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

CHAPTER FIVE

THE OFFICIAL MEDIATOR between gaolers and prisoners at Ban Pong was a young Japanese interpreter with an American accent, whom we called Hank the Yank. He was a friendly enough man, and when early in February 1943 he came and told us that we should be ready to move the following day, the instruction caused no more than the usual spasm of anxiety. At least we knew where we were going: Kanchanaburi, a town about thirty miles to the north west of Ban Pong on the new railway’s route to Burma over the Three Pagodas Pass. We were now pretty certain that the railway was destined to reach Moulmein in Burma, where the river Salween empties into the Gulf of Martaban. Relieved, therefore, that we were not being sent much further up the line, from which horrific rumours were already coming back as the work parties went deeper into the wild hilly country of Kanchanaburi Province, we packed our gear with aggressive good humour. We had our cookhouse equipment, our medical stores such as they were, and our bits of ftimiture – the odd stool or home-made table, a little unit of shelving made from discarded boxes: things we had scavenged and put together over the past few months to make our huts orderly and bearable.

We were cocky, taking risks and laughing at our captors because we did not yet fully understand the nature of the risks we were running. Life could still seem the kind of game it always becomes when young men are cooped up together and before they discover they are trapped. We almost flaunted our stolen goods. I had a saw strapped to the outside of a canvas bag which I had acquired before leaving Changi; we had whole workboxes of tools hidden in our baggage: chisels, hammers, screwdrivers, that soldering iron… If it had been a matter of cutting through bars to escape this prison, we would have flown away long ago.

We piled into a lorry driven by a British private soldier. I sat in front, with a Japanese guard between me and the driver. A small convoy of vehicles turned westwards out of the camp, leaving the bamboo fence and the long hut behind us. Halfway to Kanchanaburi, or ‘Kanburi’ as it was universally known among the English prisoners, our driver slipped his foot on the clutch in the sticky heat and bumped into the lorry in front of us. The Japanese guard went berserk, screaming incoherentiy at the driver, pushing him out of the cab. I got down carefully on the other side, keeping my distance but looking at the guard intently.

This was a man full of rage and fear and resentment. No older than me, and outnumbered by his prisoners, he nevertheless had absolute power over us and now he was close to losing control. Retribution would be his, no matter what we did. He went on berating the driver. I thought about the stories, about the nurses’ bodies in the surf at Banka Island. He gripped his rifle so that his knuckles paled under the olive brown of his skin. But he calmed in time, and no blow was struck. He ordered us back into the cab and the lorries moved off again.

Until now, all our contact with Japanese violence had somehow been at second hand, for even the severed heads of the poor Chinese back in Singapore were not a direct threat to us as British prisoners. I had never, until that moment, seen any fellow prisoner threatened with assault, though of course the tracklaying gangs were being grossly abused simply by the nature of their work. It is true that I had seen men forced to stand hour after hour in the full blaze of the sun for some infringement of camp discipline; but no direct physical attack. I felt now that I had come very close to violence that morning. It was hard to tell if this was one unstable man, or whether his nerves were fraying because of some larger calamity; perhaps a foreknowledge of eventual defeat. This weird confrontation on the road, with the green of the big mango trees and nipah palms for a backdrop, seemed a step further towards danger, and away from the shreds of civilization and comfort we were still clinging to. Milepost zero of the railway was just east of Ban Pong. I began to fear that the higher numbers would be negative ones, measured on a brutal new scale.

At first, we seemed to have landed on our feet again. Kanburi was then a little town surrounded by the remains of a defensive brick wall. Within it was a main street, with the river Mae Klong parallel to it on the far side of the walls. There were shops here, and some substantial wooden buildings, corrugated-iron huts and patches of overgrown waste land. Some buildings backed on to the river, their yards running down to its banks, which were high above the muddy brown flood.

A little way outside town was the main ‘Airfield Camp’, as the Japanese called it, and to the south lay the railway workshops where our technical knowledge would once again shelter us from the worst. The workshop camp was known to the Japanese as the ‘Sakamoto Butai’, meaning the camp under the command of Major Sakamoto. It consisted, as usual, of a series of bamboo huts thatched with attap which were used as workshops, stores and offices, similar quarters for the prisoners in a separate compound, and a small group of better huts for the Japanese. Between each hut was a space about a hut’s width. The latrines were at right angles to the hut: deep trenches (though never deep enough) with planks across them and sheltered by a bamboo and attap cabin. A not very convincing bamboo fence ran around the entire site, with a guardroom at the main entrance near the road. One bored guard stood at the other side of the camp perimeter, a few hundred yards from the railway.

Sidings had been laid out near the town; closer in, there was a locomotive yard with a wooden water tower and a huge firewood dump. All of these engines burned wood, and steam engines are voracious consumers of timber. Once again, our camp was a repair-shop for the construction gangs’ tractors, the road-rail lorries and, as time went on, the locomotives themselves.

Our group was joined by officers and NCOs from other camps. Fred Smith, a sergeant in the Royal Artillery, was one of them; a regular soldier, a first-rate technician and a person who combined stoicism and good humour with immense physical toughness. Later I would realize that he was one of the most impressive men I was ever likely to meet. Here too were Major Jim Slater, a textile machinery manufacturer turned artilleryman who immediately superseded Bill Smith as our senior officer and whose droll and unquenchable pessimism made him the camp Jeremiah; Harry Knight, an easygoing Australian engineer from one of the Malayan mining companies, a useftil and trustworthy man; and Alexander Morton Mackay, another artillery officer, who had been bom in Scotland but spent a lot of time in Canada.

He was in his early forties, vigorous and companionable, more youthful in spirit than his age seemed to allow. Of all my fellow-prisoners ‘Mac’ or Morton, as he was usually known, was the one who became closest to me.

Two other men in our hut at Kanburi can now only be thought of together, though they had nothing in common at all: Captain Jack Hawley and Lieutenant Stanley Armitage. The latter was a quiet studious Irishman; Hawley was his polar opposite, a smooth and showy character who modelled himself on romantic film-stars like Ronald Colman – a man who enjoyed the clubs and the ease of pre-war Singapore, where he had worked for the British American Tobacco Company.

