‘We finally make it to Ranau in mid-February with only ten dead on the way. The two groups ahead of us have lost thirty-five men between them. The guards have their orders, if anyone slows down or can’t continue they must be shot or bayoneted. We’d be walking along and you’d see a bloke beginning to slow down. If he was close enough you’d try to help, put your hand to his back, tell him it’s not too far to the next smoko. But those who died on the march and later when we were carrying rice from Ranau to Paginatan, where groups six to nine stayed for a few weeks, would just come to a stop. You’d see in someone’s eyes he were good as dead. You’d shake his hand, tell him, you know, that she’ll be right, then move on. You’d just hope he’d die before the killing squad arrived. If they were kind, they’d shoot him, but mostly they’d use the bayonet or the butt of their rifle so they didn’t have to worry about cleaning their rifle barrel. They’d shoot or stab or beat the poor bastard to death and drag his body a few feet off the track and leave him there. There’s no time for a burial and there’s no padre with our lot so there’s no prayers, just a carcass left to rot in the jungle. There’s only one thing we all knew for certain, once you stopped, you stopped for good.
‘Conditions at Ranau Camp are terrible, we’re not supposed to stop here. We’re meant to be going to Jesselton, but the Allies are bombing the crap out of it. Our accommodation, if you can call it that, is a long open-sided hut. Dysentery breaks out and soon three-quarters of the living space is filled with blokes sick or dying. There’s shit and dirt and flies, lice and bugs and fleas, mites and crabs, there’s plenty of them, only thing that’s scarce is hope.
‘There’s no room at Ranau, the blokes in groups six to nine are still at Paginatan, which is also a staging post for Japs using the track. They’ve all got to be fed, so now we’re in rice-carrying work parties to Paginatan, twenty-six miles away. It’s a track through the jungle and it’s hell, there’d be twenty of us in a work party, each with a sack of rice on our backs but one thing this does, it gives us a chance to get extra food from the natives and we also manage to steal a bit of the rice. The thing is, if you’re strong enough to make the distance, you have a better chance of survival than those back in the camp. If a bloke died on the way or was bayoneted because he couldn’t keep up, we had to carry his rice bag, taking turns between us.
‘Then one night Albert Cleary says to me, he and Wally Crease are planning an escape, do I want to come?
‘“Tommy, we’re gunna die anyway, might as well die in the jungle, bloody sight better than a Jap bayonet. Then again, we might make it.” I’m sorely tempted but I tell him I can’t.
‘“Mate, you’re a good scrounger, the best of us all, we’ll get there, you’ll see,” he says to me again. “The natives know the Japs are on the run, they’ll help us, it’s in their interest now.”
‘“Mate, it’s not that,” I tell him, “It’s me mates, the three of them and me, we’ve been together since Malaya, I can’t leave them now.”
‘“Bring ’em then, they’re good blokes,” he says.
‘“They’d never make it, mate. All three o’ them are pretty crook. It’d only stop you and Wally getting away.”
‘I’ve managed to find a sweet-potato vine and I give him the two sweet potatoes I’ve dug up, shake his hand and wish him luck. Cleary’s a real good bloke, the best kind of digger you can find. I don’t ask him which way he’s going in case the Japs have a go at me, knowing we’re mates. Best I know nothing, then you can’t get into trouble.
‘On the third of March, Cleary and Wally Crease do a runner into the jungle from camp. Lieutenant Suzuki is off his skull, even one escape and the world will know what’s been happening and he’s in disgrace with his superiors. He knows there’ll be trials at the end of the war and, with witnesses, he’s going to be hanged for sure. The guards on duty who allowed them to escape are sent on a three-mile run with full kit, rifle and bayonet and then they’re lined up for a bout of face-slapping, which is the worst disgrace that can happen to a Japanese soldier.
‘Nine days later Cleary is caught, betrayed by some native villagers for the reward the Japs offered. Cleary was wrong, the natives are still hostile, or some o’ them anyway.
