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I had not been feeling well now for several days, and one of the symptoms was constant pins and needles in my arms, gradually becoming worse until on the night of the second of August I collapsed, and was taken into hospital with a high temperature and a
rigor.

I remember little of the next week, as I had the worst malaria attack I had experienced until then. The next day a Pte. Wilcoxon was carried back from the railway, and laid beside me; he had the same complaint, and died two days later.

Eleven days after becoming sick I had recovered enough to sharpen the doctor’s scalpels and scissors. A friend told me that someone else,a 'Dusty Miller', was managing to butcher the animals satisfactorily. It is always a little disappointing to discover that one is not indispensable!

I was still in hospital when a trainload of wounded Jap soldiers passed through the station on their way down country; we had never seen or heard of wounded Japs up till then, and as our last ‘news’ had been that they were still attacking on the Indian border, this was a most encouraging sign.

This almost certainly indicated that fighting must be taking place much nearer to Thailand. What, we again wondered, would our guards do when their front line was pushed back as far as here?

To aid my recovery I bought a pint of gula-malacca, a kind of brown sugary treacle the Thais obtain from a palm tree, one of the tallest out there. They cut off the stalk which bears the fruit and suspend a bamboo bottle under it to catch the sweet juice. The water is evaporated to produce the product which is a cross between brown sugar and syrup.

On the sixteenth of August the doctor said I was fit to return to work. Things had not been progressing too well of late on the external work-parties. The Japs in charge of bridge repairs had a difficult job to do, and they were often impatient and brutal.

Our C.O. decided that I would be better employed in charge of the bridge repair party than as odd-job man, so Dusty Miller took over my job. The next day a load of Aussies, nearly all of them sick, arrived from up country in the pouring rain, and we all mucked in to get a hut ready for them.

I was surprised on my first day back on the railway, to find that we had ‘bolshie’ guards who did not seem to care whether we worked or not; I’d never come across this situation before. We were taken to Rin-Tin, a few kilometers up country, supposedly clearing away undergrowth where the jungle was creeping back and encroaching on to the line.

After an hour’s work, the Japs took us into an old hut, and we all spent the remainder of the day talking and singing.

A few days later we started with the engineers on what was to be our regular job, bridge repairs. First they told us to dig a deep trench round their site hut. They were at pains to explain this was for drainage, but as it was five feet deep we guessed that it was for use during air-raids.

We had been hearing for some time that the railway up country was getting regular attention from our bombers, and we had seen that traffic on the line through our camp was now moving mainly by night. On the way back that evening one of our men was severely beaten because the guard did not see him salute as he passed.

The bridges we were repairing were simply constructed from standard sized timber balks, cut straight from the jungle, and held together with metal dogs. The balks had been cut from trees irrespective of quality; some were of good hard timber, others were soft and pithy, easily and quickly eaten away by the omni-present termites.

Now, as the trains passed over, the unserviceable beams could be seen being compressed like sponges with the weight. Our job was to cut sound teak trees down, perhaps a hundred yards away in the jungle, square them by hand into balks, and drag them to the site of the bridge.

Our only tools were blunt cross-cut saws, blacksmith made axes, and ropes. As we felled each tree, we first cut it to length, cut a series of slots across each side in turn with our cross-cuts, then flattened them out with our axes. It would have been a painfully long job were it not that there were so many of us working; like the termites whose ravages we were repairing.

Sometimes there would be no suitable trees close at hand, then we would travel up to half a mile into the jungle to find them. Elephants with their mahouts would then be hired or commandeered, one with a chain to pull at the front, and the other to push the timber from behind.

Two of these animals could manage far better than the hundred prisoners heaving on ropes with sticks waved over them. The Japs sometimes tried riding the elephants themselves, and worked themselves into terrible paddies when they would not do as they were told; but it is no use getting cross with these incredibly intelligent and gentle beasts, as they know themselves, better than their masters, how to cope with their work.

Each fresh log an elephant is given to move, is first assessed; it is gently rocked to and fro with head or tusks, or if chained to it, gently pulled from side to side. If he feels the log is too heavy, or if the ground is too soft, neither blows, cajoling nor shouting will move him until more help is provided.

The actual process of exchanging new beams for the faulty ones in the bridges was far more difficult. Handling heavy timbers weighing a ton was difficult and dangerous at the best of times; it was made worse by the fact that our engineers spoke little English and thought that we could be made to understand their incomprehensible orders with screams and blows.

Many of the replacements were fifty feet up; we had no winches or derricks, and each one had to be hauled up with ropes, and levered into position with crow-bars. Sometimes when a train was heard, the Japs would get excited and lash out at the men pulling on the rope that was preventing the balk from falling on the men trying to push from below.

