The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WORK AND THE strong pull of the currents that run through everyday life – no matter how threatening they can seem to someone whose memories are bad – give the illusion of sweeping us away from the past. Like many men who went through Japanese prisons, I found I could allow my professional life to crowd out my desire to settle those old accounts.

Although I relived the past more often than I wished and had, again like many of my wartime comrades, accumulated a library of books about the campaigns in Malaya, the Burma-Siam Railway and the camps, I still felt a certain reluctance to confront that past directly. In the 1970s, my friend Alex Morton Mackay – by then living in Canada – found my address through an ex-POW organization and wrote me an affecting letter in which he described how I had been an example and an inspiration to him, with my arms in splints and my specs taped together; but if I recognized myself in his description, I knew it was not the whole story. No one is a hero to themselves. I found it difficult to reply to Mac, but we did eventually correspond and one day, after a service of remembrance for those who had died in the Far Eastern war, we finally met again. Fred Smith joined us for lunch in London. It was my only reunion with these two men who had meant so much to me.

But that past was not easily denied. The need to know more about what had happened to us in Siam was not some idle curiosity, and it asserted itself powerfully whenever I had time to think. After my retirement in 1982, I could put off no longer the need to know, the desire became more intense than ever. I wanted to find out what had really happened; why the Japanese had made the search of our hut on that particular day, and if somebody had tipped them off. I wished to establish the exact sequence of events. I also wanted to find out more about the Japanese responsible for the beatings and murders, apart from those already brought to justice, and above all more about the Kempei personnel who had tortured me at Kanburi. I knew nothing about their units, their names or their fate after the war. The prospects of finding the right men, of finding them alive, even of making a start were so remote; but as the events receded the obsession grew. It was like trying to reconstruct a coherent story from evidence reduced to tattered rags, faded documents, bones and rusty rails. And memories, which are even less durable.

Perhaps I was trying to recover something of what I had been before being sent to war and put to work on an insane railway. I also admit that I wanted to make them pay, pay more than they had already done. The more I thought about it, and thought about it, the more I wished to do damage to the Kempei men if I could ever find them. Physical revenge seemed the only adequate recompense for the anger I carried. I thought often about the young interpreter at Kanburi. There was no single dominant figure at Outram Road on whom I could focus my general hatred, but because of his command of my language, the interpreter was the link; he was centre-stage in my memories; he was my private obsession. His slurred and struggling English; his endless questions; his repetitiveness; the way he gave voice to the big torturing NCO: he represented all of them; he stood in for all the worst horrors.

By the time I had hardened my desire to search out the truth, I had already met Patti. I was still lecturing to audiences about industrial relations around Britain, and one day in 19801 found myself standing on the platform at Crewe Station, that great and historic railway junction in the centre of England. I should not have been there at all. I had gone to Chester to view a book auction – the old collecting urge was still as strong as ever – and went to the station to take the train back to Manchester, then on to Edinburgh, only to find that the train was cancelled. I am still grateful for that blockage on the line, whatever it was. Instead I took a train to Crewe, where I knew I could meet a train going up the west coast to Scotland. I had not spent a lifetime learning about railways for nothing.

At Crewe I was just in time and as the Glasgow train pulled in at the platform I ran for it and climbed aboard. I had a first-class ticket, so I entered an old-fashioned carriage with a corridor and separate compartments. The third compartment was occupied by a pleasant, good-looking woman sitting alone and that was the compartment I chose. I was suddenly aware that I had let myself become a bit shabby, with my old prisoner’s teeth and good but well-worn clothes, even though I looked younger than my sixty-one years. She made me feel awkward, this slim, handsome, dark-haired person who looked at least fifteen years younger than me, a glamorous and confident woman from a different world. Her face, however, had so much trusting kindness in it that I forgot about age and fashion.

She was consulting a little book, The Observer’s Tourist Atlas of Great Britain, which she balanced on her knee as she traced her journey up the west coast. She was English, and had worked here as a nurse, but had lived in Canada for many years, and this was a journey of rediscovery for her. I was pleased to learn that she had run an antiquarian bookshop in Montreal. She was on her way to visit a friend in Glasgow. I was soon discoursing about the history of the towns we were passing through, hoping that I was not boring her. But there was a kind of instant rapport between us that made me go on.

Two men got in. I refused to move my raincoat off the seat, coldly and stubbornly. The captive’s ability to obstruct could be very useful; I did not want an audience for what I now realized was a very important conversation. Three hours later the train drew into Carstairs and I screwed my courage up and asked her if she would have lunch with me the next day in Glasgow. She said yes.

It emerged quickly that we were both living rootless and not altogether happy lives; her marriage was as reduced as mine. We saw a lot of each other, and spent some good time together in Somerset, where she was staying during her British holiday. And then she went back to Canada. There were many letters and long-distance calls after her return. At an age when changes of emotional direction seemed impossible, and when I was already brooding on my vengeful quest, I had fallen in love. And then we were together: she came to live with me in Edinburgh. I was now part of a second extended family, Patti’s sons Graeme, his wife Jeanne, Nicholas and Mark welcomed me. They gave me hope for the future. Quick thinking about the movement of trains can have strange outcomes, though it failed to surprise me that my meeting with the woman who would play so great a part in changing my life should take place on a railway.

