by Damien Lewis
When Catcher flipped, he did so in spectacular fashion: the shocked guard fell back under a hail of blows from Catcher’s bony fists, which were going like a windmill. Other guards came running to their fellow’s aid. Catcher was quickly overpowered and carted away. The following morning his fate was clear for all to see: he had been placed in a tiny bamboo cage, which was positioned in full view at the edge of the parade ground.
Catcher would be locked in there come rain or shine for days on end. He would be starved, beaten, and eaten alive by insects and vermin day and night. It was a fate that would drive many a lesser man to madness and beyond.
On July 27, 1945, a full year had passed since the Van Waerwijck survivors had arrived at the hell railway. Many had spent over a thousand days in captivity by now, and still their suffering wasn’t at an end. As impossible as it might seem, the iron rails snaking through the Kuantan gorge had all but reached the far side, though few liked to contemplate how many human lives—both Allied POWs and romushas—that dark valley had swallowed.
Batches of prisoners had even been shipped to the far end of the railway, to Moera, so they could start the building from that end. The plan now was for the two ends of the line to meet somewhere in the middle. But practically everywhere were signs that the Allies were closing in. Seemingly a day didn’t go by when a U.S. B-29 Superfortress wasn’t spotted high over the camps. Many speculated that some at least were reconnaissance flights, helping plan a campaign to liberate all of Southeast Asia, including Sumatra.
But no one could know for sure.
Chapter Twenty-three
Then came stunning news. In the second week of August 1945 a bizarre rumor flew up and down the railway. It would become an impossible to believe yet apparently genuine fact. An inconceivably powerful weapon had been dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Prisoners and guards alike spoke about it in hushed, disbelieving tones: this one American superweapon had apparently flattened an entire city.
It was of course the atomic bomb code-named Little Boy. Little Boy had been dropped by a U.S. Air Force B-29 Silverplate long-range bomber—one specially adapted to carry a nuclear weapon—on August 6, 1945. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima a second atomic bomb, code-named Fat Man, was dropped over Nagasaki. Together, the two bombs would end up killing as many as a quarter of a million people, but the alternative to using them—an invasion of Japan that would without doubt lead to many millions of casualties—had been equally unthinkable.
After the dropping of the atomic bombs the Japanese guards seemed lost in a blind frenzy. Work gangs were sent out having had only four hours’ rest. Some spent days away from camp slaving on the railhead. American merchant seaman Captain George Duffy was one of those sent to the far end of the line, to Camp 12. Rations were so nonexistent there that he and fellow POWs resorted to eating rubber tree nuts, which are full of deadly cyanide. They had to be laboriously prepared—sliced, soaked, washed, and dried—to render them edible. Prisoners who got the treatment wrong died a horrific death of cyanide poisoning.
With Judy’s party at Camp 7, odd and unprecedented things seemed to be afoot. With no apparent explanation or ceremony Catcher, the young prisoner who’d turned on his abusive guard, was released from the bamboo cage. Barely able to stand, let alone walk, the mumbling, half-crazed figure was helped to the hospital hut. With food, proper medical treatment, and rest Catcher’s body might recover; it was his mind that no one could be certain about.
Then, from out of the blue it was announced that all prisoners were to have their heads and eyebrows shaved to help rid the camp of lice. Rarely had the guards demonstrated the barest modicum of concern for the health of their human charges. Speculation was rife that the Japanese overseers were beginning to accept the inevitable: that the war was lost, that the camps eventually would be liberated, and that they in turn might be held accountable for the unspeakable horrors that had transpired here.
But for Frank, Judy, and their cohorts, the lice-eradication program was to have much darker consequences. The guards announced that Judy, the heroine of the trans-Sumatran railroad, was likewise lice-ridden, and she was to be handed over to them so she could be shot. Frank, Les, Jock, and her many faithful fellows suspected that this was no lice-eradication measure. The guards were more or less starving alongside the prisoners. In their extreme hunger they had their eyes fixed on the hell railroad survivor extraordinaire—its mascot dog—for the pot.
