By the Friday evening, 54 hours after coming on board, we had begun to think that we were doomed to rot slowly on the bottom of this wretched boat in the middle of Keppel Harbour, for such days as remained to us in this world. So it was at first with incredulity, and then with hoarse cheers, that we heard the anchors being taken up. As the vessel at last moved forward a first trickle of fresh air came down the vent into our purgatory. With it came hope and an incredible rush of cheerfulness.
As we steamed slowly westwards and out into Malacca Strait, I could not help thinking of third-class and tourist cabins I had occupied at times on various ships, and of complaints I sometimes made about the conditions. I realised now that even in the ill-ventilated inner cabin which I had shared with four others on a Russian boat in crossing from London to Leningrad, I had been cruising in the lap of luxury. Wanderlust may carry me into some strange places on some very odd ships, but I don’t think I or anyone else enjoying Nippon’s hospitality on that particular pleasure cruiser will forget its fragrant memories.
When we turned northwards up Malacca Strait on the evening of 16 October 1942, destiny had obviously dealt out the hands for all to see, and there could no longer be any doubt that Burma was our destination. In Changi we had heard of a railway project in the Bangkok area, and we knew that a number of prisoners from Changi had been sent up there earlier in the year. Burma had been mentioned by the guards in Batavia, but it was only now that we came to realise that we were probably going to be employed on the construction of a railway to link Bangkok with the Burma coast and the Bay of Bengal.
The Japanese allowed us on deck for periods of 20 minutes or half an hour at dawn, and again in the evening. Our worst trouble was the entire absence of water for washing. A number of men, who sought to wash in the trickle from a deck hose or at the leak in one of the pipes, were mercilessly beaten up by Dogface, the worst of the Batavian guards, who accompanied our party. On two occasions, for brief periods, we did get permission to turn on the deck hose and by this means hundreds of men had the only wash in ten days after leaving Changi.
The latrines were similar to those on King Kong Maru and, with the number of dysentery cases increasing daily, they were soon in an appalling state and almost unusable. The ration of water, at first two pints a day, was later improved; but the meat throughout consisted of Australian mutton carcasses from the Singapore Cold Stores, bearing the dates 1931 and 1935. This meat might have been all right while frozen but Mayebassi Maru had no refrigeration, and the meat stank to high heaven, so that only those with the strongest stomachs could tackle it.
The scanty medical supplies brought by the party were liberally used by the crew and guards for the pettiest ailments. The senior M.O., Colonel Eadie, Melbourne, was beaten up for refusing to allow a Japanese to fool with his microscope while he was using it. We eventually secured permission to place the worst of the dysentery cases on top of the hatch, so that they could be near the latrine, but scores of men who were becoming weaker daily had to face the grim climb up to the deck.
Every now and then the Japanese indulged in orgies of bashing, usually on the flimsiest of pretexts. Prisoners were hustled down into their stinking inferno at the end of the short periods on deck with blows of rifle butts, and sometimes, for hours on end, even the sick were not allowed access to the latrine.
Yet somehow we got through the days as the vessel crawled slowly along the green Malayan coast with its low, swelling hills. We were anxious about torpedoes, for we knew that British submarines were operating in these waters. The Dutch P.O.W. ship which followed us a week later was attacked by a British submarine, and we were amazed at our own luck in getting through. At the bottom of those deep wells, with only one rickety ladder leading to safety, and 200 Japanese who would unquestionably panic and jam the only companion- way leading to the deck, the chance of escape in an emergency was slim in the extreme.