I did not tell Patti all at once about Malaya and Siam during the war, but it came out slowly. She was discovering for herself that she was living with someone with unusual problems, but meanwhile I carried on with my quest. In January 1985, I published an article in the London ‘FEPOW Forum’, a newsletter for ex-prisoners-of-war, appealing ‘before it is too late’ for information about the events at Kanburi in 1943.1 asked for eyewitness accounts, for information about the ‘American’ interpreter and the Dutch doctor. As for the seven officers, I looked around and they were all dead, Mac having died a few years before, and ‘Daddy’ Smith, the frailest of all of them, living until the age of ninety before passing away in 1984. And I could tell that Fred was dying: ‘My chest has been very bad lately and the cough is getting worse’, he wrote to me that year; in the same letter he admitted something which he had always been able to keep concealed; ‘My nerves were cracking during the nights, always at night-time.’ Fred’s heart – that indestructible rock of support – gave out five years ago.

About twenty letters, almost all of them kind and considerate, came back after the article was published. One of them came from T. C. Brown, who had been a sergeant in the Royal Norfolk Regiment:

Your article in Forum brings back horrific memories of that night … I remember you all lined up in front of the Guard Room and the night of the bashing the Kempei came rushing to our hut and pulled up the bamboo bridge over the drain to our hut, we thought we were in for a bashing but of course you were the victims, what a night, the cries of mercy was terrible and there we lay not being able to do anything but pray for you, it was dark so we could not see what was going on… The following day two of you were missing off the ‘parade’ outside the Guard Room if I remember right it was the tall slim officer and a small officer in your party… After the Japs surrender a Cpl Johnson of the Foresters told me that he knew the two missing officers were buried behind Guard Room, apparently he was on fatigues over the Jap Quarters and found an Officers Cap there soaked in blood… Never will I forget the mess you people were in after the bashings, I was NCO i/c Sanitation and saw quite a bit of you on your journey under escort to the latrines.

There were many letters like this, which touched me but gave me no information of the kind I was seeking.

Then a letter came from Henry Cecil Babb of Oxford, a former regular army chaplain who was now almost eighty years old. He had served in Malaya since December 1940 and been captured, like the rest of us, at the end of that disastrous campaign. He arrived at the main POW camp at Kanburi in August 1945 just as the war was coming to an end, and he was told by some junior officers that about two years earlier, two unidentified POWs, who had been involved in the operation of a radio in the railway workshops camp nearby, had been killed and their bodies dumped in a latrine near the guardroom. The officers had asked him if, despite the passage of time, he would conduct a formal service. Babb agreed, and read the prayers for The Burial of the Dead, the first time he had ever done so without knowing the names of the deceased. ‘For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’ It was good to think of poor Hawley and Armitage, the ladies’ man and the scholar, being commemorated in that squalid place where no-one seems to have remembered them.

I wrote to Babb and told him the names of the men he had prayed for, and when he replied he told me that after the war he had not returned to England immediately, but had volunteered to take part in an official War Graves Commission party which was setting out to travel the entire length of the railway, all 258 miles of it, in a search for rough cemeteries and for the bodies of missing men. The group had been organized by the Allied administration in Bangkok and consisted of sixteen British and Australian troops, together with a young Japanese interpreter. The expedition left Bangkok on 22nd September and went as far as Thanbyuzayat in Burma, travelling on open wagons fitted up with attap roofs, and returned on 10th October 1945 after locating 144 cemeteries – mostly trackside graves in the jungle -and over 10,000 bodies. Babb recalled conducting another burial service, for the entire crew of a USAAF B29 bomber which had been shot down just before the end of the war in the mountains on the Burmese side of the frontier.

Babb had lost touch with all the members of the search party, but he told me that the interpreter had recently sought him out and that he might be able to help me in my search for information. Would I, he asked, be willing to let him make enquiries on my behalf? I asked specifically for information about the identity of the men who had beaten me so meticulously and of the hateftil ‘American’ interpreter who had supervised the beatings; I was trying to tie down the history of the murders first, and I confined the questions which I passed to Babb to that night in the main Kanburi camp. I hardly expected to receive any news from so unlikely a quarter and was glad diat Babb was acting as an intermediary. Direct correspondence with a former Japanese soldier would have been impossible for me.

This man was called Nagase Takashi, and he lived in the city of Kurashiki. He wrote to Babb, saying that he could not help him with the information he required, but that he thought the man in question had died soon after the war.

Babb suggested that some of the information I was seeking might be in the Public Record Office in Kew, where records of some of the war crimes trials were now held. In the spring of 1985,1 found myself sitting at a quiet table reading fading copies of old documents in File W0235/822, the official record of the trial of those held responsible for the deaths of Captain Hawley and Lieutenant Armitage and for the ill-treatment of my colleagues and me.

It was an extraordinary afternoon. I forgot my surroundings, and entered a kind of trance as I read, visualizing the scene in Kanburi almost as a spectator. There was the guardroom, the Korean and Japanese guards, the wooden table, the drainage ditches, the areas of raw earth, the dust and heat and in the distance the hazy mountains which were a barrier between us and the friendly west; the row of British army officers, beginning to suffer terribly from several hours of exposure to the heat, from the brilliance of the sun and from thirst, still standing to attention with great difficulty, and then from the dark the rabble emerging to beat the men.

