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Yoshhiko Futamatsu
The idea had come to me, stimulated by a visit I had made to Thailand in 1983, that the railway might have been built, by mistake, in the wrong place. Clearly I should now go into this further. After some enquiries I contacted Ewart Escritt, a former RASC officer and fellow POW at Nongpladuk. He had since had a distinguished career at Oxford. Although getting on in years and not in good health, he was still quite active.
After the war he had made something of a speciality of studying the construction of the Burma-Thailand railway. He had even been in correspondence with one of the Japanese army engineers responsible for the railway's construction. This was Yoshihiko Futamatsu who had held the rank of Major as a gunzoku — civilian in army employment.
Much of Ewart Escritt's material is in the Imperial War Museum, but he sent me a copy of an essay he had written on the construction of the railway. This confirmed much of what I had suspected, but with a somewhat different conclusion.
A civilian engineer named Kuwabara had had the idea as early as 1939. The official decision to build the railway was finally made in Tokyo in June 1942, and reached the Japanese HQ in Saigon that August. Yet the first British POWs had already gone to Thailand on 24 June. It seems that local commanders had made a start, to be subsequently confirmed by Tokyo.
The railway was no doubt part of their long-term plans for Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. These plans would scarcely have included the capture of 100,000 POWs, but this labour force made the railway a practical strategic possibility.
Kuwabara's plan had been to build the railway along the banks of the Kwa Noi as far as Three Pagodas Pass. Hence the Southern Region Army prepared no topographical large-scale maps (from aerial survey) of the areas beyond Tamarkan. Yoshihiko Futamatsu therefore had at his disposal no detailed maps of the point beyond the junction of the two rivers.
There does indeed seem to have been confusion over Thai place names. This is not surprising. The spelling and pronunciation was by no means consistent and the Japanese would transliterate them into Katakana. We POWs then based our own names on the Japanese versions, of course. For instance, the Japanese converted Lat Ya (also spelt Laddya) into Rajya, which we then called Raja. Beyond Lat Ya there is a hill called Khao Chongkai, but the place which the Japanese and POWs knew as Chungkai is nowhere near it, and is properly called Khao Poon. Further up the river there was another well-known camp called Tarso. But the Thais called it Wan Yai. The 'real' Tha Sao is a long way off, not far from the real Chongkai. It does look as if there was a real confusion.
The flatter lorry route by which I travelled in 1989 is a track of great antiquity, used by Burmese raiders. In 1942 it had not been built as a proper road, and there was only a ferry crossing over the Meklong at Tha Manao, known to the Japanese as Tadan, and to the POWs as Tardan. According to Ewart Escritt, whose source was Yoshihiko Futamatsu, responsibility for the development of this route was not in the hands of the Japanese, but of the Thai government, which acted incredibly slowly. This other road should have been developed with at least as high a priority as that of the river route along the Kwa Noi. Escritt writes that:-
'Even if Futamatsu had had 1: 20,000 aerial survey maps of the Kwae Yai beyond Tamakan, the disastrously dilatory attention of the Thai Government's contractors to the lorry highway would, in the event, have compelled him to rely entirely on the Kwae Noi for transport of men and materials for laying the rail track.’
The Imperial War Museum had an excellent collection of texts, and there are fifty-four typescripts on the Burma Railway. One by Robin Band, whom I had known both in the period of captivity and later, drew a very interesting sketch of the route he and other POWs had taken marching from Kanchanaburi to Tarso at the beginning of November 1943. He shows the route as running, not along the river, but on the very same lorry road I had taken when I went in 1983, up the Meklong and across to Tarso via Tardan.
The C.E. Escritt collection at the Imperial War Museum provided me with a great deal of valuable extra information, including his handwritten translation of Futamatsu's book, ‘Across the Three Pagodas Pass: the Story of the Burma- Siam Railway’ together with an early version of his introduction. This was completed in 1983, but has not so far been published.
Futamatsu intended to present an objective account of what really happened, and as such is a valuable contribution. But it does not go very far into the sufferings of the POWs, and the style is so dry and terse as to give the impression that nothing very serious happened at all.
He points out how the low-ranking Korean auxiliary camp guards (gunzoku or heiho) thought themselves superior to the prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers thought likewise. They had been taught that it was shameful to be captured in battle. In the Japanese army there was absolute compliance with orders by those of higher tank. Corporal punishment would be inflicted on the spot, with beating and kicking. This same principle was applied to POWs, who were astonished and taken aback. Within such a context POWs were undoubtedly ill-treated, and some acts of barbarous cruelty committed.
He admits that when the POWs were taxed beyond their strength they were punished for going sick. Medical treatment of illness fell within the scope of the POW administration, but shortages of medical officers, facilities and supplies made it impossible to achieve a satisfactory state of affairs.
This vastly understates really terrible conditions, but I do think the author seeks to conceal the truth.
I asked Kameyama about the route followed by the 'lorry road'. He agreed with me that there was no lorry highway from Kanchanaburi to Wanyai in 1943. The road between the villages was only for railway construction work, and was very bad. This confirms my feeling that the Japanese Army never considered any other route.
