Long Way Back to the River Kwai

by Loet Velmans

  As the Japanese cycled down the Malay Peninsula toward Singapore, I did not hear any confidence-building messages coming from high up. Not a word was said about where and how our army might form a line of defense. The future did not seem very promising. I could not understand what my superiors were up to. For my part, I was convinced that one of Japan’s primary motives for going to war was to pluck the rich pickings of the Indonesian archipelago, especially its oil and rubber. To me, Japan’s occupation and our defeat were a foregone conclusion.

  The closer the Japanese came, the more threatening they seemed. From general to private, we had all been conditioned to look down on the “Nip.” We held to the Western image of the Japanese—sinister and strange. Their successes were therefore doubly alarming.

  Our morale—not high to begin with—sank to its greatest depth. But we did start to take soldiering more seriously. Every other morning we were taken to the rifle range and competed as sharpshooters. Our weekend passes were canceled; Mother came to visit every Sunday, despite the long round-trip train journey from Jakarta to Bandung.

  When Singapore fell, on February 15, 1942, I lost all respect for the British. I had counted on them to have better defenses than ours. For the first time, I decided not to entrust the cleaning of my weapon to anyone else. I polished my ancient and clumsy Lee Enfield rifle as if my life and the defense of our island depended on it.

  Finally, March 1, 1942, came the moment of truth: Japanese forces invaded Java. We were confined to barracks, in a state of high alert. An enemy plane dropped a single load of bombs near our compound. Battalions and squadrons were marched from one end of our exercise field to the other, to no purpose that I could determine.

  Our army panicked. We sent a mobile kitchen, complete with cooks and dishwashers, to spearhead one of our defense positions. Somehow the fighting units had managed to lag behind. For one day I waited nervously, praying that the rumors of valiant Dutch frontline troops halting the Japanese offensive would turn out to be true. Then I was ordered to go into battle.

  Our orders were to go down a road along which the Japanese were expected to advance. We went in three trucks, each holding a sergeant, a corporal, and eighteen privates—sixty-odd adolescents in all, with hardly any combat training between us. In the first truck, a professional sergeant-major was in overall command. A lone soldier on a motorbike had been assigned to scout the terrain in front. For firepower, each truck counted one old-fashioned machine gun and our slow-loading rifles. We carried a small reserve of bullets in our belts. No one spoke.

  I was in the last truck. The men, or boys, under my command were Eurasian recruits. I had never met any of them before. We were all nervous. The scout returned to report that, up ahead, the road narrowed into a kind of tunnel, with high ridges on either side. If we went on, we could be sitting ducks for a Japanese ambush. But our sergeant-major was fearless. It was probably also his first armed engagement. He gave the sign to go forward. I launched into a military pep talk, exhorting my terrified troops to stay calm and hold their fire. That was the only strategy I could come up with. “Hold your fire.” I said. “When we’re all out of the truck and in the field, don’t fire until I tell you.”

  As luck would have it, the Japanese must have been advancing on roads parallel to ours. Occasionally we met a villager; none had seen any Japanese troops. We came to a crossroads where half a dozen Australians, sitting around two machine guns, seemed as lost as we were. They offered us bottles of lukewarm Aussie beer and candy bars. When darkness fell, our expedition ended. We all breathed a sigh of relief and returned to base.

  After the war, I learned that the numbers on the enemy’s side had been inferior to our own. But our military command was caught completely off guard. Throughout, our generals sought to reassure the population by issuing martial-sounding bulletins that in fact reassured nobody. Even when the Japanese had conquered almost all of Southeast Asia north of us, including some strategically important airfields, ports, and oilfields on the other Dutch islands, our radio was still boasting that we would halt the enemy. One of our military leaders proclaimed, “It is better to die standing up than to live on your knees.” When we heard this, we laughed.