I came to myself after several hours of reading and rereading the evidence, including some of the documents I had typed myself, feeling completely exhausted. Perhaps the most remarkable element in this experience was the curious sensation that I was reading something in which I was not personally involved. I was seeking these exact truths on behalf of some person I barely knew.

Babb moved from Oxford to Cambridge late in 1985, and I went to visit him. He was very old and ill, but clear-minded and articulate. I was not surprised to discover that he was, like so many of us, ambivalent about that part of his past. He had destroyed his POW notes and papers in the 1960s, and later regretted doing it; he tried to reconstruct them from copies in the Imperial War Museum. His faith had thinned after the war; he had exchanged religion for the certainties of mathematics, and taught the subject for years, returning to his role as padre only once, on a visit with ex-POWs to modem Thailand.

He gave me some information about his correspondent Nagase Takashi, who claimed to have become active in charitable causes near Kanburi in the post-war years, and who had just built a Buddhist temple close to the railway there. I read about his activities with cold scepticism and found the very thought of him distasteftil. I could not believe in the idea of Japanese repentance. He had organized a meeting of ‘reconciliation’ at the River Kwae Bridge, that too-famous structure which has given so many people such a false picture of POW life through the David Lean film (who ever saw such well-fed POWs?). I had not seen a Japanese since 1945 and had no wish ever to meet one again. His reconciliation assembly sounded to me like a fraudulent publicity stunt.

Padre Babb died in 1987. I might have taken up direct correspondence with his repentant Japanese ex-soldier, but it would have been easier to cut off my arm.

It was becoming more and more difficult for the person I loved most to bear with me. The ex-prisoner, even after several decades of ‘forgetting’, can puzzle and frighten others. It is impossible for others to help you come to terms with the past, if for you the past is a pile of wounded memories and angry humiliations, and the future is just a nursery of revenge. At times my good qualities, which I am self-aware enough to know that I have, could almost be crowded out by sudden triggerings of frightened anger. A confrontational edge to a voice could bring all my shutters down. All of this made it difficult to imagine a way of healing my wounds.

Patti had to suffer the sudden icy rages, the withdrawals of affection and contact, of a man who could not stand being teased even lovingly. My hurt response was never deliberate; it was a way of disappearing into myself, of adopting the impassive hurt features of the victim; I shut down as a way of protecting myself. Patti was bewildered by it. I recall not speaking to her once for almost a week because of some imagined insensitivity. Another time, I woke from an afternoon nap after some wonderful days in which we had been getting on so well, and possessed by the spirit of loving fun I crept downstairs naked, intending to surprise my wife as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. When I appeared like a ghost at the door behind her she turned and, matching my high spirits, threw a wet dish-cloth at me to cover my indecent condition. That harmless gesture pitched me into a frightened remoteness, ruining a delightful piece of hilarious intimacy.

Everything in my world was still printed in black and white. I had become so used to burying the truth, the real pain, that I preferred to hope it would go away: as I thought my torture had, as I fooled myself Outram Road could be made to do. My unreasonable docility was allied to immense stubbornness.

Patti suspected that I had been seriously damaged by my wartime experiences, and that they were at the bottom of our difficulties, and decided that something had to be done about it; neither of us could bear the thought of our relationship breaking down.

I had no idea where to turn. The thought of consulting a psychiatrist or psychotherapist had never entered my head. The ordinary former Far East POW has probably never talked to anyone about the details of his experiences, except perhaps to other ex-POWs. A few have succeeded in writing memoirs, but they are very few. Not talking becomes a fixed habit, a way of shielding ourselves from those years, and this is doubly true for the victim of torture, who most certainly does not talk. I can write this now, but I have come a long way since the moment I first determined to confront my memories.

We found ourselves pursuing parallel lines of enquiry. Patti read an article about the long-term health of former POWs from the Far East by Dr Peter Watson, a Senior Medical Officer of the Department of Health. He had studied a thousand of us, and listed the medical problems that we faced, and reported that over half those he investigated had obvious psychological problems.

She wrote to Dr Watson, and soon I was on my way to the RAF Hospital at Ely, in Cambridgeshire, for a tropical disease investigation, with a special request for psychiatric evaluation. I was going to have to talk at length about Siam and Malaya, more than I had ever done at one time to anyone. I knew that for the treatment, whatever it was, to have any effect, I would have to talk, but I could not bring myself to do it. I solved the problem by writing the story of my misadventures in the form of a Memorandum, which ran to over fifty typewritten pages. I presented this to an astonished Squadron-Leader Bloor, the consultant psychiatrist at Ely. I could not possibly have told him any of it by word of mouth, but the Memorandum gave us a basis for discussion. For the first time in my life, I felt that a barrier was being pushed aside.

After four days in Ely I returned home. In the meantime Dr Bloor called to confirm that Patti had on her hands a straightforward case of psychic damage arising from wartime trauma, a kind of prolonged battle-stress. He may have had a more clinical name for my state of mind, but it did not matter; simply to have the problem identified and named was in itself a step forward.