In the workshops, we found subtle ways of keeping overworked lorries in apparently good mechanical condition, but with an unfortunate tendency to break down a week after they left our hands. I was learning the arts of subterfuge and quiet resistance, and I was becoming a competent thief.

I took on the job of unofficial camp carpenter, making wooden paths so that the frequent rain would not force us to wade through liquid mud. I found that by far the easiest way to acquire materials and tools was to walk into the workshop stores in broad daylight and to walk out again with the goods prominendy displayed. I was never challenged. Little did I know that I was profiting by their carelessness, and that it had another darker side to it.

The Japanese were already making us conform to Tokyo time, which meant that we usually rose in the dark. When they also declared that officers had to work, they made me timekeeper and signwriter. My job was to sound the gong in the main workshop as the signal for standing and stopping work. This gong had to be sounded eight times a day, and the clock that was supposed to guide me in issuing my reverberant signals was a small Japanese timepiece perched on a shelf by the generating plant.

I soon realized that the working day could be ten hours long, yet contain less than ten hours. I conformed carefully to the official starting and finishing times in the morning and evening, but in between them I began to fiddle with the clock and as each day passed, each intermediate starting time got later, while the intermediate finishing times got earlier and earlier. Now we were stealing time as well as information from our gaolers. This was a popular and revolutionary approach to labour control, and even some of the Japanese mechanics approved of it. Unfortunately, I was found out, and a Japanese soldier was given my job. My only punishment was to be told to stick to signwriting and painting.

More than anything else, we wanted to delay them, to hinder their efforts, to do shoddy work in such a way that the origin of the nuisance could not be traced back to one man or group. Even people who were working on tasks like stonebreaking – which was considered a ‘light’ job – would work unbelievably slowly, giving the absolute minimum of co-operation. I think every prisoner became a slacker, a saboteur, and of course some of us are doing it to this day, having spent so much time creating quiet havoc in our early manhood.

We could not surrender the hope of escape. The country was, in a sense, a vast open prison, and we thought that there might with luck be a way out through the north of Siam. But in order to go anywhere after the first couple of miles, information would be vital – information in the form of a map.

It was always very important for me to know where I was, to locate myself precisely on a grid: to record, list, and categorize the world around me as far as possible. It was a way of creating certainty in a world now robbed of all certainty. Of all of us in the camp, it was characteristic of me to make the map. As official signwriter, I had access to pencils, and there was always paper for mechanical drawing in the workshop. I took a large sheet of plain paper, over two-feet square, from the chief engineer’s desk. In the storehouse I noticed a small atlas that included much of South East Asia and Siam; I ‘borrowed’ it and slowly copied the relevant pages with a pencil, working on a scale of about 50 miles to the inch. It was too small for practical purposes really, but it gave me such hope as I filled in details gleaned from POW lorry drivers who had been some distance up the railway, and memorized topographic facts from Japanese plans and documents left lying around the stores.

The map also showed the route of the railway, which I was able to work out as we had a chain of informants all the way up the line. The track hugged the river for a considerable stretch, and if we stayed close to both we might be able to scavenge food more easily if we made a run for it. But mapping the railway had its own intrinsic pleasures.

This was a clandestine piece of artistry, but at the time the secrecy was instinctive, an expression of prisoner’s caution rather than any real awareness of the risks I was running. No-one had told us not to make maps, yet it was so obviously a deadly business that I took great care to conceal mine. I kept it in a bamboo tube and hid it lovingly. It was covered in neat pencilled place-names, the boundaries of Siam and its rivers drawn as elegantly as I knew how. The paper took on an antique texture.

It had softened, with wavy edges from my handling of it and the moisture it absorbed from the humid air.

If anyone wanted to walk out of the camp, there was very little to stop them, and we had soon explored the whole area. Dense feathery bamboo covered much of the ground; big fruit trees were so abundant we hardly knew what to do with the fruit – mangos, durians, pawpaws. Beyond us to the north and west you could see broken and densely-green hills.

Kanburi and its markets were less than a mile away. We had permission to buy food in the town, so we did not starve, even if the staple diet was still rice and a basic stew. We sometimes bought Siamese delicacies like a fried banana concoction made by peasant women over a pan of hot oil, or dried fish.

It was becoming clearer all the time that the Japanese engineers had decided to take a most difficult route for the railway, and that they were going to stay as close to the river Kwae Noi as possible; this allowed them to supply the labour-gangs by boat. This also meant that they were imposing terrible demands on our comrades, for the limestone hills came right down to the river along this part of its meandering course, and the prisoners and labourers would have to hack through them. Viaducts and cuttings and trestle bridges would be needed to support the track, and would have to be built with axes, saws, spades and hands – and nothing else. We were not sorry to be where we were.

We could still find humanity among our gaolers. In Kanburi there was a very reasonable officer called Ishi, a Cambridge graduate by his own account who, whether or not he had ever been near the fens, spoke excellent English. He liked to talk engineering with us, and even to argue about the war. We could ask him what was happening, and he would give us some official version of events in New Guinea, though he admitted that they had already lost the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons. One day he said in his anglicized drawl that if we were really so interested in the war why didn’t we take out a newspaper subscription? Thinking that we were victims of some deadpan sense of humour different to our own, we gave him the money he asked for – saved out of our ‘pay’. Within a week, we were taking delivery of the English-language Bangkok Chronicle, by post. This paper was now a Japanese organ, full of disinformation, but by reading it critically we could still learn a lot. One stirring article told how German forces were ‘advancing westwards’ in North Africa, which was a strange way for Rommel to fulfill his objective of capturing the Suez Canal. In this way we followed, with increasing pleasure, the Axis retreats in Russia, Africa and Asia. But we should have been much, much, more careful than we were of an increasingly cornered and baffled enemy. At the workshop camp the Japanese with whom we came most into contact were reasonable men. But not all of our captors were decent human beings caught up despite themselves in a war which had taken them thousands of miles from home. We had a pet kitten in the camp, a seductive black stray, and we doted on it. It was a creature more helpless than ourselves that we could look after. One day it was playing in the dust of the compound when a Korean guard was passing. He unslung his rifle with its long fixed bayonet and skewered the little animal, as though he were going to toast it.

