellow human prisoners. In the eyes of the railway guards she was a much-loathed but entirely edible dog. And as unspeakable brutality was unleashed upon her fellow companions she would feel compelled more than ever to protect them, which in turn would incur the guards’ savagery and ire as never before.
That first night in Camp 4 provided a searing indication of things to come. Les Searle, Frank Williams, Jock Devani, Peter Hartley: each was allotted a slice of hard wooden shelf eighteen inches wide as his new home. POW 81A-Medan got nothing, but she was happy enough to curl up at Frank’s feet, content in the knowledge that she was still—miraculously—with the one she loved the most, plus their fellows. By the crude light of a homemade lantern—a scrap of rag floating in a can of coconut oil—the appalling state of the hut in which they were billeted was clear to see.
Wall and roof were made of nothing more substantial than palm leaves bound to rough bamboo poles. Under the sleeping platforms tropical weeds reached out their hungry fingers, and the interior of the hut was thick with the voracious insect life that infested the jungle. A swarm of biting, bloodsucking flying things circled around the light, unidentified critters peeling off to left and right to attack one or another of the hut’s human occupants. And from the jungle on every side the rhythmic preep-preep-preep of the insect chorus rang out deafeningly. Who could ever manage to sleep through all of this?
The air in the hut was thick with the stench of damp, waterlogged wood and rotting vegetation, to which was soon added the stink of unwashed sweat and sleepless fear. Bullfrogs took up a chorus of damp, throaty croaks, calling to one another across the darkened jungle. Howls and shrieks of unknown beasts sent eerie echoes rebounding back and forth through the trees like crazed laughter. At times they sounded spitting-distance close. It was mind-bending.
A warm bath, the feel of a clean towel, the caress of a loved one, the comfort of a home-cooked meal—all the norms of life seemed so impossibly distant.
On that first night the men felt as if they had been asleep only for a matter of seconds when the harsh call of a bugle tore through the fetid hut. It was pitch-dark still, but no doubt this was their wake-up call. Life began at seven o’clock on the railway, but that was seven o’clock Tokyo time. Here in Sumatra it was four-thirty in the morning, the depths of the night. No matter: in the minds of their Japanese taskmasters everything from Imperial Japan was superior, and that included even time itself.
Responding to the blare of the bugle, figures stumbled about in the dark trying to find the hut doorway and get out on parade. There was a brutish simplicity to life here that reflected how low these men had fallen: there was no need to change into day clothes, for there were none; no need to pull on shoes, for most had none; no need to scrape a blade across angular features, for their thick, matted beards would have defeated all but the sharpest cutthroat razors and few had any shaving kit, less still the facilities with which to wash or to shave.
Under the ghostly light of the moon the prisoners lined up for parade, plus the obligatory head count. Before them in the shadowy half-light lay the smoking silhouettes of oil drums with fires burning beneath them, signifying that breakfast was served. The first light of dawn was filtering into camp by the time each man received his one ladleful of gray-brown slop in a battered can or bowl. This was the entirety of breakfast—so-called ongle-ongle, a sludge of tapioca flour boiled in water that set like tadpole jelly as it cooled.
Tapioca is made from the pounded root of the cassava plant, a kind of tropical potato. Devoid of sugar or salt, ongle-ongle was entirely tasteless and completely lacking in vitamins or sustenance other than a small dose of carbohydrates. Yet this was the ration upon which these men were supposed to embark upon a full day’s—invariably more than a full day’s—hard labor on the railway.
The work gangs were divided by task. One group of men was sent deep into the jungle in front of the railhead to build successive camps for the main body of laborers to follow. A second, larger body of men was tasked to raise the embankment for the railway itself—digging out sand or mud by hand and carrying it in woven baskets to the rail route. This was some of the toughest work of all, and it was mostly given to the romushas—the local slave laborers, most of whom hailed from the neighboring island of Java—the living dead of the railroad.
Further gangs cut wood from the forest for the railway construction, or loaded sleepers and iron rails onto the rail truck for movement forward, or planted those sleepers on the raised embankment, or laid the rails on top of them, with a final gang bringing up the rear to hammer the rails in and fix them to the sleepers.