Meanwhile, I had read an article about the launching of a new organization. It was called the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and had set up shop in a disused hospital in London. I knew nothing about it, but wrote to its director, Mrs Helen Bamber, and early in August 1987 I was invited to visit them. Helen Bamber received me personally. I can still see myself sitting at the end of her desk with my back to the wall, haltingly describing why I had come in precise sentences that hinted at things I could not say. I still thought that what I was telling her was unique to me, and perhaps I felt a little ashamed of my difficulties; but when she told me that everything I had told her was so familiar to her, from countless victims of torture from many different countries, the most intense feeling of relief flooded through me.

She was utterly unhurried, and this is what impressed me more than anything. She seemed to have infinite time, endless patience and sympathy; but above all she gave me time. It was astonishing simply to know that the pressure of everyday life would not drown out what I had to say. I remembered the half-hour medical examination in 1945, when I was still raw and sore, and there was no interest or time. Half a century later I was still livid with suppressed anxiety and now at last here was someone with the time. Not only that, there was the easing of mind that came with knowing I was not uniquely crippled or mad.

That meeting was like walking through a door into an unexplored world, a world of caring and special understanding.

Helen Bamber is a remarkable woman. A small person, whose stillness and calm presence belie an extraordinary energy for her seventy years, she has spent most of her life working with the victims of cruelty. The Medical Foundation of which she is a founder is probably the only organization in the world whose staff and consultants are expert in the problems of the tortured. Helen entered Bergen-Belsen with the Allies at the age of nineteen in 1945, and stayed for two and a half years. It is an illusion to think that the inmates of the Nazi camps were ‘liberated’ and went home; most of them had nowhere to go, and it was people like Helen who looked after their tuberculosis, their memories of cannibalism, murder, and the grotesque selection procedures that sent some to work and some to the gas chamber. She learned as a girl in Belsen the importance of allowing people to tell what had been done to them; the power of listening to their testimony and of giving people the recognition that their experience deserves.

For many years Helen worked with Amnesty International, and the demand for special services for victims of torture eventually became so pressing that she set up her new organization. We’ve learned so little in my lifetime that torture is now a global epidemic: Helen’s small group has seen 8000 cases in its ten years of work.

Our first meeting was an exploratory one, but after an attempt to interest my local health service in taking me on – when I was told by a young psychiatrist that ancient history did not fall within her brief-I received an invitation from Helen Bamber to become the first ex-serviceman from the Second World War to be accepted as a patient of the Foundation. This changed my life, at nearly seventy years of age.

I was amazed again and again that everyone in the Foundation from the Director to the newest and youngest member of staff cared enough to observe and to listen, and to listen again. I could hardly believe that I was beginning to talk.

Throughout 1988 and 1989 Patti and I attended this extraordinary place every four weeks, making a round trip of 600 miles on each occasion. The doctor assigned to me, Stuart Turner, was a man of infinite tact, and he persuaded me in his ‘guided conversations’ to reveal more and more, gradually bringing to the surface every fragment of my experiences from early 1942 onwards. He seemed to have wide and painful knowledge of the world’s tortures and of their effects on victims. I had never before met a doctor who was so perceptive and so willing and so quick to understand.

I was aware of myself for the first time as a person for whom the idea of torture might hold some answers – why I was such a strange combination of stubbornness, passivity and silent hostility; why I was unable to express open anger, and why I found authority so difficult; and why I was sometimes unable even to feel.

Stuart once told me that I was the only patient he had ever met whose face was so inscrutable that he could not tell what I was thinking. I had never heard my mask-like expression described so objectively; it must have slipped on whenever I wanted to hide from his questions for a moment.

While I was learning how to face the past and beginning for the first time in my life to understand what sort of person I had become during the war, I had not forgotten my personal quest for the full truth of what happened in 1943, and yet in the course of these two years, my search changed its character only very slowly. The need to identify the Japanese responsible for these particular cruelties was reasonable enough, but the idea of revenge was still very much alive in me.

One of the men I had found in my belated search for information was Jim Bradley, who had lived in the bed next to mine at Changi in 1944. He published an account of his experiences as a member of the Wilkinson escape party in 1943 and his subsequent mistreatment, and after reading a review of his book I found a copy in which I read a warm tribute to ‘the late Eric Lomax’. It was a pleasure to write and surprise Jim with my insistence on living. We met and renewed our friendship. In October 1989 I went to stay overnight with him and his wife Lindy at their home in Midhurst, a village in Sussex on the edge of the South Downs. We had a pleasant evening, talking about the old days, and over breakfast the following morning Lindy gave me a photocopy of an article from the Japan Times of 15th August 1989. This is an English-language paper published in Tokyo and not a publication I was ever likely to buy. Lindy had been sent it by a member of the War Graves Commission in Japan, who knew of her extensive collection of cuttings about the war in the Far East, and she thought that this article might be of interest to me because it mentioned Kanchanaburi.

The article was about Mr Nagase Takashi, the interpreter who had helped the Allied armies find their dead along the railway after the war, and Padre Babb’s eager correspondent. As I read it.