It was now that Frank and Judy’s disappearing act truly came into its own. Overnight, she became a ghost dog. At a flick of Frank’s fingers she’d dart into the bush and stay there for as long as her master deemed necessary—basically, until there wasn’t a starving or a baleful-looking guard in sight, at which point Frank would whistle her out again. In this way man and dog managed to avoid the worst of the guards’ famished predations until the day upon which the impossible came to pass: the completion of the railway.
The final few days had been a madhouse. Torrential rains falling for hours on end had turned the last few hundred meters into a treacherous mud bath. Prisoners were whipped until they dropped. Sleep was snatched here and there at the railhead, and meals eaten three in one go as the prisoner-slaves labored around the clock. But on August 14, 1945, the two work gangs—one building from the Pakan Baroe end, the other from Moera—finally met.
The next day, August 15, dawned bright and sunny over the Sumatran jungle. The men in most of the camps were given a rare day off apart from a handful that were required for a special duty at the juncture of the two ways. The atmosphere everywhere was utterly surreal. After the murderous pace of the past few days and the widespread cursing and beatings—not to mention the deaths—the guards seemed abnormally chatty, even friendly.
The vast majority of the prisoners wondered what on earth this might mean. A few were tasked to attend a ceremony at the very point of the joining of the rails.
The prisoners were ordered to set up wooden tables and chairs adjacent to the spot where the final rail lay waiting. Bottles of sake and biscuits were arranged on the table. The prisoners were told to make their way into the bush and remain silent and out of sight. The ceremony began at close to midday. The sun was high, and it was sweltering as a Japanese officer delivered a short speech. When he was done, the last rail was lifted into place, and the officer produced a golden spike—one modeled along the lines of the iron ones used to anchor the entire railroad.
The golden spike was loosely tapped into place, whereupon a Japanese general was handed the ceremonial hammer and invited to hit it home. That done, there was a reverential silence for several seconds, after which the assembled party took up the formal cry of banzai: “Banzai Nippon! Banzai Nippon! Banzai Nippon!”
Banzai translates as “ten thousand years,” and it was both a traditional battle cry and a call of respect to the emperor.
The Japanese officers’ words echoed across to the prisoners crouched in the bush, but they seemed to lack a certain conviction. It was little wonder. At 0000 hours that very morning Imperial Japan had surrendered to the Allies. On the day of completion of the trans-Sumatran railway—one laid in suffering, degradation, and blood—the war was already over. As they nibbled on their biscuits and sipped their sake, the Japanese officers were aware of this, yet still they had proceeded with the railroad’s formal opening ceremony.
Of course, none of the POWs crouched in the bush could know that the war was over, and the Japanese officers weren’t about to tell them. All along the railway the guards were keeping very quiet. At their camp, Judy and her fellows knew that all was not as it had been and that change was afoot—but what exactly the nature of that change might be few could tell.
That evening the camp commanders up and down the line made a similar kind of announcement: the railway was finished, the prisoners could rest, and rations would be increased once the Japanese had the supplies to make it happen. And no one was permitted to leave the camps.
Days passed
in this weird, otherworldly kind of limbo. There were signs everywhere that the war had to be over, and the rumor mill was working overtime. In several places the Japanese were seen lighting huge bonfires as they sought to burn all the camp documents. British prisoner and Junyo Maru survivor Rouse Voisey spotted them doing so in his camp. Were they destroying incriminating evidence? he wondered. It certainly looked that way.
The daily rice ration—the Japanese still had ample supplies of rice, it seemed—was increased to 2,600 grams a day, ten times the starvation ration of the last few weeks. It was too much food for most, whose stomachs were shrunken and shriveled. Padre Peter Hartley could barely believe it when a consignment of Japanese Red Cross parcels arrived, along with the massively increased food rations. There was little of use in the parcels, but surely it had to signify that the war was over and that the prisoners were finally free.