We had a radio working again, and the set now had a few refinements. Fred Smith had become our second radio maker. He had stolen an old mains radio from a house on the Bukit Timah road in Singapore and repaired it back at Changi with a few valves which he had also somehow acquired, and before he was sent up the railway had taken his improvised set to pieces and hidden it to evade the Japanese searches. Lance and Fred were using a modified buzzer from a field telephone set with an old battery as a power supply, and after many hours of tinkering they could tune the set to the right frequency and damp down the sound so that the BBC voices were intelligible.

It was still the same ritual every night: the tense guard around the hut, Thew huddled under his blanket, the earnest discussion of the news afterwards. Unfamiliar names on hazily remembered maps: Kharkov, Kursk, the Trobriand Islands. Lines of victory as well as lines of defeat were now connecting us to the world at war.

The news was passed along by trusted men, through hundreds of different mouths, around the workshop compound and up the miles of railway track to the real death camps. We made sure that one reliable man. Gunner Tomlinson, was placed on the ration train going up the line and briefed him on what to tell the men suffering there. It was difficult for them and for us to distinguish truth from rumour, to know how much to believe. Who knows how the news was distorted as it went along, how truth became legend and vice versa; but having these scraps of information was a wonderful boost to our morale and to our sense of connection with the world we had lost. The radio meant more to prisoners than anyone can imagine: it literally gave meaning and normality to our lives; now we felt we knew what we were living for.

Reading was an important part of that normality and dignity. I had a Bible, an Authorized Version, which I read constantly. Later, I swapped it with an Australian called Harkness for the Moffatt edition of 1926. I still have it: the book survived everything. The once-black boards are worn down to soft grey fibre, with smudges of black ink traceable on it; the spine board is gone. It was underlined almost throughout by Harkness in blue fountain-pen, meticulous neat small capitals annotating every column of every page of every book of the Bible. The widow pages at the end of each book are covered in the same tidy blue script. My own Bible in Ban Pong and Kanburi was annotated in the same way as I read the New Testament consecutively through with a bookmark, again and again.

The Book of Revelation continued to exalt me. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending…’ Its vision of apocalypse and of last things, of a world falling apart only to be recomposed in light and happiness, had been at the heart of the Chapel’s belief and of those long sermons at Charlotte Street. Nothing since my arrival in Malaya had persuaded me that disaster could not strike; that empires could not disintegrate; or that human beings could not find themselves helpless in extreme situations.

Perhaps only prisoners held at an enemy’s pleasure, without fixed term or rules, can understand Job’s bafflement with his God:

We could not talk about many intimate things together, but we could talk about religion, even though most of my fellow prisoners were members of the Church of England and I was a member of a Baptist sect. I recall exchanges of passionate letters between young men in the camp exhorting each other to greater spiritual effort. It was a way of encouraging the best in our humanity, and it all helped us to survive.

I still wanted to learn, to improve. I remember making careful notes on Hindustani on green scrap paper, neat columns of vocabulary and tenses; and even collaborating with my friend Williamson to learn some Japanese. We mastered a bit of basic vocabulary, enough to help us catch some of what the guards were saying.

The year 1943 wore on, the balminess of spring giving way to the ovenlike temperatures of summer. We grew almost accustomed to the humidity, the rains, the rich black mud which they created, and we maintained our elusive inner life which the Japanese couldn’t touch. We were now used to walking around half-naked, our thin bodies browned in the sun, and to the permanent itch and rawness of ingrained dirt on the skin that comes when there is never enough soap to go round.

The camp at Kanburi was uncomfortable and oppressive; on the whole, however, it was a ‘good’ camp. Almost all the work was skilled; there were few calls on us for outside work, and relatively little hard labouring; the Japanese in charge were, as at Ban Pong, engineers rather than professional Imperial Army soldiers, some of whom were ideological fanatics, or Korean camp guards who took out on their prisoners the contempt with which they were themselves treated by the Japanese; and we could get to Kanburi and its precious food markets in half an hour.

Others were not so well situated. One evening in April, I noticed some filthy, depressed and tired British soldiers collapsed against their packs outside the main gate of the camp, on the road to the north. As I walked out, I realized that there were hundreds of them. They lay around with the unmoving stillness of men who are already in a bad way, and know that there is worse to come. One of the men told me that they had just walked thirty miles from Ban Pong with no food and very little water, driven by aggressive Korean guards, and that they were supposed to keep walking up country. None of them knew how far, or what awaited them when they got there.

This ragged army of neglected soldiers scattered around the grass by the side of the road was a stark reminder of the Japanese Army’s capacity for that carelessness which is really an indifference to, a crime against, humanity. These exhausted men formed the advance guard of ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces, sent from Singapore to Ban Pong in special trains. The trains from there to the higher reaches of the Burma-Siam line, which was now nearing completion, were filled night and day with new rails and equipment, so these men – ‘on loan’, one of them explained, from the Japanese Malayan Administration – were expected to hump themselves and their equipment to their work stations in the hills.

For the next two months, columns of bedraggled men passed the front of the workshops at Kanburi. We did what we could, sharing food and water with them, but they were already lost. Through some crazy oversight, they were never transferred to the Japanese Siamese Administration which, accordingly, did not feel obliged to look after them. Those responsible for their feeding and care sat in offices in Singapore, a thousand miles away.

I have tried not to anticipate, to use hindsight too much in my telling of this story so far, but the fate of these already half-addled men deserves recording here. ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces had the highest casualty rates of all the POW drafts on the railway. They were to give the work a final boost, to complete the line earlier than planned – a kind of expendable shock force. Some of them would walk two hundred miles up into the hills; one in three of them would die, and many of the rest be crippled for the rest of their lives by illness or injury.

We speculated even then that there may have been some cruel method in this madness. Admiral Yamamoto, the strategist of the attack on Pearl Harbor and probably the greatest naval commander in the history of Japan, was shot down over Bougainville Island in the Solomons on 18th April, just before ‘F’ and *H’ Forces were sent out to walk to the end of the railway. Was what happened to them some demented form of mass punishment? Did the death of their leader provoke in the Japanese a desire for some further vast humiliation of their prisoners? These were the kinds of questions with which we tormented ourselves, and to which I still have no answers.

The men passing the camp would spend the night in the open, with no protection from the mosquitos that plagued us after dark. When they walked on, they left bits of kit behind them to lighten their loads. How much would they have left, I wondered, by the end?