*
Even the slowest hours and days draw to an end at last. On 22 October we steamed into the mouth of the Irrawaddy, and slowly up its broad, muddy stream between brilliantly green padi fields, past innumerable warehouses, to anchor at the Rangoon docks. We were not allowed on deck from the time we anchored until sunset, but it was one of those sunsets that makes anything worthwhile. As the great orange ball of the sun sank into a bed of golds and purples, night descended rapidly on the river. Against the background of light and colour which changed each minute, we stared fascinated at the thronging rivercraft. Heavy barges and ferries chugged slowly upstream against the swiftly flowing current. Slim lateen-rigged fishing smacks glided gracefully past. Heavy prahus and sampans of all sizes laboured painfully upstream, driven by the tireless arms of sturdy native oarsmen, or slid rapidly seawards in the grip of the coursing stream. Red, green and blue lights appeared on the ever-changing stream of craft as the last lights of day faded. We stood there entranced, drinking it in as eagerly as the cool evening breeze which brushed our faces. Then the guards decided that we seemed too happy, so we were thrust down below again.
This was the worst night of the lot. It was not merely that we were stationary and that the air vent was not working; millions of mosquitoes filled the holds so that one could not move one’s hand without brushing against scores of tiny, hovering bodies. The droning buzz from these countless invaders beat against one’s eardrums relentlessly. We wrapped ourselves from head to toe until we nearly stifled, but sleep was an impossibility. For nine hours we sat or lay or stood in misery; but, except for the handful who had mosquito nets, I don’t think one man had an hour’s sleep.
Next day we were told to collect all our gear and, after assisting the Japanese to extract all their goods from the hold, we left the ship and were marched along the wharves. It was obvious that first the Japanese and more lately British bombers had been having a busy time over Rangoon’s extensive dockland. The river was littered with the masts of sunken shipping and with fragments of wreckage. Many of the godowns had been gutted or blown to fragments, and the docks themselves had suffered considerably.
While we were waiting to climb the gangway of another ship – Yinagata Maru – we watched gangs of handcuffed coolies moving rails on the wharves under the direction of Japanese taskmasters. The nature of the treatment meted out to these Burmese and Tamils as they toiled suggested that the Jap was not likely to make himself any more popular in Rangoon than in Singapore or Batavia.
From the docks we could see a number of the main buildings and thoroughfares of the city. The same curious atmosphere of inertia and deadness, emphasised by the absence of motor vehicles, seemed to exist here. Directly opposite us, the Hollywood Hotel, its architrave bedecked with red and yellow figures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and various other film personalities, brought back startlingly another world in which hellships, coolie labour and bullying Japanese had no part.
Aboard Yinagata Maru we found ourselves placed in a hold on top of a cargo of gravel, which had the great merit of being flat, and provided by far the most comfortable billet I had yet found in a Japanese ship. Here we were issued with six and a half biscuits per man. That afternoon we raised anchor and, to our surprise, were all allowed on deck until after nightfall, while the boat moved slowly down the Irrawaddy and out across the Bay of Mataban towards Moulmein. Our last view of Rangoon, like the first, was of gold-topped pagodas glinting miraculously in the late afternoon sunlight to remind us that in the unchanging East the overthrow of Empires and the coming of new conquerors impose their influence only on the surface of things.
It was on the following afternoon that we drew slowly in to the mouth of the Salween River, a much narrower stream than the Irrawaddy, and knew that, at last, journey’s end was in sight. We passed a number of native kampongs amidst fields of lush corn and rice, and then towards evening found ourselves, again amidst pagodas, dropping anchor off Moulmein.
After dark we went ashore on a huge floating platform towed by motor tugs. It was a beautiful moonlight night, marred only by the
screaming and ranting of the Jap sentries who found occasion to indulge in some brutal kickings and beatings before the first batch was landed ashore. After the misery of our passage, it was good to stretch out full length on the metal pavement of the road where the Japs held us for an hour before we were marched off to the Moulmein jail. It was 17 days since we had lined up on the road in the Bicycle Camp – days in which many men were murdered as surely as if a knife had been thrust into their vitals.
All things considered, we were tremendously lucky that the epidemic, which the M.O.s dreaded, did not sweep the crowded holds. The fate of the 1500 Dutch P.O.Ws who left Batavia a week behind us proved how uncheckable was infection under such conditions.
