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To the End of the Road
There had been military camps at Nongpladuk since the early days of the railway, but at first there had been few prisoners of war in them. But as the main work on the railway drew to a close, and the Japanese forces moved up-country, more and more space was taken over for the POWs. Later on, there were several heavy bombing raids on the area, a legitimate military target because of the heavy concentration of marshalling yards and workshops. Quite a number of POWs were killed and wounded. Apparently some sort of intelligence message got through to the Allied forces; later, after our release, we were able, in Calcutta, to see the air reconnaissance photographs. They were interpreted in a way which erred far on on the side of safety, most of the Banpong-Nongpladuk area being considered as POW camps.
The camp we were moved to was being used for POWs who were no longer needed on railway work. Some were being sent back to Singapore, to endure the miseries of Changi gaol. Several large parties were being prepared for shipment to Japan or Korea, many of them to perish at sea at the hands of US submarines. As it turned out, those of us who remained in Thailand fared rather better. But, it might not have been so.
The working parties based on Nongpladuk worked chiefly on the on the construction of other camps — and notably on the new hospital being constructed at Nakompathom, about fifty kilometres to the south-east. As far as accommodation was concerned, our transport unit was simply absorbed into the main body of POWs. But from now on our men would be driving the lorries servicing the POW camps in the area. We had added to us about forty additional drivers, and Tony and I were joined by two other officers, John Neal and Donald Hilton, both of them in the Royal Artillery. We ourselves did not drive, but were once again responsible for supervisory duties. The chief trouble was that we were once again back in a POW-style administration, with junior army officers and NCOs in charge, but with the main day-to-day responsibility in the hands of Koreans. These were, as elsewhere, a somewhat unpleasant lot. I regret it, but this was the image they presented, not at all deserved by the Korean people as a whole. It was simply that these were young men with insufficient education who had been pressed into the service of the Japanese army. Any with humane instincts seemed to have been weeded out. It's only fair to add, though, that they themselves had a pretty miserable time at the hands of the army proper.
Tony Graham was still our senior officer, but by this time I had acquired a fairly fluent knowledge of simple Japanese. This served well for practical purposes, and gave me a considerable sense of self confidence. But it also meant that I had to do most of the negotiating with our guardians. This had the effect of putting me at the receiving end of any nastiness being handed out to the prisoners. In the book ‘To the River Kwai’, on his experiences as a sergeant-interpreter (a much more competent one than I was), John Stewart tells of several dangerous situations in which he found himself, including one in which he and the Major for whom he was interpreting narrowly escaped having their heads cut off by a frenzied officer cadet. The difference, however, between his situation and mine was that it was generally recognised that he himself was not responsible for what he had to say, whereas I was almost always my own interpreter as a responsible representative of our side.
I think the policy was that POWs were not to be badly treated. The Japanese officers and NCOs seemed quite ready to listen to complaints about the behaviour of their men. However, by the standards of discipline within the Japanese army itself it was quite normal for superiors to inflict physical punishment on inferiors. The usual course of events was for one of our men to be beaten up by a Korean — or otherwise abused, for example by being forced to work and perform heavy tasks when ill, or accused of thefts for which he had not been guilty. I would accordingly complain to the lieutenant or sergeant. For the moment nothing much would apparently happen. If the Korean concerned had been disciplined he certainly said nothing to me. Then, several weeks or even months later he would accuse me of an imagined but possibly plausible fault, such as not carrying out his orders quickly enough, and would attack me furiously, slapping and punching me, and usually knocking me down and kicking me. This happened several times in the following months. I was not badly hurt, and funnily enough it was never very painful or frightening. The most important thing was that I never had my glasses broken.
Christmas that year (1943) was spent at the new hospital camp at Nakompathom, where our lorries were busy bringing in building materials — mostly bamboo and atap. Nakompathom itself was a rather miserable little town, but it was also the site for one of the biggest Buddhist pagodas in Thailand. The camp was beginning to fill up with men from the railway in a sorry state of health — and doctors without much in the way of equipment or drugs with which to treat them. There I managed to meet up again with my cousin Finch-White, whom I had not seen since our days in Changi. I was glad to find that he had survived the railway work. His situation was unfortunate, as a regular army major who might have been promoted to a much higher rank if he had not been captured. Moreover, he had recently married a pretty young wife from the Channel Islands who had been expecting their first child when he was sent to Singapore. Compared with people like him my personal situation was positively carefree.
