Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero

by Damien Lewis

  Each time a rail was successfully positioned, a stick was handed out to that gang’s honcho. When the team had accumulated a dozen such sticks, they were permitted to go for a cup of tea—swamp water boiled in an old oil drum at the side of the railhead and with a bare sprinkling of black tea leaves. No dawdling during the tea breaks was allowed, for a guard was always on hand to kick the team back to work.

  At the approach of midday the sun hung directly overhead, huge and blindingly bright. It had become the rail layers’ single greatest enemy. The earthen embankment shimmered in the heat haze. It threw back the glare, dazzling unshielded eyes. The air itself seemed to be on fire, each breath dragged into heaving lungs in a painful inrush of burning. The merciless heat of the sun sucked moisture from unprotected skin and burned into bare heads and shoulders.

  The midday meal offered a few precious minutes of relief. But all it consisted of was a single cup of boiled rice, leveled with a stick by the server, plus a watery soup made of cassava leaves. No sooner had the lunchtime ration been wolfed down than the work began again, and minds began to wander to the evening, when ravenous bodies might again be able to rest and eat. As they lifted the heavy rails Frank and his fellows found themselves calling out time to the men opposite.

  “Left, right, left, right, left, right . . .” they cried as they marched under the crushing load.

  If their movements were not completely synchronized, one bony shoulder would be going up as the rail came whipping down, with agonizing consequences.

  As for Judy, she would be harrying back and forth just ahead of them, snuffling for anything of interest in the jungle to either side of the tracks. Every now and again she’d turn to check on the rail-carrying party and to make sure the guards weren’t causing any trouble. In spite of the bad company they were forced to keep, Judy loved being out in the jungle. There were all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures to sniff out, and in parts the thick vegetation was full of a dog’s most favorite thing in the world—fresh bones.

  Perhaps the hardest work of all already had been done by the time the POWs reached the railhead—that of clearing the route and heaping up the embankment. In places this had involved moving massive quantities of earth to harden the terrain where it was low-lying and boggy. In other places an army of human excavators had had to cut through steep ridges and hillsides using only hand tools. That army consisted of tens of thousands of romushas, and already they were dying at the staggering rate of one hundred or more per day.

  Unlike the Allied POWs, there were few if any camps constructed for the romushas. The POWs might be painfully underfed, but the romushas received zero rations from the Japanese. Nothing. And each night after a day’s torturous slave labor they were left to fend for themselves in the jungle. They were literally used as disposable beasts of burden—for excavation, clearance, and transport—and they were discarded once they were too sick or too weak to move.

  The bush was littered with the remains of the dead and the dying. Their corpses attracted scavengers: rats, giant iguanas, and tigers. Their skeletons lay everywhere, stripped of what little flesh had remained on their bodies at their hour of dying. For Judy, bones discarded in the jungle were always a temptation, especially as she received zero food rations herself.

  But the main issue for Judy was how she could shield her loved ones from suffering a similar fate to that of the romushas.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The rations doled out at the end of the first day’s hard labor reinforced the dominant theme—starvation. The only difference was that the single cup of rice was heaped up and the watery soup had some lumps of tapioca root and okra floating around in it. Just as the sustenance provided by the midday meal had been burned up in a few minutes of lugging iron rails, the evening’s repast left every organ in the body crying out for more and every prisoner dreading the long hours of the night that would be racked with hunger pains.

  For Judy there was no ration, of course. Yet still Frank and his fellows were unwilling to see her starve. The emotional link between Frank and Judy had become so palpable that many of his fellows feared that if she sickened and died, so would he. Likewise, if Frank was the first to perish, they were afraid that Judy would lose her will to live. It was as if man and dog shared a common life thread. So it was that a small portion of rice was set aside by those with the biggest hearts so that a dog might also live.

  Those in Judy’s party—sailors, airmen, and foot soldiers alike—had long learned the vital lesson that the outer reflected the inner in any prisoner of war. Those POWs who had let their appearance go had very likely given up on the unequal struggle and were heading for the hospital hut, from where few ever returned. It was vital to try to maintain a modicum of cleanliness and self-respect. But here in the ragged camps along the dark and serpentine railway, the chances of keeping body and mind together were slim indeed.

