by Loet Velmans
“I envy you,” Frans once said. I was short, reserved, self-effacing, and easily lost in the crowd. It helped. I was not singled out for too many beatings.
A strong bond grew between us. We took our meals together; at night I could hear him snore or feel him toss restlessly. Yet we were not tempted to experiment in any sexual way. Our meager diet must have had something to do with it, weakening our sex drive; but a sense of propriety held us back as well. Occasionally I would wake up in the early morning with an erection, as in former days. But that would soon vanish, together with its accompanying sexual fantasy, which usually focused on Marie-France or some girl from the distant past but which could never be transferred to the miserable, abused, and battered creature with whom I sometimes lay back to back.
Frans’s size proved to be his undoing. He was taken out of our group and selected to join the first work party that left Changi. His group, we were told, was going on a permanent mission to an unknown destination. He was the first of my friends to die on the railroad.
Driven by adolescent hyperactivity and a need for stimulation, I conceived the idea of starting a restaurant. The goal was to raise money for the purchase of medicines, since our stock was running low. I presented a proposal that was sketchy but basically sound to two British officers, one of whom was in charge of drug supplies, the other of miscellaneous entertainment projects. It was the first business presentation I had ever made in my life. I felt elated when I obtained the go-ahead. A site was selected. We furnished it with long benches and a few small tables under a large bamboo overhang. Half a dozen cooks working under a Dutch Eurasian chef cooked over open fires. Supplies were limited: bananas, rice, coconuts, sugar, salt, oil, and a few eggs. Consequently the menu was limited as well; our most popular item was ongol ongol, a jellied and slippery pudding made of coconut milk, coconut rind, and sugar. Our regular camp kitchen hardly ever provided sweets; we all craved sugar. It came as no surprise, therefore, that every evening a long line would form in front of our cafe’s cashier, who used an old cigar box as his cash register. We had to impose a limit of two ongol ongols per person. The rest of the menu, which might feature a minuscule portion of banana fritters or saucer-sized mini-omelettes with a pinch of salt, was dependent not only on what ingredients were available but also on the whim of the chef, a young man of great talent and a dazzling smile. I named the restaurant the Flying Dutchman.
It became fashionable to have a snack at the new café/restaurant after our meager six o’clock supper and before the nine o’clock curfew. The venture became much more popular than expected. It was all the rage to have dessert at our place, where one could chat, nibble, and listen to a variety of entertainers, accompanied by a guitar player.
Meanwhile, the black market was thriving—and expanding. With most watches gone, Parker pens, cigarette lighters, cuff links, and silver pencils became popular with the Japanese. Working outside the perimeter of our jail, members of the work parties stole whatever they could get their hands on: screwdrivers and other small tools, lightbulbs and flashlights. They became very skilled at snatching salable merchandise right from under the noses of their Japanese guards and finding ingenious ways to hide these in their clothing or mess tins until the time came to hand over the loot to their equally clever fences: their Singaporean Chinese black-market contacts.
A good thing finally came to an end. In the last months of 1942 and the first four months of 1943, more and more POWs, my original Java contingent among them, were sent out on successive rail transports. Because I was “manager” of the Flying Dutchman, I was considered staff and, at first, exempted from the regular deportation of prisoners destined for “up country.” The Japanese told us that we were being sent to work in the north, but supplied no further details. Those of us still in Changi, including hundreds of Allied officers, were organized into a group designated as H-Force.
By May 1943, our restaurant had shut down. There were neither enough cooks nor enough customers left. My unit, including the entire staff of the Flying Dutchman, was on one of the last trains out. Except for the hospital, Changi was now virtually empty.
My bunkmate George stood beside me, as he had at every roll call in Changi, while a Japanese soldier counted us for the last time in the place that had become home to us. George and I had never had much to say to each other. George looked like an old man to me. He must have been in his late twenties and had been deputy manager of a tea plantation in eastern Java. When we were finally told to pack up, he shaved off his mustache. “Too much work,” he explained. “Besides, I’m not going to survive.” He was in an almost constant state of depression. That was the main reason for our not getting along at first: to me, he was an old grouch; to him, I was the naive and eternal optimist.
By this time, however, we had gradually come to respect each other—George appreciated my energy, I his wide knowledge of botany, which he used to teach to a large class of POW students.
Whereas my attitude toward life was that the glass was half full, George’s glass was always half empty. It was a difference in outlook: the view of the “old” George versus that of the young nineteen-year-olds. I had become impatient with the men of experience in our midst (those in their thirties and early forties!), whom I dismissed for their lack of wisdom, loathed for their lack of optimism, and envied for their self-proclaimed maturity.