I had the chance of meeting Yoshihiko Futamatsu in Japan. He took us out to the suburbs by taxi to give us an excellent Japanese meal, served by his wife. He had an up-to-date ordnance survey map of the relevant part of Thailand, showing the route that the railway and the road now take. In general, he confirmed that it was much as I had imagined. No single individual can be responsible for such an undertaking. He had had to work as best as he could according to instructions received, using the facilities available. He certainly had no responsibility for the way in which the labour force, either European or Asian, were recruited or treated by the army.
We had an agreeable evening and arranged to exchange more information. Soon after I returned to England he wrote, telling me more about his career as a railway engineer. In reply I asked him, had there been a mistake over place names? Were maps of the adjoining areas available to him? Was any alternative route for the railway adequately studied? Was it possible that the Thailand end had been built in the wrong place?
Having graduated from Kyoto Imperial University in 1937, he joined Japan National Railways. He was called up in 1941 as a railway engineering civilian with the rank of Major in a Special Railway Bridging Unit. In June 1942. he joined the 9th Railway Regiment, which was responsible for the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway from the Thai end.
He worked in Thailand for a spell in 1942, and again from March 1943 to May 1944, the time of frantic work to complete the railway. In the last seven months he was the conductor of a railway maintenance party. He reacted quite strongly but had to agree that my opinion may be 'not incorrect'. However, he gave me more information which does modify it.
In 1942 the lorry route via Tardan was passable only for light vehicles, but not in the rainy season when even carts could not use it. Lorries were able to pass after the road had been reconstructed or repaired in April 1943, up to which time all transport had to be by river. But in June 1943, the rainy season again prevented use of the road. Once the railway opened in October 1943. it became the main means of transport.
In 1942 Futamatsu had not known that the maintenance of the road was the Thai Government's responsibility. In the autumn he had seen Japanese soldiers working on it in the jungle with many elephants.
He does not think that this followed the same route as the present road. He too had observed that this took a level route, shorter than the railway. but in 1943 had not been aware of this.
Kuwabara, the originator of the idea, whom he knew, worked solely from maps. On the basis of Kuwabara's information, the Japanese Army conceived the idea of building the railway in one year with a force of two railway regiments. This would then have been the master plan which determined our fate.
In 1942 a staff officer and two railway engineers inspected the route. They went up the River Kwae Noi by boat, but returned through the jungle on the backs of elephants along the lorry route. They seem to have chosen the river route because of the availability of water transport. Even a road alongside the railway could not be used in the rainy season. Futamatsu himself helped in the surveying work. For this work they were given a partial topographical map on a 1:20,000 scale. Each map enlarged from aerial photographs, was two to three metres long. covering forty to sixty kilometres. For reasons of military secrecy, that was all they were given. So he personally could not have known of alternative routes.
The modern 1:250,000 map indeed shows another Kai Chonkai which was not the Chunkai known to the Japanese and to the POWs, and another Thasoe which was different from the wartime Tarso. He points out that Japanese or POW names had no relationship with place names on the map.
Regarding the Wampo and Arihu (Arrowhill) cuttings and viaducts, where the POWs suffered enormous casualties, Kuwabara did not design the railway precisely. and had no real idea where there would be cuttings, viaducts or stations. The proper way of building along this route would have been by tunnels through hills and cliffs. but 9th Railway Regiment did not possess the necessary equipment. As a railway engineer he was not satisfied with the solution, but being a civilian could not overrule the military. A tunnel, while harder than cuttings and viaducts. might have been less dangerous, with fewer casualties. It would have taken much longer, and would have frustrated the plan to reach Wanyai by May 1943. He doubted whether the number of casualties could have been reduced by any change of route.
I have referred several times to Laurens van der Post's ‘The Seed and the Sower’, in which the Japanese Captain Yonoi cut off a lock of Major Celliers' hair. In some way the victim had 'sown a seed' in Captain Yonoi, which had grown in the course of time. Captain Yonoi intended that the strand of hair should be consecrated in the shrine of his own village. At the end of the war he is condemned to death as a war criminal, and asks Colonel Lawrence to ensure that the strand of hair is sent to his village. In the film ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’, Captain Yonoi is executed, but in the book he is reprieved and serves a four-year sentence. Colonel Lawrence keeps the piece of hair and sends it to Captain Yonoi after his release. He is extremely grateful, and sends Lawrence a poem he has written for the dedication of the hair in the sacred fire of his people's shrine:
In the Spring
Obeying the august spirits,
I went to fight the enemy.
In the Fall,
Returning, I beg the spirits
To receive also the enemy.
This parallels the title of Shosaku Kameyama's article he wrote in 1989: 'The enemy of yesterday may become the friend of today.' I hope so.
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C56 class wood-fired locomotive
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Ninety C56 class wood-fired locomotives were exported by the Japanese to Thailand, of which 45 worked on the Burma-Thailand railway up to 1980. Locomotive C5631, bedecked with flags, was first up at the place where the tracks from east and west joined on 17 October 1943, and is now displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It is the object of monthly cleanings and polishings by the C5631 Preservation Society, on a rota provided by the 9th Railway Regiment Society. My initial reaction to this was one of resentment. A potent symbol of our misery was now at an important national shrine.
But when I thought of homely seventy-year-old men still doing their monthly stint, aided perhaps by younger members of their families, I felt that maybe we could close the book on our misfortunes.
*******
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![wh_l_arr[1]](../assets/images/wh_l_arr_1_.gif "wh_l_arr[1]")
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