  Camp 4’s washing facilities consisted of a slow and muddy river that wound through the forest. The only time allowed for washing was in the evening, and in order to reach the river the prisoners had to flit through the darkened forest, cross a swampy area while balanced on a series of half-submerged tree trunks, and clamber down to the slippery water’s edge. It was one hell of an undertaking for men who had been worked half to death already and had only bile and hunger in their bellies.

  Such were the grim realities of their first days in the camps that fed the insatiable maw of the railway. With the Sumatran monsoons just around the corner, the SS Van Waerwijck survivors would learn soon enough that there was only one alternative to the muddy river as bathroom. It was to wait for a tropical downpour, when the heavens would open and the rain would sheet down, and dash out into the curtains of pounding water for a makeshift shower.

  Perhaps inevitably, during those first nights in Camp 4 minds drifted to memories of the comparative plenty of before: of scavenging in the Dutchmen’s garbage cans at Padang, of the magical arrival of the Red Cross parcels at Gloegoer One, of the miraculous delivery of the Bible at River Valley Road Camp. At Gloegoer, Frank Williams and his fellows had even felt able to set aside a little of their daily sugar ration—coarse brown native sugar but sugar nevertheless—to sabotage the Japanese war effort.

  Whenever a guard’s back had been turned, they’d managed to slip a few spoonfuls of sugar into the drums of aviation fuel they were tasked to unload, plus the barrels of gas. Popular folklore has it that sugar provides the perfect sweet revenge—that it can ruin a combustion engine. Sucked along the fuel lines, it gets heated into a sludge that glues up the engine’s innards. But the real killer is supposedly when the motor cools and the sucrose slush cools with it, turning rock solid, thus fouling up the engine’s arteries for good.

  Although those risking it at Gloegoer would have faced a spell in the punishment cell if caught, they were unlikely to have been beaten to death with a shovel on the spot. And whereas the idea of sacrificing a little sucrose to get back at the enemy was entirely feasible at Gloegoer, here on the railway sugar itself was soon to become an impossible dream.

  After a long night of sleep tortured by hunger, the next day at Camp 4 began as had the previous, the only variation being what kind of overseer would be assigned to the work parties, for the infamy of the guards went before them. In Camp 4, as in most, the Koreans were by far the most sadistic and vicious. Korea forms part of the Asian continent abutting the islands of Japan, and in 1910 Korea, which was at that time still one country, had been annexed by Imperial Japan.

  Most Koreans grew to despise the Japanese occupiers, and those who were recruited into the Japanese military were invariably the dregs of society: they had little to lose by throwing their lot in with the conquerors. Once they were given a uniform, a gun, and the power of life and death over their charges, there was little mercy to be expected from them. By contrast, some of the Japanese showed a grudging respect for the Allied POWs, who were at least fellow warriors and thus men of honor.

  In Camp 2�
�the hospital camp or death camp—Korean guards stubbed out their cigarettes on the faces of the sick and dying. Pencils and other sharp objects were rammed into patients’ ears to perforate their eardrums. Every camp had its roster of monsters, whose nicknames betrayed the kind of savagery they excelled in: the Wrestler (a giant of a Korean who challenged the skeletal POWs to wrestling bouts), the Pig (a thickset monster and a brainless savage of a bully), the Basher (a name requiring no further explanation).

  But perhaps the worst for those at Camp 4 was a dark-bearded Korean known as the Black Corporal, or more commonly as the Black Bastard. At the railhead the work teams often ran out of sleepers, without which all work would grind to a halt. Some of the Van Waerwijck survivors were sent into the jungle with orders to fell trees and craft makeshift sleepers. Among their number was Engine Room Artificer (ERA) Leonard Williams, every inch a gunboat man and the most senior surviving person from the Dragonfly’s original crew. Unfortunately, their overseer was to be the dreaded Black Corporal.

