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

CHAPTER SIX

AT FOUR o’clock in the morning of 7th October 1943 the five of us were roused from our sleep. Three or four figures were standing quietly in the shadows at the door of the hospital hut. I caught glimpses of them as they paced about. The insignia on their collars was unfamiliar to me, but it was unmistakable for all that; these were men whose presence was more terrifying than any number of drunken sergeants running amok. They represented something colder, more calculating, an organization that lurked on the edges of the worst imaginings of all the prisoners on the railway. The Kempeitai’s reputation was like the Gestapo’s; worse, for us, because we knew more about what this Japanese secret police unit had done in China during.the 1930s.

A lorry was waiting outside. I was the last out. I tried to pack such kit as still survived, the long splints on both arms making every small task painful. Mac helped me to get my things together, as he had been doing for days now. I joined the others outside and we climbed on to the truck. As dawn was breaking we were driven swiftly through the main gates of Kanburi POW camp. We thought that this could easily be our last journey, and the cold light was perfect.

The truck again took us only a very short distance; we were moving tortoise-like through their circles of punishment. We found ourselves being driven into the town of Kanburi itself and along a narrow street parallel to the Mae Klong River. The street consisted of a long row of sizeable buildings, the houses of Siamese and Chinese merchants. I had seen it many times in daylight. The ground floors were normally used as shops, warehouses and offices, and the upper floors as living accommodation. We stopped at one of these merchant’s premises, a tall building which had a special protective wall built out on to the street, with an armed sentry at the narrow entrance. We were not aware until then that the Kempei had a local headquarters. Our war had suddenly become one in which secrecy, suspicion and paranoia were weapons.

We were quickly hustled out of the truck and through a gloomy passage into the yard at the back of the building. The yard was a long narrow one which ran as far as the river bank. Although we seemed so close to the broad slick expanse of muddy water, the banks were high and the river far below us. The left-hand side of the yard was bounded by a wall; and along part of its length there were blocks of little hutch-like cells or cages. They resembled drawers in a filing cabinet. We were each ushered into one of these cells through a small, low door about two feet square. The front of each cage was made of bamboo lattice-work; each cell was about five feet long, little more than two and half feet wide, and less than five feet high. The top was solid, a flat surface presenting itself to the sunlight like a hot plate.

We were allowed to take into our box one blanket each, a drinking cup or mug and the shirts and shorts which we happened to be wearing. The rest of our kit and our footwear were removed. They had taken away the last shreds of our dignity and caged us like animals.

The little doors were locked and we were left to our own thoughts. I lay down on the floor, diagonally across the cell; I am over six-foot tall, and I had to lie cramped, my arms held up to prevent my own weight crushing the unset bones; but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. The cumbersome wooden splints and bandages were desperately constraining, and there was no point in crouching upright under the roof. The heat was suffocating after the sun came up and it seemed to suck the air out of the cage.

We couldn’t communicate with each other – shouting was certainly out of the question, as there was a hard-faced sentry in the yard, the long spike on the end of his rifle casting a shadow across the ground in front of the cells. In the forenoon, they gave us a small bowl of heavily-salted rice formed into leaden balls. There was another helping of this dehydrating mush in the evening. I was very suspicious of this and I ate as little as possible of the rice; I thought it might be a way of making us ragingly thirsty and of breaking us down; but two bowls of intensely salty rice daily was all we got for the rest of our stay in that place. I felt more and more hungry, and was thirsty all the time.

At least I was supping with the Japanese with a very long spoon. One of the medical officers in Kanburi camp had made me a spoon fastened to a wooden handle so that the whole thing was about eighteen inches long. This was the only way I could feed myself, since I couldn’t raise my arms enough to use a normal spoon, and the Japanese wanted me alive enough to let me keep my special utensil.

The cell became literally an oven by the afternoon, an enclosed box containing heat. Ants, vicious large red ones, crawled all over it and over me; the immobility of my arms in their splints was a fierce frustration, preventing me from sweeping away insects from my legs and back.

