The Story of Danny Dunn (12 page)

Danny grinned. ‘Yeah, okay, mate, but I daresay it won't be a popular move,' he advised. He knew that it wasn't the generous and brave Sergeant Billy du Bois who'd liberated them, but the diminutive Welshman who'd risked his life to keep a promise to a dying mate to raise the flag. He watched now as Spike bent over the guard who was sitting with his back against the gatepost; Danny could see he was bleeding from the nose and mouth. The little Welshman's hand rested sympathetically on the Jap's shoulder as if he were one of his own men. Jones was one of those rare men who, in his heart, carried no hate for his fellow humans.

Ten days after the announcement of the Japanese surrender, the prisoners of war had been trucked to a Japanese-built airport near Bangkok and flown in twin-engine Dakota transport planes to Rangoon, the capital of Burma, where Danny spent the first month out of prison camp in a British army hospital.

In spite of gaining nearly ten pounds, Danny still looked as if the next breeze would blow him off his feet. He'd also lost an inch in height and now walked with a slight stoop, in fact, an inch worth of stoop, brought about by being struck repeatedly in the small of the back with a rifle butt by Japanese or Korean guards. He'd been shown the X-rays of his spine and told bluntly that he was one of countless prisoners of war who would probably (read certainly) suffer from a bad back for the remainder of their lives.

Major Craig Woon, the Australian army doctor in Rangoon, had given him an extensive examination lasting almost three hours. Danny had entered his surgery, come to attention and saluted him, but the young officer had simply waved him to a chair. ‘Forget all the formal crap, Sergeant Major. Take a seat. You've been through enough.' Danny immediately warmed to him as he went on, ‘I've read your army record and I'd like to ask you one or two questions if I may. Cigarette?' He extended a slim silver monogrammed cigarette case.

‘Thanks, sir, I don't smoke. Please, go ahead, ask away.'

Craig Woon grinned at the habitual ‘sir'. ‘Army habits die hard, but you'll soon be back in civilian life. Better get used to no longer having to respect someone who is technically your superior but very unlikely to be your better.' He snapped the cigarette case shut with a flick and returned it absently to the top pocket of his uniform jacket. ‘It would help me if you would allow me to make notes,' he said, and when Danny nodded, went on, ‘Perhaps you'd like to tell me how your face got into such a mess. The damage obviously didn't come about from an explosive device.'

There was a pause, then Woon added, ‘If you'd rather not, that's fine, it's just that sometimes it helps to talk about these things. Buried too deep they can cause problems later on.'

‘You mean psychological problems?' Danny asked.

‘Yes. I confess we don't really know a lot about the condition we used to refer to in the First World War as shell shock. But it's an area I believe we ought to be looking at more carefully. Some of us are beginning to think that there is a lot more to understand about the long-term effects. In this hospital we have over a thousand beds and we know through anecdotal evidence from men like yourself who survived the prison camps that many prisoners of war just gave up, refused to eat, and died – in a manner of speaking – from despair.'

Danny nodded. ‘Yeah, in the first eighteen months we saw it all the time. Nothing you could do about it. Blokes would sink into a state of despair and when they stopped eating their rice ration you knew it was only a matter of time. You could try talking them out of it and occasionally someone would respond, but mostly they got a certain look in their eyes, as if they were no longer listening to you, but to some inner voice. After that it was usually only days or a week or two at most. There was no telling who it would hit – other blokes, seemingly physically worse off, made it through to the end.'

‘Yes, it's a story we're hearing all the time and there are patients who, now that it's all over, are falling apart mentally right here in this hospital. We're more concerned with treating tropical diseases here than mental problems; we're a general hospital, with only two psychiatrists on staff, and they can't begin to cope with the load.' Dr Woon shrugged. ‘As I said, I'm not yet qualified to have an opinion but I have a feeling it's going to be important to understand the effects of war when we get around to running the peace. So, thanks for agreeing to talk to me, Danny.'

‘Go for your life, doc. But there's not a lot to talk about. I simply got bashed up by a Jap officer and a bunch of Jap soldiers under him.'