I experienced a strange, icy joy of the weirdest kind. A photograph accompanied the piece. It was of a slight elderly man, dressed in a dark collarless shirt and leaning back in a chair against a wall full of books, his arms spread out to the side making him look resigned and vulnerable. Behind his right shoulder was a large photograph of the River Kwae Bridge with its distinctive spans in the shape of minor arcs. The face was unsmiling, thin and familiar with pain, the face of an ailing seventy-one-year-old man; but the text with its short paragraphs and neutral prose revealed a younger face behind it.

The article described how Nagase had devoted much of his life to ‘making up for the Japanese Army’s treatment of prisoners-of-war’; how he had been ordered to join the Allied group trying to locate the graves along the railway, and how, although he had seen trains loaded with POWs leaving Singapore for Thailand in 1943, he was unaware of what occurred on the upper reaches of the railway until he went with the Allied party and saw the corpses in grave after grave in the primitive trackside cemeteries. On that trip, Nagase was quoted as saying, he decided to dedicate the rest of his life to the memory of those who died constructing the railroad.

This was the man I remembered from Padre Babb’s account, and about whom I had been so scathing. But there was more. The article described his ill health, his recurtent heart disease, and how every time he suffered a cardiac attack ‘he has flashbacks of Japanese military police in Kanchanaburi torturing a POW who was accused of possessing a map of the railway. One of their methods was to pour large amounts of water down his throat. “As a former member of the Japanese Army, I thought the agony was what I have to pay for our treatment of POWs,” Nagase said.’

I did not say anything in the Bradleys’ kitchen that morning; I probably showed no reaction at all, the impassive mask gripping my face with a vengeance. I stared at the article and read and reread it all the way from the nearby station to London on the train and by the time it pulled into Waterloo Station I knew that this was the man I wanted. His face was recognizably the face of the interrogator, his sunken cheekbones and eyes and mouth an older edition of that serious young man’s features. He was speaking about me, and guardedly admitting that he had been there during my torture. I felt triumphant that I had found him, and that I knew his identity while he was unaware of my continued existence.

I had been haunted by what he described for half a century, but so, it now seemed, had one of my tormentors – the only one with a face and a voice, the only one I had ever been able to endow with a personality across the years. He too had nightmares, flashbacks, terrible feelings of loss. The article talked about Nagase atoning for guilt, about visiting Kanchanaburi many times since 1963, when the Japanese government deregulated foreign travel, laying wreaths at the Allied cemetery, and setting up a charitable foundation for the survivors of the Asian labourers who died in such vast numbers. In my moment of vengeful glory, triumph was already complicated by other feelings. This strange man was obviously drawn on in his work by memories of my own cries of distress and fear.

I had apparently found one of the men I was looking for and I had the near certainty, shadowed by only a tiny cloud of doubt, that I knew who he was and where he was. I was in such a strong position: I could if I wished reach out and touch him, to do him real harm. The years of feeling powerless whenever I thought of him and his colleagues were erased. Even now, given the information about what he had done since the war, and my own changing feelings about revenge, the old feelings came to the surface and I wanted to damage him for his part in ruining my life.

When I got back to Berwick much later that day, Patti said it was the first time I’d looked truly delighted for years. On my next visit to the Medical Foundation, liberally handing out photocopies of the Japan Times article, I was interested to be told that for the very first time in the stafiPs experience I could be described as ‘animated’. Facial inscrutability was impossible now.

I still did not know what to do about Nagase. I made enquiries about him, writing to the British Ambassador in Tokyo and to experts on Japan’s dreadful record of coming to terms with its past. Nagase’s activities were well known, it seemed, to people concerned with the threat of a renewed Japanese militarism, but what I could not tell was whether his expressions of remorse were genuine or not. I needed to see that for myself. The thought was entering my head, distantly at first, that perhaps I should try to meet this man, to make up my mind with that face in front of me again. Many people could not accept the reality of our injuries after the war because they had not been there, because they could not make the leap of imagination out of their comfortable lives, but I wanted to see Nagase’s sorrow so that I could live better with my own.

This half-thought desire took a long time before it could be expressed. One or two people suggested that perhaps it was time for me to forgive and forget. I don’t normally argue openly about anything, but I began to argue just a little about this. The majority of people who hand out advice about forgiveness have not gone through the sort of experience I had; I was not inclined to forgive, not yet, and probably never.

Throughout the next two years I could not decide what to do with my information, which seemed the product of incredible and precious coincidence. Meanwhile, for the first time, and solely to benefit the Medical Foundation, I allowed myself to be interviewed by journalists. Hitherto, the prospect of anything resembling interrogation filled me with horror, but I managed to get through an interview with a woman from the Sunday Times and even, late in 1990, a television programme about the Medical Foundation, which was broadcast in January 1991.

I spent that year at my periodic meetings with Dr Turner discussing the effect of the discovery of Nagase on me and considering what I should do. I still thought often about striking him down, but Stuart helped me to see beyond murder. He thought that I should not try to meet my former interrogator at all, arguing that to do so would be to enter uncharted territory. Despite the range of their awful experience, not one of the Medical Foundation staff could find any precedent for a meeting such as I proposed. Helen Bamber could not recall a voluntary encounter between a person closely complicit with torture and his victim in the history of post-war Europe; while Stuart Turner more than once reminded me that there were many records of US veterans of the Vietnam War suffering traumatic flashbacks when confironted with strong reminders of their wartime experiences.

