Burma Railway Man: Secret Letters From a Japanese Pow Read online

  Rice, which when boiled becomes a gluey mass is another kind. Ketan, it is called. A more unappetising meal I cannot imagine.

  Then there is broken rice or chicken rice. Very bad quality, dirty and most unpleasant but better that white polished rice.

  If you ever have rice in the house when we settle down, I’ll. ….. you and that’s a threat and a promise!

  All during his imprisonment, Charles would occasionally write a list of happenings and observations. At the beginning of June he wrote;

  A few notes

  Australian Canteen in No. 1 Camp very popular. My first egg for many months was a wonderful experience. All eggs are duck’s eggs, size about European chicken’s egg. Aiming at one egg per day – 10 cents.

  Small Regtl.Canteen opened by RQMs (Regimental Quarter Masters)

  ............ (-the swindlers). 11 June – our first Jap Roll Call. Hopeless mess-up.

  Address by ‘High Japanese Official’. Australians found in cinema in Singapore. Shooting threatened.

  Chinese break into camp selling 5-cent cakes etc, before daybreak.

  25-pdr unexploded shell found a short way from my billet.

  A race-game organised by 336 Bty on Yasme (rest) day to pull in money for welfare. CWS (Charles) cashier – you bet!

  Typical meal 14 June;

  B. Rice, two spoons stew, tea

  L. Rice, fishcake, cucumber, tea

  S. Rice, rice ‘meat pie’, ‘apple’ turnover, tea, Largely rice & ersatz. I’m afraid.

  Much aerial activity on part of Nips

  Commission to write Regtl.Diary, if imprisonment.

  Debates organised. Spoke at several.

  Sjts & W.O’s Mess organised. Social evenings enjoyed with Sjts from Norfolks, Cambs, Aust. Etc. Now dominoes champ.

  Dates obtainable.

  C.O. obtains supply of Rice Polishings (B.1 content high) from Johore Bahru. Given to cattle in peacetime. Saving us from beri-beri now. Dreadful stuff to take.

  Brigadier Duke gives lecture to Offs & WOs. Say things could be worse.

  Church being built – outstanding modern murals on asbestos walls.

  A postscript declared;

  A bad thing has happened. All senior officers over the rank of Colonel, i.e. Brigadiers and Generals are to go to Japan. Bad for us, because the higher the rank the better bargaining powers we have with the Nips.

  Our CO Lt.Col.Toosey is taking over command of the Brigade. An excellent man.

  The Australians had very quickly become adept in trading with the local Chinese, often braving punishment by leaving the camp to go in search of food. They were also reinforcing their reputation for indiscipline and showed scant respect particularly for British ‘brass’. Brigadier C.L.B. Duke, commander of the 53 Infantry Brigade came in for special attention from the irreverent Diggers. When the Japanese held the first formal count on 11 June, the whole of the Burkit Timah camp was paraded and discipline barely maintained. As each adjutant stepped forward to report to the Brigadier and delivered a smart salute, a roar of abuse was hurled from the ranks of Australians. This was contagious and it spread to the British troops, who gave vent to their anger and frustration for the position in which they found themselves.

  This near-fiasco of a parade was about the last official function that the Brigadier commanded. In the middle of June, all officers above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel were transported to Japan and within a few months, the 18th Division’s commander, General Beckwith-Smith, had died of disease. The mantle of command was placed upon the shoulders of Lieutenant Colonel Toosey who succeeded as the senior British officer.

  The church referred to was a little chapel named St David’s, sited in an asbestos walled shed. One of the bombardiers painted the walls with grey vehicle paint and modern ‘working-class’ murals were added.

  The relative easy time Charles and his Bukit Timah comrades were enjoying was reflected in his next few letters, where he concentrates on local colour.

  Darling,

  The Wayside Cook is a feature of the East, which is unknown in Europe. He, or more likely, she, carries her utensils and commodities in two baskets on the pole over her shoulder. She arrives, squats down, puts her pan on a tiny charcoal fire, cooks her rice and eatable and then waits for the first comers.