Fittingly, in Judy’s camp it would be the miracle survivor dog who finally barked the good news, confirming that liberation had come for those who had survived over a year on the railway.
On the morning of September 4, 1945, the prisoners awoke to another day in limbo, only to hear a very strange sound indeed: it was a loud, insistent, and somehow clearly joyous round of barking. Judy had spent the last few days living as a ghost dog, only risking the occasional appearance whenever Frank whistled for her. But this morning, she was barking her head off unreservedly.
Judy had long learned to keep her counsel in the POW camps. Barking had only ever served to attract unwanted attention from those who might seek to do her harm. But this morning, as the sun rose above the surrounding jungle, she was truly letting rip. Frank hurried out to quiet her down, but he quickly realized that all was somehow different about the camp. No matter where he looked, there didn’t seem to be a Japanese or a Korean guard in sight.
It was then that he understood just what it was that Judy was so joyously barking over. She approached Frank accompanied by two heavily armed figures. They were dressed in the smart uniform of British Royal Marines. Judy cavorted around them, knowing instinctively that the good guys were here at last.
Four parachutists commanded by a Major Gideon Jacobs had been dropped from a Liberator long-range bomber near the location of their former prison camp, Gloegoer One. From there they had made their way to Pakan Baroe and up the length of the railway. Incredibly, the Allies had had not the slightest idea that the trans-Sumatran railroad had been under construction until Major Jacobs had parachuted in to discover it.
As skeletal prisoners tumbled out of their huts to greet the newly arrived troops of liberation—some with wild cries of joy, others with cheers and laughter, but many with a quiet and uncomprehending lethargy—makeshift Dutch and British flags were raised above the camp over which only the Japanese rising sun had ever flown.
But even now news of the longed-for liberation proved too much for some. Even now some would prove too debilitated by their long ordeal to survive. Tragically, some who had fought so doggedly to make it through would perish during these final days as the camps of the trans-Sumatran railroad were dismantled. Yet for Frank Williams, Les Searle, Jock Devani, Peter Hartley, Rouse Voisey, and George Duffy—as for so many other Allied prisoners—this day marked the deliverance for which they had so long dreamed. And for Judy of Sussex, the much-loved dog of the hell railroad, this was the start of her long journey home.
Perhaps it was inevitable, but along the way there would be one last hurdle, one final attempt to separate man from dog. When it finally came time for Judy and her fellows to set sail for England, they would be ordered to depart via Singapore on the troopship Antenor. For the first time in Judy’s life—she was approaching ten years old by now—she was about to board a ship that wasn’t under threat of river piracy or bombing or torpedoing by the enemy. But that was only if she was going to make it aboard.
When Frank received his embarkation papers, a footnote read: “The following regulations will be strictly enforced: no dogs, birds or pets of any kind to be taken aboard.”
Frank gave Judy a fond look where she was curled up at his feet. “No dogs allowed, old girl,” he murmured softly. “Only ex-POWs, and that, of course, means you.”
There was no way that Frank was willing to even contemplate abiding by the order, and neither were Judy’s fellow ex-prisoners. This time, no sack was required to hide her from a murderous Captain Nissi, but still the operation to smuggle Judy aboard the Antenor was organized with the precision, flair, and efficiency without which these resourceful and brave men might never have saved her from a long string of dangers.
Frank waited until the gangway leading onto the ship was largely clear. Leaving Judy hidden between some rows of kit bags, he went aboard, trying to act as casually as he could. Les Searle and the others followed, but they paused at the top of the gangplank and fell into apparently easy conversation with the staff supervising the boarding.
Once all were seemingly engrossed in the chat, Frank gave a faint whistle in the direction of the dockside. In a flash a streak of liver and white had sped up the gangplank and Frank and his fellows were able to welcome Judy aboard.
