|
Postscript
Half a century later, at a reception in Tokyo, at which war veterans from both sides were meeting each other, I was surprised when another ex-POW and I were approached by the former major who had commanded one of the 9 Railway Regiment battalions stationed at Takanun. There was no question of his friendliness or desire to be helpful in every way. But one could not help wondering what his role had been in 1943. Takanun was not the worst railway camp, but bad enough. Dr Robert Hardie (‘The Burma-Siam Railway: The Secret Diary of Dr Robert Hardie’) made an entry in his diary in 1943 about the hospital there:-
[Conditions] ... are really terrible. The few tents are crowded, six or seven people on each side lying on roughly flattened bamboo slats. Most of them are severe dysenteries; they are helpless. There is a lot of rain now, and the tents leak. There is only one bedpan in the whole hospital, and three enamelled pots. The weather is too wet to get the patients outside every day — even if there were stretchers to carry them on — and even if they could be got out we have no soap or cloths to clean the tents up. The stench and squalor of these tents is shocking; what is surprising is how the orderlies manage to keep them from becoming worse. Nursing in any ordinary sense of the word is practically impossible. It is no wonder that some of the men despair; last night one of them tried to saw through the arteries of his wrists against a sharp edge of cut bamboo. It’s a wonder that more don't attempt to do away with themselves. But they need hardly trouble. When they have reached that stage they are almost certain to die anyway.
Another entry that year concerns the fate of the Asian labourers:-
A lot of Tamil, Chinese and Malay labourers from Malaya have been brought up forcibly to work on the railway. They were told they were going to Alor Star in northern Malaya; that conditions would be good — light work, good food and good quarters. Once on the trains, however, they were kept under guard and brought right up to Siam and marched in droves up to the camps on the river. There must be many thousands of these unfortunates all along the railway course. There is a big camp a few kilometres below here, and another two or three kilometres up. We hear of the frightful casualties from cholera and other diseases among these people, and of the brutality with which they are treated by the Japanese. People who have been near these camps speak with bated breath of the state — corpses rotting unburied in the jungle, almost of affairs complete lack of sanitation, frightful stench, overcrowding, swarms of flies. There is no medical attention in these camps, and the wretched natives are of course unable to organise any communal sanitation.
Hence, actually meeting men who had been in charge of us as prisoners of war faced me with a certain problem. Notwithstanding their evident friendliness and goodwill, one could not help remembering. For my own part, I have little personal memory of the POW camp guards or of the railway engineers. Those Japanese I do remember were either Kameyama's men, who were without exception well-disposed towards us, or the NCOs and Gunzoku Koreans of the transport unit with which we worked afterwards — by no means lily-white, but not as bad as many others. I had no firsthand knowledge of the overall organisers of the POW administration, or of the railway work.
Was I now dealing with people who had a thoroughly bad record, perhaps had been war criminals? I had not paid any attention to the war crimes trials, and had noticed little more than that Captain Noguchi, who had been in charge of some of the camps I had been in, had been hanged — as had been General Yamashita who had defeated us at Singapore.
I can assure you the situation was not all that clear. There are several levels of responsibility for the Burma-Thailand railway. There were the Dahonei and the higher command, who took the decision to build the railway and use POWs on it. Secondly, there were the railway engineers on the site, and thirdly the POW administration which had to supply the labour force. There is no doubt these two latter categories were under very severe pressure to get the job completed on time — more or less regardless of consequences.
When you place men in such a situation you become dependent on their individual characters. If they are basically humane, they can do little to mitigate the situation. If they are sadists, full rein will be given to their excesses. The war crimes tribunals were only of limited efficacy in sorting out the worst cases. Hence, it is hard to determine individual guilt. The real fault lay in the planning of the railway. Were the problems and hardships it would cause vastly underestimated or simply ignored. If the latter, then the responsibility did lie at the highest level, and so would largely have been dealt with at the Tokyo trials.
Meeting these men, I could on return to England have gone the Public Records Office at Kew. I doubted whether I would have found much. If I had it might just have proved embarrassing. Deep down, I doubted the justification and efficacy of war crimes trials. I did not feel I was meeting any kind of major war criminal, any Japanese equivalent of the German Dr Mengele. If I was now consorting with minor wrongdoers who had repented, was it my place to reopen old gores?
Do you feel I am avoiding the issue? All my life, half a century on in fact, I have been reflecting on this. If you want pursue the development of these reflections, please read my other book, ‘The End of the Showa Era’. This book does no more than tell you how it was.
|
|
|
|
|
|
![wh_l_arr[1]](../assets/images/wh_l_arr_1_.gif "wh_l_arr[1]")
|
Previous Page
|
Next Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
