by Damien Lewis
As there had been at Gloegoer One, here on the hell railway there was a secret prisoners’ radio. News was disseminated along the line as rumor in an effort to disguise its timeliness and accuracy. The radio was thought to be operated by one of the officers, who had a hollow leg in which he kept it hidden. It was an aluminum prosthetic, and supposedly each night after use the radio was dismantled and the parts carefully wrapped up and hidden inside his leg!
It was toward the end of October 1944 when the rumor mill began churning big time, courtesy of the secret radio. Camp 4 had in it one of the few American POWs on the Sumatran railway, a Captain George Duffy. Like Frank Williams, Duffy had served as a merchant seaman until his vessel, the American Leader, was sunk by a German warship. Taken as a POW by the Germans, Captain Duffy had in turn been passed to the Japanese, which was how he had managed to end up in Camp 4. For Duffy and the handful of other Americans their nationality was about to become both a blessing and a curse.
One night in the last week of October 1944 the Japanese guards held a drunken party. The sake—Japanese rice wine—was flowing, and wild celebrations and what sounded like victory songs echoed across the camp. In the morning the guards were boasting about a decisive Japanese naval victory. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of the Second World War, had just taken place in the waters off the Philippines. According to the guards, His Imperial Majesty’s Navy had sunk a string of American warships, including one light aircraft carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort.
The prisoners’ clandestine radio soon gave the lie to the guards’ claims. In truth, Leyte Gulf had constituted a crushing defeat for the Japanese. Though the losses boasted about on the Allies’ side were true, those suffered by the Japanese Navy were far worse. One fleet aircraft carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers were sunk, with the loss of 12,500 lives. Twenty-eight Japanese ships had gone down, as opposed to six Allied vessels.
As tight as it doubtless was, the Japanese propaganda machine couldn’t keep such losses secret from its troops, not even those living in a world lost in time. The Japanese and Korean guards couldn’t fail to notice the changed atmosphere around the camps. The supposedly invincible Japanese war machine had suffered a major defeat at Leyte Gulf, and thanks to their clandestine radio the prisoner-slaves knew all about it.
It was around now that those at Camp 4 were moved to Camp 5, at Loeboeksakat, twenty-three kilometers farther along the railway. The move was to keep pace with the onward progress of the railhead. Frank Williams, Les Searle, Padre Peter Hartley, plus Judy joined the relocation, as did the American Captain George Duffy. In Camp 5 were gathered together around a thousand POWs, the majority being Dutch, British, and Australians, plus a handful of Americans—those who had achieved the seemingly impossible and crushed the Japanese forces at Leyte Gulf.
Over time George Duffy had taught himself to speak Dutch from the prisoners in the camps. As a result, he was often mistaken for a Dutchman. At Camp 5 he was appointed honcho for a group of mainly Australians, who were tasked with loading gravel into small open-topped wagons along a spur track leading into the jungle. When the wagons were full, the rail truck would pull them up to the railhead to be emptied.
Duffy had allocated a place beneath a certain tree for those who became too ill to work. By midmorning there were six skeletal figures lying in the shade, and he noticed a Japanese guard approaching them. He hurried over, explaining that the men were far too sick to work. This irritated the guard. He demanded to know if Duffy was an Australian. Duffy pretended that he didn’t understand the question.
“English-ka?” the guard asked—“Are you English?”
Again Duffy shrugged his shoulders, acting as if he didn’t understand.
“Blanda-ka?” the guard demanded, Blanda being the Malay word for “Dutch.”
When Duffy tried to claim that he still didn’t understand, the guard went to unsling his rifle, a sure sign that the American was about to be clouted. Seizing the moment, Duffy leaned forward and stabbed the guard in the chest with his finger before pointing at himself.
“America! America!” Duffy announced. “American!”