At Camp 4 the SS Van Waerwijck survivors were allotted their tasks as the Japanese corporal in charge saw fit. Les Searle was one of the lucky ones: he joined a party of thirty-odd men being sent forward of the railhead to build a new jungle camp. Frank Williams—and Judy with him—got the grim task of unloading the iron rails from the rail truck, carrying them up the line, and laying them on the sleepers.
From the very first the casual brutality and the apparent cheapness of life here were shocking. For Les Searle’s party work was announced with the screamed command of “Kura! Kura! Kura!” Few knew exactly how that word translated into English, but all understood its meaning: “Oi!” Here on the hell railway it meant “get to the storehouse now and grab your tools, or else!”
For the new camp the Japanese engineers had chosen a site near a stream so that it would be close to water. The first task was to clear the area of vegetation, after which piles of bamboo had to be cut and split battering-ram fashion by lashing an ax head to a tree and running the bamboo into it. This bamboo was as thick as a man’s forearm, and it grew to sixty or more feet in height.
Lashed together with jungle vines, the bamboo lengths formed the frame upon which all huts were constructed, after which they were thatched with vegetation cut from the jungle. All of this required orders to be both issued by the guards and understood by the prisoners, and in a language that one side barely understood. Invariably, the prisoner who failed to catch on faced an outpouring of savagery.
Les Searle was sickened to witness one such prisoner get beaten to death with a shovel simply because he didn’t understand Japanese. It was such a senseless way to die. Certainly, there had been beatings before now and terrible abuses—like the punishment cell back at Gloegoer One. But the casual and sadistic violence here would come to be a daily occurrence, one seemingly designed to snuff out the prisoners’ lives as quickly as possible. It constituted an inhuman and murderous cruelty that many would never get inured to.
Being a sergeant, Peter Hartley the makeshift padre was appointed the honcho—head—of one of the labor gangs. The honcho had less work to do, but he was directly responsible to the guards for ensuring that those under him did whatever was required and exactly as instructed. As such, the role was to be avoided at all costs, for the wrath of the guards more often fell upon the honcho’s shoulders when anything was misunderstood or went wrong.
One morning Hartley saw a Japanese guard set about one of his men for no apparent reason. The guard swung a heavy shovel edge, aimed at the man’s head. It was a blow designed to maim terribly, if not to kill. The guard missed by a hair’s breadth, but he recovered his balance and went for a second swing. Acting on instinct, Hartley reached out and grabbed the guard’s arm, preventing the shovel from hitting home. After that he had no memory of how he got back to the camp—only that he woke later heavily bandaged and scarred for life himself from a shovel’s blade.
But conditions were the very worst for those tasked to labor at the railhead itself. At least Les Searle and his gang were able to work mostly in the shade of the deep jungle, but out on the open railway prisoners were exposed to the merciless sun. Just south of Camp 4 the projected route would cross the equator. Once the early morning mist had burned off the jungle, the temperature there was unbearable, especially for seminaked men forced to work without a break for every hour of available daylight.
Frank Williams made up one in an eight-man rail-portage gang. First, the men had to line up in descending order of body height to keep the crushing weight of the iron rail evenly distributed across their bony shoulders. On command, the rail was hoisted into the air. Moving with 300 kilograms of iron slung between two lines of starving, emaciated, seminaked men, most of whom possessed no shoes, would be a perilous activity at the best of times. Doing so along a slimy, steaming uneven rail embankment in the burning heat of the day was sheer murder.
The two lines of men had to march in sync in an effort to prevent the load from becoming unbalanced, falling, and crushing someone’s feet. But newcomers to the rail gangs—like Frank and his fellows—had yet to learn the tricks of the trade. Under the relentless sun the iron rails heated up to searing temperatures, and unless a pad of protective cloth was placed on the shoulder, the bare metal would burn and scorch itself into bare skin. And always the work had to be done at the double, any slacking being punished by kicks or blows from rifle butts.
A guard waited at the delivery end, where the rails were to be set into place on the sleepers in line with the ones behind. On a shouted word of command the dead weight would be lifted off shoulders and held in position before being carefully lowered. The sleepers weren’t anchored to the ground yet, and if they hadn’t been laid true, they could flip up with the weight of the rail, injuring the nearest prisoners.