by Damien Lewis
Ground up and formed into a paste, the foul-tasting and nauseating DIY medicine could be mixed with the morning ration of ongle-ongle to make it vaguely palatable. The nasty skin infection scabies was rife, and lice and fleas were everywhere. The DIY cure for scabies was to use raw sulfur dissolved in old motor oil. The oil was drained from the sumps of some disused Japanese Army trucks, and the dark, gluey ointment had to be smeared over the body from head to toe and left on for forty-eight hours.
Tropical ulcers, scabies, malaria, beriberi—Padre Peter Hartley had had just about every disease going. Yet still he had done the seemingly impossible and twice beat the Death House—and in large part thanks to Padre Patrick Rorke, a Roman Catholic priest who, oblivious to the risks of infection, had spent hours squatting on a homemade wooden stool, comforting the sick and dying regardless of whether they were believers. That Catholic padre had helped restore Peter Hartley’s faith and given him the strength to perform his funeral duties as the graveyards along the railroad swelled to overflowing.
Whenever a man died, he was taken to the preparation area, where his body was washed and wrapped in a straw mat. If he possessed four good and able friends, they could request a formal burial service for that evening. If the dead man possessed too few able-bodied buddies, his body was laid outside the morgue. The woodcutting party would pick it up after its lunch break—along with any other corpses, and invariably there were several—and carry it to the cemetery, whereupon the grave diggers would bury it without ceremony. Such was the casual nature of death on the bestial railway.
Losing life had become so commonplace that those who survived had become inured to the loss. But the Grim Reaper was also stalking the ranks of the enemy as the Allies closed the noose around the Axis powers. Mid-April brought a rash of rumors flying along the railway. Via the secret radio there were reports of landings by Allied forces on Kyushu and Honshu, two of the main islands of Japan, plus news of the death of the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), from a a stroke.
Roosevelt had indeed died, but in fact there had been no Allied landings on those Japanese islands. Even so, such rumors, which couldn’t fail to reach the ears of the railroad’s overseers, only served to up the ante still further. Unbelievably, on April 23, 1945, the Japanese ordered that the POWs’ daily rations be cut to 200 grams of tapioca flour and 270 grams of rice for workers and less for those who were too ill to labor.
Four days later the death toll in Camp 7 was seventy-nine individuals for the month, and April wasn’t even done yet. The prisoners were struggling to bury the dead fast enough as the sick and the incapacitated were starved into their graves.
In desperation, one of the camp doctors had an inspired idea. He figured they could secure a free and protein-rich source of food. He’d watched the camp chickens growing fat foraging around the latrines, and he realized they were eating maggots. In due course he and his fellows started to haul maggots out of the latrine by the bucket load. They were washed, cooked, and fed to those who were at death’s door. For many this revolting but protein-rich diet would prove an absolute lifesaver.
But in the tense and febrile atmosphere of the railway there was little that could be done to defend against the guards’ growing predations. As they stared defeat in the face, their tolerance was at near zero while their aggression levels were soaring. At the same time—and perhaps sensing that the end was near at hand—Judy of Sussex was becoming ever more defensive of her flock.
Judy never had been able to hide her hatred of the guards, but now she seemed determined to do everything in her power to bring the worst of the savagery to an end—at least on her patch. Whereas once she had been content to dodge a kick leveled at her flank from a guard’s jackboot, now she stood her ground. She’d crouch low, barely feet away from her adversary, muscles tensed and ready to spring, her jaws a row of yellowing fangs and a deep snarl issuing forth from her throat. With blatant daring she’d face down the murderous bully. But Judy was up against those for whom a POW’s life meant little, and even less when the prisoner happened to be a dog. And with guards armed with rifles it was an unequal contest that, if continued, could only end badly for the dog that had for so long refused to die. Judy’s fellows could sense that their railway hell had to end sometime soon now, and none could face losing their miracle dog at the eleventh hour.