‘The guards who’ve lost face over his escape and are humiliated take it out on Cleary. They tie his hands behind his back and make him kneel, then they tie his ankles and place a ten-foot pole behind his knees and pull his legs back so his ankles are touching his arse and they tie them around the top of his legs so the pole is jammed behind his knees. After that, they jump on either side of the pole. Poor bastard is crying out in agony, screaming from the pain, but they keep on and on. Every hour or so, they untie him and force him back to his feet, causing him terrible pain as the blood runs back into his legs. They leave him lying there all night and we can’t get to him because he’s being watched by the guards.
‘Next day the guards, led by Kawakami, The GoldToothed-Shin-Kicking-Bastard, start all over again. He’s still tied to the log and they bash him something terrible. Grabbing and pulling his head back, they punch his throat till the blood pours from his mouth, they kick him and smash him with the butts of their rifles, slowly reducing him to a pulp. They don’t want to kill him straight off, they want his death to be slow and as painful as possible, so each time they untie him they give him some water to drink so he won’t die of dehydration.
‘About noon we see the Kempei-tai arrive in camp and they’ve got Wally Crease, he’s also been betrayed by the natives. Crease gets the same treatment as Albert Cleary with the log and they’re both tortured at intervals right through the night. We can hear them screaming.
‘At about 7 a.m., the torture stops for a little while because the guards have to organise the day’s working parties. Crease, who’s been untied to get a drink of water, realises the guards are busy elsewhere and ain’t looking. Christ knows how, but he can still walk and he makes a sec ond run for it. He tries to hide in the jungle but a few hours later a search party spots him and they shoot him dead.
‘This time Suzuki is mad as a cut snake and he goes apeshit, the guards are severely punished and there’s more face-slapping and now there’s even more guards been humiliated and Cleary cops more torture. They’ve tied him to a tree with a rope around his ankles and his neck and every time a guard passes he kicks Cleary or smashes him with his rifle butt, spits on him, or takes out his cock and urinates on him. They won’t touch him with their hands, afraid they’ll get dysentery. Cleary’s out there in the blistering sun all day and no shelter from the mosquitoes at night. He’s covered in his own shit and blood and he’s got no face left, there’s nothing you can see, just pulped and purple flesh with a hole for his mouth where his face once was and where a Jap guard pours a bit of water twice a day to keep him alive.’
Tommy turns to me, ‘I can’t do nothing for him. I feel it should be me there, or maybe if I’d gone with them, it might have been different. I speak the native lingo real good by now and maybe I could have persuaded the villagers who turned him in that they would’ve got a bigger reward from the Allies or explained how the Japs were being defeated and, if they helped them, we would’ve come back and got them afterwards. All these things go through my head as I’m watching my mate dying. I feel terrible guilty, like it’s me that’s let them down. I know it don’t make sense, but the route they took was wrong, maybe I would have persuaded them to go another way. One mate is dead and another is dying in front of my eyes and I’m praying to God to let him die. But the guards won’t kill him off, they want him alive as long as possible.
‘Cleary suffers eight days of torture. He’s only semi conscious and I dunno how he’s still alive, but he’s dying. His body, that part that ain’t covered in purple bruises and blood blisters, is a sickly yellow colour. The tropical ulcers on his legs have eaten to the bone and the pus runs down his ankles. He’s always only worn a fondushi, a loincloth, like the re
st of us and it’s soaked with muck and blood pouring out of his bowels.
‘Then on the twentieth of March the guards cut him down and dump him like a dead dog beside the Meridi track. It’s the first time we can get to him and we pick him up and take him to the creek, where we tenderly wash away the shit and the grime and encrusted blood from his battered and broken body. Thank gawd, Cleary’s unconscious. But we hope he knows it’s us come to care for him, that his mates love him. I’ve got him in me arms and someone else has got him by the legs and we take him back to the hut, tender as we can, and we’re not long back when he dies in me arms. He’s twenty-two years old and one of the nicest blokes you’d ever meet.’
Tommy is silent for a long time and I hear him sigh a few times. I’ve got this lump in me throat big as an apple and there’s tears running down my cheeks but I don’t want Tommy to see I’m crying again. After a while he starts off again.
‘The Japs wouldn’t let us bury him with his mates, they said he was a criminal and so we had to put him in a lonely grave away from the others. It’s such a small thing but it broke our hearts.