  ERA Williams was a long-standing fan of Judy of Sussex. He’d been with her on the gunboats, been marooned with her on Shipwreck Island, had drunk the water she’d miraculously unearthed there, and had shared her adventures ever since. He’d often refer to her as the prisoners’ “marvelous lifesaver” and “a dog in a million,” and he meant every word. But there was only one Judy, and she wasn’t able to be with everybody who might need her at all times.

  Leonard Williams and a Lance Corporal Smith were in the process of chopping down a particularly large forest giant. The locals normally left such trees untouched because of the menaces they harbored. Some had hairy undersides to their leaves, and as the tree shook under the assault of an ax, the hairs would rain down, causing horribly red and itchy rashes. Other had been colonized by fire ants, a particularly aggressive and painful adversary.

  The tree being the ants’ home, they protect it ferociously. Within seconds they swarm all over the arms, legs, and head of any ax man until his entire body feels as if it is on fire. The most hated of all the Korean guards had even fashioned his own torture using fire ants. His nickname was Porky, and he liked to tie a prisoner to a post, naked, with his feet barely touching the ground. He’d then collect some fire ants and place them in the man’s mouth, nose, and genitals, after which he’d leave the victim to fry in the sun and twist in the ants’ venom.

  In time, Porky would threaten to become Judy and her fellows’ chief oppressor as they were moved farther down the railway. But for now the Black Corporal was the foremost worry. You had to be very careful when felling the giant trees that made up the deep jungle and even more so when doing so under his baleful gaze.

  For a moment Lance Corporal Smith must have let his mind wander from the task at hand, for he’d started to natter away to the prisoner at his side. The simple effrontery of talking was enough to raise the Black Corporal’s murderous ire. As Smith swung his ax, the Korean guard smashed his rifle butt down onto the prisoner’s unsuspecting head. Smith was thrown off balance by the powerful blow, and instead of hitting the tree as he had intended, he drove the ax deep into his own foot.

  To the Black Corporal, Smith was just another of an endless series of victims to be thrown aside when their usefulness expired. A badly wounded British POW was useless for the task at hand, that of building the emperor’s railroad. The Black Corporal ordered the injured man—who was bleeding profusely—to be dumped by the railhead. The rail truck that brought the men to work would carry him back to camp. Williams and his team did just that, and while in transit they managed to improvise a tourniquet for Smith’s leg to stop him from bleeding to death.

  It was seven o’clock that evening when they were finally done with their work, and the poor victim was still lying by the rail tracks. They managed to get him back to camp, but by that time Corporal Smith was at death’s door. His life could be saved only by amputating the injured leg, a process that the British camp doctor had to perform with practically no surgical instruments, medicines, or even painkillers—and all because Smith had had the temerity to talk while working on the Black Corporal’s labor gang.

  This time Judy hadn’t been there to shield a fellow prisoner from the savagery of one of the guards, but the time was fast approaching when she would—and then battle would be joined.

  As remarkable as it may seem, hardly any of the Van Waerwijck survivors had yet lost the will to fight or their spirit of resistance. Their earlier shock and anguish at being brought to the hell of the Sumatra railway was starting to wear off. In its place there bubbled up the typical bulldog spirit and grim humor of British soldiers everywhere and the burning desire to find a way to hit back at their oppressors in however small a way possible.

  The men of the devil’s own railway began to joke among themselves. They would form the Pakan Baroe Rail Workers’ Union, or the PBRWU for short. All were welcome to the PBRWU regardless of nationality and species: four-legged comrades were as appreciated as two-legged ones. They would demand higher wages, shorter working hours, better conditions, and legal holidays. They would have a canteen and a social club with a bar, plus an annual conference with a few short speeches and the best beer and sandwiches money could buy.

  Such humor served to raise morale, and with it the idea of sabotaging the railroad even as they built it began to crystallize in the minds of those most inclined to the spirit of resistance. Frank Williams, Leonard Williams, Jock Devani, Peter Hartley—all knew that by deliberately damaging the Japanese emperor’s railroad they were putting their lives in great danger, but they faced death on a daily basis anyway, so what of it? And in her own inimitable fashion Judy of Sussex was going to play a vital part in such a perilous enterprise.