Shortly after our return from Nakompathom our transport unit was given its own camp about a mile away from the main camp at Nongpladuk, and safer, we thought from bombing attacks. We were a strange bunch, which now included several Americans, including a master sergeant called Wiley Woodrow Wisdom, known as Tex. Americans were rather rare, almost all of them from a Texan National Guard Artillery Regiment which had been caught in Sumatra, how and why I don't know, or else survivors of the crew of USS Houston, which had been sunk with HMAS Perth in the Sunda Straits. We were in the charge of a Sergeant Arimoto, a tough little regular who looked as if he had seen much of the Japanese Hundred Years War, and likely to see much of the rest of it. He himself was gruff, but not particularly disagreeable. The trouble lay with his Koreans, who were both nasty and corrupt.
About that time the Japanese Army began surrounding POW camps with deep broad ditches, about 20 feet wide and 12 feet deep, with bamboo fences on both sides. Apart from anything else, this provided work for POWs and saved on expensive materials such as barbed wire. We had one put around us, with a bridge at the main entrance, and another leading to a Thai village which had a well from which we obtained our water supply. Inside this perimeter we lived in atap huts. The four officers had one of their own, which we managed to fix up to about as high a standard of comfort as we had yet enjoyed.
There were not many diversions with which to amuse ourselves; but after the horrendous experiences of some of the previous camps that did not seem to matter much. Reading material of a sort was available. Many of us had managed to retain books, carrying them from place to place. Whenever we got into settled conditions we would pool our books as a sort of lending library. Needless to say they got more and more dog-eared, and the 'librarians' had to work wonders in rebinding them. I still have one such example, ‘Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry’, by Christopher Dawson, published by Sheed and Ward in 1931. At one stage the Japanese administration required us to have our books censored. They therefore all bear the censor's stamp, including my Bible and Prayer Book.
Writing paper was, of course, in very short supply, and probably more valued as cigarette paper (as also was the paper of books, especially the fine paper of Bibles.) In any case, it was not a good idea to commit anything to paper; discovery during a search would lead to all sorts of further questioning.
We did discover one new thing to do. Whereas the 'Tamotsu Yusotai British Choir' had not been a success, in this new camp Donald Hilton turned out to be an experienced choirmaster. Under his guidance about a dozen of us formed a choir. We developed an extensive repertoire consisting mostly of well-known hymns, for which Donald could remember all the male voice parts. The Japanese were doubtful about this to begin with, but soon realised that there was nothing subversive in our singing, sometimes even congratulating me on our performance.
Our lorries travelled around to the various camps in the area, and to some extent we managed to serve a useful function in maintaining communications between them. 'News' we had to be very careful about. Throughout our time as POWs we had always managed to maintain some sort of information service. Clandestine radios were operated under almost all circumstances. I myself was not very directly concerned, but several of our drivers were, because they could recharge batteries. There were no transistor radios then. The source of power had therefore to be large and cumbersome, like a car battery. This was dangerous; discovery could have drastic consequences. Even the distribution of news was risky. The camp population had become very mixed, and included many Eurasians from the Netherlands East Indies, who counted as ‘Europeans’. Doubt was not really thrown on these Dutchmen, but it had become easy for the Japanese to infiltrate their ranks with agents of their own. One had to be very careful how news was passed on, in case sudden measures might be instituted to discover the source.
The most important scoop was to spread word of the D-Day landings in Normandy on 21 June 1944, within about twenty-four hours of the event. Few other events did more to prove that at last things were turning our way.
In lesser ways too we managed to perform some useful services. It was the practice in most camps to collect money to our hospitals. This raised some problems when most of the seriously sick were concentrated in a single hospital at Nakompathom. On one occasion I visited a camp on one of our lorries and was asked if I could transfer the money they had collected. I readily agreed, only to find that it was a large number of notes in small denominations, more or less a hat-full of money. The simplest method of deceit was to be quite open. I tied the money up in a large handkerchief which I carried in full view across the hundred yards or so to where our lorry was parked.
