The Forgotten Highlander (15 page)

For us prisoners bushido, the so-called ‘Way of the Warrior’, gave the guards a licence to murder, maim and torture. The only thing more despicable to them than a prisoner was a sick prisoner, as we first discovered on our death march.

In the months to come many thousands of prisoners would follow in our footsteps and this jungle trail would claim hundreds more lives.

That night we stopped again at a village. We were fed rice, spicy stew and water, before sleeping where we sat. I slept much better, either becoming accustomed to the jungle sounds or just too dog-tired to care.

We went on our way again in the morning. We hauled our sick men along by their arms, their toes dragging in the dirt. My fears of being massacred had long subsided. If they were going to do it, they would have done so by now. I believed that we were being taken to work as slaves on something.

By now covered in scabies and lice, I had been struck down again by the dreaded malaria. As the protozoan parasites raged through my bloodstream, my spleen became tender and enlarged. Walking became ever more difficult and I stumbled more often than not. Some men, whom I had helped earlier on in the journey, gave me blankets to break the fever and to stop the rigors that shook my body like a man possessed.

We walked all day and through the next night, stopping only for brief respites beside the track. It was a final push by the Japanese to get us to our destination, whatever it was, inside six days. Whether there was a date we had to arrive by, I was unsure. It appeared that the soldiers wanted us moving at double-time, rush or not. In the late afternoon, after we had been trudging for around thirty-two hours, we arrived at our final destination – we had completed a 160-kilometre trek.

It took some time for us to comprehend that we had made it, that this small, sparse clearing in the middle of the jungle was ‘it’, the ultimate objective of our eleven-day journey. There was nothing here, not a single hut. On one side of the clearing lay an array of tools. Pickaxes, shovels, two-handed saws and scythe-like instruments. Seeing them made me wonder again what our purpose here was. An aerodrome perhaps? Were we at a strategic point for the Japanese to launch an air assault on India? The men were gathered, chattering about our future possibilities, when the guard in charge got our attention.

Through his interpreter he told us: ‘This is your camp. You make home here. Build own huts. All men work on railway.’

A
railway
! A railway, here in the middle of nowhere. It seemed mad and it certainly never occurred to me that this would be our task. How would they get the sleepers into the jungle? Not to mention the steel railway lines. The British had considered the construction of a railway to link Burma with Siam many years before but concluded it could not be done. Not without massive loss of life anyway.

Finally we had been told of our purpose but I do not think that it sank in properly. All we cared about was that the march was over. Surely things would start looking up. We could not envisage the enormity, misery or savagery of the challenges ahead. I just felt glad to stop walking.

The soldiers had arranged arc lamps in one corner of the clearing, which they led us to now and instructed us to start construction of our sleeping quarters. We all stared at each other blankly. One of the guards, noticing our bewilderment, pointed to the scattered tools and made an A-frame with his arms, yammering away in a language we did not comprehend.

‘What are we supposed to do? Build the ruddy Ritz?’

The plucky Londoner who had stepped forth to offer his cockney wit quickly retreated when a guard went for him with a pickaxe handle. It was our signal to get on with it. We snatched a tool each and tried to look busy. They wanted us to clear more trees but we were so knackered that it was totally fruitless. I took a scythe and started hacking at some trees. It was pretty hopeless. The blade bounced off the hard bamboo but at least I appeared industrious in the eyes of our masters.

The Japanese wanted us to build five huts for the POWs, forty men to each. They would build their own huts, while the first thing we were required to build was an awning for the cooks to operate under.

They stopped us after about two or three hours, perhaps realising that we were too shattered to make any progress. Allowed to stop I sat down on the spot and curled up. After thirty-six hours of constant activity I could finally rest. The tropical forest sounds didn’t interrupt my sleep that night and I wasn’t visited in my dreams. Tomorrow would be a new dawn.

