‘Yeah, mate, the selfsame, though we didn’t know it at the time. The Japs made it sound like them blokes were going to a holiday camp for retired soldiers.
‘It’s now early July, we’re fed up with the Selarang Barracks diet of rice and a bit of veg, that is if you’re lucky. In all the time we were there I never tasted an official AIF egg, even though the hens in the new poultry farm were popping their bums off daily in front of me very eyes.
‘Privately it was another matter of course, an omelette wasn’t entirely unknown back in the humpy. But still, there’s a principle involved, ain’t there? A man shouldn’t have to risk the cart for stealing the odd egg when he’s working on a flamin’ poultry farm.
‘With everyone out on working parties, there’s 3800 of us left behind. Those of us in Selarang are not exactly the pick of the crop neither.
‘There’s the old blokes, nothing too much wrong with them, most are damn good soldiers from the first world war who do the administration duties. Then there’s those not fit enough for a working party who are running the camp, the cooks, the kitchen hands, cleaners and general rouseabouts, a more lazy mob would be bloody hard to find. There’s us so-called larrikins, or what is known as “the less well-disciplined”, doing hard yakka, working in the vegie gardens and poultry farm, pulling the cart and other unpleasant tasks. There’s the real hard cases doing latrine duty. Then there’s the sick, of course, who can hardly wipe their own bums, and those convalescing on light duties. After that, there’s a whole bunch of useless bastards called officers and warrant officers, who are not required to do an honest day’s work and who are probably the ones scoffing all the eggs.
‘So when the Japanese say they need another two thousand men for a second workers’ paradise, which they describe as a rest camp suitable for older men and convalescents, we’re there boots an’ all. They conduct a medical inspection to choose two thousand fit men but there’s no way they’re gunna get them. They change it to 1500 and even then they’re scraping the bottom of a very battered barrel. We’re called B Force and one thing is certain we ain’t no force to be reckoned with.
‘All the old blokes are comin’ along, a lot of them from non-combatant units so they’re soft as plum duff. The walking not-so-sick are included and the late recruits who never really knew what had hit them when they went into battle and are still wonderin’ how they got here in the first place.
‘Then there’s all the officers and warrant officers who have been doing bugger-all for the duration. In the history of military organisations, I’ll vouch no group ever had a bigger officer-to-private-soldier ratio. There’s one officer for every ten men. Of a final count of 1494 soldiers, there’s 143 officers. In one unit, the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment, or what’s left of them, there are twelve officers, two majors, one captain and nine lieutenants responsible for thirtythree men. What’s more, nine of the men are NCOs!’
Tommy looks at me, ‘Mole, maybe you think because I’m a corporal I’m heaping shit on officers and higher rank. Mate, I’m not. A good officer is the salt of the earth. Our C.O. Anderson at the battle of Parit Sulong, you’d have given your life for him. And, as I said, we weren’t exactly God’s gift ourselves. But with some exceptions, like Ken Mosher and Lionel Matthews, both outstanding officers a man would be proud to fight under, about twenty per cent of the officers in B Force were a heap o’ shit. I don’t mean only their personalities, there were some really useless bastards you wouldn’t feed in any army! Two out of ten don’t sound that much but out of 143 officers there were twentyeight officers you wouldn’t pay to pimp in a brothel. There were blokes with one and two pips on their shoulders who’d arrived just in time to go into the bag and who didn’t know their arse from their elbow when it come to being an officer responsible for leading men.’
‘No, you’re right,’I now say to Tommy, ‘I read in this book where it said the officers in POW camps in Asia ranged “from cream to sour milk”. I guess you got the sour milk.’
Tommy nods, ‘You can say that again! But at the time we think it don’t matter that much. We’re going into semiretirement, us and all the old blokes and the convalescents. The five of us Young Turks reckon we’ve done good getting in on this lurk. After the cart and the chook farm it’s time for a bit of a spell, you know, lie on the beach eating coconuts and mangoes, taking it easy for a change. May even be some of the local sheilas around. The Asian women ain’t a bad lookin’ lot, some of them are real crackers and used to takin’ good care of their men.’