It is impossible to account precisely for the next few days; I could not even account for the normal interchange of night and day and my mind was confused, sometimes even to the point of oblivion.

I think that there is no doubt that one full day and night elapsed before the interrogation started, but after that time became a blur. Sometime early in the morning I was taken by two guards into the main building. I passed some of the other cages and was able to see dim figures reclining inside, but they did not stir. Once in the house I was pushed towards the front, and into a room constructed entirely of wood, a dark tropical hardwood that gave the chamber a permanent twilit atmosphere. Across a plain narrow table, also made of dark timber, two Japanese were seated.

One of them was a large, broad, muscular, shaven-headed man wearing the uniform of a Japanese NCO, his face and thickset neck full of latent and obvious violence. The other figure, in an ordinary private’s uniform, was far smaller, almost delicate. He had a good head of very black hair, a wide mouth and defined cheekbones, and looked very unmilitary beside his rounded and thuggish colleague. There was no ease between them; it was obvious who was in charge.

The smaller man opened up, speaking a heavily-accented, uncertain but quite fluent English. He introduced himself as an interpreter whose job was to assist the NCO of ‘the special police’, as he put it, in his investigation into the ‘widespread anti-Japanese activities’ which had been occurring in the POW camps in the neighbourhood. They knew, he said, that these illegal activities were being directed by officers in the Sakamoto Butai.

The NCO then spoke, or rather shouted in a series of short barks, and the small man began his task of translation. Their styles of delivery were, and remained almost to the end, very different: the NCO relishing his own aggression, assuming my guilt and utter worthlessness in the contemptuous way he put his questions, the younger man speaking like a mechanical conversational voice doing its duty, with almost no inflection of interest. He seemed to be a little afraid of the NCO – or perhaps I just hoped that he was even a little as afraid as I was. He now interpreted a long speech in choppy, menacing segments. This introduction was more or less to the effect that ‘Lomax, we have already examined your colleagues Thew and Smith. They have made frill confessions of the extent of their activities in making and using wireless sets in the Sakamoto Butai. They have frilly admitted circulating news sheets. Lomax, they have already told us all about the part you have played, about the collections of money to buy parts from Bangkok for the radios and about your passing on the news to other camps. We are satisfied you are guilty. Some of your fellow POWs have used wireless sets before and they have been caught and executed. Lomax, you will be killed shortly whatever happens. But it will be to your advantage in the time remaining to tell the whole truth. You know now how we can deal with people when we wish to be unpleasant.’

You will be killed shortly… A flat neutral piece of information, almost a conversational remark. I had just been sentenced to death by a man of my own age who looked as if he were a little detached from his surroundings, and who seemed completely indifferent to my fate. I had no reason to doubt him.

I knew that I was the only Royal Signals officer for miles around Kanburi and it had already occurred to me that with my obvious knowledge of communications, they would be particularly suspicious of me; so the indictment delivered by the interpreter was as unsurprising as it was unanswerable.

The questioning started. They wanted to know about my family history: detailed and precise questions about my grandparents and other relatives, my mother and father and their occupations. The room was close, and I was already very tired and sore. The pointlessness of what we were doing began to overwhelm me. Here I was trying to explain the migrations of my Lancastrian and Scottish ancestors to a couple of uncomprehending Japanese men in a Siamese village.

They wanted to know about my work before the war, my schooling, my war record up to the capitulation of Singapore in February 1942. From that date my movements were questioned in really minute detail; when they finally placed me in the Sakamoto Butai, after several hours of halting progress, I had to account for almost every hour of my time.

They also asked about my spare-time activities before the war. I tried to explain my interest in trains and railways, tried to make them understand some of the fascination of living in the country that had started the industrial revolution. The young interpreter’s face was a cold mask of bafflement. They exchanged staccato comments about my response, but moved on.