At about the same time the first of the civilian labourers arrived. At first there were thin columns of Asians, Chinese, Indians, Malays, Indonesians, straggling along the main road from Ban Pong towards Kanburi. Later on there was a flood, a tide of unhappy men, and sometimes even women and children, streaming towards the upper reaches of the Kwae Noi and the most distant camps on the railway route. like the POWs, they had been summoned to accelerate the completion of the railway. Unlike the POWs, however, the labourers had no organization. They were individuals, or families, with no structure or chain of command.

It was possible even then, with my small knowledge of the scale of events overtaking all of us, to guess that these pathetic labourers would die in enormous numbers and be the biggest victims of the railway.

Yet even here, in a prison camp close to men responsible for organized cruelty on this huge scale, and capable of unthinking, spontaneous cruelty to individuals, I was still able to take pleasure in the machines I loved and to which I was now so unwillingly close. We retain more innocence than people imagine, even when death is yards away. One day, soon after the departure of ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces, from the direction of the new Burma line, a column of smoke and steam rose up. There had not been a locomotive on these new tracks before, and I was immediately aroused. The train, which was a small one of three or four stores wagons, came right into the camp. It was propelled by one of the most amazing steam engines I had ever seen. It was a beautifully preserved, tum-of-the-century machine built by Krauss of Munich, its origin described on a magnificent brass plate. I remember the joy of its sudden appearance on that dusty and degraded siding under the palm trees. Its cowcatcher stood out proudly beneath its high waisted chimney; its gleaming black boiler and brass trim brought with it ghosts of journeys between spa towns, perfumed goodbyes and lives gambled away.

My time as an involuntary professional railway man came to an abrupt end in August 1943.

Whether we were betrayed, or the Japanese just got lucky, I will never know; I have spent many nights awake, in the past half century, piecing it all together, trying to trace the leak. Perhaps someone boasted in the hearing of a guard about an Allied victory; perhaps some fool was keeping a diary of the news passed to him by the drivers who were our couriers. It mattered desperately, once upon a time, to know who had betrayed us, for in our eyes he was as much a traitor as if he had informed on us knowingly. After the war, the survivors would have gone after him with deadly intent – if we could have been sure. But all we had was the endless, painful uncertainty, rubbing like sandpaper on tender skin.

On 29th August 1943, instead of dismissing us from the normal early morning roll call, the Japanese guards kept every POW standing at attention in the assembly area. It was still half dark, quite chill in the strengthening sun. A group of them walked back into the huts; the rest, unusually alert and aggressive, surrounded us with fixed bayonets. We could hear them moving around inside the huts, at first with no great energy or purpose; then something happened to set them off. A crescendo of pulling, clattering and dragging began.

An hour passed. The sun was now high and hot, but we were forbidden to move. Over a hundred of us stood rigidly in our vests and scraps of uniform. The search went on and on, belongings piling up behind us as they threw and carried things outside the hut. I couldn’t see very much, but soon there was a small haystack of objects. And a lot of activity seemed to be centred near Thew’s comer of the long hut.

After about three hours Thew was called, a Japanese guard shouting his name. He went into the hut. We were dismissed, and turned to see piles of motorcar batteries, dynamos, boxes made of wood and tin, and an incredible variety of tools – all of them Japanese, and the remnant of what we had already sold to the local Siamese and Chinese villagers through the camp fence. A lorry drove up, and the whole heap of contraband was taken away. Thew was allowed to return to us; his shock was dreadful to behold. The guards had found the radio.

One of the men had been standing so that he could see inside our hut. The search party had seemed to take the whole business fairly casually, at first. They walked down the entire length of the dark space, picking up only a few odd articles. One Japanese, passing Thew’s bed, saw something in the folds of a dark blanket. It probably looked like a tiny triangle of white paper, as small as a postage stamp in that weak morning light, but it must have stood out against the neatly-folded wool of Thew’s bedding like a coy invitation to mischief: a little paper something out of place.

The guard, still possibly all innocence, flicked it with his finger and pulled. It was a small sheet of paper, and I knew it well. On it was a rather nice hand-drawn map of the Solomon Islands. We had copied it from an illustration in a Japanese newspaper which we had lifted from a guard, in order to help us follow the references on All India Radio to the savage fighting on Rendova, Munda and New Georgia in the Solomons. The blanket was whipped off the bed and there, stark and unmistakable, lay a pair of wireless headphones, the green canvas webbing and the black steel of the earpieces curled like a small sleeping animal.

In the ransacking they found, as we knew they must, not one but four small wireless sets in various stages of completion. We had kept busy, and lavished much care and attention on replicating our first success. Like the original one, the new sets were also neatly and beautifully made and fitted into coffee tins. The bottom of each tin was detachable and formed the bottom of the radio. It all fooled the casual observer, but these observers had now become sharply focused.

When we got back inside the huts, we found them in chaos. Every man went to look for his particular cache of forbidden goods, and found it barren. Every bag and box had been turned over; every sleeping space inspected. Even the passion-fruit creeper outside the officers’ hut had been pulled off the wall and torn apart.

The day had turned black. The pessimists, Jim Slater their gloomiest spokesman, said that the entire camp would be exterminated. The optimists hoped that the discovery by itself might satisfy the Japanese, but they looked haggard as they said it, and the camp went to work that day in fear and silence. Thew was the centre of a great fog of helpless sympathy as he worked, unsmiling and tense, on a diesel engine in the shop. There was very little sleep in the hut that night. Whispered speculation ran among the bed-spaces like the bugs as they dropped on to the wooden floor from the roof thatch and scurried away.

Early next morning Thew and one other soldier, who was found to have more stolen Japanese stores than most of the others, were summonedby the Japanese Camp Commander and after a brief time inside his hut were seen to emerge into the sunlight, which was now 100 degrees in the shade. They stood to attention, a guard posted near them, and were still there a few hours later. This was standard punishment, we knew, and could last for a whole day or longer.

That afternoon, They disappeared for a little while, but reappeared carrying a heavy iron sledge-hammer. He was stationed out in the open again, far from the nearest shadow, beside a great block of wood and began to swing the hammer down on to the block, over and over again, blow after blow, hour after hour. The dull thud of metal on wood could be heard all over the camp, underneath all the other sounds, as men walked to and from the workshops. It was like a drum beat announcing some terrible, nameless event.

