The Forgotten Highlander

by Alistair Urquhart

  The Japanese never allowed us to speak while working. You had to speak with your head down, in hushed tones, to someone, ‘Hey, slow down mate. You’re making it worse for all of us.’

  While I could successfully fake the amount of effort I was putting in on pick and shovel duty, I couldn’t escape the toil of carrying rocks in the baskets. It was the most difficult task. You had to be on the move all day, knees buckling under the weight, often down steep inclines. It was especially difficult during the monsoon season and caused more injuries than anything else.

  Each day the Japanese increased our task. We had managed twenty feet the day before so today they wanted twenty-five feet. I whispered to the guys in my work party, ‘Let’s not do it. Let’s go slow.’

  They all agreed. We went on a go-slow all day, chuckling to ourselves as the shadows lengthened. By the time it got dark we were a little over halfway through what they wanted us to do. But the plan backfired. Instead of returning to camp at 6 p.m., the soldiers set up arc and carbide lamps, bamboo fires, containers filled with diesel fuel, oil and hessian wicks, anything they could lay their hands on, to keep us there well after nine in the evening, until we had finished the task.

  No matter what time of the year, summer or winter, it was always dark by the time we got back to camp. Most evenings men would gather outside the huts and chat before they hit the hay. I would occasionally join them but I would stand on the fringes and not say anything. There was not much to chat about, although a lot of men were married and would talk about their families back home. These slightly older men in their thirties and forties seemed to survive in much greater numbers. Surprisingly it was the young men who died first on the railway. Perhaps the older ones were stronger emotionally. Perhaps with families they had more to live for. I sometimes wondered if I would die without having a family and without having had the chance to live a life, and then quickly try to banish these thoughts before getting my head down.

  The huts teemed with bloodsucking bed bugs that would emerge just before dawn to torment us. We could never eliminate them; we had no chemicals or anything like that. When you caught them and crushed them they smelled absolutely disgusting. After a few weeks of being eaten alive by bugs while sleeping on the floor of the hut, I decided to try a night sleeping outside. I did not know what would happen to me if I did but I judged it was worth the chance of being bashed by the guards. I always slept near the front of the hut, third man in on the right, and sneaked out during the night, careful not to make a noise, around the side of the hut. I lay down in the dirt. It was undulating but soft and cool. The stars were out and the high sky seemed to muffle the constant malariainduced moaning of men and the tormented cries brought on by nightmares. The jungle noises by now had lost their edge for me and I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke I joined the breakfast queue, feeling much more sprightly and relaxed than I had after sleeping in the packed and restless hut. The unbroken rest would pay dividends during a day on the railway. I slept outside most nights from then on. Strangely nobody commented on it and no one copied me.

  There were some, however, who got up in the night to stretch their restless feet. It was quite normal for men to walk outside and find a cool spot, some wet leaves or damp soil, to cool their ‘happy feet’ – the name we gave to the very painful burning sensation caused by beriberi, which was brought on by acute vitamin deficiency.

  A full-time burial party of six men now worked in the camp. It was comprised of the same six souls, who never went out to work on the railway. While digging graves in the jungle was by no means easy work, it was easier, physically at least, than being on the railway. But seeing those poor dead men must have taken a lot of strength and will from the gravediggers.

  Just to face the next day required a huge effort for all of us. You did not have the energy to do what our captors demanded. On around a thousand calories a day it was completely beyond our physical being. But it did not matter to them. There were thousands of POWs, not to mention the tens and hundreds of thousands of natives, waiting to replace us. We were slaves to the slaughter and utterly expendable to them.

  But even the Japanese eventually realised that some tasks were becoming beyond our physical capabilities. For the previous few months we had been manually dragging huge teak logs to be used as railway sleepers. When we first arrived it would take eight to twelve men to move these hardwood trunks but as we became weaker it took twenty or thirty men to edge them into place. After a while the soldiers introduced two elephants to take over that task, to increase productivity. I had seen elephants when the circus came to Aberdeen and up close these beasts were equally impressive and intimidating. It was pleasing to see them in action, knowing our backs were being saved for another day, but their presence only added to the overall danger of railway life. The logs hung on steel chains around the elephants’ necks. The animals moved them easily but they would swing around dangerously, causing a lot of accidents and broken bones and taking out plenty of men.