Tommy is silent, poking at the fire with the stick. Then he glances at me and looks away into the embers. ‘If I’d known what was gunna happen to us, I’d have volunteered for permanent duty on a six-man harness on a Changi trailer! Better than that, I’d have gladly done latrine duty for the rest of the war. Emptying shit buckets would have been a privilege.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It’s getting pretty late but Tommy’s still talking and I’m still listening, though for a while he’s gone silent, thinking, looking into the fire.
Having four hours’ sleep after our tea was a good idea and I’m hoping he can go for the duration. I can see there’s worse to come and I don’t want him to run out of steam and leave it for another time.
It’s funny, as the night goes along I begin to see Tommy in a different way. I’ve always known him as a bloke with a bad side and a good side. The bad side is that he’s a drunk and a crim and doesn’t love us. The good is when we’re in the bush, he explains things to me just like an ordinary bloke, even sometimes a bit like a father. Now I begin to see how he got to be who he is. Nancy always says, ‘Your father’s damaged, you can’t expect more from him.’ When you’re a kid, you don’t understand and you do expect more; well, not expect, but hope for more.
Even the kids in Bell Street, most of whom have an old man who comes back home drunk a couple of nights a week, skite about their dad. Sometimes they get thumped, come to school with a black eye or a thick lip, having run into the same neighbourhood door knob everyone runs into if you live in our street. But the thing is, they don’t hate their old man and they tell how he does things with them, comes to the footie matches, takes them to the beach once a year, and they go on picnics and camping and fishing for fun.
I’ve been lucky to have the good side of Tommy, the bush side, but the others haven’t experienced that and they only know the bag-of-nerves Tommy. Bozo ignores him and gets on with his life. Mike despises him. Little Colleen is terrified of him and Sarah tolerates him if he stays away from her. Only Nancy tries to pretend he’s a proper member of the family and has the rights of a real father.
The way Tommy is telling me the story of the war I can see he isn’t trying to big-deal himself. I’ve heard lots of blokes talking about the war and after a while they’ve picked up everyone else’s bullshit and mixed it with their own so when they tell it, you’d think they’d won the war single-handed.
As Tommy speaks, I see him differently to before, now he’s just an ordinary bloke who’s not going to get past the rank of corporal. He can be trusted to do what’s asked of him but he’s not going to volunteer for any extra, even if it could make him a hero. He’s doing his best to stay alive and that’s all. What’s coming through, without him having to say it, is that he is a pretty nice bloke and not really a larrikin. Tough maybe, a bushie and a survivor, someone you could trust if the shit hit the fan.
He’s also a pretty good observer of things and can put two and two together, like he remembers the names of places and the numbers involved and what was going on in the big picture. I suppose that’s the same reason he’s so good in the bush, he knows the little bits as well as the big, he can see the overall picture as well as the detail. Now I’m about to hear what happened to change him into the man he’s become. The bloke who can’t remember the names of the four mates who fought with him, who he claims saved his life on more than one occasion. The man wh
o can’t be a father because he thinks it will damage his family if he loves them. I’m almost scared to hear the rest of his story, afraid to find out what it takes to turn a good man into a drunk and a thief who is terrified to love. In my heart I hate the Japanese, because I know it’s them done this to him and it’s his family that’s had to suffer.
I wonder about all the other blokes who come back from being POWs and their families. There’s Mr Gee and his family, he’s got Bruce, the son, and then there’s two girls, twins. How’d they be? His wife, what’s she had to put up with? Nancy wears the pants at our place but even she gets very frustrated with Tommy and reckons she could sometimes wring his neck. There’s others also. You never know, do you? Families don’t talk about those things. They’ve just got to cop it sweet because the old man is a war hero. I think of Mr Baloney, Tommy’s old man, comin’ back from the Great War. Tommy doesn’t talk about him much, could be he got a fair shovel of shit thrown at him from his father.