They moved to larger and, given the circumstances, more abstract questions: Who is going to win the war? Why? Where will the Allied landings be? Then they would shift suddenly to specifics, asking me why we wanted to get the radio news, demanding to know why we could not accept the news given in the English-language Japanese bulletins and in the local newspapers. There would be a banal question like ‘Do you enjoy eating rice?’ And so on, and on, and on again.

Their real interest was anti-Japanese activities in the camp, and still more in any contacts we might have had with resistance forces or agents outside it. They hammered away at this endlessly, and I could see that for them I was a piece in some crazed jigsaw puzzle that linked Singapore, Malaya, Thailand and elsewhere – wherever they were having trouble or there was resistance to their occupation. I knew that to give even the appearance of having such contacts would be absolutely fatal; and of course we had none.

They tried to cross-check whatever they had already got from Smith and Thew, which was not much, so they wanted to know the date on which we first received the radio news, what the items were, and how often we worked the set. I tried to be vague, noncommittal and prolix all at the same time. Then, once, the interpreter let slip that Fred and Lance were in fact still being kept somewhere in the building. It was a brief surge of hope to know that they were still alive.

Where I knew they knew something, I gave them straightforward corroboration, but of course this in turn allowed them to produce a list of apparent discrepancies between my version and previous versions of events, and so it started all over again.

I thought during one suffocating, endless session – it may have been in the afternoon of the second day, though I had lost all sense of time by then – that introducing a diversion might be a good tactic. There was something earnest and studious about the young interpreter, something in the way he seemed to relish – or was I imagining this? – our exchanges about British life and culture. I found it hard to tell because I loathed his endless sing-song questions, his dreadful persistence and smug virtuous complicity with what they were putting me through; I was beginning to feel that he and I had been in this room for months But I asked him anyway to tell me something about the Japanese educational system during some exchanges about my own education, to which they had returned, as though the clue to the crumbling of their imperial ambitions could be found in the teaching of the Royal High School. He volunteered some account of his own schooling, and we had an interesting little chat about language teaching. At that moment, and there were others, he became a hated intimate, a sort of lifeline – simply because we could share a language and a moment of curiosity about each other.

The Kempei NCO slowly became suspicious and began to interrogate the interpreter, who reminded me that it was he who was supposed to be asking the questions. The interpreter was simply meant to be a channel of communication, and when it got blocked or distorted the NCO would shout at him too. Although I felt that the interpreter was in some way a human being like me, I hated them both, hated the interpreter more, because it was his voice that grated on and that would give me no rest.

They were obsessed with radios, of course, but waited a long time before introducing the subject of transmitters. Then they went at me. ‘Did you have a transmitter? Tell us how you would make a transmitter. What materials would you need? If you made a receiver why didn’t you make a transmitter? Lomax, could 3;c»m make a transmitter? You made a transmitter. Tell us what you transmitted.’ It was in these questions that they revealed their extreme ignorance about radio equipment in general, wanting to know how a simple receiver could be converted into a transmitter, for example – which can’t be done.

Answering these questions was easy enough, but trying to make them understand the truth I was telling was a different matter. I was floundering in the gap between their knowledge and mine, and was suddenly the victim of my whole upbringing and culture; for my interrogators were from a relatively backward society. It is hard to imagine this now, after half a century of astonishing technological development in Japan, but in 1943 the Japanese Army was a technically primitive organization, reflecting in this the partly feudal state of its homeland. The two men sitting across the table from me simply did not know enough to judge what I was telling them, which was that the technical problems of making a transmitter were too great, and that no group of prisoners with the pathetic materials available to them could work a miracle.

At some point they brought in a different NCO, the first one having failed to get the answers they were looking for. So far they had not laid a finger on me, but the endless disorienting abuse relayed by the impassive young man, the barrage of ludicrous questions and the deprivation of sleep were bad enough. I sat hour after hour balancing my broken arms on my thighs, longing for rest. It all became a featureless blur, eighteen hours a day from what seemed like early in the morning till well after dark. Once or twice they woke me at night and brought me to the room. The endless wearisome repetition wore on and on. There was so little inflection in the interpreter’s voice, it filled my dreams with its flat repetitive questions.

