Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Now it’s bloody gone. Some Jap’s nicked it and it’s probably ticking away in his house in Osaka, with his kids thinking their old man is a war hero and the clock was given him by grateful citizens for saving their lives.

  ‘While all this ransacking is taking place, there’s blokes dropping like flies in the ranks, but they just lie there at our feet and we are forbidden to help them. One of the blokes who was on the far side of the mob told me later that one of the God-botherers had broken ranks, defying the guards to beat him. He’s gone and got a kerosene can made into a bucket, filled it with water, and a tin mug and he’s going from man to man lying on the ground lifting their heads and making them take a drink of water.’ ‘What was his name?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, just one of them padres.’

  ‘Wardale-Greenwood?’

  ‘Could be, yeah I think it was him,’ he says, still not sure.

  Tommy squints up at me, ‘It was bound to be him, he was fearless. Maybe he was a proddo, but I tell you what, he was a bloody saint. He should have got the VC.

  ‘When it come to signing the document, I doubt there was a proper name used among the entire B Force. On the sheet where I sign “Mickey Mouse”, I count eight Ned Kellys and six Bob Menzies and one “Up the Hawks!” Cleary signs “Fatty Finn” because there are already several Ginger Meggs. Me other four mates make up something equally bloody stupid, one I remember was “King George” and another “Captain Cook”, although there was a real Captain Cook among us and I’ll tell you about him later. I don’t reckon there’s one bloke wrote his birth name down.’ Tommy stops and thinks a moment, ‘Yeah well, I suppose there’s a few who did. Some of our blokes were pretty bloody stupid. If the Japs catch on to this lurk, they don’t say. With them it’s all about not losing face.

  ‘We started to work on the airfield ten days before “ze oase” fiasco. At first the work isn’t too bad, it’s hard and punishment is severe for the slightest mistake, but the rations are enough to keep our bodies reasonably strong so we’re coping okay. Some of the coves doing the heavy labour get twenty-six ounces of rice, the others eighteen ounces, with a little fish or meat and some vegetables and a couple of cigarettes. To be fair, we had it pretty easy the first twelve months. We got flogged a fair bit, though when you’re a POW I suppose it’s to be expected but we had enough food and cigarettes. In fact, some of us had enough rice over to trade with the locals at the airstrip. Ten cents a day for working on the airstrip doesn’t sound like much, but you could buy a coconut or a fair-sized banana or a turtle egg for a cent from the natives. The best was a banana fritter, you could get one for two cents and it was a special treat. We’d sometimes find a bee’s nest and have a feast of honey and when we felled coconut palms, at the heart of the palm is this tender green centre which was pretty good to eat and which we called rich man’s cabbage, because you had to chop down the whole tree to get it. There was also a canteen in the camp where you could buy a bit of medicine or razor blades or extra cigarettes. It really wasn’t too bad at first.

  ‘The work on the airstrip was simple enough, digging up the tufa on the rises, filling up skips with it and then pushing them along a system of portable rails to the dips in the ground, tipping the skips and levelling the spill. Our biggest problem on the airfield was our eyes. Like I said earlier, the tufa is easy enough to work when it’s hard, but it’s almost white as snow and in the tropical sun, just like snow, it kicks back this blinding light your eyes can’t stand. So we invent these special “glasses” to stop the glare, two slivers of bamboo, or two sticks placed together with just the smallest gap between them to see through, with a piece of cord or plaited grass rope tied to either end of the sticks and then brought round and tied at the back of the head. Simple stuff, but it worked a treat. Only problem was that you ended up with pretty limited vision so you never knew if a Jap guard was creeping up on you. Sometimes you’d stop a moment for a breather and next thing you’d cop a pick handle across your back that would knock you to the ground.