Thew was not a weak man, but none of us were fit, and certainly not fit for this kind of mindless mortar-and-pestling of a dead log. In the evening the officer in charge of the Japanese guards sent to the POW cookhouse for some food for Thew. The cooks did him proud: they prepared meat and vegetables representing rations for a number of men, raiding our meagre stocks of protein, and packed them into a large mess-tin, completely covered with a heap of innocuous boiled rice. The commander inspected the tin and passed it: the sticky white mass must have looked like additional punishment. Thew got his meal.

Late that night he was released, blistered, bruised and exhausted, and very burnt by the sun. How we saw so clearly that this was not the end of it I can’t be sure – some instinct of foreboding, some accumulated knowledge of the Japanese habit of referring serious matters to new levels and departments, with each handing out its response – or punishment. This system, we thought, must now be in operation.

It is impossible to describe the emotional state of POWs at a time like this, as retribution gathered momentum. Work and feeding went on as if nothing had happened, but there was everywhere a desperate haunting fear, superimposed on the normal perpetual uncertainty which filled the mind of every prisoner. Little groups of men sat in odd comers of the huts or out in the yard, endlessly chewing over grim alternatives.

The first move was against Bill Williamson. He was summoned and told to accompany a party of men being sent up the railway. At the time it seemed he should be envied: the Japanese had clearly decided he was not important to our enterprise. He had been a good friend, but partings in wartime had to be conducted according to rules that averted too much emotion. Reticence was safer.

A week later Thew was taken away from the camp with all his kit. Though he had been allowed to go on working after the first round of punishment, he never for a moment imagined he was off the hook.

Two days after his removal a messenger from the main camp at Kanburi, about a mile away, came to the officers’ hut. It had started, we heard, as soon as Thew got to the camp; a long interrogation followed by a terrible beating. He was then made to come to attention, barely able to stand, and forced to hold this position for fifty hours outside the guardroom, all day and all night for two days.

On 10th September, Fred Smith followed Thew to the airfield camp. He was not attacked violently, but he too was forced to stand to attention – for no less than four days, falling over asleep, kicked awake, and dragged upright again and again. Smith was an incredibly tough man, physically, but one hundred hours of agonizing forced alermess is more than any body can bear.

As always, this information came back in second-or third-hand form, made worse by distance. What we could not see with our own eyes took on dreadful proportions. The possibilities twisted off" like threads into the future, each one more painful than the last, a maze in which there could be no good outcome. I have written of the uncertainty that eats at a prisoner’s mind and fills his days with anxious tension: those three weeks were the hell of uncertainty – the only sure thing was that we were on the edge of the pit.

Any feeling of security was utterly false. We imagined them doing their paperwork, telephoning each other, wondering what to do next. It was like being on death row without a formal sentence. And in all this time, their curious mixture of carelessness and obsessive attention to detail revealed itself: there were no further searches. For all they knew, we had other radios and could easily have disposed of them during those weeks.

Nor could we forget the stories about Pomeroy, Howard and Kelly. In February two escape parties, one consisting of Captain Pomeroy and Lieutenant Howard, the other of three men led by a Sergeant Kelly, had left the railway near Kanburi. The two officers got quite far, but they would have had to walk through rough limestone country, stumbling over creepers, dense rough grass and thickets of bamboo. They probably did not have even a map as good as mine: what chance did they ever have?

Sergeant Kelly’s group was the first to be recaptured, followed by Howard and Pomeroy. All six officers and men were then murdered, without any form of trial or court martial. We heard that they had been shot out of hand; we heard that they had been killed slowly, bayoneted to death one by one after being made to dig their own graves. No-one knew what to believe.

Day after day the officers in their hut in the Sakamoto Butai wondered and worried, inventing and cancelling different versions of the worst. I have often wondered why, under these circumstances, I kept my own map. It was now rolled up in a hollow bamboo tube in the back wall of our latrine behind the hut. It represented, I suppose, a slim chance – a remote glimmer of hope. It was the only carefully drawn general map of the area in the hands of any prisoner, as far as I knew, and I kept it in case we needed to run for it, in case we needed to set out on that thousand-mile walk to the Burma Road. And it was a beautifully drawn map.

On 21st September we found out what they intended for us.

Eariy in the morning four unshaven and untidy Japanese soldiers filed into the officers’ hut. I recall that one of them was fat. One of the others said they were here to remove five officers to ‘another camp’. There were nine officers living in our hut, and it so happened that seven of us were there when they came. This was what we had been waiting for; the end was coming with a group of squalid, indifferent camp guards. We did not need to speak among ourselves to feel intensely of the same mind about what was happening. I sat down. The fat Japanese read out the names of those he wanted: Major Smith, Major Slater, Major Knight, Lieutenant Mackay and Lieutenant Lomax.

As he spoke, a truck drew up outside. In the background. Captain Hawley and Lieutenant Armitage sat still. They said nothing for there was nothing that they could say or do. The Japanese gave us instructions to pack up at once and to get into the truck waiting outside. Beyond the reference to another camp we hadn’t a clue where we were going.

The next few minutes were quiet panic. I dismantled my battered mosquito net and my old canvas camp bed and rolled them up. Everything else went into my kitbag, with some clothing and smaller things in a big shoulder pack and a haversack. The fragments of furniture made and collected over such a long period were discarded in the space of a moment; the rickety table, the bamboo stool, the clothes line and hooks and shelves: they had all become useless. The only thing of interest now was survival.

While bustling about I had to do some very quick thinking, which is not always good thinking. Since we were now in very great danger the prospects for us were poor, if the initiative was left in the hands of the Japanese. I knew that there was a good chance of a firing squad or hanging party at the end of the road they would bring us down. I considered – if you can call such an impulsive decision considered – that if we were going to make a break for it and head northwards, up country towards the Burma Road, then we would be better off with a map than without one. I decided to carry it with me, wherever we were going. It was my talisman of certainty; it gave a sense of direction to the blind steps we were now taking.