‘Perhaps a little more detail? The how, why, when and where . . .'

‘It's a while ago now, doc. I'll have to think . . . never talked about it before.'

‘Perhaps the day of our surrender in Singapore might be a good place to start?'

‘Oh, okay then. It's not something I'm likely to forget in a hurry.' Danny sighed, and his eyes lost focus as he began to recall. ‘We'd fought all night, held our position until dawn, thought we were doing pretty well holding the Japs off in our sector. That is, until a radio signal came through that Percival had surrendered.' Danny's voice rose. ‘Shit . . . like I said, we were doing okay. We reckoned everyone was; after all, we outnumbered the enemy two to one on the island. They, the Nips, had no more reinforcements, no backup. Jesus! We had sufficient ordnance and supplies to damn near mount a counter invasion on Japan and it was us who hoisted the white flag, who surrendered!' Danny was warming to his story.

‘It had a lot to do with water as I remember?' Dr Woon volunteered.

‘Well, yeah, as it turned out. Talk about biting yourself on the bum. Percival made no arrangements to build defences against a Japanese invasion, in particular for the holding reservoirs on the island, all of which were close to where the Japs landed in the north-west sector. The pipeline that fed them brought the island's water from Johore on the mainland, and in the process of blowing up the causeway from Malaya the Brits also blew up their own pipeline, their main source of water, ferchrissake! The Japanese took possession of the holding reservoirs – the island's only remaining supply of drinking water – so they could turn off the taps to Singapore city at any time they wished. No water, no war. Sit down and wait for everyone to die of thirst. Nice one.'

‘I daresay there were other issues,' Woon said, in an attempt to be fair.

‘Yeah, sure. The Japs had a brilliant general in Yamashita and we had a bloody nincompoop in Percival. Not that our Australian bloke was much better. Bloody General Bennett hopped onto a boat and fucked off back to Australia as soon as the surrender was announced. That was after he ordered us not to attempt to get off the island. Cowardly bastard!'

Measured analysis was beyond Danny, after three and a half years of being a prisoner of war as the result of the biggest military defeat in British history, almost entirely due, in the view of most of the fighting men, to a monumental cock-up. It was obvious that Danny had built up a deep resentment against his leaders. Woon was later to discover this same resentment and humiliation in a great many other prisoners of war, who felt they had lost something unnamed but akin to their manhood, and had undergone a kind of mental emasculation that would continue to haunt them for the remainder of their lives. They were young warriors who were sent up against the enemy with their hands metaphorically tied behind their backs.

The young doctor generally agreed with Danny's viewpoint, but he was more anxious to hear his personal story, to have Danny revisit past experiences he may have buried deep in his subconscious. ‘Your facial injuries, did they happen on the day of the surrender? Tell me about that incident,' he said.

‘Nah, later. The first day we walked – marched, I suppose – but we were that buggered and disillusioned, we walked or dragged ourselves through the streets. I remember the crowds gathered by the Japanese to watch our humiliation were as silent as we were. Everyone, it seemed, was in a state of shock. Before the invasion Singapore was full of Chinese. Now there wasn't a Chinese face to be seen in the crowd. We soon enough understood why. In the weeks that followed, when we worked in the warehouses on the waterfront, we witnessed the killing of dozens of Chinese and saw the results of hundreds more.

‘All along the waterfront the Japanese erected several hundred poles sharpened to a point at one end and about five and a half feet high. On each pole, they stuck the severed head of a slaughtered Chinaman or woman. Each morning as we marched to work from the old colonial barracks of Selarang there would be fresh Chinese heads on public display, staring at us at eye level, a black cloud of flies buzzing around them.' Danny glanced at Craig Woon. ‘I don't know whether the Japs had worked out the height of the average Allied soldier, but there is something very bizarre about a severed head every three feet staring you straight in the eye as you pass. If the Nips hated us, it was nothing compared to how they felt about the poor bloody Chinks.'

‘These warehouses . . .'

‘They call them godowns, and there were literally hundreds of 'em.'

‘Aha, godowns. And you were . . . ?'