A more serious situation arose when I had word that our Korean guards were stealing Red Cross supplies intended for us. We knew that large quantities had arrived, but as far as we could tell they were not being distributed. Meanwhile some of the guards having access to them were helping themselves. The limit was exceeded when we found out that the stores going missing included some valuable surgical instruments, badly needed at Nakompathom. It was time to act. I got hold of the Korean known to be chiefly responsible and threatened to tell the Japanese unless he handed them over. There then followed a kind of cloak-and-dagger series of episodes, in which messages were passed and rendezvous points agreed. That night, there was a thump and a rattle outside our hut, and I went out to find the surgical instruments tied up in a sack. From there it was a relatively easy matter to get one of our drivers to conceal the sack on his lorry when he went down to Nakompathom the next day. Two days later the Korean concerned offered me a hundred dollars to keep quiet. That sum too went into hospital funds.
Food supplies were reasonably good and we did not suffer from too much bad health. We lost another driver on 26 June, as a result of burns suffered when his lorry caught fire. He made the sixth and last entry in my Prayer Book.
I myself had an unpleasant experience. I was sitting alone one afternoon in our little officers' hut when a heftily built Korean named Tomikawa came stumbling in with a sword in his hand. He was red-faced with drink, and roaring at me in a language largely unintelligible, Korean I suppose. This was actually a serious offence in Japanese eyes. I understood enough to realise that he was threatening to kill me because I had got him into trouble with the sergeant. He made furious thrusts at me with the sword, and whistled the blade around my head, smashing it down every now and then at the split bamboo table by which I was sitting. I really thought my last day had come, but there was nothing I could do about it. He was beyond all reason. I can recall now that I did not feel particularly afraid — only a sense of annoyance that I would come to such an end after surviving so many other events. This went on for several minutes. Then, as suddenly as he had appeared, he turned round and left. Next time I met him he was his normal rather surly self.
Apart from such incidents, the greatest danger lay in bombing attacks, The Allies were becoming more aggressive. Up to then most of the attacks had come from Liberators, but by September 1944 the Flying Fortresses were coming into service, and we were at the receiving end of some of their attacks. One night a large number of bombers came over, and bombs were whistling down from all directions. We were crouching in slit trenches, but when I looked over the edge I could see Sergeant Arimoto standing defiantly, with his hand on his sword hilt, on the parapet at the edge of the camp, silhouetted against the flashes of the bomb blasts. We supposed that the main attack had been on the marshalling yards near the main camp. If so, the aim had not been very good. Next morning, when we went out to get water from the Thai village, it was utterly deserted, with several large bomb craters across it. It seemed that we ourselves had after all been a target. We then found out that the main camp had been hit too. A stick of bombs had fallen across a line of huts, killing and wounding several score of our prisoners, including Paddy Sykes, the RASC Major who had been the senior officer on the first of our parties to come up from Changi the year before.
Not long after that our transport unit was finally disbanded. We were sent back to the ordinary POW camp. In the first place we went to Tamuan, a large camp between Banpong and Kanchanaburi. There was not much work to do, and although food and other supplies were by no means plentiful we lived in relative comfort. We had arrived in time for Christmas 1944, and were able to enjoy the superb pantomime put on. By any standards, including the costumes and musical instruments, this was first class. It was quite remarkable that even in the most adverse circumstances we were able to put on a show of magical Quality.
Bombing attacks became more frequent, with the main targets the bridges above us at Kanchanaburi — the site of what is now shown to tourists as 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. Some of these were daylight, low-level attacks, audible to us, if not visible. The wooden bridge had been damaged some time before, and now we learned that the steel and concrete bridge had been badly damaged too. There were also reconnaissance aircraft flying at a much greater height. Once when such a plane had passed overhead we saw an object come fluttering down. It fell beside one of our huts and we rushed to retrieve it before a Japanese guard arrived. It turned out to be an airman's gauntlet, made of leather and fur, slightly torn. We stared at it in amazement, as if it were an object from another world.
We knew that the war was rolling on, with Hitler nearly beaten in Europe, and the Americans advancing from island to island in the Pacific. This did not surprise us; it was what we had expected. But we still had no idea how the war would end, as far as we were concerned. The Japanese gave us no clue. Transport to Japan or back to Singapore seemed to have stopped. Then came the slightly sinister order that officers were to be separated from other ranks. You will recall that at the time of our surrender, Europeans had been separated from Asians. And before long the most senior officers were sent off to Japan and Korea. This was now a further step to divide us up.