  As in most peacetime armies, our officer corps had grown smug and fat. In a peaceful society, limiting one’s military resources is a good idea. But in the Dutch Indies, the lack of military preparedness stemmed from a deeper cause. When indigenous tribes rebelled, it had always been easy for the colonial army to put them back in their proper place. Local uprisings never got very far. That is how the military had always earned its keep. The resulting complacency had made it doubly difficult for the army to contemplate the possibility that the Japanese might pose a threat. They had managed to convince themselves that Western military power would always be superior to that of Japan, the upstart Asian newcomer, and an inferior race to boot. Most of our officers could not imagine that colonial life would ever come to an end. Thus, the breakneck speed with which the invaders took island after island and conquered country after country left the Europeans in the region shaking in their boots. Their state of utter unpreparedness was not only physical or material; it was psychological as well.

  Soon after the outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific region, the Allies established a regional joint American/Australian/British/Dutch command. It was a hodgepodge of generals, admirals, and air force brass who had never worked together before but soon concluded that Java was indefensible.

  On March 8, a week after the invasion began, we heard over the radio that our army had capitulated. It was May 1940 all over again. First the Germans, now the Japanese. Few soldiers on our side had fired a shot. I certainly had not.

  A hand-delivered packet from my parents, probably carried in relay from village to village, made it through. It contained, among other things, one of the few notes I had ever received from Father. In my first eighteen years, I had lived in such close proximity to my parents that there was no need to write—except for Mother’s daily postcards when she was on a buying trip.

  Father reported that, despite what I might have heard about looting in Batavia, they had not been bothered and were both well. I was relieved to hear that. Some of my friends had been distressed to learn that mobs of local Javanese had gone on a rampage, killing, looting, and raping, not only in the Chinese parts of town but also in the Western neighborhood where their parents lived. A letter from Mother and a wad of banknotes was enclosed as well.

  In the rest of the week that it took the Japanese to occupy Java, we were confined to barracks. The Japanese had issued orders that all military personnel were to stay put and warned that we would be held accountable for any missing equipment and weapons. They may have got wind of the desertion of many native soldiers who had simply stepped out of their uniforms, put on civilian garb, and gone home. In our barracks, much time was spent by the rest of us lining up for inspection by our sergeant-major and his superiors, who wanted to make certain that we were well drilled and disciplined and looking spick and span. They also made sure that we still had in our possession every article of clothing and every eating implement that the army had issued us with. I noticed that our officers now fussed over us more than ever before. It was obvious that they were as anxious as we were. We were certain, of course, that the Japanese would intern us. We wondered how we would be treated.

  I had come to another crisis point in my life. I recognized the symptoms from the way I felt when Holland capitulated to the Germans. Once again, my throat and stomach constricted. I could not express my fear. My friends and I vented our frustration on everyone in command—our government, the military, and even our own officers. In the middle of one heated argument, someone shouted that the radio had just announced that the Americans and Australians would soon counterattack, that, if the Japanese were to intern us, our captivity would be of short duration. Most importantly, the war was soon to be over. A cheer went up. We all believed it. Within a few hours our euphoria evaporated a
s the realization sank in that help was not on the way. We had lost our freedom. We had no idea what would happen to us now. I had never met a German soldier and had yet to meet my first Japanese. My thoughts, once again, turned to escape.

  On March 9, at 5 A.M., less than twenty-four hours after our surrender, I decided to flee. “If we don’t make it, we can always come back,” I said to Hans, my high school friend. In our youthful obliviousness, we gave no thought to the possibility we might be killed. We jumped into an open staff car that had the keys in the ignition. Hans drove, since I had never learned how to. The story we made up for the guard at the gate was that the officer who drove this vehicle had ordered us to collect some clothes from his home for laundering. What we did not reveal to him was that our destination was Australia.

  Since we had heard on the radio that the Japanese had occupied all ports on the north coast of Java, we headed for Tjilatjap, the southernmost port. There were few vehicles on the road we had chosen.