I asked permission to use the latrine and walked back to the attap and bamboo shelter around the hole in the ground. In my shirt pocket I had my ‘diary’, notes on books and incidents since the fall of Singapore written in minute script on small pieces of toilet paper, and I thought about throwing it down the latrine; but it seemed a pity to lose it, and it was so harmless. I could not think straight. After peeing for the sake of appearances, I reached into the hollow bamboo in the back wall where I kept the map. It came out without difficulty, and with it a black scorpion, very irritated, darting and wriggling. I shook it to the ground from the folded edges of the paper and it lunged at nothing with its venomous tail. The black ones were more dangerous, I’d been told. I have often wondered what would have happened to me if I had been stung by that insect.

No one saw me retrieve the map, which I tucked into my shirt. When I returned to the hut I slipped it into a Royal Signals instrument mechanic’s leather bag in which I kept the smaller items of my kit. The scruffy guards kept a little way off. Their lack of interest in us screwed the tension up even further. It was as though we were being called by some large and slovenly organization for a job interview.

The five of us boarded the truck and sat on our untidy heaps of baggage. Japanese guards came and sat very close to us; they made us understand that any attempt at escape would have fatal consequences. The truck banged into gear and pulled off.

POWs moaned and groaned about everything, all day and every day; probably the whole British Army complained endlessly. It was a way of getting through the boredom of warfare and the worse tedium of captivity. Our men were nevertheless very much aware that their officers did the best they could, and that officers often had to take real risks on their behalf in standing up to the Japanese camp administration, and of course they knew about the discovery of the radio. When something went wrong, and they knew that something had now obviously gone very wrong, the ‘other ranks’ closed firmly behind us and gave us unshakable support. All the prisoners in the vicinity of our hut waved us ofif. Some saluted raggedly; some saluted us magnificently. Most of them never saw us again.

We were driven quickly out past the guardroom, the hard wooden seats of the lorry jolting us around, and then to the right, along the main Kanburi road. Driving panic and tension seized me; you feel as you approach extreme danger a throbbing in the head and a heaviness in the limbs, the impulse to flight being held down by a weight you can’t shift. We barely spoke to each other; we barely had time. After a mile we were driven through the entrance to the main camp at Kanburi, where they had taken Thew and Smith. This main camp held several hundred men and the Japanese military here were in charge of all the POW camps on the lower stretch of the railway.

The truck pulled up just inside the main camp entrance, near the guardroom. We were ordered down and our kit was dumped on the ground. They told us to sort it out, and we gathered our pitifully shabby belongings and took responsibility for every piece of baggage. After a long delay some Korean guards searched our kit, but there was now little left which would be of interest to even the most diligent searcher – except for one thing. The Korean who rummaged through my kit failed to find it.

The guards conducted the five of us to the main guardroom where we were brusquely ordered to stand to attention, a few feet in front of the building and well away from any shade or protection from the sun. The guardroom was a flimsy three-sided wood and thatch structure, open in the front, with a table across the gap. A guard stood at attention on the side nearest the camp entrance; a few more were seated behind the table. Among them was a large, fat and rather elegantly-dressed white-haired man, who now proceeded to address us in fluent American English. He ordered us forward. His attitude was aggressive, sneering and hostile as he checked our identities, making contemptuous references to Western duplicity and cowardice throughout the short procedure.

He ordered us back into the sun. There we stood beside a long ditch, neatly spaced like five telegraph poles along a road. The time was ten o’clock in the morning.

The morning and afternoon dragged on, every minute almost an hour. When you are forced to stand stiffly to attention in a blazing hot sun you have nothing to do but think; yet thought is a process that should be directed by the will, and under extreme stress thoughts spin away on their own, racing faster and faster like a machine out of control, one that has lost the touch of a human hand.

There was nothing we could do about it now: we stood there, knowing it was coming. The wretched little guardroom was no bigger than a domestic living room, and the few guards sprawling inside it or on guard behind us controlled the lives of several hundred men. So few to hold so many.

We stood for twelve hours with our backs to that hut. The nerves and flesh of the back become terribly sensitive and vulnerable when turned to an enemy. At any moment I expected to feel a rifle-butt on my spine, a bayonet thrust between my shoulder-blades. All we heard was their talk, their occasional rough laughter.

The intense heat of the sun, the irritation of flies and mosquitos feeding on sweat, itching skin, the painful contraction of eyes against the light and even the fear of violent death had been superseded, by the evening, by the even more powerful sensation of a burning thirst. They gave us nothing to drink, all day, but they allowed us occasionally to go to the latrine. On one of these visits I regretfully disposed of my diary. The flimsy pages covered with neat notes on books, on grammar, on lists of collectible stamps fluttered into the stinking trench.

As dusk fell the five of us were moved into a closer and more compact group in front of the guardroom.The darkness came on with singular abrupmess. We were lit by a weak light from behind us in the guardroom. A time signal was heard as a noisy party of Japanese and Koreans approached through the dark from the direction of the camp offices. They looked like NCOs, their uniforms dishevelled, one or two of them unsteady on their feet. All of them carried pick-helves. They stopped to talk to the guards, as though exchanging ideas about what to do with us.

Major Smith was called out in front of our line, and told to raise his arms right up over his head. His tall, gaunt figure, his thin arms held out like a scarecrow’s, looked terribly weak and pitiful. He stood there on the edge of the circle of light. I thought for a moment – a last gasp of hope – that this was the beginning of an advanced form of their endless standing to attention. A hefty Japanese sergeant moved into position, lifted his pick-handle, and delivered a blow across Smith’s back that would have laid out a bull. It knocked him down, but he was trodden on and kicked back into an upright position. The same guard hit him again, hard. All the thugs now set to in earnest. Soon little could be seen but the rise and fall of pick-helves above the heads of the group and there were sickening thuds as blows went home on the squirming, kicking body, periodically pulled back on to its feet only to be knocked down again. Bill Smith cried out repeatedly that he was fifty years of age, appealing for mercy, but to no avail. The group of attackers seemed to move in concert with their crawling, bloodied victim into the darkness beyond the range of the miserable lighting from the guardroom, but the noises of wood on flesh continued to reach us from the dark of the parade ground.

They were using pickaxe-shafts: like solid, British Army issue handles, and perhaps that is indeed what they were. The guards behind us did not move. There was no expectation that we ourselves would move, intervene, run away: merely the slack, contemptuous knowledge that we were trapped. That first blow: like a labourer getting into the rhythm of his job, then the others joining in, a confused percussive crescendo of slaps and thuds on flesh and bone. They kept kicking him, getting him up, putting him down – until he stopped moving altogether, unconscious or dead, I could not tell. Nor could I tell how long it all took. How does one measure such time? Blows had replaced the normal empty seconds of time passing, but I think it took about forty minutes to get him to lie still.