‘A fortnight after Cleary died, the blokes who had been kept at Paginatan, or what was left of them, arrived. Dysentery and starvation had knocked them off like flies. Of the 150 men who’d reached the village six weeks before, now only fifty were alive. There was plenty of room in the hut because there was only about a hundred of our lot left as well.
‘Those of us still on our feet could only watch as our comrades wasted away. You can see two kinds of dying in the eyes. There’s the eyes of the blokes dying of dysentery, the skull clear through the stretched skin, all except the eyes, which are popping out like they’re gunna burst out the sockets, the white part is yellow and the colour of the eyes is gone and looks like muddy water. Then there’s the blokes with beri-beri, the face is swollen like a balloon with the eyes just slits in skin that looks like suet pudding.
‘You’d wake up of a mornin’ not believing you was still alive, the thread in you hangin’ on ain’t broke yet, not sure you’re glad it’s still holding, you’ve got another day to get through. You look to one side to see if the bloke next to you is still alive and then the same to the other side. If one or both are dead, you roll them over a bit to see if he’s got anything you can use or there’s anything in his belongings might be handy. You’d leave him there, hoping you wasn’t picked for the burial party.
‘There would be a burial party every morning though this time there wasn’t a coffin or even a bamboo platform. The dead were stripped naked and we’d tie their wrists and ankles together and we’d put a bamboo pole through them and carry them like you’d carry a dead animal, like a dead dingo. There’d be no padre and we’d scrape a ditch six inches deep because we didn’t have the strength to dig a grave. Then we’d stand back and spit on the body before we scraped the soil back over him.’
‘Spit!’ I shout out. I can’t believe it’s what I’ve heard Tommy say.
Tommy shrugs, ‘It was a mark of respect, leaving some thing of yourself with him, it was the soldiers’ way,’ he explains.
‘We don’t know it at the time, of course, but there’s an order that’s come through to all the Jap-controlled POW camps from the Japanese High Command in Tokyo. It says that every prisoner of war held by the Japanese must be killed, there must be no survivors to tell the stories of the atrocities the Japs have committed. The camps must be burned down and any evidence destroyed that can implicate them.
‘What’s happening to us is that they’re allowing us to die as fast as we can manage on our own by starving us and holding back the medicine that’s been supplied by the Red Cross to Sandakan Camp. There’s plenty of rice because we’re carting it to Paginatan and the Jap soldiers are getting a full ration of two pounds a day. The plan is that whoever is left at the end they’re instructed to kill.’
Tommy gives a little laugh, ‘Our side is doing its level best to finish us off as well. The camp is close to a small airstrip, nothing much, just a bit of grass in the jungle, but they strafe and bomb it. A couple of POWs and a few Jap soldiers staying in a temporary barracks nearby get killed, so Lieutenant Suzuki decides to relocate. We pack up and move to a bunch of native huts in the jungle that’s not too far away but can’t be seen from the air.
‘By this time, it’s late April and there’s only fifty-six of us left. Two weeks later when Richie Murray gets murdered, there’s only about thirty of us, we’re falling like nine pins. A week or so after that, the Japs say they need seven men to carry rice to Paginatan. They’re expecting a mob of blokes there pretty soon and the village is out of rice. What we don’t know at the time is that the new arrivals are another lot of our Sandakan mob who’ve left on a second march at the end of May.
‘We’re all in pretty bad shape, half the blokes are on the way out and can hardly stand up. Lieutenant Suzuki calls out seven names. Me and me three mates are among them. Me mates are just about hanging on and I see that Kawakami, The Gold-Toothed-Shin-Kicking-Bastard, is assigned as a guard. I plead with Lieutenant Suzuki to let them stay back. He’s shaking his head and pushing me back into line, but I won’t let up. I can speak enough Japanese so he knows what I’m on about but he won’t relent. He’s angry and says something to a guard, who knocks me over with his rifle butt. I get up and tell him he can shoot me, but just don’t let me mates go on the working party. Then I realise who the guard is who knocked me over, it’s another evil bastard called Suzuki Saburo. His favourite trick during burials was to follow two prisoners carrying their dead mate on the pole, like I explained earlier. He’d stick his boot out so one of the carriers would trip and the body on the pole would crash to the ground. Suzuki Saburo thought this was huge fun.
