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Preface
In the years immediately following our release in 1945, many books appeared telling how badly we had been treated on the Burma-Thailand railway. These included ‘Railroad of Death’ by John Coast, whom I had known quite well, ‘Bamboo Doctor’ by S.S. Pavillard, a medical officer, also known to me, and ‘Prisoner on the Kwai’ by B. Peacock. For a time these books secured a fairly wide readership and a certain notoriety for the subject. Little in them is untrue or exaggerated, although those I read concentrated chiefly on the more sensational side of our experience. Tribute was also paid to the heroism and solidarity of the prisoners of war. Thus, our particular predicament got more publicity than most others, an exception being the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. However, our experience was really only part of a far wider picture.
There are uncertainties in the statistics available. The total number of prisoners of war in Far East theatres — i.e. the number of lives that the Japanese army might have been able to bargain with in securing peace terms — is sometimes given as 350,000. Much depends on what you count as British. Did this include Australians and Indians? Then there were many tens of thousands of Asians, especially Chinese, who suffered at Japanese hands. Accurate figures are hard to come by, and in any case say little about the real level of human suffering. In particular, we don't really know how many Chinese died in the earlier stages of the Sino-Japanese war from 1937 onwards.
It would appear that the Allies suffered 138,708 casualties connected with the fall of Singapore, of whom about 130,000 became prisoners of war. The conquering Japanese force was about a third of that size, and had 9,824 casualties. Over 67 ,000 of the Allied casualties were Indians; 18,490 were Australian, including 1,789 killed in action and 1,306 wounded; the local volunteer force numbered over 14,000. The British loss was over 38,000. The workforce on the Thailand-Burma railway consisted of about 51,000 who were either British, Dutch or American, with 9,500 Australians, and perhaps about 270,000 Asians. It is generally agreed that the military prisoners had about 13,000 deaths, while the number of Asians can only be roughly estimated at about 70,000. The Japanese Army is recorded as having had 12,000 men working on the railway, of whom 1,000 died. Australian figures have a melancholy character. They had 21,644 prisoners of war in the Far East, of whom 7,777 or over a third died in captivity. Of these, 2,336 died in Thailand, 1,783 in Borneo, and others in Ambon, Burma, Malaya, New Britain and Japan. Losses at sea were 1,515. There were 27 executions for trying to escape, 193 executions for other reasons, and 375 who are believed to have been executed. I imagine that most in the last category suffered this fate soon after being captured.
The sufferings endured were of many different kinds. For the Chinese, the conflict preceded our own Far East war by several years. For the occidentals, there are several rather different categories to be distinguished. There were summary killings of defenceless prisoners, such as the American airmen shot down over Japan. And there are many well authenticated cases of torture, applied particularly by the Kempeitai. Then there were cases of killing or of inhuman punishment of prisoners of war who had tried to escape. There were also a large number of cases in which individual prisoners, particularly officers or NCOs in charge of parties, were subjected to extremely severe physical punishment simply because an individual Japanese soldier objected to something he had said or done, usually by way of complaint about living or working conditions. However, for the vast majority of prisoners of war, death and suffering were due to totally inadequate organisation and supplies, on an exceedingly difficult railway construction project. The Japanese guards and railway engineers were under extreme pressure to complete the job on time, and their military ethic did not inhibit them from laying about the working parties in their charge with fists, sticks or rifle butts. The hardship, sickness and death was largely due to appallingly bad hygienic and nutritional conditions which, if avoidable, were not necessarily an intentional feature of Japanese policy. Added to this there was an unpleasant and sometimes dangerous level of physical coercion by way of bashing and beating up. I myself suffered no more than those in the last category.
Then of course there was the suffering of the Japanese themselves, especially at the end of the war, through the atomic bomb and final bombings and battles. In fact, these sufferings were such that not many Japanese these days have much time for what we endured at their hands. They claim too to have evidence of atrocities committed by British or American troops on the battlefield. And they have many stories of how they were subjected to very degrading treatment, if not downright physical brutality, as prisoners of war, 'surrendered personnel' or war crimes suspects. The best-known book available in English is Aida Yuji's ‘Prisoner of the British’.
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