  How do these people live? They deal in such small quantities that it appears impossible that they can support themselves. One sees these cooks surrounded by their clientele, all squatting down on their haunches and shovelling food into their mouths with chop sticks. Most insanitary!

  …I do not know very much about butterflies, but I have quickly realised that for beauty, variety and size, they are more important in Malaya than birds.

  There are butterflies of every conceivable size and shape, of every colour and every combination of colours. There are little sprites which one sees as flashes of yellow and blue, there are giants which flap slowly high overhead and which resemble slow moving birds. Some are at least 10” across.

  Darling, I wish you could see them – but not me!!

  …I wonder how many letters you had from me prior to the Capitulation? I sent off several from Singapore and also some cables but I think many must have been stopped by enemy action.

  What a grand feeling it was to see your handwriting on the envelope! How good a feeling it was to write to you!! I cannot bear to think of the time which must elapse before once again we can carry on that correspondence that we value so much.

  I lost my letters at the Capitulation, but I still have your photographs, grand girl!! You don’t know what they mean to me … If only there were any hopes of getting letters from you. Never mind – we’ll stick it out.

  …The unbelievable has happened. We have been given an opportunity to write home. I cannot express my feelings.

  I thought first of being jocular with something like this:-

  ‘I am fit and well

  Don’t worry over me

  The rice is simply swell

  I’m as happy as can be.

  I’m always thinking of you,

  You have my love as well,

  Keep smiling, don’t get blue

  Keep your chin up, darling girl!’

  But thought the Nips might not like it. I therefore sent the card that I hope you will receive with the next couple of months. I am not ashamed of the fact that I wrote it with your photograph open in front of me.

  The prisoners were able to supplement their meagre diet by growing their own produce.

  I am not called upon to go out so much now, so, with Captain Neal (Bty Capt.) and Capt. Viney (my Troop Comdr), I have started a Bty garden. It lays in the valley on what was once a football pitch. For water, we depend on the main anti-malarial rain drain which runs nearby and, for manure, upon decomposed urine.

  The produce grown were bananas, tapioca, sweet potatoes, beans, pumpkins and pineapples.

  The sweet potatoes are grown either for the leaves (taste like spinach) or the roots (like potatoes). It will be a long time before we get bananas or pineapples, I’m thinking.

  In August, Charles wrote another of his lists, which contained the seeds of what was to come.

  1.

  Inter-Bty quizzes popular. Am captaining 83b Bty side.

  2.

  Free India Movement launched in Singapore (now Syonan)

  3.

  Japanese newspaper ‘Syonan Times’ finds its way into camp. Unadulterated bilge. How they believe it, I don’t know.

  4.

  Library started. Small tin shed made into replica of reading room. Excellent.

  5.

  15 August. Celebration by Nips. POW organisation supposed to start.

  6.

  Korean (Japanese conscripts) arrive to act as guards.

  7.

  Amateur artists draw frescos on 344 Bty walls.

  8.

  Jap’s pay 25, 15, 10 cents to all men, plus bonus of 5 cents to those on job outside. Trouble over distribution of bo
nus. Finally goes to Cookhouse, extra messing.

  After six months of minimal supervision during which the British ran their own internal administration, the Japanese instituted their own organization. The guards who patrolled the Burkit Timah area were those of the ‘Indian National Army’, drawn from the Indian prisoners who chose to change sides. About a quarter of the captured Indians, mostly Sikhs, saw the Japanese as a means of gaining independence from their British masters and became willing collaborators and enthusiastic gaolers. For all their swagger and petty cruelties, they were the model of restraint compared with their replacements, the Koreans.

  Korea was the Poland of the Far East, a buffer state between Japan and China. After her resounding victory over Russia in the war of 1905, Japan was acknowledged as the strongest military power in the Far East. Having occupied Manchuria, she further strengthened her hold on the Asian mainland by colonizing the Korean peninsular.

