大象传媒

My Hell on Earth
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Jack Victor Fowler

So another day was over and another day was done. They drew new strength from somewhere; they battled for their lives though the odds were over-weighted in this too unequal strife. They kept on filling bogies and they struggled with the rails but still persisted hopefully when it seemed to be of no avail.

From the early morning until late at night they just had to grin and bear it and pretend it was a game. They had to laugh and say "we will have a few when this is done."

With a cold damp evening came a leaving of response and a narrow hard unyielding bed on which to rest their woes, where the bliss of sweet oblivion might eradicate the shame. Yet the bliss of sleep's oblivion tarried long upon it's way while the bed bugs left their havens for a drying, dying prey and the ants, mosquitoes, scorpions and the lice joined the rats and nosy chik chaks and the mine's mice.

On an island a few miles from China called Taiwan Formosa, there is a copper mine called Kinkaseki where there is a monument to man.

In a period of three and a half years cutting through the rocks in tunnels small, in loincloths and rags bound around their feet, they sweat and toiled with copper and acid browning their bodies. Filling bogies with ore with aching backs and bleeding feet, with dying desperation working more than humans should with beriberi swollen tight.

Twas the hand of fate that marred them as it tallied up the score slaving from dawn to dusk. Was hard to break, there was no air in tunnels so small.

It was Kura Kura; if you straightened your back. One excuse for living was to finish the job. That was the mercy of the Emperor. Then from the gun there was nothing new to save them from the task they had begun. There was nothing to save them from the toiling and the sweat but the saving grace of illness. That was more exacting yet so they welcomed malaria, dysentery, and beriberi with its vomit and it's ache. Illness for its semi-torments sake. There was dysentery, pellagra and a host of sister ills. There was every cause for dying but few for hanging on.

When so many fell asleep and followed comrades who had gone. It was to put them in a box let out of the bottom in a shallow grave. The rain-washed the soil away to be covered another day.

But for those they left behind, there were brutish things to bear. At the hands of brutish beings who were only well aware of the primitive upsurging of an animal delight that enjoyed the thrill of torture and quiverings of fright.

They could drag their aching bodies to their grass and timber huts. They could rub the salt of impotence in open wheals and cuts. They could steel their will to conquer, to forget and perhaps forgive but they found it mighty difficult to force themselves to live.

They had open huts of atap loosely tied to wooden poles and the roof, a partition, gaped and yawned in rotting holes. Either side were filthy bed boards but a yard above the ground with a floor of earth and water, with bugs and lice all around. Rats and mice running around nibbling your feet at night.

To rest their weary bodies, over-worked and under-fed, sixty centimetres of this planking was their homestead and their bed.

When the day at last arrived, and when the rest of them were free, they devised a Union Jack and displayed it on a pole.

There they left their friends behind them.

There they left them sleeping in the shadows of a distant tropic shore.

Jack served in the 4th Suffolk's from 1936 until 1946.

He was a P.O.W. from 15th February 1942 until August 1945 and spent most of that time in the copper mine Kinkaseki, Taiwan.

Out of a total of 955 men in the 4th Suffolk's:

132 were killed, died of wounds or were
listed as missing,
58 were listed as missing at sea,
287 died, were executed or shot whilst a
P.O.W.,
102 died after release.

Jack Victor Fowler

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