  ‘The other problem we have is Lieutenant Okahara, the Jap in charge of the airstrip project. He is the original comic-book Jap, about five feet two inches tall with buck teeth and bottle-bottom glasses. Okahara is one of the cruellest bastards it is our misfortune to come across, a sadist who loves to inflict pain. The only time you ever saw him smile was when he was ordering someone to be beaten. He tells us he wants the first landing strip completed by December 1942 before the monsoon rains and that it’s got to be 850 metres long and 50 metres wide and he’ll get it whatever it takes.’ Tommy stops and thinks, then says, ‘In our measurements that’s approximately 930 yards long by about 55 yards wide. There’s only a limited number of skips and rails and with two working parties of three hundred working six days a week, it’s a bloody big ask. The rest of the prisoners are working on camp duties, the roads, driving trucks and loading supplies from town, others are collecting wood. But Okahara has a little trick up his sleeve to make sure the airstrip is completed by Christmas. It comes in the form of a “basher gang”.

  ‘I haven’t told you about the Formosan guards, have I?’ I shake my head. ‘Yeah, well, they’re conscripts from the island of Formosa which is part of Japan’s empire. Thickset powerful little blokes who the Japs regard as a second-rate people. They’ve joined up or been conscripted, willing or not, thinking once they’re in the Imperial Japanese Army they’ll be treated the same as the Jap soldiers but they soon find out that they are there to do the dirty work and their only outlet is to take it out on us.

  ‘Lieutenant Okahara picks four of the worst for his basher gang. Their leader is a mongrel named Kada. Built like a brick shithouse, he never tired of inflicting pain. He was known to us all as “Mad Mick”. I reckon he was genuinely off his rocker and when he was in a rage, which was daily, he’d foam at the mouth and his eyes would bulge out of his head like a bullfrog. The basher gang and the guards are under the supervision of another thoroughgoing bastard, a Jap officer named Lieutenant Moritake.

  ‘There was no way of escaping Mad Mick and his gang. They’d be armed with pick handles fashioned like swords which could be grasped in both hands. Any sign of slacking or if he imagined you were slacking or didn’t like the expression on your gob, Mad Mick and his boys would get stuck in, not only into the bloke they picked first off, but also his entire working gang.

  ‘One of their favourite tricks was to pit us against each other, mate on mate, and if you didn’t wallop your mate hard enough or he you, the guards would really have a go, knocking many a bloke into a state of unconsciousness. I remember one of our blokes, a mate of mine who was at Pulau Bukum, you remember the island off Singapore where we loaded oil drums and Blades Rigby got lopped?’ I nod, it’s not something you could easy forget. ‘Well, Richie Murray was a bloody good welterweight in civilian life and the first time we are made to go one-on-one, it’s me and him. Well, he’s clobbering me something terrible, though he’s pulling his punches and I’m missing him with just about every attempt. So Mad Mick sees this and stops the so-called fight and makes Richie keep his hands behind his back and tells me to beat the crap out of him. Richie’s a real game bugger and he’s that good on his feet and at keeping his head out the way, ducking and weaving, I still can’t hit him. So Mad Mick comes up from behind and clobbers Richie Murray with the pick handle. After that Richie Murray and me became mates.

  ‘Another little invention of Lieutenant Moritake was known by the men as “Flying Lessons”. For no reason whatsoever we’d be stopped and lined up and told to remove our hats and our eye protection and to stand with our arms extended at shoulder height to either side, like a kid playing at flying, using his arms as wings.

  ‘We’d be ordered to stand like this, looking up at the sun, and if a guard copped you with your eyes closed or shoulders slumped, he’d thump you with the pick handle. We’d stand there for an hour without moving, though we’d seldom know the reason f
or the punishment. This particular exercise would strain your muscles to the point of collapse and even though you closed your eyes every moment there wasn’t a guard nearby, the sun would burn the retina of your eyes so you couldn’t see properly for hours later and the bloody headache would last all day.

  ‘Any bloke who collapsed, and there were a lot of them, myself included on more than one occasion, got the full attention of the basher gang. But you didn’t have to do nothing, you copped it anyway, the guards would walk down the ranks hitting out willy-nilly into the rib cage under your extended arms. These whacks left livid marks across the ribs and back and if you only got one, you didn’t bother to mention it, two and you could claim corporal status, three and you’d hear blokes saying, “I got me sergeant’s stripes at flying practice today.”