I thought that I must be the first English person he had spoken to, after his training. His first interlocutor in another language a person he is helping to break down: would this make him feel proud? I hated him more and more. He was the one asking the questions, driving me on. I was sick of the sight of him, I would have killed him for his endless insistence, his boring mechanical curiosity about things I thought he would never understand.

I remembered all that POW talk about the moment when you are absolutely doomed and you take one of them with you. It was easier said than done with two broken arms, but it came to me all the time now and I wanted to do it. It was the interpreter I would have tried to kill.

I could not spin them a yam, of course, or go into complete fantasy because I feared their violence when they found me out. I did not know for sure what they knew, only what they wanted to know; my task was to give them sufficient information to satisfy them without incriminating any other person. You have a fraction of a second in which to think up answers and I felt so close to disaster all the time, through one careless word. They wanted to know who our contacts were, how the information was sent up the railway, who we were buying parts from, so I would say that it was a man who wore a shirt without insignia so we could not tell what unit he was in; that it wasn’t me who passed on the information, it was another soldier in another hut whose name I didn’t know; that we left a note outside our hut and never saw who picked it up.

I was trapped. I did not think at the time that there was anything heroic about refusing to give information, or the names of my friends, but I was certainly stubborn, and perpetually vigilant. I had to say something, and yet if I had given the slightest indication of the membership of the wider network they could have rolled it up, torturing each man to reveal his contacts. Gunner Tomlinson would have been forced to reveal the names of the men to whom he gave the edited news-bulletins, and these innocent Hsteners to the BBC at fourth hand made to suffer. So far, I seemed to be the only one in our group being questioned in such detail: I was in the net because they thought that the Royal Corps of Signals was the organizer of all communicative evil.

It is a strange feeling, being sentenced to death in your early twenties. It made me feel relaxed, in a strange way, to know that I was living on borrowed time. Yet day after day the psychological torment continued. With Pomeroy and Howard in mind, I did not expect any other outcome except – at best – a few Japanese soldiers facing me in the forest, being tied to a post, then a volley. It occurred to me that my family would never be able to find my grave.

They left me my imagination, and it was a worse tormentor than they could ever be. I expected death, but had no clear image of an ending that would make sense to me. I was now living in a world without rules – they could make up their own, and there were no grids or points of reference at all. The world I knew was one in which regularity was almost sacred, a world of predictable and marvellous organization; arrivals and departures were significant, but ultimately controllable events. Mine was a world in which all kinds of communication were revered and I had become dedicated, in my own way, to improving and understanding it. All this had been burst apart by violence. Communication and movement between places had fallen into the service of horror in the place where I found myself.

When I was not being questioned I lay in that cage. We had not been allowed to wash or shave since we arrived here, and I was now filthy. My cage was worse. I was not allowed to visit the latrine at night, and we were living on a rice diet. I think it was Slater, in the next cage to mine, who was not being interrogated very much, who badgered the little interpreter as he passed his cage and persuaded him that it was not good for them or us that we should have to foul our mugs and cages. We were eventually given closed lengths of bamboo to pee into during the night. But I never saw the interpreter outside that hot wooden room. Slater and I could not compare notes because of the constant presence of the guard; in any case, the less we told each other the better we knew it would be.

There was no light at night and I just lay across the floor of the cell, unutterably depressed. I tried to keep count of the passage of time by making scratches on the wall of the cage with a fish bone which I found in the rice. Squadrons of mosquitos from the river droned all round and over me during the hours of darkness and the only possible sanctuary from them was inside the blanket, but that was so suffocating that I had to endure the bites of the insects instead.