These prisoners never left the ship through 22 days and nights of hell from Batavia to Rangoon. After taking ten days to reach Penang, they lay stifling there for nine days following a submarine attack. Dysentery, already bad, now spread like a bushfire, and by the time they reached Rangoon, 14 were dead and scores more on the verge of death. A Japanese doctor made a cursory examination of the sick at Rangoon but made no attempt to succour the dying men. All prisoners were herded into the Rangoon jail where on the first night the worst dysentery cases, in batches of 60, were locked in bare stone cells with nothing but a little straw on the floor. They were left all night without food, water, pans, buckets or anything else. This was a death sentence for many. Within a few days more than half the total force was virtually incapacitated by dysentery.
Constant appeals by senior Dutch officers were met by the Japanese with abuse, refusals and sometimes blows. The Japanese provided nothing whatever for the dying men except tools for their comrades to bury them, for the captors were mortally afraid of an epidemic involving themselves if the corpses were not hastily shovelled underground.
Even at the cemetery, crosses bearing the names of the dead were deliberately changed around by the Japanese in a final childish attempt to spite those who had passed beyond the reach of their inhumanity. Throughout the whole period at the jail, no milk or sustaining light food of any kind was given to even the worst cases, although the Japanese had plentiful supplies captured after the British evacuation. The diet for all prisoners consisted of plain rice pap without even soup to help it down. Despite all representations, only about 60 of the worst cases were taken from the jail to a hospital, and then only when it was often too late to do anything for them. In any case, little more attention was given in the hospital than at the jail.
On 20 December, when the strongest of this force left for Moulmein to work on the railway, they left behind 200 dead and 450 more incapable of movement. Even then they carried with them many who could not walk. In the grinding work along the railway line, numbers of these men succumbed, while in Rangoon itself the total of Dutch dead reached 260, or more than a sixth of the party.
One has only to see a man dying slowly of dysentery, becoming more and more emaciated as each day passes, to feel that his plight would draw blood from a stone. But our hosts of Dai Nippon Gun, with their vaunted code of Bushido, cared nothing and did nothing as these men rotted to death before their eyes.
The Hintok Road
Ray Parkin
Parkin says that he left ‘an interval after the war in order that circumstances may not be distorted by prejudice’ before writing Into the Smother. ‘It was originally written as a diary to capture that passing moment and hold it before it had slipped from our memory forever … each entry was written without any knowledge of what the next day would bring.’
There is no more humane and inspirational writing about the Thai–Burma Railway, or any other brutalising prison experience, than Into the Smother – not by Primo Levi or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Parkin somehow found that meditative mode within what was happening to him which allowed him to see beauty in a leaf, or an insect, and the virtue of hard work and self-reliance.
In the book about his time as a slave labourer in the Japanese coal-mines (The Sword and the Blossom, 1967) after the railway, he writes about the kind of instinctive Buddhism that he discovered in himself. Writing in the third person he
found the hint of what faith was in the invisible ends of those exquisitely fine white filaments of fungus slowly striving in Stygian silence beneath the sea. Those thread-like fingers acted as a catalyst to his thoughts.
‘Let’s face it,’ he thought deliberately. ‘What if none of the prisoners ever gets home? What if this war, or another one, destroys civilization? Or lays the whole face of the earth flat and dead? Then, what?’ John had felt a calm as the answer came. These filaments would continue to grow – to bridge again the infinite with the finite.
Here he waded in and sat on a pile of wet slimy logs and wrote by the light of his cap-lamp.
Parkin served in the Royal Australian Navy for 18 years until he was last man off HMAS Perth sunk in the Battle of the Sunda Strait in 1942. He was made prisoner on Java, where he met among others Weary Dunlop and Laurens van der Post. This story is told in the first volume of the trilogy, Out of the Smoke (1960).
The three books are illustrated with Parkin’s wonderful black and white art. After the war he worked as a tally clerk on the Melbourne waterfront, writing the trilogy, and researching and illustrating his later masterwork about Captain James Cook and his ship, H.M. Bark Endeavour (1997).