  ‘Although there were incidents and constant beatings, while the Japs thought they were winning the war, the first year wasn’t too bad. Seven blokes died that year in B Force and none that I recall from torture. But already there were signs of sickness that would later cause havoc among the men. We’d been in the tropics now nearly a year and POWs more than six months, and the tropics under the conditions we were in is no place for the white man. Some of us were starting to develop tropical ulcers, you’ve seen the scars on me legs, but there’s other things, not bad at first but later, dysentery which I’d copped in Singapore, malaria, beri-beri and, in the heat and humidity, rice balls.’

  ‘Rice balls! What’s that?’

  ‘Mate, it’s a fungus, an infection you get in the tropics and it leaves the skin on your balls raw and bleeding and it’s so itchy you’d happily rip them out and throw them to the shithouse if you could! Then later there’s deaths from malarial meningitis. Later still, when we’re starving and most of us haven’t got no boots and walk around barefoot, we pick up hookworm and various types of intestinal worm as well from trying to eat stuff we find. There’s bloody nothing good to say about the tropics, the blackfellas can keep all of it as far as I’m concerned.

  ‘Being a bushie I’m a bit interested in the environment and whenever I get a chance I have a bit of a fossick around, seeing what can be et, what can’t. I don’t mean bandicooting, that’s different, I’m looking around in the jungle seeing if there’s wild stuff you can eat.’

  ‘What’s bandicooting?’

  ‘Bandicooting? Yeah well, after a while we find a way to get under the wire at night and into the vegie garden, which the Japs reckoned belonged to them. We’d go looking for tapioca mostly. The trick was to dig under the plant and pinch a fair amount of the tapioca root and then cover where we’ve disturbed the soil so the plant is still standing, and there’s no evidence it’s been tampered with. That’s bandicooting.

  ‘There’s been no successful escape from Sandakan but it’s always on yer mind. I’ve took the trouble to learn a fair bit of Malay from the native workers and the blokes who come to trade with us at the airstrip and I’m good enough for some of the other blokes to let me barter for them. So I’m fossicking in the jungle working out what can be et. In the back of me mind is that maybe if things get too bad I may try to escape someday.

  ‘We’re doing okay at the airfield, falling behind schedule, and then in October, there’s this big parade, some Jap bigwig, a Major Suga, is due to make an inspection of the airfield. You’d have thought he was a general, the Japs are running around like chooks with their heads cut off, getting everything ready. Hoshijima is shitting himself, thinking something will go wrong and there’s warnings every day that if any of us fuck up we’re in for the high jump. Well, the major turns up and we’re paraded and it’s blah-blah-blah but then he says in English, “All Japanese officers – Samurai. All Japanese officers – honnable. You work hard, finish airfield, you be fine!”

  ‘Then next morning at tenko we are told that the airstrip has now been increased to 1400 metres, which is about one mile, and that it still has to be ready for a trial landing before Christmas! Mate, those of us working on the airstrip don’t reckon it’s humanly possible. The monsoon season is just about on us and there’s no beating that.

  ‘Then the Japs in their wisdom decide we’ll work better without our senior officers interfering and trying to look after the welfare of the men. So Colonel Walsh our C.O. and some of the other senior officers are sent to Kuching. Seven majors and officers of middle rank remain. A year later, at the end of 1943, they clear them out as well and all but eight officers from our camp are sent to Kuching, leaving us with one officer for every two hundred and fifty men.

  ‘The Japs reckon the best way to work us harder is to beat us harder and we’re now working seven days a week and copping more shit than ever. We’ve built the whole strip layer by layer, a layer of river pebbles and a layer of tufa, but the Jap officers decide that drains are not necessary though Blind Freddy can see what happens every time it rains. Well, it’s not our job to tell them, is it? There are blokes among us who know a bit about engineering and reckon as soon as the monsoon season comes it’s bye-bye no more aeroplane fly.

