大象传媒

(This chapter is part of Len Baynes' book '
The Will to Live
', an account of his wartime experiences with the Cambridgeshire Regiment, his capture in Singapore, and the four years he spent as a prisoner of the Japanese.)

Dear old Changi

We were now told officially that a party of 30 men from our regiment, together with all the remainder of the Recce Battalion, were to leave Changi in a week's time for an unknown destination. I was to be one of the party, and we were to take a share of the cooks, pioneers and medics.

Our new RSM called all the NCOs together for a pep talk. No-one could tell where we would finish up, he said, but wherever it was, it was in the opinion of our officers likely to be very tough going. For this reason we would need to hold the men on a very tight rein, as without a very high standard of discipline, under adverse conditions they would quickly descend into a rabble, and then it would be a case of devil take the hindmost.

We spent the next three days cleaning the camp we were shortly to vacate, lest any who came to fill our places should think us a dirty lot.

There was now a general feeling of apprehension among us, as we could not help worrying in anticipation over the devil we did not know.

Bad though that 'devil' was to prove, I was always to be given the strength to face him. Now, when I find a friend worried about the future I am able to say from experience that when the terrible thing you fear comes about, it can never prove quite as bad as you thought it would be.

A month earlier we had talked of how fed up with Changi we were. Now, as we looked around, about to leave for the unknown, it became 'dear old Changi'!

I now had to prepare for leaving, first of all ensuring that my socks, shirts and underclothes were all darned. I had three shirts so I let Ken have one, because his only one was nearly worn out.

Since being taken prisoner I had scarcely been out on a working party without gathering another item of junk, and I really had an enormous heap now, so I went through it carefully sorting out all the essential stuff, and making a separate pile of the remainder.

I finished up with a very small heap of rejects and about three-quarters of a hundredweight of 'musts'. We had already been told that we were only to be allowed to take as much kit as we could carry on our own persons; and our hands had to be kept free to take our communal items.

Five days before we were due to leave, we practiced packing up our kit, to make sure that no-one took so much of his own stuff that our cooking dixies and so on got left behind.

My kit bag

Although I cannot remember all I had at that time, I certainly had the following: bucket, a four imperial gallon (five American gallon) petrol tin, Dunlopillo seat, two shirts, two pairs of shorts, one pair long trousers, sheet, half blanket, three sacks, a bag of 'buckshee' rice, water bottle, wire, rope, half a dozen books, New Testament, mosquito net, cooking tins, mug, mess tin, piece of canvas, ground sheet, gas cape, respirator haversack, open razor, scissors, full set of army equipment complete with Bren gun ammo pouches, bundle of rags, bundle of paper, soap (which I had exchanged for Red Cross cigarettes), three enamel plates, and finally my bag of odds and ends, which included sharpening stone, old hacksaw blades and other items with which I hoped to form the nucleus of a tool kit.

I filled all my haversacks and pouches, and tied all the big things on to my belt. When I stood up I must have looked something like a Christmas tree, but I was able to walk with my hands free as specified.

Each regiment has a 'President of the Regimental Institute's' Fund, known as the PRI. It is used for assisting needy cases and as a reserve of cash for special occasions. The CO allocated us a proportion of the cash in this fund and I was sent off with an officer to spend the whole twenty-one dollars on smokes. These would be light to carry, and non-smokers would be able to exchange their share for other things.

Early in the morning on 2 November 1942, we were called out on parade ready for our journey into the great unknown. Friends helped me to my feet; we had been issued with four or five tins of food each, company reserve, to be handed in on reaching our destination, and they were to me the straws that nearly broke the camel's back.

I stood on the parade ground (which had been a gun park), wearing my double-crowned Aussie hat, long shorts, and strung around with bucket, tins and all my other rubbish. I must have looked a strange sight and many were the cracks from the friends who gathered to bid us farewell.

It was nine months earlier that we had been captured, and we had now reached the end of the first phase of our captivity. Up until now we had been able to live fairly civilized lives, running our own affairs and with order and a degree of cleanliness prevailing, at least for most of the time.