The gang came back out of the night. My special friend Morton Mackay was called forward. I was next in line. As they started on Mackay and the rain of fearful blows commenced I saw to the side another group of guards pushing a stumbling and shattered figure back towards the guardhouse. Smith was still alive; he was allowed to drop in a heap in the ditch beside the entrance.

Mackay went down roaring like a lion, only to be kicked up again; within a matter of minutes he was driven into the semi-darkness and out of the range of the lights, surrounded by the flailing pick-helves which rose and fell ceaselessly. I remember thinking that in the bad light they looked like the blades of a windmill, so relentless was their action. In due course Mackay’s body was dragged along and dumped beside Smith’s in the ditch.

The moments while I was waiting my turn were the worst of my life. The expectation is indescribable; a childhood story of Protestant martyrs watching friends die in agony on the rack flashed through my mind. To have to witness the torture of others and to see the preparations for the attack on one’s own body is a punishment in itself, especially when there is no escape. This experience is the beginning of a form of insanity.

Then me. It must have been about midnight. I took off my spectacles and my watch carefully, turned and laid them down on the table behind me in the guardroom. It was almost as if I was preparing to go into a swimming-pool, so careful was the gesture of folding them and laying them down. I must have had to take a couple of steps backward to perform this neat unconscious manoeuvre. None of the guards made a move or said a word. Perhaps they were too surprised.

I was called forward. I stood to attention. They stood facing me, breathing heavily. There was a pause. It seemed to drag on for minutes. Then I went down with a blow that shook every bone, and which released a sensation of scorching liquid pain which seared through my entire body. Sudden blows struck me all over. I felt myself plunging downwards into an abyss with tremendous flashes of solid light which burned and agonized. I could identify the periodic stamping of boots on the back of my head, crunching my face into the gravel; the crack of bones snapping; my teeth breaking; and my own involuntary attempts to respond to deep vicious kicks and to regain an upright position, only to be thrown to the ground once more.

At one point I realized that my hips were being damaged and I remember looking up and seeing the pick-helves coming down towards my hips, and putting my arms in the way to deflect the blows. This seemed only to focus the clubs on my arms and hands. I remember the actual blow that broke my wrist. It fell right across it, with a terrible pain of delicate bones being crushed. Yet the worst pain came from the pounding on my pelvic bones and the base of my spine. I think they tried to smash my hips. My whole trunk was brutally defined for me, like having my skeleton etched out in pain.

It went on and on. I could not measure the time it took. There are some things that you cannot measure in time, and this is one of them. Absurdly, the comparison that often comes to my mind is that torture was indeed like an awful job interview: it compresses time strangely, and at the end of it you cannot tell whether it has lasted five minutes or an hour.

I do know that I thought I was dying. I have never forgotten, from that moment onwards, crying out ‘Jesus’, crying out for help, the utter despair of helplessness. I rolled into a deep ditch of foul stagnant water which, in the second or two before consciousness was finally extinguished, flowed over me with the freshness of a pure and sweet spring.

I awoke and found myself standing on my feet. I do not recall crawling out of that ditch but the sun was already up. I was an erect mass of pain, of bloody contusions and damaged bones, the sun playing harshly on inflamed nerves. Smith and Slater were lying on the ground beside me, blackened, covered in blood and barely conscious. Mac and Knight were in a like state a few yards further away. We were only a few feet from the guardroom, close to the point where we had been standing the previous night. Slater was nearly naked; a pair of shorts and some torn clothing lay on the ground behind him, mud-stained and bloodstained.

The guards simply ignored us. They stood in front of a barely moving, battered pile of human beings under the fierce sun and acted as though we were not there.

By the middle of the morning I must have felt brighter because I began to wonder why I should stay standing up when the other four were lying down. I sagged at the knees and sprawled out beside Smith and Slater. There was still no response from the guards.

About noon, the large American-speaking Japanese interpreter sauntered over from the camp offices, squatted down beside us and inspected us with a critical eye. He sent a guard for a bucket of tea, which he offered to each of us from a mess-tin. Vague stirrings of life from the others; bodies in various horizontal postures managed to drink quite a quantity of tea. I was sitting up. I tried to take the tin, only to find that my wrists and hands were so swollen and useless that they couldn’t hold it. The Japanese interpreter solved the problem by pouring warm tea down my throat. I gagged on the acid lukewarm liquid, but it was a huge relief to my dreadfial thirst.

The Japanese man lectured us, his sneering voice triumphant over our heads. He told us that Thew and Smith had been through his hands a little while before, that it had been necessary to give them a certain amount of ‘treatment’; that they had told the story of the manufacture of the wireless sets and the reception and distribution of the news, that the Japanese knew the extent of our involvement and that we would shortly be questioned. He said that we might get off lightly if we made suitable full confessions, but that if we were difficult or obstructive in anyway there would have to be, regrettably, a repetition of the previous night’s ‘incident’. Then the interpreter looked at us in a strange half-respectful way and said with considerable dignity: ‘You are very brave men; yes, indeed, you are very brave men.’

He moved away and we collapsed again. The sun was now high and we had no protection. Slater told me afterwards that he felt himself naked in the burning sunlight, unable to move, and felt someone trying to cover him with a scrap of shirt and some shorts. I remember scraping them up somehow with my broken arms and pushing them towards his body: his nakedness looked so vulnerable. He didn’t betray any interest at the time and appeared to be in a kind of coma. We lay around in that state until late afternoon, when the guard commander, suddenly inspired by the thought that we had had enough rest, shouted at us to get up. He became quite violent, his voice screaming at us, full of petty vanity and anger, so we tried to respond. Slater and I managed to rise but the others continued to lie there mutely. The guard commander ignored us again after that. We remained outside and at the side of his hut throughout the afternoon, evening and night of 22nd September.

Early the following morning the main POW workforce in the camp gathered into squads and prepared to march out on to the railway and towards the bridge they were building over the river.