Over the months that they’d been together Frank Williams had developed an unspoken, almost telepathic means of communication with Judy. He was always able to reach her. She seemed permanently on the prowl now, almost deliberately seeking confrontation with the guards, but at one word or a gentle touch from Frank her fierce red eyes would soften, and a potentially deadly altercation would be brought to an end.
Sensing the way the wind was blowing—that Judy was on a collision course with one or other of the guards—Frank developed a new trick in an effort to protect her. It was a variation on the jump-into-the-sack routine that he had employed when smuggling her out of Gloegoer One and onto the SS Van Waerwijck. At the soft click of his fingers Judy would disappear into the thick jungle at the rail side. There she would remain, utterly silent and obscured from view, until the coast was clear, whereupon a gentle whistle from the one she loved the most would bring her back to his side.
But the day inevitably came when Judy went a step too far. Frank Williams, Judy, and her gang were out at the railhead, the prisoner-slaves as usual being driven to the brink of collapse by their guards. Perhaps there was nothing specific that had triggered it: in the dark spring of 1945 the railway’s overseers needed little provocation to unleash their worst. For whatever reason one of the guards set upon a prisoner, screaming obscenities and slamming him around the head with the thick bamboo pole that he carried.
The prisoner’s head whipped backward with the first blow. More followed. The horrific scene had become all too familiar, as a figure who was barely skin and bone staggered under the onslaught and fought to remain upright. He flinched under an extrapowerful swipe and looked sure to lose his footing, when into his place sprang a four-legged champion. Snarling and barking with undisguised ferocity, her hackles raised and her eyes blazing, Judy stopped the guard in his tracks.
Hitherto all-powerful and utterly unprepared for any kind of resistance, the guard’s brute confidence momentarily wavered. Then one hand lowered the bamboo pole as the fingers of the other curled around his long-barreled Arisaka rifle. Many a time Judy had witnessed the effects of these oddly shaped thunder sticks. She’s seen them fell any number of beasts that were far larger and more powerful than she was. She’d come to appreciate both the thunder stick’s range and its deadly effect.
Judy knew instinctively that it was time to make her getaway. In any case her work here was done: she’d turned the guard’s aggression away from the prisoner onto her own gaunt and fleshless shoulders. In a flash she whipped herself around and fled, racing for the cover of the thick bush at the bottom of the embankment. But even as her thin white tail disappeared into the dense undergrowth, the guard leveled his rifle and took careful aim.
The long bolt-action rifle barked once, the muzzle spitting fire. A bullet tore after the fleeting figure of the dog. It had all happened at such speed that Frank Williams and his fellows had been powerless to intercede. They were horrified at the prospect that the bullet might find its mark. Thankfully, there was no canine cry or yelp of pain from the undergrowth, and it looked as if Judy had yet again escaped unscathed.
Either that, or the bullet had killed Judy stone dead, silencing her forever.
Chapter Twenty-two
It was a long time before Frank felt able to risk a faint, low whistle to call her back to his side. Several hours had passed, and their work party had moved a good way along the embankment. When finally Judy came to him, Frank noticed that she was limping. He was shocked to discover an angry and bloodied furrow running across her shoulder. The 6.5-mm bullet had missed Judy’s head by a bare few inches, her heart by just a few
more.
In the dark and malevolent world that was the hell railroad there was no reward fit for a dog as brave or as spirited as Judy apart from Frank Williams’s boundless affection and love. Yet Judy went ahead anyway and found one for herself. A while later there was a bout of sustained and excited barking from within the forest. Frank went to investigate, fearing that Judy might have come up against some animal too large for her to handle or maybe even the same vicious guard.
Instead, he discovered his dog with an utterly goofy expression on her features as she tried to drag the world’s biggest bone into a hole that she had been digging. She paused for a moment to give him that look of hers—guess what I’ve found?—before going back to her task. It was so large, it could only be an elephant bone, Frank reasoned.
It was certainly a reward big enough for a dog of Judy’s enduring spirit if only she could manage to get her jaws around it and give it a good gnaw.