  My army-issue clothes, shorts and shirt had long since rotted from my frame. In a bid to retain my remaining dignity, I resorted to wearing a ‘Jap-happy’, a simple loincloth that had become popular among the men. It consisted of a long piece of white linen approximately six inches wide. Two pieces of tape or string attached to the ends meant you could tie it around your waist, while the rest of the material was drawn from behind under your groin to cover your bits. The loose end just flapped down in front of you. It would win no fashion awards but it did the job and was surprisingly comfortable. Otherwise I was naked. The more naked I was, the cleaner I felt. But the filth, dirt, crawling lice, the itch, smell and loss of all freedom and dignity were hard for any proud man to bear.

  The wall of rock that had started off four hundred yards in front of us was getting closer every day. The thought of using pickaxes, hammers and chisels on this great slab of limestone gave me the horrors. I knew people were dying around me on the railway but I didn’t really want to know. It was too dispiriting. It was difficult to judge the full toll of casualties and by this stage I had become so self-obsessed, in a true mental battle just to get through each day. I had very few friends at Hellfire Pass and most of us were the same. We all worked so hard that, just trying to survive, each person became more and more insular as it became more difficult. It required a superhuman effort to make it to the end of each day. Strangely the less we talked to each other, the more we talked to ourselves. Nearly all of the prisoners talked to themselves and I was no exception. Every morning I would tell myself over and over, ‘Survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day.’

  Occasionally, often with bizarre timing, I would have flashbacks to funny incidents from my childhood. Several men reported the same thing. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, we would be transported back in time, an astonishing and vivid experience. It must have been the mind’s way of coping with the extreme stress. In my case Auntie Dossie would often appear. Images of Dossie doing crazy things would prompt me to great outbursts of hilarity to the point where I would be laughing out loud, tears tumbling down my cheeks. Even though most prisoners talked to themselves, men stared at me in alarm.

  ‘What the hell are you laughing at?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I would reply, trying to regain my composure.

  ‘There’s nothing funny about this place.’

  By this time mental health had become a major issue on the railway. We all suffered from depression. Men were taking their own lives. All along the railway men cut their own throats, put their heads on the railway line and simply walked into the jungle to die. Many developed the ‘atap stare’ and just looked intently at the thatched roof of the hut – death soon followed. Others went mad because of medical conditions caused by vitamin deficiencies and some just gave up, losing their minds and their self-control. They would fight with anyone over nothing at all, throwing punches, biting and kicking. They needed to be controlled physically but just could not be calmed down. It came to the point where so
mething drastic had to be done to prevent innocent men being killed by deranged fellow prisoners, some of whom had reverted to animal instincts. The decision was made to build our own lunatic asylum to cage these poor souls.

  With the agreement of the Japanese, the burial party built two six-foot-square bamboo cages. The ‘madmen’ could stand or lie down in these, just ten feet from my hut, and they had a bench to sit on. They received food and water but sadly were largely ignored. At night it was awful to hear them in the darkness jabbering and screaming, throwing themselves at the cage sides. The men who went in there never came out alive. Death would have been welcome for them. It was a dreadful thing to see our fellow beings caged like animals but what else could we do?

  By now the lack of food at Kanyu I had become a major issue. Only those on work parties received rations. The sick were not given any food so ours had to be divided up so they could have some. The more sick men there were, the less food I got as a worker. It was a terrible situation.

  The Japanese decided how many bags of rice we required but the way in which it was distributed was up to our officer. I didn’t know how he came to his decisions; we just hoped he was fair.