  The method of sabotage that Judy’s gang hit upon was ingenious yet simple. When not laying the iron rails, they very often formed up the gang that fixed them to the sleepers. Normally, this was done using long bolts that fastened the iron to the wood below. However, because the Japanese were in an impossible hurry they opted to use massive metal spikes instead. The spikes were hammered through lugs in the rail and driven deep into the wood, using heavy sledgehammers.

  Spike driving under a burning sun proved backbreaking work, but it also offered a delicious opportunity for sabotage. The spikes were like large, blunt-ended chisels. If the chisel edge was driven into the wood in line with the grain, a weakness could be formed. Under the weight of a passing locomotive the wood might well split, breaking the sleeper in two. In the best-case scenario it might even cause a derailment.

  Of course, this was something of a double-edged sword, for the workers rode the rail truck to and from the railhead, so they would very likely be such sabotage’s first victims. But so be it. Risks aside, a little sabotage was better than no sabotage at all.

  Alternatively, when working as a sleeper-laying gang, Frank Williams and his team could choose to place the wooden crossbeams on a soft or uneven patch of ground in the hope that those sleepers would be forced sideways by the weight of a speeding train, thus buckling the track.

  Somehow, Judy always seemed to sense when such skullduggery was afoot. All her thoughts of hunting in the forest would be instantly forgotten. Instead, she’d take up the post of chief sentry, positioning herself between the saboteurs and the most likely direction of a guard’s approach. From a distance she’d appear to be fast asleep, resting her belly on a sun-warmed sleeper and with her head cradled on outstretched forepaws.

  Yet long before a guard might be visible she’d have inched open one watchful eye. Moments later she’d be up on her haunches, ears pricked forward and nose vacuuming up the scent as she detected the Wrestler, King Kong, or the Black Corporal’s approach. Just as soon as she was certain one of them was coming she’d let out her signature growl—the one that she only ever used to warn of the approach of a hated guard. And never had Judy of Sussex been known to cry wolf. If she growled, you could be certain a Japanese or Korean was inbound. Time and again it proved a life
saver.

  Yet it was nature itself that would prove to be the greatest collaborator in helping the saboteurs derail the devil’s railway. As September 1944 blew around, the monsoon rains began to sweep down from the dark mountains, massive cloud banks piling up into the heavens over raging tropical storms. The lightning flashed and the thunder roared, and with it the largest of the animals began to move, heading for the drier ground of the highlands.

  The jungle was teeming with life. Judy had often sniffed out the spoor of what had to be a big cat around the railhead. At one time a group of prisoners had even been saved from a vicious beating by a huge pile of elephant droppings. They’d begged their guard’s permission to go into the forest to answer the call of nature. In truth, they were desperate for a smoke. Just occasionally, a little tobacco found its way into the camps, and Peter Hartley had found his Bible in correspondingly high demand, for the wafer-thin pages made excellent rolling paper!

  There was a serious side to this craving for a smoke: for a while at least it dulled the pangs of hunger. The smoking party must have dawdled too long, for the guard came looking for them. Catching the scent of tobacco smoke, he’d demanded to see the evidence that they had indeed needed to defecate. It was then that one of the prisoners had spotted a pile of fresh elephant droppings. He’d pointed it out: There—wasn’t that proof enough? The guard stared at it incredulously. “Many-man benjo,” the prisoner explained—“Many-man crap.” The guard scratched his head in amazement before ordering the prisoners back to work.

  As the rains came in ever more ferocious downpours, herds of elephants were on the march, seeking drier ground. They soon ran into this strange linear formation that unexpectedly barred their path. They instinctively shied away. But there was no way around it and no way under it, and so the bull elephant leading the herd clambered up and over with his charges following. In the process, sleepers weakened by sabotage spikes were pounded into matchwood and badly laid rails were left twisted and misaligned.