The guard’s eyes practically popped out of his head. He clearly had no idea that the dreaded American enemy was anywhere near his railway. He waved Duffy back to his task, but word soon came down the line that the guard was working himself up into a towering fury. When the break came for midday meal, the guard struck. On some imagined provocation he grabbed his rifle by the muzzle and swung it like a baseball bat into Duffy’s torso, hitting him with all the force he could muster, just below the ribs. The blow was powerful enough to fell the American. Knowing he was in danger of being kicked unconscious, Duffy scrambled to his feet. He was knocked down two further times before the guard finally decided he had had enough.
After eating their lunchtime ration, some of his fellow prisoners tried to persuade Duffy not to go back on the work gang, for he was still in considerable pain and the guard clearly had it in for the American. But Duffy refused to back down, and oddly it was the Japanese guard who failed to return to work, so boosting the confidence of the American that in defeat, the Japanese could be faced down.
A resurgent spirit of defiance swept through those Brits, Aussies, and especially the handful of Americans resident in Camp 5. As the monsoon rains strengthened and even as the floodwaters rose throughout the forest, the prisoner-slaves were buoyed by further news of U.S. victories emanating from the railway’s secret radio.
Camp 3 was flooded out completely and had to be relocated. At Camp 5 work gangs were sent out to shore up the rail embankment near a swollen stream. All of a sudden a pair of forest buffalo appeared on the far bank of the watercourse. The nearest guard, a Korean, raised his rifle excitedly and fired. All his shots missed. Standing next to him was an American POW. Unable to bear the thought of so much potential food going to waste, he wrested the weapon from the unsuspecting Korean guard, dropped to one knee, and fired two shots in quick succession, felling both animals.
The American thrust the rifle back at the startled guard, after which he proceeded to take charge of the meat-retrieval operation. He called for a rope, slung it around his skeletal frame, and waded into the fast-flowing water. Perhaps the Korean had heard of the Americans’ military prowess and was starting to worry about whether he’d chosen the right side in this war, but for whatever reason he let the American continue with his mission until both carcasses had been loaded aboard a rail wagon. That evening, in an unprecedented show of evenhandedness, the buffalo meat was divided between guards and prisoners alike at Camp 5.
But such shows of solidarity were rare indeed, and they were destined to become rarer still as Imperial Japan’s fortunes in the war worsened. Much as it might defy belief, as defeat stared them in the face the Japanese would drive their prisoner-slaves ever more remorselessly, forcing them to work ever longer hours on ever decreasing food rations—or die in the process.
Christmas Day 1944 was fast approaching, and for the SS Van Waerwijck survivors it would prove their darkest in nearly three years of captivity.
Chapter Twenty-one
Six months had passed since the SS Van Waerwijck survivors had first laid eyes on Pakan Baroe, the starting point for a railway whose progress would be measured in the futile sacrifice of so many lives. Repairs to the bridge damaged in the monsoon had been completed, and a huge quantity of new sleepers and rails was being shipped down the line. It seemed as if the railway’s taskmasters had redoubled their efforts to finish the line come what may.
Such was their urgency to drive the iron rails onward that Christmas was almost canceled. But sensing a revolt among the POWs, the Japanese commander declared a rare holiday for December 25, 1944. Each camp had two cookhouses, one for the guards and one for the POWs. The prisoners’ kitchen was staffed up by those assigned to light duties—more often than not the recovering sick or th
e walking wounded. On Christmas Eve 1944 rumors abounded that the cooks at Camp 5 had something special in store for the morrow.
Not for the first time all thoughts turned to food.
For weeks now the cooks had hoarded supplies, and sure enough that Christmas morning breakfast proved to be an impossible feast: five ongol balls per man, plus—joy of joys—coffee. Ongol balls were nothing more than the standard tapioca flour, but fried into “doughnut holes” and flavored with cinnamon and precious sugar. Lunch was more impossible still: ikan daging, nasi goreng, and more coffee. Nasi goreng is stir-fried rice, and ikan daging is a dish made of tiny dried and salted fish.
But it was dinner that proved the real miracle: from somewhere the cooks had rustled up brown bean stew, sambal katjang—hot peppered beans, plus trassi balls—smelly but decidedly tasty golf-ball-sized nodules of fish paste, and . . . more coffee. But though the feast was as fantastic as it was unforeseen, the increasingly jumpy and resentful Japanese guards still found a way to pour cold water on the festive spirit.