Still consumed by the desire to make Nagase suffer fully the consequences of his actions, I decided that I would like to surprise him, revelling in my superior knowledge and his ignorance of me. Aid for this vengeful plan came from an unexpected quarter. The director of the brief television film about the work of the Foundation and my own predicament, Mike Finlason, became so fascinated by the story which he saw unfolding that he decided to try to make a full-length documentary about Nagase and me. My intention was that a meeting should be arranged but that Nagase should be told only that I was a former Far East POW, and not be told that I had identified him as a member of the Kempei. At first Finlason acceded to my plan, but he became understandably and increasingly reluctant to stage a surprise assault on Nagase of the kind I wanted.

The ways of television were completely new to me, but I soon learned that there is many a slip between the ftill cup of excited plans for a film and the actual lip of the audience. Mike Finlason was then an independent director and this was his personal enthusiasm. Funding for the film proved elusive, and the early summer of 1991 passed without any of my plans nearing fulfilment – a delay that has almost certainly infinitely benefited at least two people’s lives. Stuart Turner was warmly concerned about my intentions, and suggested that I should try to meet some Japanese people socially to prepare myself for the encounter which I was determined to arrange. Given that I had not spoken to a single Japanese person since 1945, this was no easy matter, but I agreed to try. Various schemes were canvassed: visiting a Japanese travel or airline office, for example, so that I could flee without difficulty if I found it necessary to do so.

No embarrassing meetings with startled Japanese ticket clerks had taken place when one day in early July 1991 I answered the phone at home, which I very rarely do; Patti has screened calls for a long time past, at my request, and she was out when the phone rang. The caller was a historian of my acquaintance, who asked whether I would be willing to meet a Japanese professor of history, a woman from Tokyo called Nakahara Michiko, who was researching the exploitation of POWs and Asian labourers by the Imperial Japanese Army on the Burma-Siam Railway. I said yes. My wife returned to find that I had arranged a meeting with a Japanese person at our own house. She was more than a httle astonished.

For a few days before the meeting in late July I was frightened of my own response, but when the time came it was a revelation. It was a beautiful summer day, our best clear and light northern weather. Patti went to meet her at Berwick Station, and a little later I heard our garden gate clatter open. I saw my wife walk up the garden path beside a petite, smiling woman wearing elegant trousers and a black silk jacket, her hair a striking deep blue-black. We shook hands. Professor Nakahara spoke superb English, and within a few minutes I could tell that it was going to be all right. She is a considerate and learned woman, and after lunch we sat outside in the garden exchanging information and looking through papers, books and relics. Her husband, she told us, had been wounded at Hiroshima. She wanted to rescue the labourers from obscurity; dozens of books have been written about the POWs, but almost nothing about the romusha, as they were known to the Japanese. There were a quarter of a million of them: Malays, Indonesians, Chinese, Burmese, Tamils, a disorganized and starved multilingual army with no internal leadership or organization, unlike us. Michiko was interested in my memories of work in the railroad camps; I was fascinated by her as my first new link with Japan. She told me that she had once met Nagase.

The man who had crept under my skin and stayed there in 1943 seemed different through the eyes of others, and aspects of Japan began to interest me. Here, for example, was a historian unafraid of the truth, delving into her country’s most shameful actions, and I liked her. Soon after her return to Japan, she wrote to us to say that she had received an invitation to the Akasaka Palace to give the new Emperor Akihito a lecture on modem South-East Asian history, prior to his tour of the area. She accepted with the condition that she be allowed to speak freely.

In the month of Nakahara Michiko’s visit I was given a copy of a small book by Nagase which he had published in Japan. All I knew was that it was called Crosses and Tigers, since my Japanese studies had not progressed much since my efforts with Bill Williamson in 1943, but I learned that an English edition had been published in Thailand in 1990. I ordered a copy and eventually a small package arrived. The book was a tiny paperback, with a picture of the railway bridge over the Kwae on its light green cover; it had less than seventy pages of text, roughly printed with bad type, but I sat down to read it as though it were a rare manuscript.

The book opens with a brief introductory account of Nagase’s conscription in Tokyo, in December 1941, when I was waiting for his Emperor’s army at Kuantan. He was classified B3, presumably an indication of low physical fimess, and the photograph he reproduces, taken on 20th December 1941 shows a very slender young man with a face I remembered too well – an intense, fine, timid and mournful face – dressed in Japanese Army uniform and forage cap, clutching a sword that looks too big for him. He describes how he was sent to Saigon to serve with the oddly-named ‘Literal Intelligence Bureau’ of the General Staff Office, and how he was then sent to Java to interpret for an intelligence officer collecting information at the end of the Indonesian campaign. By early January 1943, he was working in ‘transport operations’ at Singapore, snooping on POWs who were being sent up to the railway, and presumably searching their baggage for precious firagments of the kind that Fred Smith had taken with him on his way to Ban Pong. In March 1943, when we were already in Kanburi, he was assigned to Bangkok, to the headquarters of the Railway Construction Staff, and in September he received an order to serve with what he calls the ‘military police platoon’ at Kanburi. He acknowledges the terrible cost of the railway, and that a prisoner or labourer must have died for every sleeper laid; and that today it runs for less than a third of its original length.