After one particularly dangerous episode, when a Jap told the wrong men to pull, and a dozen of our men narrowly escaped falling to their deaths, I stuck my neck out and ordered the men to lower the balk to the ground. I paraded them in two lines, and ignoring the shouts of our engineer, I marched over to the Jap in charge.

I made him understand I was suggesting that if he would go for a rest under the trees with all the other Japs, I would supervise our men and get the job done. Since we always had to finish a replacement job once we had started it, no matter how late we finished, I could see no harm to the Allied cause in what I was offering to do; getting our men killed would help no-one.

‘Bagero!’(fool) shouted the Jap, ‘Engerisoo soljah no good’. His cronies gathered round him, and for five minutes they argued and gesticulated. At last, without speaking, I was waved back to my men, and the Japs moved a little further off. I think that none of them would take the responsibility for letting me do what I wanted, but they all wished to see what would happen.

I called our gang together, and we discussed our plan of campaign. Smaller gangs were split off, each with a leader, and with a specific job to do, and all moved back to the bridge. Without a shout or a blow, the beam moved into place with military precision, and in less than half the usual time.

Never again on that working party did we get any interference, and in fairness to the Japs, it must be said that however quickly we replaced our beam, no more work was ever added.

With our new system working satisfactorily, our guards became more friendly; during meal breaks they would come over for a chat, and occasionally offer us some of their food.

Sometimes we would be asked how long we thought the war would last; evidently realizing at last that their propaganda had misled them, they thought that we had more genuine information than they.

More and more they would reiterate that if Japan did lose the war it would be the duty of every Japanese man to kill his wife and children, and then to commit the hara-kiri (literally, 'belly cut'), giving us a practical demonstration (without knife of course) of how the ceremony was performed. When the end did come I was to see no-one carry out this gory deed.

We had one guard, a decent type, who spoke some English, having been a schoolmaster. Seeing some of our men elbowing one another out of the way to get at some of their left-over food, he said to me ‘At school we teach, all English, gentlemen’. I replied, indicating one of the bullying Japs, ‘At school we teach all Nippons polite’. After thinking awhile, he said ‘War changy all!’

Although we had no regular source of news at Kinsio, we knew that things must have been going badly for the Japs. Apart from that trainload of wounded, and the air-raids, their manner had undergone a change from their earlier arrogant and boasting attitude.

On the twenty-eighth of August, we left camp for Rin-Tin bridge soon after dawn. The bridge was a long curved one around a cliff, and very high. We were working near the center of it later in the day, when I heard a plane, and looking up, saw it approaching straight down the line at us.

I yelled ‘Run’ at the top of my voice, and Japs and prisoners alike legged it over the sleepers for the end of the bridge over fifty yards away, every moment expecting to hear the whine and crash of bombs.

We took cover in the jungle, and knew that it was not to be, as the plane passed overhead, down line in the direction of Kinsio camp, with its station nearby. At intervals of about two minutes several other planes passed over, and towards the end of the raid we heard a stick of bombs explode.

‘Not far down the line, hope they haven’t got our camp!’ said someone. When it all seemed to be over, our guards held a hasty conference; they seemed to be arguing whether to take us back to camp or carry on with the work.

After a short time one of the Japs hurried off down the line, and the rest of them took us back to work, albeit with many an anxious glance skyward from us all; no one’s mind was on the task in hand.

An hour later, a diesel engine came up the line with the Jap on board who had gone off earlier; as he gesticulated, and excitedly told his tale to the others, we knew something serious had occurred. We were hastily fallen in and marched back in the direction of our camp.

As we approached Kinsio station, everything was in turmoil, with dust still hanging in the air, and Japs running about everywhere. We entered camp and learned from our comrades what had befallen. A stick of a dozen bombs had been aimed at the station, but none had hit its target.

Before the raid, the Japs had dispersed into the jungle, including the station-master, who had taken refuge over a hundred yards away. The nearest bomb to the station scored a near direct hit on him; he would have been safe had he remained in the station.

They burnt what they could find of his body that afternoon, and put the ashes into an eighteen inch cubic box, covered it in white paper inscribed with Japanese characters, and held a funeral service in the evening.

The ashes were then sent off down country, ostensibly destined for Japan. (We later heard that these were destroyed before leaving Thailand.) After tea we were ordered to dig trenches round our own huts similar to the ones we had dug for the Japs, and these were to save lives later on.

We left camp as usual on the first of September, initially to repair a bridge. However we were diverted to what we were told was an emergency; about a hundred of us piled into a diesel train, and we moved off down the line.

The emergency proved to be in the shape of a steam locomotive which had left the track and ploughed its way down the embankment pulling six trucks after it. Fifty yards of track were torn up, and the locomotive’s nose was deeply buried in the soil. The only tackle we carried was a few jacks,pulleys, and ropes.