Five

Hellfire Pass

On that first morning they split us into two groups. Half of the POWs had to finish building our sleeping quarters, while the rest of us cleared trees at the camp. As a guard thrust a pickaxe into my soft hands, I could not remember the last time I had endured any hard labour. And this was going to be a far cry from hoisting cast-iron bathtubs on to lorries bound for Highland mansions.

I positioned myself near the trees, away from the guards, and took a moment to watch the other men in action. Some of them were already getting stuck in, swinging their chunkels, heavy Thai hoes, with apparent ease. They were flailing into the earth, digging up roots and rocks. It looked easy enough and after a few awkward swings, some of which grazed my bare shins, I quickly got the hang of it. It was rhythmic toil and I became almost mechanical in my movements. But within an hour bubbling blisters started to appear on my palms. By lunch my thumbs felt painfully disconnected from their sockets and my back ached at its base from all the unnatural movement. There was no respite. The Japanese had no consideration for our poor health or hunger and beat men across their backs with bamboo or rifles regularly enough to make us keep our heads down. It was a long first day and if I had realised then that it was just the first of 750 days I would spend as a slave in the jungle, I would have broken down and cried like a baby.

After another night sleeping in the open with restless centipedes and soldier ants, we went back to work. Through some ingenuity I managed to get selected to help construct the huts. The work was no less frantic but it was less physical and gave the balloon-like blisters on my hands a chance to subside. The only dangers lay in the fact that nobody knew what they were doing. I felt that my Boy Scout knowledge of knots and the outdoors would be useful. Instructing us through an interpreter the Nippon Army engineers spelled out what they required. The huts were to be very basic A-frame structures, using lengths of bamboo for the frame and support struts, and the point of the roof raised to about twenty feet high. We would use slivers of tree bark, or rattan, carefully cut with parangs, Burmese knives about eighteen inches long, to lash the bamboo together. You dampened the rattan before tying it around the bamboo and as it dried it would shrink, providing an amazingly tight fastening. The floor, made with bamboo split in long half-lengths, would have a corrugated effect and be raised about three feet off the ground. We were to sleep on either side of a gangway that ran the length of the hut, which was open at both ends but at least closed at the sides with walls of bark. I volunteered to make the roof, which involved thatching it with atap leaves. It was a good job, not least because I was out of reach of the guards and their vicious tempers.

When I had finished it looked great. But it provided little more than shade; these huts really only created shelter for mosquitoes and disease-carrying flies. During the monsoon season, when the rain pelted down in stair-rods, the water cascaded in and we may as well have not bothered with our roofing efforts. We were permanently damp, working, eating and sleeping in the rain. As result we lost a lot of men on the railway to pneumonia. For many the disease known at home as the ‘old people’s friend’ would become the ‘prisoner’s friend’, offering a relatively peaceful and unconscious end.

This camp would become known as ‘Kanyu’. I thought of it as ‘Can-You’, which I often found cruelly ironic. As the line progressed it would become Kanyu I, when Kanyu II and Kanyu III were built further up the railway that snaked its way through the dense jungle of Thailand towards Burma.

After three days the Japanese considered our huts to be completed. They told us we could add finishing touches in ‘our own time’.

On day four we were to begin construction on the infamous Death Railway, the 415-kilometre Burma – Siam Railway through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. The British engineers who had scoped out the possibility of a railway in 1885 were quite right to warn of the massive loss of life it would entail. The construction of the Death Railway was one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century. It was said that one man died for every sleeper laid. Certainly over sixteen thousand of us British, Australian, Dutch, American and Canadian prisoners died on the railway – murdered by the ambitions of the Japanese Imperial Army to complete the lifeline to their forces in Burma by December 1943. Up to a hundred thousand native slaves, Thais, Indians, Malayans and Tamils also died in atrocious circumstances.

Even Japanese engineers estimated that the railway would take five years to complete. The Japanese Imperial Army would prove them wrong, however. It had a secret weapon: slave labour. In just sixteen months a railway linking Bangkok with the Burmese rice bowl and its vital oil fields would be completed at a terrible human cost. The single-track narrow-gauge line, just over a metre wide, allowed rice and raw materials to be looted from Burma and Japanese reinforcements to be sent from Thailand for the planned invasion of India.