The rest of the little book has three main sections: his memories of Kanburi; his reconstructed diary of his three-week expedition with the war graves group, including Padre Babb, in September-October 1945; and some brief remarks about his post-war experiences in Thailand.

The first section, and especially the first five pages of it, held me spellbound. Nagase arrives at Ban Pong in dark and cloudy weather. The scene as he recalls it is hellish, the sky overcast and grey, flocks of large black vultures perched on roofs and in the branches of tall teak trees. He thinks at first that vultures are native to this place, but then realizes that they are attracted to the smell of carrion around the prison camp.

The next day he goes to Kanburi. ‘Again there were ghastly flocks of vultures when I walked across the field of tall weeds. The birds moved their heads back and forth every time they made a forward step.’ Nagase meets a funeral procession of prisoners, carrying a body on a stretcher covered with a faded Union Jack, followed by a Japanese soldier with a gun and behind him four or five vultures nodding their heads to and fro. He sees the rough bamboo fence of the camp and is told by the sergeant accompanying him to pretend to be an inspector of the camp, since he is unknown and the prisoners may unwittingly give him information. He is shocked at the sight of the camp, and sees shabby roofless huts, sick prisoners shivering in soaking blankets, malaria victims rolling feverishly on their bedding or on the floor. The rain starts falling as a British officer comes up to him, pleading for improvements in their conditions, telling him that they have had no roof on their hut for over a week with malaria patients exposed to the rain. The ‘weak dimmed eyes’ of the malaria patients affect Nagase badly. He remembers seeing the same mournful gaze when prisoners were being packed thirty at a time into box cars in the scorching sun at Singapore railway station. There a blue-eyed British officer had persistently asked him where they were headed, over and over again, repeating the question, but Nagase was unable to answer. ‘Why do blue eyes look so sad?’ he asks.

He is assigned at Kanburi to the squad responsible for Tokko, intelligence and counter intelligence. He accompanies the head of the squad or a tall sergeant with a ‘bluish, clean shaven face’, at all times. Sometimes he is asked to impersonate a Thai and to talk with the prisoners in order to learn their thoughts and movements. I had not known that he also spoke Thai, or perhaps he was mimicking a Thai villager who knew a little English.

Some time before the opening of the railway in October they suspect that a radio is in operation among the prisoners, and that we are listening to Allied broadcasts. They discover the set when they inspect the prisoners’ belongings without warning. When all the ‘suspects’ are brought to his intelligence squad, he writes, they have already been beaten badly. He thinks that one prisoner has been beaten to death.

Suddenly it’s as though he steps out from behind a screen and I am looking at a scene familiar to me distanced as though in a dream. He writes:

Nagase pauses to criticize the Imperial Rescript, the long oath of loyalty, which all recruits had to memorize, and the authoritarian system of absolute obedience that underlay it, which held a person’s family responsible for his actions. He contrasts this system with the respect for fundamental human rights which seems, in his eyes, to be rooted in the minds of people in the West.

For the rest of the war Nagase spent six months in hospital, and was then returned to Kanburi, from which he set off with Padre Babb and his fellow officers on their special train in the search for abandoned graves. Nagase describes the quiet, restrained hostility of the big English and Australian men with whom he was forced to travel, the difficulties of persuading Japanese troops to co-operate with the search, and the sad state of the bewildered surviving romusha, clustering around the Allied officers and pleading to be sent home. Their plight moves him since the Japanese army units are by now attempting to clean up the POW graves, but the Asian labourers’ graves are ignored by everybody. 1 feared that this contrast would make people think that the Japanese did not care about romushas’ souls.’ They find countless abandoned mounds of earth and wooden markers in the jungle, already strangled by vegetation. Nagase is disgusted by the fertility of the jungle, the myriad centipedes and worms, and comically afraid of tigers, which he imagines are lurking by the side of the track wherever he goes. He describes a tense confrontation with armed, desperate and ‘awftilly ferocious’ Japanese troops at the end of the line in Burma, whose commanding officer at first refuses to salute the British captain leading the war graves party.

One evening, the Allied officers take him into their roofed wagon and sit him down, putting headphones around his ears. He hears a broadcast describing how the Japanese Railway Corps, the POW administration units and the ‘special police’ are suspected of being major war criminal groupings, and how a unit of the Allied forces is currently engaged in the collection of information about Japanese war crimes such as maltreatment of POWs along the railway. ‘I was aware,’ he writes, ‘that all the officers’ attention was focused upon me and my face turned pale, my throat and lips dried up and became frozen.’ After a long silence he admits to them that he used to work for the special police. They ask him gravely if he has ever had any trouble with prisoners. ‘Nothing in particular,’ he answers, and they tell him that he will be all right, as long as he is with them, if he does his duty well.

Nagase notes that he began then to sense a breach between British and Japanese points of view regarding the value of human life and began to try to comprehend why GHQ in Tokyo should have pushed ahead with a railway line that British engineers had rejected ‘because of the predicted large number of victims’. He concludes that it was the cult of absolute obedience and the absorption of the army leaders in ‘an armchair plan’ that made the difference. Later he decides, after seeing like a terrible revelation the thousands upon thousands of crosses behind the POW hospital at Chungkai, near Kanburi, that ‘the refined civilization should be based upon humanity’.