In the nightly delirium I had weird exalted visions, lying there in my shorts and shirt with my long-handled spoon for company. My mind was turning into a machine that produced texts, words and images, cutting them up and feeding them to me in disconnected and confused snatches, slogans, scenes, fantasies. I became a screen with bits and pieces unfolding across me. Sometimes the messages had a sound, quite loud; sometimes they were intensely visual. Most of them were religious, or at least came full of immense and comforting majesty; they were based, mainly, on the most exalted literature I knew, which was that of the Protestant seventeenth century: phrases like

At the worst moments time became completely separated from my inner world of pain and sleeplessness. Once I came out into the yard, after what I thought was an all-night interrogation and saw the dawn light oiling the river at the end of the yard, filling our cages with luminous shadow. Then suddenly it went dark and I realized that I had been watching the sun set.

They brought back the first NCO. He would bang on the table with a big wooden ruler, waving it threateningly to get my attention. ‘Lomax, you will tell us.’ He was becoming more and more aggressive.

One morning I was taken into that room and there on the table, spread out carefully, was my map. It looked so fine, so neatly done. The NCO and the interpreter stood at the window with their backs to me. The room was silent. They left me standing there for a long time.

Then they turned and from both of them came a storm of fake anger. They had obviously known about it all along, but were now trying to shock me. This is a very good map… why did you make it? From where did you steal the paper, where did you get your information? There must be other maps from which you got your information… Where are they? Were you planning to escape on your own? With others? Who are they? And then they kept returning to one thing: who we were planning to meet up with, whether there were villagers who had promised to help us, whether we received instructions by wireless, whether any villagers had radios. Were you in contact with the Chinese? And so on.

The young interpreter was now getting deeper into his role as interrogator, as though he were enjoying it. They were really worked up. I could feel their frustration at being sent around in circles by my stubborn refusals. There was a violent electricity in the air.

They wanted to know why I had drawn the railway on my map. I tried to convince them that I was a railway enthusiast, that I had made the map so that I would have a souvenir of Siam and the railway, and know where the stations were. They could not imagine that this was partly true: I had not lost my instinct to record and list and trace. I spoke to them about trains, loaded them up with information about British standard gauge and how interesting it was to see a metre-gauge railway in operation, and the problems of exporting locomotives designed for one system to countries with different systems. The interpreter struggled to find the right terms, about gauges and boiler sizes and engine weights.

He kept saying to me: ‘You are railway mania?’, meaning, I think, ‘maniac’ or ‘fanatic’, his voice expressing genuine, angry puzzlement, and then he would try to explain this incredible excuse to his colleague, who looked darker and more brutal by the minute.

Suddenly the NCO grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out, half stumbling, the relentless force in his powerful arm, his fingers pinching my flesh where he grabbed my shirt. I remember seeing the yard, and the river bank, and the wide brown river flowing past as we stood there. I remember seeing the cages, and noticing Major Smith and Mac and Slater, and seeing that Thew and Smith were now in cages too. But I was told fifty years later, by someone who should know, that I was first taken to a bathroom, and that there was a big metal tub in it, full of water, and that my head was shoved under the water again and again. I believe my informant, but to this day I can’t honestly say I remember this. Nothing: a strange selective filter allows us to hold some thing back from ourselves. But I do remember the rest.

A bench had been placed out in the open. I was told by the interpreter to lie down on it, and I lay on my front to protect my bandaged arms by wrapping them under the seat. But the NCO quickly hauled me upright again and made me lie on my back while he tied me to the bench with a rope. My arms were loose. The questioning recommenced. The interpreter’s voice: ‘Lomax, you will tell us why you made the map. You will tell us why you made a map of the railway. Lomax, were you in contact with the Chinese?’

The NCO picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question from the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch from above the height of the NCO’s head on to my chest and stomach. It is so much worse when you see it coming like that, from above, when it is slow and deliberate. I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body, and the branch smashed on to them again and again. The interpreter was at my shoulder. ‘Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.’ I think I felt his hand on my hand: a strange gesture, the obscene contrast between this gesture almost of comfort and the pitiless violence of what they were doing to me.