The new camp for officers was to be on the outskirts of Kanchanaburi, a few kilometres to the north. It was some distance from the bridges, but rather uncomfortably near the railway. Here, we inflicted on ourselves our own apartheid. The field officers (i.e. majors and lieutenant-colonels) decided they would have huts of their own. These we disrespectfully christened 'the Imperial War Museum'. There was not much work to do. In fact, parties of other ranks were brought into the camp to do the heavier work. On the other hand, discipline was quite severe, with punishment for such offences as failing to salute a Japanese soldier. The senior officer was the renowned Colonel Toosey, a Liverpool businessman who had acquired a worthy reputation as a senior officer in No. 2 Group. It is claimed that he was the prototype for the mythical Colonel Nicholson in the film Bridge on the River Kwai. I doubt very much whether Pierre Boulle would even have heard of him when he was writing the original book. True, Colonel Toosey did believe in keeping morale as high as possible through constructive and creative work, but there the resemblance ends. I never met him again, but I was glad that he later received a knighthood, as much for his civic work in Liverpool as for his actions as a POW. At the time, even he was showing the strain after three years of difficult and uncertain conditions.
I myself joined up with a small group of young officers who all intended to train for the Christian ministry after the war. The others kept to their intention; I regret to say that I did not. (We maintained our contacts, 'though, and in due course I became godfather to the elder son of one of them, and he to mine. In 1990 my wife and I went to his golden wedding celebration.)
In due course the Japanese decided to move us to another camp on the other side of Bangkok, away from the strategic lines of communication on which our camp stood, and into the middle, as we learned later, of the area in which they were planning to make their last stand in that part of Asia.
There were several air raids in our general vicinity, but there seemed to be no more on the bridge, which had apparently been badly damaged while we were at Tamuan.
But there was one rather silly attack, in which a bomber flew round about us at quite a low level, without opposition, for about twenty minutes. We squatted in slit trenches, hoping that the target would be a locomotive, which was clearly visible on the railway line about a couple of hundred yards away. The pilot then loosed off a stick of bombs right across our camp. He hit nothing important, but one of our number had to have a kidney removed as a result of a clod of earth thumping down on him in his trench.
In July 1945 we were told to organise ourselves into seven parties of about 200 each, who would move at weekly intervals. Each party was to have an interpreter; once again my services were called on in that capacity. One consequence was that our clandestine radios were put temporarily out of commission, because of the need for concealment while in transit, just at the time when we most needed news of the outside world. Rumour had it that the Allied forces in India and Ceylon would be launching an attack in September, when the monsoon season would be coming to an end. But there had been similar rumours before. This is how I recorded events shortly after my release:
The news that we had to move to a new camp was met with great dismay and resignation. The war was at a stage when relief was almost in sight, but how it would come no one could prophesy. Rangoon was in Allied hands and soon an invasion of Thailand and Malaya could be expected. It would be a matter of chance what happened to us. We might have to overpower our camp guards and run for it. But the Japanese were taking no risks. Our camps were surrounded by twenty-foot-wide ditches, and the place to which we were going was reputed to be in a defence zone near the borders of French Indo-china. The usual promises were held out as to what a fine camp it would be. In July the advance party left to start building. We knew little about the journey, except that there would be a thirty-mile march at the end of it, with little possibility of transport for our belongings beyond what we could carry. Weeks were spent in pruning kit down to the minimum.
I was to leave with the fifth party on 10 August. There was much debate as to whether it would be better to leave on an early or late party. But as far as I was concerned this was the one to which I was assigned as interpreter. It was raining when we paraded. The first part of the journey was done in open railway trucks, and the first night was spent in them at Nongpladuk. We then proceeded with a wary eye kept on the aircraft flying overhead. At one point we had to get off the train at a badly bombed bridge and make our way over a crazily improvised footbridge. That evening we arrived on the river near Bangkok. After a wait of three hours we were pushed into barges literally pushed with rifle butts — and spent a miserable night floating downstream so tightly packed that there was only room to stand. A few ghostly pagodas slipped by in the half-light, and that was all I saw of Bangkok. Next morning we reached some sheds ('godowns' in local parlance) near the mouth of the river. That was on the thirteenth of August. It was here that we heard the first rumours that the war was over. A Dane had told a driver that the Japanese had surrendered. A Chinese had told someone in the cookhouse. But we had heard rumours like that a hundred times before. At the best it only meant that there had been an Allied success somewhere. On the 14th we were put on a train again. That night we got as far as Bangkok station, where we slept among bombed ruins. The following morning we started again, and after several cramped hours in the trucks we pulled into Pachinburi.