Finally, the dog that had so many times snuck under the wire was homeward bound.
Epilogue
During their long voyage to Great Britain, Judy was helped by several trusted fellow POWs and others, most notably one of the ship’s crew working in the galley. An irrepressible dog lover, he provided her with all her meals prepared by his own loving hands. But man and dog’s trials were far from over.
Upon docking at Liverpool, Judy had to endure six months’ separation from Frank and fellow POWs in keeping with Britain’s strict quarantine laws. Unsurprisingly, Judy was bewildered and upset to be separated from her fellows at the Liverpool docks, where she was taken to the nearby Hackbridge quarantine kennels. But the subsequent reunion with Frank was made all the sweeter in that by then Judy the POW dog had become something of a national sensation.
Reunited, man and dog were feted by the British media and military alike. Judy emerged from the Hackbridge kennels to a joyous reception from the waiting public. As flashbulbs popped, the now very famous POW dog that had survived the hell railway warmed to the cheering crowds. Judy even enjoyed the distinction of being “interviewed” on a special Victory Day BBC radio program in which her barks were broadcast to grateful listeners all across the nation. No one seemed to complain that they couldn’t understand what this hero dog had to say.
Judy visited London and was enrolled in the Returned Prisoners of War Association as its sole canine member. She was presented at Wembley Stadium as one of four war dogs—the “Stars of Blitz and Battlefront”—and featured on the BBC. She was made an official mascot of the RAF and given a flying jacket embroidered with the RAF’s crest to wear. Frank Williams won the White Cross of Saint Giles, the highest honor awarded to humans by the animal charity the PDSA, and Judy won the PDSA’s Dickin Medal, more commonly known as the Animal VC.
The press ran headlines typified by the following: “Gunboat Judy saves lives—wins medal and life pension.” Judy was even given a generous grant from the venerable animal charity the Tailwaggers Club so that she could “enjoy life in peace for the rest of her days.” Proudly sporting her Dickin Medal—inscribed with the motto “We also serve”—Judy and Frank toured schools, children’s hospitals, and other venues as the great British public feted a truly deserving four-legged heroine of the war.
Judy’s uniquely apposite Dickin Medal inscription reads:
For magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners, and also for saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness.
Saving lives through her intelligence and watchfulness indeed. Judy had saved the lives of her fellows—both soldiers and civilians—on so many occasions during her long journey from the Yangtze River patrols to the hell railway and back again.
The ill-fated railway that
had been forced through the Sumatran jungles at such a terrible cost in human life was completed the day Japan surrendered to the Allies. What had driven the Japanese overseers to force it to completion in the face of their inevitable defeat remains a mystery. All the research that I have carried out seems to offer no explanation for this pointless and grossly inhumane imperative other than that it was pursued in an effort to prevent them from losing face—something that was seen as being of the utmost importance in the Japanese culture of the time. If the last few weeks of frenetic and murderous construction were pursued in that name, the waste of thousands of Allied and Indonesian lives is all the more reprehensible.
The railway, completed or not, was never going to serve the Japanese war effort, for even as they pushed the prisoner-slaves to exhaustion and death, it was crumbling all around them. There are detractors of the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They need to remember this: without their use, the unspeakable suffering of the Allied POWs and the local forced laborers held by the Japanese would have lasted far longer than it did, at a cost of countless more lives. Indeed, as documents have subsequently shown, the Japanese camp overseers had orders to execute all the POWs should the Allies set foot on Japanese soil and “threaten the emperor.”
In many of the trans-Sumatran railroad camps prisoners had been forced to dig what were clearly planned to be their own mass graves. This could have been for no other reason than preparation for their mass execution should the feared Allied invasion of the Japanese motherland have ensued. The use of the atomic bombs ensured that such an invasion wasn’t necessary. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced the Japanese to the negotiating table to sue for peace—a peace that would grant those POWs strong enough to survive the first few weeks of liberation their right to go home.