Ray Parkin died in 2005 as this book was being completed, at the grand age of 94. After what he had been through, it was some achievement.
*
It was 11.30 a.m. before we moved off. First, we had to get up that Hill on which men on ration parties had collapsed. There is a road there now, but many of us were fresh out of hospital and the day was well advanced in dry, sapping heat.
At the top we were allowed to rest. We had sweated freely during the climb, but as we flopped down, sweat spouted, like blood, from every pore. It was strange to see the skin spring into thousands of tiny, rushing rivulets. While we waited we saw a small phalanger glide past our heads. Only about nine inches long, it was like a fragment of the remote past. After ten minutes we moved on.
The road followed a narrow, elevated strip winding just below the serrated spine of a mountain chain. To the south were other jagged ridges of dark, stained granite resembling the sheer faces of organ pipes. It was a bamboo jungle, but in one swampy part there were a few patches of palms. In bare, burnt-out patches, some flowers – little, white irises with a pure, orange streak on their tongues – had sprung up from the recent rain with just their heads out of the soil. They grew in bunches, back to back, in half-dozens. But there was no foliage yet. Bugs and butterflies lined the route to watch us go past.
We arrived in the new camp at 2 p.m. and were given a fish soup, and some tea which really tasted like tea. I sipped mine with a spoon, to relish it. Then we were given tents, 18 feet by 12, and we put them up. Twenty men to a tent. We cut logs and covered them with a bamboo deck on which we put our belongings. It had rained on the way and been thundery. We were glad to have some shelter.
Chaps from Timor, the 2nd/40th, are here and we have eagerly swapped tales of camps and conditions. Our first impression is that the food seems better, perhaps it is simply that it doesn’t taste mouldy. There is an order in force here which was also issued to English at Konyu. It states that, whenever eggs are fried, the yolks shall be broken to prevent any profane resemblance to the Nippon flag which, of course, we have now christened the ‘fried egg’.
Another early impression is the woe-begone manner of many of the Dutchmen here.
We went to bed crowded, but much more content than one could have thought possible. It could have been the change, and an expectancy of things – be they what they might – just around the corner.
*
With the night fires still casting a glow up to the tree canopy, reveille sounded. There was a hoarse, ‘Huh! Ho!’ from the Jap guards and a shrill imperious whistle from the Dutch. Then Austin calling, ‘All Out, O Battalion!’
We dressed in the dark an
d paraded at 8 a.m., and went straight to breakfast – pap, with a splash of tea. Immediately we formed in the queue for our work rations, gulping down breakfast to make room for them in the same dixie. Plain rice and two small vegetables, and rice rissoles.
At 8.45 a.m. we marched out to the site of the railway. The first few hundred yards of our way was across a short flat valley which looked as if it would be a swamp in the Wet. It lay between two escarpments. We climbed an arduous zigzag up the southern one, and up a rock wall for the last 60 feet on a rope. It was granite and limestone, pocketed with crystal quartz.
Once over the top we went down a long slope between scattered boulders and bamboo. It led toward the river. We followed the furrows made by elephants hauling out teak logs when the red, clayey soil had been wet. Dried out, these elephant pads made good paths. It was another two miles to the railway clearing.
Here the timber had been felled. We turned elephants and dragged it clear to the sides. The clearing was 30 metres wide, and each hundred of us have to clear a stretch 150 metres long. It was what the Japanese call a finish-come-back job, and, as new brooms, we finished quite early. The size of the logs we could move by single-minded effort surprised and pleased us. The alternative was laboriously to chop them up. The cicadas were kicking up a din and our heads rang with them. We sweated and became covered with black bush bees, who drank our perspiration and encouraged other species to do the same.
We started for home up the long two-mile hill, through a maze of boulders, and finally dropped, almost vertically, on to our camp. The bamboos among the boulders are small and ‘smoothskins’ – no thorns of canes. Blue-green, emerald, lichen-coloured, cane yellow and odd purple patches; crisp, brush-stroke leaves, pencilled stems – it is like walking along a Japanese scroll painting.
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