  The native population was then subjected to decades of oppression when even its language was under threat, for the teaching of Japanese was made compulsory in schools.

  The Koreans were treated with contempt by their Japanese rulers and nowhere was this more apparent than in the army. Those Koreans inducted into the Imperial Japanese Army were regarded as auxiliaries and not even given a rank. They were treated as inferiors, so that when they were given the task of guarding the ragged and emaciated remnants of a colonial power, they found a people regarded as lower than themselves. For these illiterate and despised peasants, the opportunity to vent their anger and frustrations on helpless prisoners and, in so doing, curry favour with their Japanese superiors was too hard to resist. Put simply, the Korean guards were brutal from being brutalized.

  August 42 (Letter 29)

  My Dear,

  Trouble!!

  The IJA Have ordered us to sign a declaration that we will not try to escape. Where we could escape to is beside the point. The principle is the thing. We have refused

  (Letter 30)

  My Dearest,

  The CO has addressed the Unit. The troops left at Changi also refused to sign the no-escape declaration. After many negotiations, the IJA got the whole lot into a barrack square and left them in the blazing heat. They threatened to cut off hospital supplies. More important, they cut off water and refused sanitation. After three days the place was a mass of flies, while men were going down with dysentery and sunstroke wholesale. The senior British Officer (Lieutenant-Colonel E.B. Holmes of the Manchester Regiment) then ordered all the men to sign the declaration, stating that he would place the circumstances in front of the British Government. The CO (Toosey) then ordered us to sign, which we did.

  These Nips are bad.

  Charles was referring to the notorious Selerang incident, when the Japanese, under the command of Major General Fukuei, reacted to the British refusal to sign the declaration that stated:

  I, the undersigned, hereby solemnly swear on my honour that I will not, under any circumstances, attempt escape.

  Fukuei ordered that all 15,000 prisoners be herded into the 250 x 150 yard square at Selerang Barracks. Minimum rations were distributed; water could be obtained at just three taps and the sanitary facilities were non-existent. Within a short time, the packed area was as hot as a cauldron and foul with human waste. As if to emphasize his point, Fukuei had four men, two British and two Australians, who had attempted to escape many months before, taken to the beach. There, in the presence of British senior officers, the unfortunate quartet was executed by a deliberately inept Sikh firing squad. It took several rounds before they were finally killed. Poetic justice was enacted when Fukuei was tried as a war criminal and more humanely executed on the same spot in 1946.

  In order to end the suffering, Lieutenant Colonel Holmes ordered his men to sign on the understanding that it was being done under duress. The Japanese chose to ignore this caveat in order to end this embarrassing impasse.

  A small amount of Red Cross has arrived. A very little jam, soup powder and about 15 toffees a man. It comes from the S. African Red Cross with the Portugese Red Cross. A large amount is reported to have been taken by the Nips …

  On several afternoons recently I have gone for walks with Capt. Dearden of ‘F’ Troop. Quite against orders, of course, but no one seems to stop us.

  On the last occasion we walked a long way thro’ thick forests of mighty trees along paths which wound in and out of the great trunks and were often covered with tropical creepers. We came out near the lakeside and then sat talking of this, that and t’other amid the most beautiful surrounds I’ve ever seen.

  Then we noticed two armed Sikh policemen watching us. We walked back to Camp closely followed by the two bearded horrors, who made no attempt to detain us.

  On the very next day, Capt.Dearden was out with another officer but came back under escort with their arms tied behind their backs!

  Our last walk, I’m thinking.

  As the work on the Shrine neared completion, the prisoners had an increasing number of hours to idle away. Charles even had time to think about his army pay.

  I wonder what is happening about my pay?

  I was made up on the 31 Jan. A fortnight later, Singapore capitulated. If three weeks had elapsed, the Part II making me paid A/WOII would have been published. As it was, on the day of the Capitulation, the O.C. had the entry making me P/ALWOII put in my Pay Book. So long as I hold on to the AB64, I think things will be grand.