Tommy looks up from the fire and starts talking again. ‘I remember, the rise ’n’ shine bugle at five o’clock on the morning of the eighth of July, the day B Force leaves for the workers’ paradise, wherever that may turn out to be. All we’ve been told is we’re going on a boat. We pack our gear, have a breakfast of rice porridge, milk and sugar, half a slice of bread and a mug of tea, not too bad by Changi standards. No eggs, of course! Though they give us a dollar note each and a cigarette ration. I’m all for the easy life, I think to meself, I’m even a bit excited about the boat trip that lies ahead.’
Tommy shakes his head, ‘Mate, we should have known that very morning that the Japs, who’ve treated us not too bad since the surrender, were mongrels underneath. Some of the B Force are put into a convoy of trucks to drive to the wharves and some have to start marching and they’ll be picked up by the first trucks returning from the wharves. We’re lucky and get on a truck and on the way we have to pass through part of the city.
‘On street corners are stakes pushed into the ground with freshly severed heads rammed onto the top of them. There must have been dozens of the poor sods. Then on either side of the Anderson Bridge, displayed on long tables, are more freshly severed heads, the tabletops are stained dark with blood drying in the morning sun. Most of the heads look to be Chinese. I mean, fair go, it’s not like the Nips have just taken the city and they’ve done this in the heat of the battle. It’s bloody five months since there’s been any resistance and these animals keep on killing the civilian population. I should have known it would only be a matter of time before they got back to us again.
‘The hell begins the moment we step on board ship, which is a laugh in itself. It’s a small and very rusty tramp steamer named the Yubi Maru’ (Tommy pronounces it ‘Yoobee’), ‘which turns out was sold to Japan by Australia before the war.
‘Bob Menzies, the Australian prime minister, thinking he was making a really good deal, sells the Japs all our clapped-out ships for scrap metal. He don’t ask what the scrap metal is for. Which, of course, is to melt down to make bullets and shells and tanks and trucks to use against us. Up top for thinking was our Bob.
‘I suppose the Yubi Maru was still more or less seaworthy, it was an Australian wheat carrier before it was sold and the Japs must have turned it into a coal carrier because when we boarded, we found the centre hold has been divided into two iron decks covered in two inches of coal dust. The poor bastards who were crammed in and come out of there at the end of the voyage all looked like boongs.
‘The ship has three holds, for’ard, aft and amidships. Only way you could get in was by a vertical steel ladder. Being a wheat carrier, there’s no portholes and air is blown in through a canvas pipe that only works when the ship is moving. We’re packed in like sardines. I’m not kidding, we’re forced to sit with our knees tucked up under our chins. There’s no lying down, so you sleep, if you can in the terrible heat below, leaning against the bloke next to you.
‘Like a lot of the blokes I’ve got the squits, I’ve never completely got over the dysentery and all it takes is one crook meal and it’s on again. The food on board can’t be et, it’s watery rice with weevils floating on top and, I swear to God, there’s grass chopped into it. Occasionally a tiny lump of rotten meat floats by and it all smells something terrible, like rotten eggs, as if lime has been added. It’s a worm-ridden mess we only eat because we’re bloody starving. With it is a pan of brownish liquid that’s supposed to be tea. Mare’s piss would taste a whole heap better. Only thing we can stomach is the pint of water we each get a day, which in the heat ain’t near enough and a lot of the blokes are suffering from dehydration.
‘I don’t spend a lot of time hugging me kneecaps below decks because I join the long queue to use the latrines. Each day the queue grows longer as men suffer from diarrhoea because of the grub, and then come down with dysentery because of the conditions. The latrines are a series of small platforms constructed out of old packing cases that extend beyond the deck so that they hang over the sea. There’s no real hole to shit through, just a gap in the planks, and you squat on this contraption and hang onto the ship’s rails and hope for the best. I’d get to the front, have a crap, and then I’d move to the back and start queuing all over again.
‘Then dysentery breaks out in a big way. While the deck and the latrines are hosed out with sea water early every morning and again in the evening, the holds and the ladders leading down into them are not. There’s no place to wash your hands after a shit and some of the blokes below have shat their pants so that the stench is unbelievable. One good thing, the Japs don’t come down and they keep their distance. It says in the Bible that hell is burning in flames, but let me tell you I’d take that any day to the overwhelming smell of shit, chunder and sweating, dirty men jammed against each other in heat above one hundred degrees.