  We did not get very far. Just outside of town on the main road south we were halted at a roadblock manned by Dutch soldiers. An angry young lieutenant, only a year or two older than I, asked to see our orders. We had none. We tried to explain, but to no avail. We were deserters and should be court-martialed, he said. He was still reading us the riot act when a middle-aged captain came up. Luckily for us, he was more sympathetic to our argument. If Dutch soldiers who had escaped the Nazi occupation and reached England could be regarded as heroes, we argued, why then shouldn’t we be given a chance to escape the Japanese and carry on the fight from somewhere else?

  “Let’s arrest them,” the lieutenant said. But the captain, relenting, allowed us to return to our base. “I have children myself,” he said.

  As it happened, luck once again saved my life. If Hans and I had managed to reach Tjilatjap in time to board one of the last departing vessels, some heading for Australia, others for Sri Lanka, we would have been torpedoed. Japanese submarines sunk every one of those ships. There were no survivors.

  4

  Prison

  A DAY OR TWO AFTER OUR ARMY’S CAPITULATION, a sizable group of older men, most of them in their thirties or forties, had taken occupancy of an empty building in our barracks. They belonged to the volunteer reserves and, like ourselves, had seen no military action. They were teachers, traders, planters, bankers, civil servants, a few clergymen—the backbone of colonial society. Now these men too found themselves in a new and unexpected situation. They had a hard time adjusting to the fact that for the first time in their lives in the Indies, they were no longer in control of their own destiny. Tensions arose between them and the camp command; the civilians held all professional soldiers in contempt and were particularly resentful of the role-reversal foisted on them. In peacetime, the civilians’ standard of living far outclassed that of the military. Now it was the officers who enjoyed all the privileges: they were better housed, better fed, and had batmen (orderlies) to wait on them. Adding insult to injury, the officers could boss around the lowly privates—including the new arrivals.

  As time went on, I was invited into a regular daily bridge game in the reservists’ quarters and listened with a mixture of respect and skepticism to their observations about the native population. In their opinion, the Javanese soldiers had deserted only to become guerilla fighters. They seemed oblivious to the anticolonial resentment that must have been bottled up inside many of the Indonesians. They did not consider the possibility that the natives might have decided this was not their war. It was clear to even a green eighteen-year-old like me that their judgment of the situation had little connection with reality. In the prewar colonial era the white man spoke patronizingly of “his” natives. I could see the two parallel civilizations that coexisted—one representing the master, the other the servant. It was a fragile edifice that could well crumble at any time. I kept my criticisms and irritations to myself, however, for I felt flattered to be invited to participate in their game and enjoyed being treated like a younger brother.

  Meanwhile we had been ordered to stay inside our barracks. There was no sign of the Japanese. Several days went by before the Japanese made their presence felt in Bandung. At first a Japanese patrol would enter our compound every day at noon, stay for half an hour, and then leave. Occasionally we received visits from other soldiers. Victors and vanquished were sizing each other up. To us, all Japanese seemed like tourists from a faraway continent: we felt like a spectacle—the human conquests. Some of these tourists were dressed in khaki and all buttoned up; others—wheeling their bikes by hand, rifle slung across the shoulder—wore little more than rags. These were the combat troops who looked as if they had just emerged from the rain forest. The Japanese use of infantry-on-bicycle had proved an innovative military tactic.

  In their rapid thrust southward, small bike-mobile Japanese units had moved swiftly along the dirt roads and footpaths of Malaysia, using shortcuts through the jungle that enabled them to avoid defending British troops. They were dressed in little more than loincloths. Others, more conventionally dressed, seemed uncomfortable in the tropical heat, and we learned these had come straight from the cold northern battlefields of China or the winter of their homeland. But every Japanese soldier we saw had a bayonet fixed to his rifle. To us, they were an unappealing and menacing mob; in short, ugly.