  Sept.42

  Dearest,

  The Shrine is nearly finished and was dedicated yesterday. All kinds of queer rites as you can guess. Another shrine has been finished on another hilltop near the Racecourse and yet two more (one of them to the British fallen … much smaller) in the same neighbourhood. These people love their shrines.

  The Golf Course may be spoilt for the handful who play golf but generally it must be conceded that it has been vastly improved. I hope – when we retake Singapore – that we shall leave it as it is. Lots of sailors and Japanese civilians and European neutrals visit it. I’d like you to see it …

  I was never sure whether I was confirmed or not but as I knew you were, I have taken confirmation classes with the Padre (Adams) and today – 18 Sept’42 – was confirmed by the Bishop of Singapore in the Camp church. A moving ceremony.

  With plenty of time on his hands, Charles described how the prisoners passed their time.

  Letter 38

  My Dearest,

  In an effort to attract money for Camp purposes, the 135 has laid out a complete Race Course in the site of a ruined bungalow.

  The oblong concrete patch is marked out in an oval like a cardboard table game and the horses are of metal about 3 ft long. Hedges are of bushes. There is an enclosure, stable etc. The jockeys are the small men of the unit. There is a Tote and bookies in the Ring. There is overhead electric lighting. The game is conducted by two officers who throw dice. If 3 and five turn up, No 3 horse is moved 5 paces. A Norfolk’s officer does a running commentary.

  The whole thing is most ingenious and exciting. The money flows in, especially from the AIL (Australians) and the Japs are spellbound. I’m afraid most of them were pulling rickshaws not long ago …

  Quite a lot of Red Cross has arrived – all S. African. There are boots and foodstuffs in bulk – peas – malt porridge etc. We should do well for some time, I believe.

  It is quite unbelievable to taste cocoa again. There are a lot of trilby hats!!

  I’m afraid these good things make one very unsettled indeed. They increase our longings.

  Charles put these longings into words in his next letter.

  Letter 40 Oct.’42

  My Dearest,

  It is almost a year since I last saw you. The longest year I have ever spent … If it falls to my lot that I never see you again I shall be happy in my knowledge that you and I have shared a love which I think was spontaneous on both our parts, a love which was not bred among the artificial allurements of modern life but in the clea
n air of the countryside, not by the attractions of flattering clothes but at a time when our interests caused us to wear the simplest and most sincere garments. (a reference to their cycling club days)

  If I do see you again – and I pray to God that a miracle will happen and that I shall return – our love will be so strong and we shall be bound by the ties of anxiety and care so strongly that our previous attachment must look weak by comparison. I shall and have always been true to you. I know that you are faithful to me.

  All my thoughts are of you. You are to thank for a strength of mind as my parents are for my bodily strength which is going to be tested to the ultimate degree.

  Meanwhile, you are carrying on in England – doing my job as well as yours. Here, in Malaya, I realise that I have a grave responsibility to the men under me. A General said just before the war that his most difficult command was as a Lt.Col. of a POW Camp in Germany in the last war. I can realise what it was like … My love to you.

  Charles then wrote of the surrounding vegetation and tools the prisoners used.

  A most amazing plant grows under the rubber trees, which surround the bungalows in the camp. In appearance it is something like a clover but its leaves are very finely cut. Nothing unusual in appearance, I can assure you.

  But just touch one leaf! Instantly, the whole plant ‘dies’. The flowers drop their faces to the earth, the stems sink, the leaves curl up. What has been a large patch of green and blue has turned to a dull green. I’m sure that the plant recovers. A fly will cause the phenomenon.

  When one looks across the lake one sees a mighty growth of trees. One often sees monkeys swinging from branch to branch. But what takes one’s eyes are the great patches of colour provided by flowering trees.

  I do not know the name of these trees except the popular one of ‘The Flame of the Forest’. The flowers are huge, creamy yellows as buds, turning to fiery red at maturity. Against the green of the vegetation they are a wonderful sight …