Every squad which marched out of any camp was required by the Japanese to salute and to give an ‘eyes right’ or ‘eyes left’ to the guardroom as it passed. It was always a matter of pride with every POW that this should be done in as slovenly a manner as possible, often with an outbreak of coughing or sneezing as a detachment neared the guards.

That morning, the leading squad looked just as a POW detail usually did, a group of half-starved and angry men wearing the weirdest of garments; some wore ragged shorts, some what we called G-strings; some were in dirty shirts, or army-issue string vests, and most of them had old hats or home-made headgear against the vertical sun. They shuffled along preparing to express the usual defiance. This time, however, the man in charge of the squad called out ‘Eyes Right!’ as his men approached the five of us, before they even reached the guardroom. The shuffling bunch of malcontents disappeared; every man marched past stiff and erect; each man gave his ‘eyes right’ with faultless precision. Sandhurst cadets could not have done any better. Each successive squad took the hint. Can any group of officers anywhere ever have had such a tribute?

Later that morning we saw what appeared to be a small funeral procession approaching. It stopped at the guardroom. Up close it showed itself to consist of a POW with a red cross on his sleeve, two teams of stretcher bearers and a Japanese guard. This guard spoke to the commander, the stretcher parties lifted up the two bodies which looked worst, while the rest of us were told to follow on foot. The POW with the red cross introduced himself as a Dutch doctor from the Netherlands forces in Java. He took us to the camp hospital and told us that his instructions were to repair us.

The hospital was a small building with an earthen floor, a central passageway flanked by low bamboo platforms down each side of the hut. The quiet medical orderlies helped us up on to one of the platforms and laid us out like sardines. The remains of our clothing was stripped off and they washed us gently from head to toe with warm water. They gave us freshly-made lime juice to drink, and we had to be prevented from slaking ourselves to the point of nausea. Nothing has ever tasted so refreshing.

When most of the dirt and blood had been removed it was possible for the doctor to assess the damage. For my part, both my forearms were broken and several of my ribs were cracked. One hip was clearly damaged. There did not seem to be any skin on my back. What astonished even the doctor was that there was not a single patch of white skin visible between my shoulders and my knees, down both sides of my chest, hips and legs. Most of the skin was in place, but it had turned a uniform blue-black, swollen and puffy, like velvet in texture. I was in such pain I could not begin to locate its source. The four others were in as bad a condition; everyone had broken ribs; but by some chance I was the only one with fractured limbs.

The medical staff soon had us bandaged up, while the doctor himself set the broken bones in my arms and put them in splints. There was no anaesthetic, but the additional pain hardly seemed noticeable. It struck me that this was the second time my bones had been reset without the muffling of drugs. That scoutmaster in Edinburgh had not known the half of it.

We tried to settle down and sleep for the remainder of the day, sipping lime juice whenever we wished, but we were half-paralysed with pain. The astringent fruit juice was almost the only medicine that the doctor had in his little hospital. Somebody meanwhile must have gathered up our scattered kit from around the guardroom and brought it over to us. My spectacles and watch were still intact.

The Japanese, we learned, had ordered that under no circumstances was anyone to talk to us except the hospital staff and that even this contact was to be confined to discussion of our wounds. So of course we spent hours talking to that wonderful doctor. We heard how Smith and Thew had been treated, and how they had now vanished. The beating they gave us was premeditated carefully: the Japanese had given instructions that no-one in the camp was to leave his hut that evening, and that anyone doing so would be shot on sight. All that night armed guards had patrolled the camp boundaries and the lanes between the huts.

When the beating started, the doctor had begun to prepare for us. He sat up all night listening in order to gauge what our condition would be if and when we were handed over to him. He had counted the blows of the pick-helves, and counted nine hundred strokes by the time the beating ended just before dawn.

I woke up in the afternoon to be told that there was again a little group of officers standing outside the guardroom and that they had come from the Sakamoto Butai. From their descriptions it was obvious that it was the turn of Hawley, Armitage, Gilchrist and an officer called Gregg, who I did not know well. They stood there all day, the medical orderlies coming back with unchanging reports of their stiff, flyblown discomfort in the sun. Once again, at about ten o’clock at night the squad of thugs went into action.

We could see nothing, but we heard a lot. We listened to the dull sounds of wood on flesh, to the tramping of heavy feet on the ground, to the roars and screams of anguish, and to the shouts of the drunken NCOs. It went on and on; we lay awake for hours.

Early the next morning the doctor was called out by a guard. He was gone for a while, and when he returned he said that two of the men were in trouble and that he would do what he could for them. His voice was tense, and even in our pain we could see he was holding something back. We kept expecting our four friends to be brought into the hut, but no-one arrived.

There was nothing our Dutch medical man could do for Hawley and Armitage. He saw a squad of Japanese soldiers carry away the broken and lifeless bodies and drop them down a deep latrine in the Japanese section of the camp.

Gilchrist, possibly because he was so small, possibly because of his advancing age, or possibly because of that inexplicable capriciousness of the fanatic mind, was not touched at all. Gregg, the fourth man, also escaped a beating. The doctor had again sat up late at night and counted the number of the strokes. This time he reached four hundred before being called out.

For two or three days we lay in our refuge, too stiff and sore to move, but with thoughts racing through our heads, idea succeeding idea until we were sick with mere speculation. We could tell that they were not finished with us. Lying there, unable to move, we expected them to come and finish us off. Suspense became a cruel insult added to physical injury. We knew that there was a whole sequence of steps; that each one of them would be unpleasant and that we could not look ahead, could not say to ourselves ‘that’s the end of it now, we have reached some kind of sanctuary’. All we had was the agony of fear of worse to come.

Our food v/as very good, the best the camp could supply. Many little delicacies were smuggled to us by the other POWs, and we drank gallon after gallon of lime juice. With each passing day we felt better. We each found that our skin was losing the intense black of the bruising; pale patches began to show up as our bodies mended themselves. The physical healing happens so fast; it is the rest that takes time.

One morning a party of smartly-turned-out Japanese officers walked without warning into the hospital hut. Among them was the foppish white-haired interpreter. They inspected us aggressively, made a remark to the doctor about there being no permanent damage and swept out again. We were, evidently, still very much on their minds.

When I went through my kit with the help of Mackay and Slater, I found only one thing missing: my hand-drawn map of Siam and Burma showing the route of the railway.