  When the Japanese felt we had been especially disrespectful or dishonest, we would be punished collectively with further reductions to our meagre rations. This happened only on rare occasions, not through any good grace on their behalf, but because the human body simply cannot operate on anything less than the rice we received.

  I was really beginning to struggle. While my muscles had become used to the rhythm of work, I had become very ill and weak. Due to the lack of vitamin B in our plain rice diets, all of us had fallen victim to beriberi. In the long term it could be worse than dysentery or malaria. In the short term it gave me a swollen tummy and a tremendous pain in my joints, like a very bad toothache. My eyes too were beginning to give me trouble, stinging from the constant glare of the sun on the dirt and clay. The lack of vitamins entering my system worsened their state and I was lucky not to go blind, as others did. We called the blindness that sometimes came with beriberi, ‘camp eyes’, and lived in terror of going blind. At first men noticed their range of vision reduce to around ten metres and that everything was blurred. Then they would go blind altogether. The medics assured us it was temporary but I did not want to discover for myself. I also had very little chance of getting a proper sleep and the nightmares of surrender at Fort Canning continued as terrifyingly real as ever.

  As if all this was not bad enough I started to suffer from kidney stones, brought on by constant dehydration. I had first had an attack of those devilishly painful daggerballs during my early days in Singapore while still with the Gordons. Downtown when they struck, the pain doubled me over and caused me to actually shout out in public. I didn’t know what was happening so I paid a visit to the Alexandra Hospital. They told me to drink lime juice once a day and as much water as I could. Now with mere droplets dribbling past my cracked lips, the kidney stones struck often and with excruciating regularity. With no pethidine or morphine it was sheer hell. A worse pain I have never experienced.

  Kidney stones tortured me for the next few years as a POW. The pain was so bad that I started to pray, the first time I had ever lent on God’s ear in earnest. Even though I had to attend Bible class with the Boy Scouts, I never believed in a divine entity and was especially sceptical since I was forced to go to the classes. Gradually the more I suffered and the more evils I witnessed, the more I began to believe. I turned to God several times. Often I felt my prayers went unanswered. But I somehow lived through this madness and I think that someone must have been listening.

  Faith in God could not prevent the beatings on the railway, which were totally routine. The threat of a rifle butt across your head or bamboo cane across your body forever loomed large. For no reason at all wire whips would lash into our backs and draw blood. Some guards would creep up on you and strike the open tropical ulcers on your legs with a bamboo stick, causing intense agony. Often they delivered these beatings with such brutality and swiftness that you did not see them coming or even know what they were for. Sometimes you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Korean guards took a certain pleasure in the beatings. They had express permission to kill prisoners without any reference to higher authority. But most of them would be satisfied to stop at the sight of trickling blood. The beatings, no matter how frequent, never got any easier to take. In fact they got tougher. Each time I took a beating it chipped away, not just at my bones and waning muscles, but at my will to endure them. The dilemma was whether to swallow your pride by going down at the first blow or to retain some of your dignity by taking several blows and standing up to them. If you refused to show that their blows were hurting you, they would fly into rages and the beating could be severe, even fatal.

  From an early period the Japanese camp commandant, whom I called the ‘Black Prince’, became ever more inventive with his punishments. I could not imagine a more sadistic and evil person on the planet. The more heinous the so-called ‘crime’, the sicker the sentence. Under his instructions the guards had free rein. If they felt you deserved something more than a beating, it meant taking you aside and making you pick up a large boulder. For the rest of the day you had to hold the rock over your head in the blazing heat. Within minutes your already weak and malnourished arm muscles would start to twitch and fail you. Before long you would have to drop the rock, usually the size of a rugby ball or football, mindful you did so without letting it fall on your own skull. When you let go the guards would pounce – fists, rifle butts and boots flailing into your body until you picked the rock up again. It would go on all day. And if the Japanese officer did not think you had learned your lesson sufficiently, the punishment would be repeated back at camp.