‘Loading the contents into Japanese merchant ships, virtually the wealth of Malaya, Britain's second-richest colony after India. You name it, tens of thousands of tons of tinned food and other goods, hundreds of shiploads of rubber and tin, both of which the Japs needed badly. Then of course there was the captured military equipment. My work gang of forty blokes only did the godowns. But some of the other blokes who did the dumps said they were huge and placed all around the island: tens of thousands of guns and millions of rounds of ammo, thousands of brand-new trucks and cars, hundreds of heavy guns and thousands of shells.

‘There was, I remember, a warehouse we entered that had all the equipment and medicines needed for a major military hospital and several field hospitals. In effect, there was enough captured field equipment, armaments, food and medical supplies for the Japanese army to continue their invasion of the Pacific without requiring very much more to be sent from Japan. The Brits had advanced the Japanese invasion of the remainder of the Western Pacific, and equipped them better than in their wildest dreams. And they supplied them with an intelligent labour force they didn't have to pay to do the hard yakka.'

‘Your face, Danny . . . the bashing?' Craig Woon reminded him, noting that his patient seemed to prefer to stick to generalities.

‘Oh, yeah, right, but first I have to explain about our sudden change of diet because it's relevant to the story. After the first few days, five days to be exact, we'd pretty well eaten all the rations we carried. Then we realised that the Japs were going to give us only rice to eat, and not very much of it at that. The immediate result was bloody catastrophic. We were constantly hungry, but even worse, the change of diet seized up our bowels: constipation on a massive scale; we were shitless in Gaza, or, if you insist, Singapore. Corporal Catterns held the record – thirty-eight days without a shit. We ate almost nothing and grew extremely weak, something the Nips, accustomed to a diet based on rice, couldn't understand, and they thought we must be on a hunger strike. Savage bashings with rifle butts, pick handles or boots were so common they were almost the norm. They'd discovered a warehouse that contained thousands of pick handles and it became the weapon of choice among Nip NCOs, even over the much-loved heavy bamboo stave. We were severely beaten for the smallest things: if you didn't spring to attention quickly when a Jap approached, or if your feet weren't properly aligned, or your bow wasn't considered respectful enough to satisfy the ego of the gibbering peasant in front of you. But worse, far worse, was if you were a big tall bloke: the smaller the Jap and his cohorts, the greater the pleasure they took in beating you to a pulp until you lay unconscious at their feet. It was clear that the Nips thought of us, particularly the big guys, as less than human; after all, we had surrendered and so we were, in their culture, beneath contempt. Starving, constipated, and having the shit beaten out of us every day, we —'

‘Perhaps not the appropriate expression?'

‘Huh? What isn't?'

‘Having
the
shit beaten out of you
would have brought some relief, I'd have thought.' Craig Woon grinned.

Catching on, Danny chuckled. ‘Oh, okay, you're right,' then added quickly, ‘Well, to put it differently, we were forced to endure a great deal of crap!'

‘And then some, it appears. I think we'll stick with the original metaphor,' Dr Woon added, regretting his levity.

Danny continued. ‘And then some luck – one morning at the height of the constipation crisis, we were given a godown to clear that was chocka with food and general supplies. We gorged ourselves all day and within hours some of the blokes were creeping into dark corners to take their first crap in two weeks and coming back with smiles on their gobs as if they'd just won the lottery.

‘I'd warned the men not to take anything back with them to the barracks because the godown was going to take a week to clear. I told them we'd load the waiting freighter so that the edible stuff went into the hold last; that way we'd have a week at least on a decent diet.

‘We'd also found a store of medicine – quinine, emetine for dysentery, although that wasn't our problem at the time, other valuable stuff we realised the Japs were never going to supply to prisoners. So we loaded up on those, concealing them on our bodies. The risk wasn't that big. Our underpants hadn't yet worn out so we could hide most of the medicine in them – it wasn't hard when you were wearing the overlarge khaki shorts the Brits called Bombay bloomers. Besides, by the end of the day the camp guards barely bothered to search us – a cursory pat over the shirt pockets, slap on the thighs to locate anything in our trouser pockets and that was about it. Bob's your uncle, nothing easier.