‘There’s ten days of this, every one o’them hell on earth. The ship travels at about six knots and it’s so stinkin’ hot you could fry an egg on the decks during the day, and it don’t cool down much at night neither. At dawn on the tenth day, we round the north-eastern coast of Borneo and set course south to a place the Japs say is Sandakan.
‘It’s the first time we’ve heard the name and it don’t mean much at the time. Anything to get off this shit-hole called a ship that our bloody prime minister sold to Japan. I once saw the bugger, with his bushy black eyebrows and snow-white hair, in Melbourne. People were cheering and calling out, “Good on ya, Bob!” All I could think is “You bastard, I’d like to have you spend just one night on the Yubi Maru you sold so happily to Japan!” The profits probably went into perks for politicians.’
I laugh at this, because Nancy thinks Bob Menzies is an ace bloke, even though he loves the Queen and she doesn’t. It’s a contradiction in terms because she doesn’t even vote Liberal. She says it doesn’t matter, the buggers are all the same anyway, but that Bob Menzies is a nicer type of person than Arthur bloody Calwell! So she admires Menzies and votes Labor, though generally speaking her opinion of all politicians isn’t any different to Tommy’s.
‘It’s hours before we go ashore,’ Tommy continues.
‘Most of us are in pretty bad shape. Ten days of starvation, diarrhoea and dehydration can make a mess of a strong man and there ain’t too many of those in B Force. Us young blokes are only just hangin’ on, the older blokes are doing it tough. When we come down the gangplank, the Japs spray our feet and legs with a solution of carbolic acid. One of our officers demands to know what they’re doin’. “Dysentery!” the Jap sergeant yells. “Dysentery no more!”
‘We’re standing on the wharf, being counted and recounted when we get our first look at the Nip who is gunna be commandant of Sandakan POW camp, Lieutenant Hoshijima. He’s tall for a Jap, nearly six feet, and his uniform is very clean, his boots polished to a high shine. He walks down past us and I think he’s an arrogantlookin’ cove if ever I saw one. “Wouldn’t expect no mercy from
him,” one of me mates says through the side of his mouth. The Jap officer’s lip is half-curled up and it’s not hard to figure he don’t like what he sees. Mind, I can’t blame him. We’re black from the coal, smell of shit, we’re filthy bloody dirty, sick as dogs, and we can hardly stand up, but we’re hoppin’ from one leg to the other like chooks on chicken wire because the dysentery-curing carbolic acid is stinging like buggery.
‘Later we learn that, in Japanese terms, Hoshijima is like a high-class Jap. He’s gone to Osaka University and has been personally appointed by General Maeda, who’s commander-in-chief of Japanese forces in Borneo.
‘Being the commandant of a POW camp don’t seem like a great military honour, but the fact he’s only a lieutenant and got the job means he’s got a big future in the army. Which is something we’re all beginning to think don’t apply to us.
‘Some of the blokes are marched up the hill to spend the night in a church but the rest of us stay on the padang.’
‘What’s a padang?’ I interrupt.
‘Well, like the town square or the cricket oval. We’re camped there, and the mosquitoes coming in from the swamps bite me half to death but I don’t give a stuff. For the first time in ten days, I can lie on me back and stretch me legs out. It don’t matter the grass is wet and it rains during the night, compared to the Yubi Maru it’s paradise!
‘At 4 a.m. the Japs wake us up. We’re starvin’ hungry but the food they serve for breakfast is just slush, last night’s leftovers that smell even worse than on board. We’ve got to eat something or we’ll be too weak to carry on, but there’s not just a few who throw it all up again.
‘We’ve got an eight-mile march to the camp ahead of us, which don’t seem a lot, I suppose, but in our condition it’s gunna feel like fifty.
‘The first three miles is uphill and a bloody hard slog. They give us a smoko at the top though, and after that it’s more open, undulating country, leading to the beginning of the rubber plantations.
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