At first only prisoners of war were put to work at both the Burmese and Thai ends of the railway, with the object of meeting in the middle at Three Pagodas Pass, where the ancient Burmese and Thai civilisations had clashed three hundred years earlier. Then following the United States’ success at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the seas around Burma and Malaysia became a vast hunting ground for American submarines and the pace of work was quickened by working us prisoners to death and drafting in two hundred thousand coolie labourers.

Over sixteen months we would hack our way through hundreds of kilometres of dense jungle, gouge passes through rocky hills, span ravines and cross rivers, building bridges and viaducts with rudimentary tools. It was a huge civil engineering project that would be lubricated with our blood, sweat and tears. But most of all blood.

On starvation rations and with no access to medicines of any kind, we lived in camps buried deep in the remote jungle where Red Cross inspectors or representatives of neutral foreign powers could never find us. A whole army of sixty thousand men had vanished into the jungle at the mercy of our Japanese masters.

On that first morning the guards woke us by rattling canes across the bamboo walls at dawn. It was a sound that would become all too recognisable to us.

‘All men worko! Speedo! Speedo!’

A chorus of ‘Aye, aye,’ rang around the awakening hut. One brave lad replied, ‘Keep your head on you Jap bastard, it’ll be knocked off soon.’ This sort of bravado would fizzle out later when we discovered that many of our guards could understand English.

There was no time, facilities or desire for a wash and shave; it was straight out to form the line for breakfast.

‘Cheer up lads, it’s ham and eggs this morning,’ one prisoner offered from the front.

‘Naw it’s no. It’s porridge the morning,’ said another.

Some of the men in the queue cursed the early-morning jokers for mentioning such fantastic delicacies. Thinking and talking about food had become a form of torture – it just drove you mad. We all knew it would be plain rice, just rice. Just like every other stinking day.

The cooks had already been up for a couple of hours – about the only downside of being a camp cook – to heat two 12-gallon cast-iron saucer-shaped pots of rice, ‘
kualies
’, and boil drinking water in cauldrons over an open fire. The cooks were fed last, and best. But sometimes when the cooks had had enough, I would manage to get the burned skin of the rice scraped from the kualies. It may have been burned but it tasted so much better.

After breakfast we were paraded in the half-light outside our huts for the count. It was a full squad, a
kumi
, on the railway today.
Tenko
, roll-call, was conducted by guards and overseen by the Japanese version of a drill sergeant, a
gunso
, who made the RSM from the Bridge of Don barracks seem like a playful puppy. It all took time and was done in Japanese. The camps all operated on Tokyo time. Not that it made any difference to us; the bayonet and the boot were our timekeepers.

The count, or
bango
, was conducted in Japanese with numbers one to ten being
ichi
,
ni
,
san
,
shi
,
go
,
roku
,
shichi
,
hachi
,
ku
,
ju
. Number eleven was
ju-ichi
, which took the tenth number and the first, while number twelve was
ju-ni
, and so on. It took some longer than others to get their head around. But you learned seemingly impossible tasks very quickly under the threat of a rifle smashing into your face. The Japanese had especial trouble understanding some of the Scottish and English accents and when inadvertently we offended them they would go berserk. If someone stumbled and forgot what number they were, someone would shout it out for them but it didn’t always work and the guards would give the man a beating. Sometimes several beatings would be administered and the count could take up to an hour, which would result in further blanket punishments or reduced rations. I quickly learned that it was best to avoid being in the front rank at tenko, where most beatings were handed out.

In the vast sprawling camp at Changi it had been easy for me to keep out of the way of our troublesome and irritable captors but on the railway they stalked our every move and it was necessary to fully learn the humiliating kow-towing protocol that they insisted upon. If we failed to bow, salute or stand to attention at the approach of a guard, a beating would be administered.