We were about to leave all these good things behind us. For the next three years they were to be exchanged for a world of chaos, filth, blows, pain, disease and death. That was to be the general state of things under the direct rule of The Imperial Japanese Army. Farewell Changi; little had we thought to carry away a fond memory of you into the future.

Cattle trucks

Although we paraded with our kit early in the morning, it was five o'clock in the afternoon before we left for Singapore railway station. For a wonder, the Japanese sent lorries for us this time, so that journey at least was painless.

The railway, narrow gauge, had been built by the British of course; so also had the all-steel cattle trucks with no windows and sliding doors that we found awaiting us in the station. What was to come would be our first insight into the way the Japanese were to organise our lives in the future.

Those trucks had probably been made to carry at most half a dozen head of cattle, but not out in that climate. Cattle would have quickly died of heat-stroke if shut in them without ventilation, in the tropical sun.

The Japanese pushed 32 men into each truck, together with all their belongings. I naturally received dirty looks from those who were crushed in with me. The walking Christmas tree took up room enough for two men. Before we finished our sojourn up country, however, many were glad to have me with them, the only one with scissors and razor for haircuts and shaves, and tools to do the jobs about camp.

Not only was there no room to lie in there, it was necessary to sit with knees under chin. I stacked my three-quarters of a hundred-weight of kit in a corner and sat on the top of it, so took up no more room than the others. My bucket and tin were to be the most useful articles in the truck before we completed that journey.

A hellish journey

We heard the safety-valve on the locomotive blow, and knew she had steam up. Our guards came along and closed the doors, padlocking them from the outside. Our wildest fears had not included the possibility of travelling nearly airtight through the heat of Malaya; the temperature must have been about 120掳F (48掳C) in there with the doors open, who would be able to survive now with them closed?

The Japanese were taking no risks; with hundreds of miles of jungle to traverse, and many stops on the way in unscheduled places to build up steam, they were more concerned with avoiding escapes than deaths from heat-stroke.

That journey up country was to take three and a half days, but the hellish nightmare that it was seemed to last for weeks; I never went through a worse time during the whole of our captivity. The train always ran slowly, and then halted before climbing a gradient, to get up steam. This was due to the fact that wood was being burnt instead of coal, and wood produces far less heat than coal.

Sometimes, for no reason that we knew of, we would stop for hours on end, with the doors closed, gasping for breath in the fearful heat generated by the Malayan sun beating down on the galvanised roof and sides of the cattle trucks.

Once a day we would pull into a station and they would open the doors. One bucket of cold cooked rice and one bucket of water were placed against the door of each truck, and we were given only five minutes to fill our water bottles, share out the rice, go to the toilet and climb back into the high trucks.

With the perspiration we were losing, we needed a dozen times the water we got, and we had to use superhuman willpower and make our bottles last for 24 hours by taking tiny sips every half hour or so, just sufficient to keep our mouths moist. The only certain memory to remain was of one long continuous thirst. Those without the willpower to eke out their water suffered even more.

Although we lost sense of time as our heads went round in the heat, one incident on the second day left an indelible mark on my mind. Dawn was breaking, and its first grey light came in through cracks in the door. Otherwise all was quite black within our truck. As we negotiated a curve in the track I saw the light fall on one strained face after another; sleepless night was about to be followed by foetid day.

The track straightened out once more, and the ray of light fell on the face of Private McGuire as he sat opposite me in the darkness. His eyes were open and, unseen from my corner, I saw tears running down his cheeks. I felt that I could read his thoughts as well, observing the look into his face from my vantage point.

I knew him well. He was about 20, and a sincere, ardent communist. I imagined what he was thinking as he tried to relate his belief in the universal brotherhood of man, and the dignity of the worker, with our present condition.

He was never fully to recover in mind or body from our fearful journey, and he did not have to work very long in Thailand before entering upon that last and greatest journey, when all is revealed; and perhaps also to discover that there can be no brotherhood of man without a Father.

Chapter 22

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