It is difficult to say how long the beating lasted, but for me it went slowly on for far too long. The NCO suddenly stopped hitting me. He went off to the side and I saw him coming back holding a hosepipe dribbling with water. From the facility with which he produced it and the convenient proximity of a water tap I guess he had used it before.

He directed the full flow of the now gushing pipe on to my nostrils and mouth at a distance of only a few inches. Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginably choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon. Your humanity bursts from within you as you gag and choke. I tried very hard to will unconsciousness, but no relief came. He was too skillful to risk losing me altogether. When I was choking uncontrollably, the NCO took the hose away. The flat, urgent voice of the interpreter resumed above my head, speaking into my ear; the other man hit me with the branch on the shoulders and stomach a few more times. I had nothing to say; I was beyond invention. So they turned on the tap again, and again there was that nausea of rising water from inside my bodily cavity, a flood welling up from within and choking me.

They alternated beatings and half-drownings for I know not how long. No one was ever able to tell me how long all this lasted, and I have no idea whether it finished that day, or there was more the following day. I eventually found myself back in my cage. I must have been dragged there.

After dark – perhaps that same evening, or was it some other evening? How can I be a reliable witness about time? – the Kempei NCO made a special journey to my cage and handed through the bars a mug of hot milk, made from sweetened condensed milk. This was an incredible delight, but even at the time I knew it was not an act of kindness: it was a way of maintaining ambiguity, of keeping a prisoner off-balance.

The interrogations stopped. One morning, without warning or explanation, our cages were opened and the small interpreter took charge of us. Our kit was brought out of the building and into the yard. All seven of us were told to pack one bag, for we were moving again. This was a further shrinkage of our belongings and of our humanity. We asked a lot of questions, but there were no replies from the young translator-interrogator. A truck drove up, with a number of guards on board.

We had to show the interpreter what we were packing. I showed him my Bible, and he nodded. Then I displayed a mounted photograph of my fiancée. He decided that space was at a premium, carefully tore the photograph from its mount, threw the frame away and handed me back the photograph.

Then Slater asked: ‘Can we take money with us?’ I was too disturbed to work out whether he meant it satirically or not. The interpreter replied: ‘You won’t need money where you are going.’

As I was climbing aboard the truck, with Mac’s help, the interpreter walked up close to me and said gravely: ‘Keep your chin up.’ He stood there in the yard, a tiny figure standing among the larger regular soldiers. The truck pulled away.

During the journey we were able to speak quietly beneath the noise of the engine as the guards spoke among themselves. We spoke about our interrogations; I told them about my treatment with the hosepipe. Their warmth, and the solidarity of their anger, was worth so much. There was an extraordinary urgency about this whispered conversation: we were sure that this time we were about to die. Slater’s incurable hopelessness seemed the right attitude to all of us.

But instead we were taken to Ban Pong station, thirty miles away, back to the beginning of the railway, and got off at the east-bound platform. It looked as though our destination must be Bangkok.

A train arrived quite soon, an ordinary local passenger train, full of Siamese civilians. Seats were easy to find: local people moved rather than sit next to the Kempeitai.

The train moved off eastwards. After a while we passed the big camp at Nong Pladuk, on the north side the line, which was one of the largest POW camps in Siam. On the south side were the extensive new railway yards, with rows of wagons, flatcars and shunting engines, and a large number of Japanese C56 steam locomotives. I had first seen one of these at Prai, on the way here, but that seemed a very long time ago. The presence of all this machinery could only mean that the Burma-Siam Railway had been completed in record time. The engineers must have felt proud of themselves.

I wondered whether many people who travelled through to Burma on that line across the viaducts cut into the hills by hand would know what it had cost; and I wondered how long it would remain intact.

Despite what had been done to us, most of the information about the construction and operation of the radios, and our lines of communication for distributing the news, and even the purpose of my map, remained our secret. Silence was the only reprisal we could take. Now, apart from the assumption that we were on a train on our way to the royal capital of Siam, we had no idea what was facing us.