  Slowly, the Japanese began confiscating our weapons. First they took away our artillery, the antitank guns and the howitzers. Then they ordered us to round up all our rifles, machine guns, revolvers, and knives. We loaded our weapons onto our own trucks, stacking them efficiently in neat piles. Our trucks now bore the emblem of the rising sun. The work was supervised by our own officers, some of whom struck me as acting rather more subservient to the Japanese than was necessary. As the Japanese began barking out their orders more loudly, thereby letting us know that we were not moving fast enough, our own officers began to yell at us too. Our officers’ display of fear seemed undignified to me. It betrayed their tendency to brown-nose.

  Frans, one of my close friends, was the first of us to receive a beating. Whether by accident or in a spirit of sabotage, he dropped half a dozen rifles that had been tied in a bundle. A Japanese soldier administered some energetic wallops to Frans’s face and body, seeming to become more and more agitated. Meanwhile, his mates were hustling the rest of us—pushing and shoving us, gesturing that we should get on with the job and pay no attention to what was happening to Frans. We were seething, but we were also scared; to a man we complied. The next day it was my turn. I have forgotten what it was that I did that resulted in the first beating of my life, but I have never forgotten my outrage. Afterward, I walked around in a daze, hurt and full of anger, especially at my own officers. Not one of them acknowledged what had occurred—there was not a word of protest, nor a gesture of compassion. Months later I could still feel the sting of a fist on my face. For the first time in my life, I felt capable of killing someone. My vengeful fantasies about the Germans at the outbreak of the war had been mild in comparison to my vindictive flights of fancy now, in which the guard who had beaten me received a whipping he would never forget.

  Neither the Japanese guards nor any of us prisoners made an effort to communicate. From the very start we were two separate groups. Neither side took even the smallest grain of human interest in the other.

  Fortunately, most of the time our captors left us alone. We kept ourselves busy with sports and games. There were soccer matches, at which I was a spectator, and bridge tournaments, in which I was a competitor. In the evening hours we strained our ears trying to interpret the faint and crackling sounds coming from our clandestine radio, which was tuned to a distant Australian frequency. Although there wasn’t much in the news to cheer us up, we saw our defeat as a very short-term proposition. The war would end soon, and we would pick up the threads of our normal lives.

  Every day a throng of prisoners gathered at the large open window of a building that jutted out into the street in front o
f our barracks. Here prisoners and their families could communicate, although at a distance. Two lines would form; one inside, the other outside our camp. Cries of greeting, declarations of love, and mimed reports of the state of one’s health were exchanged. When a soldier had finished communicating his brief message to his wife, parent, or other loved one, both parties would cede their places at the front of the queue to the persons next in line. The system worked efficiently, without any preset rules.

  Although I had assumed that there was no longer any way to get to Bandung from Batavia, Mother showed up one day. There she was, a small figure in a plain white cotton dress (she did not want to appear conspicuous), wiping her face, waving and beaming, and carrying a large basket.

  “Are you okay?” she mouthed.

  “I’m fine,” I responded. “How is Father?”

  “Fine, he’s fine” she said succinctly. “He is not interned, and I’m fine too. Don’t worry. We’re both okay.” She went on to repeat her question about my health at least half a dozen times.

  The basket contained some khaki shirts, underwear, socks, cartons of cigarettes, and canned goods. It was the last gift I would receive in three years. It would be almost four years before I saw Mother again.

  (The image of Mother outside the gate of our barracks has stayed with me forever. Often as a boy and later as an adolescent and grown man I was embarrassed and bothered by her love. I experienced her critically as the one person who, oblivious of any friend, neighbor, or colleague who might overhear her, would blurt out whatever came into her mind—usually a recollection of something cute I had said or done when I was little. She always seemed to me a huge, overpowering creature, threatening to smother me in her heavy embrace. It was years before I could see her in a different light, as a courageous and loving, small but determined lady who stood for hours perspiring in the tropical midday sun, waiting patiently to catch a glimpse of me and throw me a kiss. I was ashamed that I had failed to recognize her utter devotion.)