On April 29, 1945, the guards marked the birthday of the mikado, the emperor of Imperial Japan, with a drunken feast. The POWs of Camp 7—Judy of Sussex included—marked it with a grim milestone, the deaths of ten of their number on that day alone. To celebrate the auspicious occasion, the Japanese deemed it worthy to give a gift of a pig to the camp inmates, but just as quickly they decided to take it back again, leaving only the head and guts for several hundred prisoners to share between them.
Bitter resentment and hatred seethed back and forth between the guards and the POWs. Across the camps the means of sabotage became ever more desperate and full of bile. Prisoners who were able to get access to the kitchen spit infected mucus into the drums of porridge being prepared for the guards. Feces from the dysentery patients were even slipped into the guards’ food.
One prisoner learned that the hairs from a certain type of bamboo bush were toxic and would cause internal injuries if ingested. He slipped some into the coffee being prepared for a newly arrived team of Korean guards. Those who drank the poisoned brew became critically ill. Within days they were seen stumbling around camp with wet rags tied around their horribly inflamed throats. A week after they had drunk the evil brew they were removed and replaced en masse, for nothing could be allowed to impede the construction of the railway.
But by early May 1945 progress on the railway had slowed to a painful crawl. During the first two months of construction twenty kilometers had been built. Now a few dozen yards were being completed a day. Weakened though they were, it wasn’t the labor force that was failing: the prisoner-slaves were being driven even harder than ever. POWs and romushas alike were forced to work round-the-clock shifts, the railroad lit by smoky, spluttering rubber flashlights that drove away the darkness, allowing the torture to continue even during the night hours.
It was the rugged terrain that was the problem. Teams of romushas were sent ahead to cut a route through the most impossible ground of all: the cavernous gorge lying ahead of Camp 11 at Medikoel, which was the 200-kilometer mark of the railroad. There the Kuantan River had cut deep through the heart of the Barisan Mountains. This was the very area that had claimed the life of W. Ijzerman, the Dutch engineer who had first surveyed this route over fifty years before.
In May and June 1945 it would claim countless more lives.
For the surviving POWs emotions seesawed between ecstasy one moment and utter misery the next. Stunning news of Allied victories would raise the collective hope that surely this had to end soon, only for there to be no change in the camps or at the railhead. The lethal, soul-destroying, and utterly futile work continued day after night after day, seemingly without end. It was all so entirely pointless—for what could be the point of continuing with the railroad when the Japanese were so clearly losing the war?
In the second week of May the seemingly indestructible Jock Devani was able to deliver the most incredible news yet. He returned to Judy’s crew’s hut after a hard day’s labor, complete with a quantity of fresh fruit and vegetables hidden on his person. As he handed the unexpected goodies around to the old faithfuls—Les Searle, Frank Williams, and Judy among them—he revealed to man and dog that a special celebration was in order.
Somehow, Jock seemed always to be the first to hear of any news, and today he’d hit the jackpot. The war in Europe was over, he announced. Germany had surrendered, and all across Europe the Allies were victorious.
“And as a very special treat,” he added, “I’ve brought you the fruit to celebrate!”
He had liberated the fruit and vegetables from a Japanese grave, he explained. One of the camp guards had died recently, and in keeping with Japanese tradition and beliefs his fellows had piled his burial place high with fresh bananas, mangoes, cassava, and the like.
“It would all have been gone by the morning any road,” Jock remarked with a grin, “and who is there more deserving than us lot?”
At first the prisoners refused to believe Jock’s news. But of course, it was true: May 8, 1945, was the day of victory in Europe—VE Day, although it had taken a while longer for the news to filter in through the POWs’ clandestine radio and to make its way down the accursed railway line to Camp 7.
With Nazi Germany having capitulated, the rations deteriorated still further. There was less food handed out, and what there was seemed of an ever poorer quality. General Saito, the supreme Japanese commander in Southeast Asia, had issued orders to reduce the food rations of all Allied POWs. They were to be fed only enough to keep them functioning as prisoner-slaves. They were to be deliberately deprived of any levels of sustenance that might encourage them to launch a prisoner uprising.