The engine was heavy; I asked our engineer if a crane was coming, ‘No crane’ was the curt reply. One of our boys was an ex railwayman; ‘Quite impossible to put that back on the line with this tackle’, he observed; we all agreed. The monster, boiling hot and steam squirting from every nook and cranny, would have to be hoisted up, the embankment restored, sleepers and lines restored, and engine and trucks replaced on the line.

In spite of all that, by twelve-thirty that night, working by the light of acetylene flares the Japs had all back on the line, steam up and ready to move off. I cannot recall exactly how it was accomplished. We cut down trees to make sheer-legs, others to make long levers and fulcrums, we were yelled at, pushed out of the way to let the Japs, running round like maniacs, do the work themselves.

They worked like men possessed, some dropping from exhaustion and being replaced by others. I caught odd glimpses of a Jap face straining in the light of a flare. Never have I seen men more determined to complete a job. Complete it they did, but I never knew whether they were driven by patriotic fervor, or fear of what would happen to them if the next train could not get through.

We spent the next few days in digging trenches beside the railway station, and several trainloads of troops went by in daylight; these were the first we had seen, as they had previously travelled only by night. They always stopped for a while at Kinsio, and often tried to speak to us.

They were crowded in similar trucks to those that had brought us up from Singapore, although travelling with the sliding doors wide open. We saw that the floor of each truck was covered with upturned forty-gallon oil drums, and one soldier sat on the end of each drum; the roof was only a little way above their heads, so they were unable to stand up.

The Jap in charge of this section of the railway was changed, with an officer named Konoye taking over. He proved to be not very nice, and our tenth day, Yasumi day, hitherto sacrosanct, and highly necessary for de-bugging, washing etc., had to be spent digging his garden. He came along just as I was giving the men a rest, and he beat me up with his stick.

Two days later I was put in charge of a small party of men in the Jap sweegy-bar (cookhouse) and we managed to help ourselves to a bottle of highly prized soya sauce each. One man’s loin-cloth was so brief that he was spotted as we left. He only had his face smacked, and the remainder of us were not searched. I was unable to understand why.

For the next week or so my party were on engine firewood fatigue, and our task was to cut firewood in the jungle, cart it to the embankment, and stack it beside the rails between two stakes which we had to drive into the ground.

While doing this work I received my first scorpion sting, when picking a log up from the ground. I staggered back feeling as though I had touched a live electric wire. As the shock seemed to affect my whole body I did not realize what had happened until my hand swelled later, and it was about an hour before I recovered sufficiently to carry on with my work.

When we returned to camp that night, our C.O. told us that he had heard officially that forty prisoners had been killed, and many injured, in an air-raid on Non-Produk, a camp some miles further up country. We sat on our beds late into the night discussing the latest turn of events.

On the ninth of September our C.O. sent for me, and said that he was appointing me Acting and Unpaid Company Sergeant Major to take charge of our company. He gave me no reason for this but I guessed that no-one else wanted to take on the job, as not many relished being in charge of working parties, and therefore having to carry the can when things went wrong, and be punished by the Japs; and although blows could be expected, there was never praise or reward for a job well done.

However, it was true that I always preferred to be in charge, knowing that if things went wrong I had only myself to blame for any errors of judgment; so I could not complain at my promotion. At one time I had two warrant officers and a colour sergeant working in my gang; although senior to me they had removed their badges of rank.

The next evening, by the feeble glow of my oil-lamp I read the first official news of our captivity. It was a small slip of newsprint headed ‘Victory News’ and was being passed from camp to camp, having been dropped by an aircraft further down the line. I cannot recall the exact message, but broadly, it said that help was on the way to us, and the best thing we could do to help our country was to stay where we were.

I was later to see thousands of leaflets dropped by our planes, but none in English. All the others were in Chinese or Thai, and we had no interpreters with us at the time. It is a wonder the Japs did not notice the radiant faces of their captives during the next few days. Not long after this we heard that a stick of bombs landed right inside a POW camp down country, killing nearly two hundred and fifty of our boys.

On September the twenty-seventh, one-hundred and four Aussies marched into the camp, which made us so crowded that we had to close all the bed-spaces down to make room for them. In the evenings I spent much time chatting to them, some of whom were real ‘old timers’, tough old nuts reared with sheep on outback farms. I found them very good company and made some excellent friends.

At Hindato there was a very long bridge, more of a curved viaduct, that swung round, skirting a cliff, and over a deep ravine. On the ninth of October a troop train similar to the one previously mentioned, filled with men sitting on oil drums, was passing over this bridge when part of it collapsed; the train fell off and landed up-side-down in the ravine.

We were never told how many men died, but from the mess we saw from above, it must have been several hundred. The Japs made no attempt to salvage the train as it was too badly damaged and the gory mess remained there until we moved away.

Chapter 35

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