Here we were met by Sergeant Shimojo ('the Frog') in one of his vilest moods. We were ordered to start the march immediately. As the interpreter with the party I got the rough edge of his tongue. He cursed us for not unloading from the train more quickly. He drastically cut down on the number of sick allowed to travel by truck. He told us to chuck away the kit we could not carry because there would be no transport for it. No, the war did not seem to be over.
At five in the evening we started the thirty-mile march. The escort was commanded by quite an ordinary little Japanese sergeant, rather like Arimoto who had been in charge of our transport camp near Nongpladuk. He had his orders and he had to keep us going. But he would fly into odd little tempers if he felt he wasn’t being understood or obeyed. In a long straggling line we marched along the red road towards the hills. We had a large number of Dutch with us, and some of them were quite old men in a poor state of health. Soon they began to fall out, and I kept on being called to the back of the line to try to prevail upon some sick old man to get to his feet again and carry on. At intervals a lorry would come back from the new camp to bring us food, and for its return journey we would cram on board as many of the sick as possible. In that way we kept the whole party going. Soon it began to rain, and our boots got soggy with water. But we kept on marching through the night, with a two-hour halt in a deserted monastery building.
That is how we spent VJ night.
The following afternoon we reached the new camp at Nakom Nayok. For myself I felt remarkably fresh, to the extent of carrying someone else's pack as well as my own for the last mile or so. The little sergeant, grunted, Tai-i no ashi tsuyoi, na! — 'The captain's legs are strong,' I was glad to agree. But most of the older men in the party were in a sad state.
We formed up in some sort of order and marched into the camp. Immediately we were greeted by the news that the war was over. An officer who had been stood at attention in front of the guard room as a punishment had suddenly been sent back to his hut. Sergeant Shimojo met us with smiles, politeness and solicitude for our condition. The war must really be over.
If that were true then nothing else mattered. Our tiredness and blisters, the rain, the miserable half-finished state of the camp, all were forgotten. Nobody knew what had happened, except that Japan had surrendered. It had not been officially announced yet, but there seemed to be no doubt about it.
Next day the camp commander gave us the news. The Emperor had ordered the Japanese troops to lay down their arms. We were now going to be sent back to England, and he hoped we would let bygones be bygones!
The way home
That evening we ran up the British flag, and any other Allied flag we could lay hands on. A thousand of us gathered together to sing the national anthems we had been forbidden to sing for three years. Our own national anthem was loudest, because there were more British than anyone else. The Dutch sang the Wilhelmus in slow and stately fashion. There were only five Americans in the camp, and although I am not sure that even they knew the words, we had a shot at the Star Spangled Banner. Each time we finished singing we raised three tremendous cheers. Later we learned that when the first of these cheers rang out the Japanese and Korean guards outside the camp fled into the jungle fearing that we were raising our spirits before coming to massacre them.
If you had told us a year earlier that when the war ended we would live beside our guards for a fortnight without raising a finger against them we would have scoffed. But that is what happened. We simply ignored them. And I have only heard of a very few cases in other camps of men revenging themselves against their guards after the surrender. Mind you, we did not really know that everyone in our area would obey the Emperor's order.
The little wireless set had been brought with us in our party, carefully concealed. It took several days to get it working, and it was only then that we got a somewhat garbled account of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All we really knew was that a new and frightful weapon had been used.
The first Allied soldier appeared in our camp about a week later. He was an American paratrooper who claimed somewhat modestly to be a chemical warfare specialist. He had been in our area for about three weeks to organise Thai resistance. We then learned that measures to look after us had been fairly thorough. But we also learned of the Japanese measures to liquidate us if necessary. Things might have been very difficult without the atomic bomb.