  ‘The first early rains come and nature as usual proves who’s the boss. It’s November, not even the proper monsoon season yet, and there’s this dirty great bog appears just where it shouldn’t be on the strip and soon it turns into a shallow lake. Tufa is still the boss and the Japs bring in this ancient wood-fired steamroller to try to squeeze the water out and, as well, a Ruston-Bucyrus 10-RB Universal Excavator. It’s the first real machinery we’ve had up to now and, except for the skips and the rails, Sandakan must be the first airstrip of any size in the world that’s been built entirely by hand with hoes and shovels, wicker baskets and hand-pushed skips.

  ‘The excavator gives up on the first day. The Japs move it to the boiler house near the camp, hoping one of the POWs can fix it. It gets fixed all right. A POW named Stevens fills its sump with sand. The steamroller is then used to try and squeeze the moisture out of the strip. It keeps getting bogged but we manage to pull it free and it’s doing all right until it hits the boggy patch. It’s going puffpuff-puff, shooting clouds of blue smoke into the air and then it kind of slows down a bit, but still keeps going and we’re all watching cause we know what’s going to happen. It hits the boggy patch, falters and stops, and, still upright, sinks slowly into the tufa bog and disappears.

  ‘The Japs are ropeable, like it’s our fault, and Mad Mick and his gang go troppo, all of us close by cop a bashing and there’s more “sergeants” made instantly from the flying pick handles than at any flying practice I can remember. They beat us until they can’t raise their arms. Then they decide they need drains after all, so we’re set to work to dig a network of drains across the strip. The steamroller is kaput so now they make us stamp the surface with our feet, which works pretty well.

  ‘Somehow we’ve completed enough of the first landing strip to allow for the official opening in early December. On the day, a lone bomber lands and you’d have thought the Japs had won the war. There’s extra rations all round and we have a sports day to celebrate. Not a rest day, a day of runnin’ and jumpin’ and boxing and wrestlin’ and a cross-country race around the perimeter of the camp with guards stationed all the way. The trouble was, those blokes who’d been excused from work because they were supposed to be sick couldn’t resist joining in, so from then on you had to be bloody sick to stay in the camp.

  ‘There’s not a lot more I can say about the airfield,’ Tommy continues, ‘except we’re way behind schedule and even the Japs can see that beating us harder ain’t gunna work and that there’s more men needed. So in June 1943, just about a year after we come to Sandakan, five hundred blokes from E Force arrive. They’ve first been sent to an island called Berhala and then later on to us and they’ve come to work on the airfield as well. They’re separated from us in a different camp and in a different work gang on the airfield. Don’t know why that is, we’re all Aussies.

  ‘Hoshijima makes all of them sh
ave their heads so that the guards will know they’re members of E Force and not confuse them with us. At the same time, just to make life bloody impossible, guard dogs are introduced. With the dogs patrolling the fences, getting out at night to scrounge for food is now more difficult. In October ’43, the Japs move all but eight officers to Kuching and the E Force blokes move in with us.

  ‘One of the E Force blokes in my hut, Nelson Short, is a bit of a songwriter and musician. He’s made this ukulele from some scrap three-ply timber and signal wire; he’s used part of a broken comb for the frets, and the pegs he’s made from ground-down glass. He’s got a real good voice like a professional singer and often when we’re feeling low he’ll reach for his ukulele and sing for us some of the good old songs and some he wrote himself. One of his own songs was so good that we all learned to sing it. We even got a bit of harmony going.’

  I know Tommy’s got a good ear for poetry so I ask right off, ‘Can you remember the song?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Couldn’t sing it for me, could ya?’

  ‘Christ, mate, you don’t want to miss nothing, does yer?’ Tommy starts to sing, it ain’t much of a voice and I reckons it’s probably been a while since he’s done any singing.

  ‘I’m dreaming of Australia, The land we left behind,

  Dreaming of the loved ones,

  We could always bear in mind. Although it’s only fancy,

  Our hearts within us yearn.