Just days prior to VE Day, the prisoners in Camp 7 had been forced to sign a similar declaration to that which they had already agreed to at Gloegoer One—a second non-escape contract. It stated that under no circumstances would they attempt any kind of breakout. In short the Japanese position was characterized by paranoia and not a little schizophrenia: the prisoners needed to be worked like slaves to finish the railway but starved to death to keep them docile and incapable of rising up against their masters.
By mid-June the overall camp leader on the Sumatran railroad, Wing Commander Patrick Slaney Davis, was complaining on a daily basis to his opposite number, Japanese Lieutenant Doi, in the most strident terms possible. He confronted the man with statistics proving how the death rate among the POWs was spiraling out of control. Lieutenant Doi’s response was that the Allied prisoners were deliberately trying to sabotage the railway and the Japanese war effort by dying.
Increasing numbers of terribly ill prisoners were arriving at Camp 2, but because of the Japanese quota system in which each camp had to deliver a set roster of fit workers, the newly arrived sick had to be replaced by a similar number of recovering patients, who were sent back down to the railhead. Of course, there were few if any remotely healthy individuals left at Camp 2, and so the barely living were forced to rejoin the work gangs.
Then, in mid-June, Wing Commander Davis was presented with an ultimatum by his opposite number, which was as unexpected as it was perplexing. Lieutenant Doi declared an irrevocable finish-by date for the railway. No matter what, it had to be completed by August 15, 1945. Accordingly, every prisoner who was capable of getting to his feet was required to get out and work—no exceptions. In spite of the wing commander’s spirited protests a roll call was held, and any skeletal, ghostly figure even vaguely capable of standing was marched off to the railhead.
In every prisoner’s mind was now being nurtured the spark of hope that the end really was in sight if only they could just hold on. But the flip side was the fear—rarely vocalized but felt by all in the darkest corner of their hearts—that in truth the Japanese would allow none to survive; that none would be allowed to emerge from this hellish reality and reveal to the outside world all that had happened here. The fear was not without justification.
Work parties were formed to carry out an alternative light duty task. Their orders were to dig air-raid shelters for the camps. The trouble was, the
y looked nothing like any such defenses any Allied soldier had ever seen before. Air-raid shelters have to be dug narrow and deep, with high earthen walls, and to be roofed over by massive beams and thick layers of earth to provide adequate protection from blasts. What the work gangs were being made to dig along the railway were long, shallow troughs with no roofs whatsoever.
It didn’t take a genius to guess what in truth their intended use might be: they had all the right dimensions for mass graves. Most were situated near the parade grounds, where the men stood for their early morning and evening roll calls. It wasn’t too hard to imagine prisoners being called out one morning, only to be machine-gunned where they stood and their corpses rolled into the open pits.
Unknown to the POWs, orders had in fact been circulated to that very effect. The Japanese high command had decreed that should the Allies set foot on Imperial Japanese soil and threaten the emperor, then all Allied POWs were to be executed. In other words, if a decisive ground assault was launched against Japanese territory by American and Allied troops, POWs across Japanese-held territory were to be slaughtered.
In these days that were rife with uncertainty, fear, and desperation, Judy proved a rock around which many a prisoner could moor his restive spirits. Frank and Judy never seemed to spend a moment apart. Wherever he went she followed, and vice versa. Frank was down to around half his weight by now—as were Les Searle, Jock Devani, Pastor Peter Hartley, and their other long-standing companions—but together Frank and Judy were somehow still able to remain strong.
Under the growing pressure there were those in Camp 7 who did crack. One was a young prisoner only ever known to all as Catcher. Les Searle witnessed what happened when Catcher snapped. He was accused by a Korean guard of forgetting to salute and bow properly before him. Screaming abuse, the guard proceeded to beat the young British soldier about the head.
