大象传媒

After seeing action in various places our ship sailed towards Africa, we went to Capetown but we did not stay all that long there, we did not stay at any barracks we stayed on board the ship, the Arizarba. We did a bit of drill on the docks and had plenty of free time, we went sightseeing up Table Mountain, with cable cars going up and a fantastic view.

We set sail again down to Mombassa, East Africa and the convoy left us on our own then to the mercy of the submarines and our ship limped in to Mombassa Port, dry dock for repairs. Our engine had broke down. We stayed on board again whilst repairs were done. Again we had quite a lot of free time. When we were repaired we picked another convoy up and we sailed again to Bombay in India. And from there we got off the American ship and we got on a train in Bombay and we went up to a hill station in Dulally it was a strange place, before the war it had been a depot for the Scotch Regiments and there were a lot of indian civillians to look after you, they were called dobiewallers and they would look after you and wash your kits. We were just ordinairy soldiers but we had punkawallers who did all of our personal stuff for a couple of rupees a week. There were about seven soldiers looked after by each punkawalla. It was strange to hear them speak with scottish accents. They would go and buy us things from the local market, because they got better deals than us; for seven bob you could get a brand new pair of hand made leather dress shoes. We then left there and went back to Bombay, we boarded another ship we then went to Australia (the convoy) on the route to Australia there was a call to the ship to turn towards Singapore, Winston Churchill had given us our orders. We were told to hold the island for at least ten days. Going into Singapore we were attacked by the Japanese aeroplanes up the Malaka straights which was not very wide, between Malaya and Indonesia. We lost quite a few men on the ships. We did manage to get to Singapore but the Japs were waiting for us and we engaged in streetfighting with them. Straightaway. Eventually we capitulated but fought on a certain road called Bukatiner Road and we did not know this until after the fighting but the Japs lost 8000 men that night,they kept coming up, one after the other shouting Banzai Banzai. That night we virtually surrended (capitulated). Now when we capitualted we had to march to Changhi, a barracks and a lot of us were kept back in Singapore to clean it up, there were some dirty jobs that had to be done. The Koreans used to guard us and they were more vicious to us than the Japs, they were also a taller race. One in particular was gruesome Alexander hospital during the fighting the japs ransacked it and killed everyone, doctors, nurses and patients I was one of the unfortunate ones picked to help clean the bodies up which were shot bayoneted, even in the operating theatre, they absolutely ransacked the hospital. We had to dig big trenches to put the bodies in and the smell of death was terrible....

The British prisoners built an obelisque for the Japs to remember their dead. When the Japs capitulated one of the first things we did was to pull it down.

I also had to work on the docks as well, loading ships, bringing cars from private houses to go back to Japan where family's had gone or been killed and left them in situe. They shipped a lot of stuff to Japan. We slept on the docks, we lived on the docks it was called Keppel Harbour until they took us up to the barracks at Changi that had been converted into a POW camp. From there we came back down to a camp called Happy Valley in the city, this was before we went up the railway and we had to sign a form to say we would not try to escape and an officer refused to sign it so they lined us up outside and we were kept there through hot and cold until the officer signed. We could stand or sit but it was horrendous, we were in the blazing sun all day and at night it was bitterley cold. And from there we went by cattle truck up Malaya to Thailand, there were forty men to a truck. It took us a long time and as we went up we were repairing the railway where the engine could not get because it was being sabotaged or damaged.
Then we eventually arrived in Thailand in Chewcanburi. I had been in the camp a day or two and I was walking accross this open ground from one hut to the other and I heard a voice shouting my name and it was a friend I knew from Ripley in Derbyshire, he was a sergeant in the Sherwood Foresters and his name was Bill Beresford. I asked him what he was doing and he said well I am not on the railway Tom, I am in the cookhouse boiling rice, they would have great massive woks and they had them built on clay fires to heat them and they had like a paddle to stir it. Japanese rice was all colours but never white, it was horrible and full of maggots. After we had past niceties, I told him he had done well and got himself a good job (if you can call paddling rice all day a good job) we would get one bowl in the morning and one at night. He was a friend of my uncle Matt Pearson who also lived at Ripley, Bill was to spend his last days at this camp. Years later, back home it always meant a lot to his son, also Bill Beresford that his dad had spent some time with a local man, before he passed on. The journey was an arduous one, a lot of men died en route and we buried them wherever they fell, a lot were buried in the jungle and had no grave markings. It was the same at each camp. There were a lot of camps we went to. We built the railway at the side of the River Kwai and there were camps about every 10-20 kilometres apart. As you moved up when you were building you did not go back to the camp you left you went to the nearest one. Moving up with the railway. Chewcanburi was an established camp already for the intake from Singapore and Malaya and other countries and Bangpong was the first camp to be built en route. I was making spikes there that fastened the rails to the sleepers with the Japanese blacksmith. And you can now buy one of these spikes at the war museum in Burton Staffs.

A lot of people think that the jungle is flat but it was covered in mountains, there were big craters, and we chopped down a lot of trees to make way for the railways, we also dug a lot ditches and raised banks two men to a stretcher, we used stretchers to carry boulders and earth. If it was uphill it was very hard.

I think that we were near to a camp called Taseoul when cholera broke out. And we had to burn the bodies, we had to be extremely careful, we dare not touch our own lips with our own hands, we had to boil water but we still had to work and sleep together, we had bamboo cups and we had to dip them in boiling water, it was a deadly disease and killed thousands. Also there was berry berry, dry berry berry or wet berry berry, wet berry berry, is where your whole body swells up with water and eventually when you die you have to be very careful when you buried the body. We used to roll the bodies onto a makeshift stretcher made from bamboo poles and hessian sacks. And when we dug the grave we would lay the body down steady just beside the edge and two of us would get to one side, we would shout right and quickly tip the body into the grave and jump back quickly as the bodies used to burst and you could get covered in pink fluid. One day I was one of the unlucky ones that had to carry a body and we carried them on our shoulders, the body was naked and so were apart from an A4 x2 sized cloth with a bit of string we as we had worn our clothes out with sweat. These were called b* bags.
This body actually burst whilst we were carrying it and we were all covered in pink liquid , we were at the side of the River Kwai and had to go into it to wash off all of the pink stuff. But not until after we had buried the body. We were constantly guarded by Japs. Civillians would go by on barges, women and children but we never took any notice of them and they of us. We kept moving from camp to camp. We had to do what work we were told and could not go back to camp until it was finished, often we worked for 19 hours at a time and it was only a daily basis, there was no rest.

We got to the Bridge on the River Kwai and we had to start building it. We built it with wood and bamboo, but it has since been rebuilt with metal. That is the first time in my life that I had come accross elephants. They called them Mahoots and they would carry the large peices of wood to help build the bridge.

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