Christmas itself wasn’t canceled, but they decreed that singing was. There were to be no carols.
There would be no repeat for Judy of her yowling serenades at the Strong Toppers Club on the Hankow Bund or even of her performance at the Gloegoer One Christmas pantomime, when she had howled out a wild accompaniment to the merrymaking. As for Padre Peter Hartley, though he insisted on holding a Christmas service, by now he was so sick that he had been consigned to Camp 2, the hospital-cum-death camp, and it proved a sorry and joyless affair.
In Camp 5 the healthy joined the sick and immobile, cramming themselves into the hospital hut, where a service of sorts had been cobbled together. It was one in which carols would be played by musical instruments in an effort to get around the singing ban. Wretched skeletal forms packed together on the rough-hewn sleeping platforms, spluttering lanterns throwing eerie shadows across the flimsy leaf walls.
When the musicians struck up the tune for “Silent Night, Holy Night” the hollow-eyed walking dead could no longer hold themselves back. The hut was filled with a soft, gentle humming to accompany the notes that the prisoners knew so well . . . but that was all. Not a voice could be raised in full song.
In spite of the day’s feasting it turned many a man’s stomach and brought tears to many an eye. It beggared belief that in the upside-down crazed world of the hell railway the Japanese had even banned singing.
Four days later the entire population of Camp 5 was on the move again. This time they were heading for Camp 7 at Lipatkain, some fifty kilometers farther along the railroad. Lipatkain actually translates as a rather poetic name for such a hellish location. It means “fold in a sarong”—sarong being the traditional multicolored wraparound skirt worn by the residents of the region.
It was the kind of garment most of the shipwreck survivors would have given their eyeteeth for right now. Very few had any clothing left apart from the single dirty gray loincloth that the Japanese issued to all prisoners.
Camp 7 proved similar to those which had gone before, only it was more remote and the huts were even less substantial. There was a new accompaniment of guards, each of whom came with a peculiarly apt nickname: King Kong, Slap Happy, Howling Monkey, and so on. Among their number was Porky, the guard who specialized in using fire ants to torture his victims. Porky was the very worst—a stocky, fat beast of a man with nearly invisible eyes, his buckteeth sticking out below a thick and fleshy upper lip. He radiated an evil cruelty from his pockmarked wedge of a head to his flapping ears.
But as luck would have it, Porky was about to get his comeuppance, and before he could visit too much of his malice on the new arrivals at Camp 7. He was sent forward to Camp 9, the railway storage depot, to collect a new consignment of rails. In the middle of the loading a heavy storm blew up. Fork lightning stabbed out of the heavens. Fearing that the iron rails might attract a strike, all moved into the fringes of the jungle, to shelter.
Suddenly, there was an unearthly scream followed by a volley of rifle fire. Porky had been relieving himself in the jungle, only to be set upon by a tiger. He was badly mauled before his fellow guards managed to drive it off. He was evacuated down the line to Pakan Baroe and the Japanese medical facilities based there, which in contrast to the POWs’ hospital camp were lacking in very little. But Porky was too far gone by the time he got there, and he died from his injuries.
Upon hearing of his passing, there were few at Camp 7 who shed a tear. In fact, Porky’s death would inspire some remarkable mimicry. There were one or two prisoners who managed to perfect an utterly convincing tiger’s snarl. Upon a dark, moonless night they’d start their roaring, which would send the guards into paroxysms of worry. With the Japanese and Koreans refusing to leave their huts, the prisoners would sneak into the livestock pens and steal a chicken or a goat. All signs of the purloined animal would have utterly disappeared come morning. If any questions were asked, the livestock theft was blamed on the tiger that had supposedly visited during the night.
On January 10, 1945, the first direct signs of the turning fortunes of the war appeared in the skies above Sumatra. The sleek, silvery form of an American B-29 Superfortress—a massive, long-range bomber that was superadvanced for its time—was spotted over Pakan Baroe, returning from a bombing run over the nearby port of Padang. Finally, this island lost in time was back on the radar of the Americans, the long-hoped-for liberators.