‘Counting the previous rice trips, this is my fifth trip to Paginatan, but I knew it would be me last, we were buggered, me mates even worse than me. We were still within sight of the camp when a bloke who’s suffering from beriberi can’t go any further. Suzuki Saburo drags him to the side of the track and kills him with a single shot through the head. He comes back cursing and swearing because he’s got a few spots of blood on his uniform. Kawakami is laughing and that makes him cranky as hell.
‘Two more prisoners are murdered before we get to Paginatan, but somehow me mates have held on and we get a night’s sleep before the journey back, which without a load is a lot easier. The four of us are still standing, still together next morning, though, as we set out, I can see they’re very weak and more than once along the way I’ve had to take each of them around the shoulder and urge them on. I’m not much better meself. We’re all reduced to shuffling along, leaning on sticks, we can’t lift our feet more than half an inch and the trail is rough and sometimes slippery. We get to a hill just a little higher than the others we’ve crossed and all three of me mates make it a couple of hundred yards up the track and stop. They can’t make it no more.
‘I can’t believe it’s all three. I urge them on, but I ain’t got a lot left in the tank meself. I can see they’re barely conscious, I try to grab a hold of one and urge him forward and he sinks down to his knees and then falls on his face. I look at the other two, they’re out on their feet, then one sits down, then the other. By now I’m screaming at them, “Get up, you bastards! We can make it! Please, please get up!” But I’m wasting me time, they’ve both got their eyes closed and then one keels over. Oh Jesus, don’t die on me, don’t die. All three are gunna die on me, I’ll be alone. I don’t want to die alone. Rigby’s dead, Murray’s dead, Cleary’s dead, I should’ve somehow persuaded Lieutenant Suzuki to keep me three best mates off the work party, it must be me done this to them! First Cleary and Crease not speaking the native lingo, going the wrong way, Richie Murray for stealing the food, now them three. Oh shit, what am I gunna do! is what’s going through me head.
‘Then Kawakami comes up and smiles, his gold tooth showing. He kicks at me mate sitting up, who keels ov
er and lies there. The three o’ my mates are just lying there now. “Smoko!” I say, “Rest! They’ll be all right, you’ll see!” ‘“Finish,” he says, grinning, “No go.”
‘I sink to me knees and grab him by the ankles and kiss his boots, “Please, please, smoko, rest time!” I beg.
‘He kicks me off and I’m still on me knees. He’s grinning down at me. Suzuki Saburo has come to watch Kawakami, who has his rifle pointed at the head of me mate. I say each of their names, I tell them I’m sorry. Kawakami suddenly pulls back his rifle and says something to Suzuki Saburo, who drags me to my feet. Kawakami’s laughing. “You shoot!” he says, pointing to me mates, then hands me the rifle. Suzuki Saburo has his rifle pointed to my chest.
‘“No!” I scream. “No, no, no!” Suddenly I’m blubbing, I ain’t cried yet in all the time, not for Rigby, not for Cleary, not for me mate who died sitting up, now I’m crying.
‘“You shoot!” Kawakami screams at me.
‘One of me mates who’s still conscious opens his eyes, his voice is barely above a whisper, his lips just moving, “Please, Tommy, you do it, mate.” Then he closes his eyes and he don’t move no more, he’s passed out. ‘“Shoot!” Kawakami screams.
‘Now I’ve got the rifle in me hands and I do it, three shots, the rifle bolt clicking back each time. The clicks and the shots I still hear in me head every day of me life. The three shots that murdered me mates, the sound of a flock of birds rising from the jungle canopy at the first explosion . . .’
I’m crying again, but again not so he can hear, tears rolling down my cheeks and over my chin. I’m glad he’s never said the names of his mates so I don’t have a picture in me head. But Tommy ain’t crying. He just sits there and then he sighs. ‘Kawakami takes his rifle and knocks me to the ground and last thing I feel is the butt in me face, me jaw breaking. He’s beaten me severe so I’d die slowly, he ain’t gunna waste a bullet on me, it’s the Japanese way of insulting the dead. But I didn’t feel the most of it, only the first, ’cause the blow to me face knocked me unconscious.
Four Fires Page 79