A flight of Dakota DC3s came over and circled around for a bit. But they dropped nothing to us. We were told to be patient because it might be weeks before anything happened. Meanwhile we should remain within the camp. The area was thick with Japanese troops and there was a fear that some of them might refuse to surrender and seize us as hostages.
Foraging parties went out to nearby villages and brought back buffaloes, pigs and chickens. We made ourselves rich, greasy stews, but found that after a few mouthfuls we could not face any more. A filthy brew of local alcohol was brought into the camp, and some of us got very sick on it.
Just outside the camp a hill rose to the height of about 6OO feet. After being cooped up behind fences and ditches for so long it gave the greatest possible sense of pleasure to clamber up it and sit at the top overlooking miles and miles of hills and forests. That was one of the things that gave us a real sense of freedom.
Release came sooner than we had expected. Being at a half-completed camp we were given some priority. On 1 September we marched down the road to get on to lorries. As we went two Japanese soldiers were sitting at the side of the road. I heard one say to the other: 'They're going home. I wonder why they are carrying so much kit.' It was quite true. As if by habit we were marching out of captivity still loaded down with all the dirty little bits of equipment we had hoarded. We made a slow and difficult journey to Bangkok in rickety Japanese lorries. We started in moderate comfort, but so many broke down on the way that we arrived at Don Muang airfield as tightly packed as we had been on POW journeys.
It was dark when we got on to the aerodrome. The driver stopped the lorry in a large puddle on the tarmac. A senior officer with the party asked me to tell him to drive on a few yards. I went to the corporal in charge of the convoy and asked him rather meekly to move the lorry on out of the water. The corporal grunted something that did not sound very co-operative. Here was my last chance to use my knowledge of the language to say something really rude. Instead I repeated my request, and this time he obeyed. Habit had reasserted itself and my nerve failed me. But the driver had driven on and the party was dismounting. The chance had gone. Those were the last words of Japanese I spoke as a POW.
Thousands of us had been collected at Don Muang, waiting for planes. It might possibly begin the next day. That night we slept in the airport building, eaten alive by mosquitoes. Before lying down to sleep I went up to the first floor to see a friend I had heard was there. As I got to the top I realised that these were the first stairs I had climbed in three years. Had I noticed anything strange about it? I had not.
Next morning the news was disappointing. The RAF had been grounded until the signing of the surrender in Tokyo Bay the following day. We hung around the airport trying to find out what was going on in the outside world. Some English magazines had been brought in, all very much as we had known them. We were slightly shocked to find advertisements campaigning against venereal disease. We asked a few RAF men there all sorts of questions. We discovered what a Dakota was and we saw our first Jeep.
Next day the planes really did come in, not in twos or threes but in scores from early morning onwards. We were marched out to the landing strip in parties of twenty-five. The aircrews eyed us curiously. We certainly were not the haggard skeletons they may have expected, but we must have looked a bit odd. For one thing we were wearing khaki drill, and not the jungle green that everyone now wore. We had kept our very best clothes for this event. I myself had boots, stockings, gaiters and a rather patched pair of shorts. My shirt had a whole new back laboriously sewn into it. I had a proper officer's cap, albeit it with a bit of cloth inserted at the back to make it fit. But I was most proud of the 16th Punjab badge that I had fashioned myself out of a bit of aluminium.
Soon we were heading out over the paddy fields and jungle towards Rangoon. On that flight we behaved like school kids on an outing. No safety belts. Plenty of cigarettes. K rations being passed round. We wandered around the plane as we liked, and peered out of the parachute door at the back to see the jungle below. We played with the navigator's map and listened to the wireless operator's earphones. If the plane gave a sudden jerk we knew that one of us was trying his hand at flying it. It seems silly now, and sad, but not surprising that, as I heard later, some of the planes carrying us out did not make it back to Rangoon.
At length we found ourselves circling a city, and down below we could see the easily recognisable Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Soon we would have to face the reality of freedom.
In retrospect, I realise that I was very lucky to get out of it; all in a reasonably good state of health. Before being discharged I was passed as fit for further military service, if I desired it. I did not. Medical problems that were probably clue to my time as a POW did not emerge until very much later. Within a year I was off to the East again, as a civilian.
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