Few of the guards were able to ignore the fact that the American enemy was able to operate such a sophisticated warplane over the territory of the railway, and seemingly with impunity. Consequently, they started carrying tin hats and gas masks wherever they went . . . and the prisoner work parties started to catch hell.
The men would be woken by the seven o’clock bugle call, often not to return to camp until past ten o’clock at night. They’d be out on the work gangs for fourteen hours, being driven relentlessly by their merciless taskmasters. Yet the more the Japanese and Korean guards upped the pressure, the more ingenious became the methods the prisoners adopted to sabotage the thing they hated most—the railway that was killing so many of their fellows.
With Judy standing fierce guard, Frank Williams, Les Searle, Jock Devani, and crew set about packing an earthen embankment that they were tasked to build with rotten wood, which they patched over with a thin layer of mud and sand. From a distance it looked firm enough, but when a fire-snorting Hanomag locomotive tried to pass over it, the embankment should crumble, sag, and disintegrate into a mini-landslide.
In recent weeks Judy’s gang had also learned how to break off the heads of the iron spikes used to secure the rails to the sleepers. Hammering in just the head gave the impression that a spike was in place, whereas in truth there was nothing substantial holding the rail in place at all. This was a surefire way of causing havoc with the rail alignment, but being caught with a supply of deheaded spikes or just the heads themselves would be a one-way ticket to the grave.
More news of Allied victories percolated down the eighty-odd kilometers of the railroad to Camp 7. This time the secret radio, which was located at Pakan Baroe’s Camp 1, was reporting British and Commonwealth forces in action, as Bill Slim’s fabulous 14th Army drove the Japanese out of Burma. The guards were faced with news of defeat on several fronts, and at the hands of almost all of the nationalities that made up the prisoners in their charge.
Unsurprisingly, tensions were reaching a fever pitch.
There were signs that the Japanese were moving vital matériel out of the area: tanks and field artillery, plus trucks loaded with military equipment, were driven east on the first stage of the long journey to Singapore. It looked as if the Japanese might be preparing for a major defense of what had once been Britain’s island fortress. It was a delicious prospect for the POWs, so many of whom had been driven out of that island stronghold as a lost and vanquished army, a defeat for which they had for too long hung their heads in shame.
By February 1945 som
e 120 kilometers of the railway had been completed, but there remained 100 kilometers or more to go, and this final stretch would have to cut through the most difficult terrain of all—the Barisan Mountains. The death rate began to accelerate terribly. During March, forty-one POWs died at Camp 7 alone. The next month proved even worse. In the first seven days of April, twenty-five of the Camp 7 prisoners passed away. At such a rate all the POWs in Camp 7 would be dead inside ten months, and the death rate just kept rising.
The Allies might have been winning the war, but the worry of all in the camps was whether victory would come soon enough for any of them. There weren’t enough able-bodied men to keep pace with the need for grave diggers, pallbearers, or burial parties. Those on light duties gathering firewood to fuel the kitchens were redirected to carry bodies to the cemetery or to dig the graves themselves.
Yet somehow Judy and her core of fellow prisoners endured. Having clawed himself back from the dead—miraculously he had escaped Camp 2, the Death Camp, and returned to the railhead—Padre Peter Hartley found himself called upon to officiate at burials. During the nightmare weeks at Camp 2 the self-taught padre had come close to losing his faith even in God. Twice he’d been consigned to the Death House, the hut reserved for those who were destined for the other side.
The lack of medicines, painkillers, sterilizers, or any proper surgical instruments at the Death Camp was so acute that the doctors had taught themselves to use fly maggots to treat tropical ulcers. They’d pack a wound with them, bind it with a rag, and let the grubs eat out the dead and infected flesh until the ulcer was rendered clean. With no malaria drugs, they’d also taught themselves to make a form of quinine using the bark of the cinchona tree that grew abundantly in the surrounding jungle.