  The Black Prince was a true bastard. Others called him the ‘Kanyu Kid’ but I thought my name suited Lieutenant Usuki really well. He was darker than the other Japanese soldiers and strutted around like royalty, his beefy gut protruding from beneath a shabby uniform. He despised us totally. We were scum to him. His absolute power over us and capacity for pitiless brutality made him so terrifying to me.

  Long before our decision to incarcerate crazy men, the Japanese had built their own cages. The ‘black holes’, as they were known, were a higher form of punishment. Those unfortunate enough to be locked inside the semi-subterranean cages, proportioned so you could not stand, lie down or even kneel fully, would be kept in for a month typically. Corrugated iron and metal covered the bamboo to intensify the heat and deprive victims of air and any cooling breeze. Few who went in came out alive.

  The Black Prince’s right-hand man was Sergeant Seiichi Okada, known to us Brits simply as ‘Dr Death’. Short and squat he took the roll-calls and carried out all of the camp commandant’s orders. Presumably he was more educated than the other Japanese or Koreans but he was evil to the marrow. Ruthless in the extreme he loved tormenting us. He especially revelled in a sickening brand of water torture. He had guards pin down his hapless victim, before pouring gallons of water down the prisoner’s throat using a bucket and hose. The man’s stomach would swell up from the huge volumes of water. Okada would then jump up and down gleefully on the prisoner’s stomach. Sometimes guards tied barbed wire around the poor soul’s stomach. Some men died and a few survived. I witnessed this disgusting display only once but it was once too often. Dr Death also took great delight in hurling stones and rocks down on prisoners from a lofty vantage point.

  When a prisoner was caught stealing from the Japanese officers’ storeroom, or if a man turned on a guard, they received the next grade on the sliding scale of Japanese torture. I called it the ‘Indian rope trick’, one favoured by Indians in the old cowboy films. The helpless prisoner would be tethered spread-eagled to the ground. They wrapped wet rattan – the same string-like bark used to lash our bamboo huts together – around his ankles and wrists, and tied him to stakes in the ground. As the rattan dried, the
ties would slowly gash into the skin, drawing blood and tearing into sinew and cartilage as it pulled limbs from their sockets. It reduced even the toughest men to agonised screaming, and they would be there all day. I would be almost glad to get out of camp in the mornings just to avoid hearing their cries of unbridled pain. It was a way of torturing all of us. Often when we returned from a day on the railway the men would no longer be there. Nobody asked where they had vanished to. I certainly did not want to know. After such a horrific ordeal death at the end of a Japanese bayonet would have been welcomed.

  The worst of the Korean guards was the ‘Mad Mongrel’. He was slightly more Western-looking than the rest, with a hard, angular face. A lot of prisoners struggled to tell the difference between the guards, who no doubt thought we all looked the same too. But I could tell and the more time you spent with them, the better you knew which ones to try and avoid. The Mad Mongrel patrolled the railway with a bamboo cane, striking out indiscriminately and often. He had been chosen by Dr Death and the Black Prince for his exceptional cruelty and sadism. On the railway their favourite punishment was getting us to kneel on gravel with ramrod-straight backs. If we sagged, blows to the kidneys straightened up our failing frames.

  One day on the railway the Mad Mongrel saw something in my work party that riled him. Before I knew anything was wrong he charged up to me and slammed his rifle butt into my forehead. It knocked me clean off my feet. I was seeing stars but despite being dazed and shaken I got up quickly, to avoid being kicked to a pulp on the ground. I still bear the horseshoe scar, a lifelong gift from the Mad Mongrel.

  Within those first few months my trusty army boots that had done me so proud since being issued back at the Bridge of Don barracks finally succumbed to the rigours of the railway. As I negotiated a slope with two baskets filled with rocks on my shoulders, the sole came away from the upper, sending me head over heels down the hill, rocks bouncing out of the baskets and crashing on top of me. I shielded my head with my arms and when I dusted myself off saw that both of my boots had split in two. Many of the men were already going barefoot and it was something I had long feared. I tried to repair the boots by lashing them together with a piece of rattan but it did not last.