The Forgotten Highlander

by Alistair Urquhart

  ‘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 w
ould 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.

  Once the count was complete we formed a line for our tools. Picks, shovels and twin baskets on bamboo yo-ho poles that you carried across your shoulders were all laid out. The saws, chisels and anything else that was sharp and could have been used as a weapon were always kept down at the railway. I could not understand how the Japanese never saw a pickaxe as a potential weapon but I never came across it being used as one, so maybe they were right after all.

  As I was handed my pick and shovel a Japanese guard whacked me across the legs with a strop, urging me to follow the men into the jungle. We followed a rough path, weaving through the trees. The only men left behind at camp were a handful of officers, two Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) officers and their assistants and four cooks. There were only six officers and they all shared one hut with the NCOs. Since the Japanese had removed anything that signified rank it was difficult to tell who was an officer and who was not. They had to convince others that they were who they said they were. But I could usually tell after hearing them speak. Most of the officers spoke a different language from the rest of us. And it was not just their posh accents; it was their vocabulary too. Farm labourers and factory workers did not call each other ‘old boy’ and describe things as being ‘quaint’.

  It took about an hour to reach our destination, nothing more than a rare and slight gap in the jungle with a rocky cliff just visible ahead in the distance. Later the Australians would dub it Hellfire Pass and I could not have thought of a better name for it myself. The Japanese engineers told us that we had to clear everything between the white markers already pegged into the ground. The pattern was set. Trees would be chopped down by hand, huge tree roots ripped up, boulders shouldered out of our path and great thickets of towering, spiky bamboo cleared.

  They divided us into squads. I was on pick and shovel, clearing all the vegetation and boulders in a thirty-foot width. In the middle of the space, where the railway sleepers and eventually the tracks would go, we had to dig down to a depth of about three feet. There we dug up the earth in a twelve-foot-wide strip, which others with baskets on yo-ho poles hauled to one side. After digging down a foot or so we invariably struck clay, which made for even tougher going.

  Another squad were tasked with removing the rocks, trees and debris, another separated the roots to dry them out and later burn them. Meanwhile on the pickaxe party some men were going hammer and tong. I said to one chap near me who was slugging his pick as if in a race, ‘Slow down mate, you’ll burn yourself out.’

  ‘If we get finished early,’ he said, puffing, ‘maybe we’ll get back to camp early.’

  But the soldiers would only find something else for us to do. And then the next day Japanese expectations would be higher. Personally I tried to work as slowly as possible. The others would learn eventually but I soon discovered ways to conserve energy. If I swung the pick quickly, allowing it to drop alongside an area I had just cleared, the earth came away easier. It also meant that while it looked as if I were swinging the pick like the Emperor’s favourite son, the effort was minimal. Nevertheless under the scorching Thai sun and without a shirt or hat for protection, or shade from the nearby jungle canopy, the work soon became exhausting. Minute after minute, hour after hour, I wondered when the sun would drop and we could go back to camp.

  Around midday the Japanese called for yasume. We downed tools and sat and ate rice, which we had taken with us from camp in the morning. When I opened my rice tin I found the contents had begun to ferment. It was almost rice wine and tasted horrible. But I ate it anyway. Lunch usually lasted for around thirty minutes at the railway, depending on the officer in charge. If he were sleepy or tired, it might be longer. We used to love it when he fell asleep!

  After lunch we carried on. Our progress became bogged down by a huge boulder semi-submerged in the soil and right in our way. We had to pickaxe around it and try and lever it out with pick handles. It took five men to prise it from its hole and once it was out we rolled it down the hill towards the river. It was the river Kwai that flowed south to join with the Mae Klong, which we had followed during the death march. It remained to our left for the duration of my time on the railway and I never once went in it.

  By mid-afternoon we had finally completed the first section. Despite enormous toil and effort over the previous ten hours, our progress had been incredibly slow. We had managed to clear the required thirty-foot width for only about twenty feet. It was the beginning for us of what would become the most notorious railway construction that the world had ever seen. The Japanese engineer came over to inspect our work. He studied the clearing from several angles, using various surveying instruments, before declaring, ‘No gooda! Do again! Deeper!’

  Utterly demoralised we had to go back to the beginning and manually dredge another foot of soil. We were all in various stages of beriberi, pellagra, malaria, dengue fever and dysentery. A new illness had also started to ravage some unfortunate prisoners. Called tinea, it was nicknamed ‘rice balls’ because the hideous swelling had the tormenting tendency to attack, crack and inflame the scrotum.

  There was never any warning when the dysentery might come on. You could be on a pick when the urge would hit you, sending you scuttling into the jungle to do your business. You might get away with it or you might just get a beating to add to your woes.

  A Japanese officer sat on a rock in the shade, overlooking proceedings. If he saw something that he didn’t like, he would shout to guards who would come running into the area. You might be working away, completely innocent, and get an indiscriminate beating because of someone else’s minor misdemeanour. I came to know which POWs were the ones always getting into trouble and I steered clear of them as much as possible. I thought it took a strange man to always be at the receiving end of beatings and never learn to avoid them. Those men were
usually the ones trying to hide in the shade or those who would see a native walking through the jungle and try to barter with them. Always looking for an angle. I did not need those kind of people around me.

  By the end of the day we still had managed only a distance of twenty feet. But we had finally dug to the depth the engineers wanted, and just before dusk we wound our weary bodies back through the jungle to camp. I got my rice and water and went straight to the hut and collapsed, my whole body aching with pain. Hands, feet, back, arms, legs were all so sore, especially my back and legs. Eventually out of sheer exhaustion I fell asleep. But when I woke it didn’t feel like I had slept at all. I was incredibly lethargic and the pain had increased overnight. I was expecting a long sleep to rejuvenate me, to help me through the next day, which I had envisaged as bringing just the same amount of torture, if not worse. But I felt horrific and that is when I realised I was at rock bottom. I felt lower than the rats that had scuttled through our hut during the night. The whole camp was completely demoralised and dejected; you could see it in the empty darkness of men’s eyes. I was glad there were no mirrors – I really did not want to witness the state of my face and read the story of my own eyes.

  Nevertheless I heaved my ravaged body out of the hut and got my food. I half-ran to the queue for tools, desperate to be given a pickaxe and shovel once again. I had seen the poor devils struggling on the baskets the previous day and while I was in agony from a day on pick duties, at least my muscles would become accustomed to it. Better the devil you know.

  On the hike back to the railway the enormity of our task suddenly dawned on me. During the first day I remembered seeing a great expanse of solid rock in front of us. Only now did I realise that we were going to have to make our way through that slab of rock.