Eighteen years after the war, when travel outside Japan became easier with the lifting of restrictions, Nagase and his wife went to Kanburi and stood in the large war cemetery, among the neat stone graves and the bronze plates with the name of each dead soldier.

Nagase visited Thailand many times after that, and did charitable work for the surviving Asian labourers, many of whom were unable to return home to India or Malaya after the war and dragged out miserable lives in villages near the railway; and he opened a temple of peace on the River Kwae Bridge, and spoke out against militarism.

It all seemed admirable, but I read about these things with a surprising sense of detachment. I had expected to feel some more powerftil emotion, but apart from the eerie feeling of being present at my own torture as an onlooker I felt empty. And I wondered at his feeling that he had been forgiven. God may have forgiven him, but I had not; mere human forgiveness is another matter.

I put the book aside. After a few days, Patti picked it up and read it slowly one afternoon. The passages which I’ve quoted on Nagase’s trip to the War Cemetery at Kanburi filled her with anger, much more than I had felt. She wanted to know how Nagase could feel pardoned. How could his sense of guilt simply ‘vanish’ if no-one, and me in particular, had pardoned him?

Patti’s sense of indignation was such that she wanted to write to Nagase immediately and asked my permission to do so. She drafted a letter which was sent in late October 1991, enclosing a photograph of me. Now there could be no thought of a sudden confrontation between him and me.

On 6th November when Patti went downstairs to collect the mail which was lying on the floor just inside the front door she saw an express airmail lener from Japan. It was addressed to her but she brought it to me unopened. I sat in my pyjamas on the edge of our bed and opened the tissue-thin envelope.

The dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.

Patti thought this was an extraordinarily beautiful letter. Anger drained away; in its place came a welling of compassion for both Nagase and for me, coupled with a deep sense of sadness and regret. In that moment I lost whatever hard armour I had wrapped around me and began to think the unthinkable: that I could meet Nagase face to face in simple good will. Forgiveness became more than an abstract idea: it was now a real possibility.

As the days went by it seemed that Nagase’s sincerity might be utterly genuine. I began to appreciate more fully how damaged he must be by what he had done, however unwillingly; an interrogator suffering in retrospect with his victims. Nor was his concern to make reparation some occasional thing; it was truly almost a way of life; I learned later that he had been back sixty-odd times to Thailand since 1963. He had also become a devout Buddhist, and his creation of a temple at the bridge was obviously a tremendous achievement for him.

He must have had a terrible fright when he received Patti’s letter, a letter from beyond the grave. Patti replied later that week, and I took another step towards him. She enclosed a personal letter from me. Patti’s letter was splendid and from the heart, setting out briefly what had happened to me since the war. My letter was brief, cool and formal; it was the best I could manage. My letters are always somewhat formal nowadays.

I asked him at first for information: were the searches made specifically to look for radio sets? What made the Japanese Army suspect that there w-;re sets in the camps? And who gave the orders? I was still determined to establish an indelible historical record of what had happened.

Nagase’s reply supplied little new information, for he had been briefly in Saigon at the end of October 1943 and by the time of his return we were already in ‘the monkey houses’, as he described those cages in the Kempei’s backyard. He thought that they had not been tipped off, but that they were looking for radios, and that they were apprehensive that we were communicating with Thais outside the camp (their great fear was that there were so few of them to hold so many of us in subjection). He thought, finally, that Captain Komai, who was hanged after the war, gave the orders for the beating. He added: ‘I know his son lives in the north of Japan, having dishonour.’ He closed by saying that he wanted to meet me partly so that our meeting would explain ‘the stupidity’ to the world, especially to those Japanese ‘who still want to have aggression toward foreign lands’.

It took us a year to arrange our meeting. Neither Patti nor I are wealthy, and we are both retired, and it is difficult to afford expensive air travel to South East Asia. (My arms and hips are in such a state that the cramped conditions of economy-class seats make long flights impossible.) We hoped that we might be able to obtain funding from the Sasakawa Foundation, which encourages understanding between Britain and Japan, but delayed doing so because there was still a possibility of the documentary film being made, and though I was now more sensitive to the danger of turning myself into an entertainment and wanted to meet Nagase independently of whatever our television friends wanted, I insisted that the film should be made for the Medical Foundation, which would play a large part in the documentary.

Nagase and I wrote to each other, but it is difficult to carry on a sustained correspondence with someone you have only recently stopped hating enough to kill, and sometimes all the old resistances welled up. I was frank with him, telling him that I found it difficult to write to him, and he was kind and understanding, always replying promptly to my letters. We wanted to meet in Thailand and afterwards he wanted me to come with him to Japan at the time of cherry blossoms in Kurashiki, which he assured me were very beautiful.

In the end, believing that Nagase and I could not wait much longer and that the world of film would wear us down, I went to the Sasakawa Foundation and they agreed to help to finance our trip. They also felt that the proposed documentary would have some effect in promoting their aims of reconciliation and understanding, and agreed to loan money for that too. I agreed, as long as the Medical Foundation could own the film when the costs were recovered. With these organizational contingencies at last out of the way, I was ready to face my old enemy eagerly and in good heart.