The train journey north, across the Malay Peninsula into Thailand, lasted four days and four nights. About thirty men were crowded into our freight car, which stank. Our light gear was piled in a corner. I sat in the center. At first I was jealous of the privileged few who had found a spot where they could rest their back against one of the sides of the car. We were so cramped for space that I soon found myself sitting back to back with George. It turned out that we could give each other some support; we now seemed to be better off and slightly less uncomfortable than those around the edge, who were now jammed into the sides and the doors. At infrequent stops we were allowed to relieve ourselves in ditches dug parallel to the track. We were fed twice a day: a bowl of rice and a soup of watery vegetables. Local vendors offered us bananas and pineapples, and our guards allowed us to make purchases. At one stop a generous group of men and women, members of Malaya’s Indian minority, brought us a gift of mangoes and rambutan, a delicious tropical fruit. It was a feast—the last we were to enjoy for a long time.
At first we were surprised that so few Japanese guards accompanied our transport. Evidently, the Japanese were confident that we would not contemplate an escape. In this, they turned out to be right, for although we talked about it, we were too weak, discouraged, and fearful to follow through.
As the journey progressed, conditions deteriorated. Many prisoners were suffering from diarrhea. The suffocating stench grew all but unbearable in the late afternoon, when the temperature had risen over the one-hundred-degree mark.
Toward the end of our journey we were bruised and aching all over from the jostling and jolting. The train made many sudden stops, for no apparent reason; then, just as unpredictably, it would lurch forward again. As the days passed, sitting and squatting became increasingly uncomfortable. It felt as if my back was broken. Added to the pain, thirst, and hunger was apprehension about what awaited us. We wanted the ride to be over. The sea voyage from Java to Singapore had taken an unexpected twist: it had ended in the Changi compound, where the living conditions were better than on Java. A similar fate might very well await us now. But we were nervous all the same.
Our final stop was Bangpong, a village in southern Thailand, about forty miles west of Bangkok. Here was the starting point of one of Japan’s major strategic undertakings: the construction of a 350-mile railroad through the jungle. It was to be a direct link between the ports of Thailand and the front in Burma. From there the Japanese aimed to conquer India. This was the infamous Thailand-Burma railroad—and we were to be the slave labor that built it, yard by yard, mile by mile, through an impenetrable jungle.
(In
1939 the Japanese had decided that, to ensure a successful invasion of India, their navy would have to exercise control over the waters west of Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. The Japanese navy had to provide guaranteed access to Rangoon, capital of Burma, the nearest major port to India, where huge Japanese armies and their materiel could come, and from which they could launch their offensive against the British in India. If a hitch occurred, it would be necessary to supply the invading army by rail from Bangkok. A railroad starting in Bangkok and leading through the Thai and Burmese jungles became Japan’s backup plan. Japanese engineers had estimated that it would require two years to build. After the Japanese lost the battle of Midway, the Japanese high command was compelled to conclude—and did so hesitatingly—that the Japanese fleet had failed to deliver; control of the sea routes leading to Rangoon had been lost. The railway now became the highest priority. The time for construction was cut in half: the engineers were given eighteen months to complete the project. A few months into the job, the deadline for completion was reduced even further, to just one year. It was decided that this could be accomplished through the use of a massive captive labor force composed of POWs and indigenous workers from the “liberated” Asian territories. At the same time, the use of captive Allied manpower solved a logistic problem that the Japanese had not anticipated—they had never expected to be saddled with such a large number of POWs who needed to be fed and guarded, putting a cumbersome burden on Japan’s shrinking wartime resources.)
When we got off the train, we entered a dramatically different world—poorer, dirtier, and smellier than anything I had seen in any of the towns and villages of Indonesia. Bangpong, the village through which we marched, did not contain a single proper building—each of its bamboo huts, along which we passed, was ramshackle. Everything looked filthy. We saw low huts with thinly thatched roofs of palm leaf that provided no protection from the tropical downpours. The earth was black and muddy; mangy dogs and cats moved about freely. When we got to the transit camp for the prisoners, we found that it was no improvement over the town. Inside our huts were thousands of mosquitoes hiding in the rafters, waiting for the right moment to bite. Clouds of blackflies and bluebottles hovered over shallow, unhygienic latrines. Our dwindling supply of cash was good for something at least; toward the beginning of our stay we were able to buy eggs and some fruit. Our large transit camp was also named Bangpong. Even though we had suffered hardship in Java and undernourishment in Changi, our physical surroundings there had been familiar: the overcrowded barracks had been of a roomy Western-influenced design and well constructed. This was different—a general sense of gloom descended on us.
My own dismay was mixed with curiosity; perhaps the scene did not fill me with as much gloom as it did many older POWs. But there was no good news—British POWs who told us that they were semipermanent staff expressed a sense of isolation that had not existed in Changi. We realized that we were now really in the middle of nowhere. Matters were only made worse when we were assured that there was no prospect of being sent to a place that would be any better. I consoled myself with the thought that the war would soon be over. This was easily done, considering the absence of news other than the Japanese propaganda reported in a Thai newspaper, which was sporadically smuggled into the compound. Apparently no one had yet dared to reassemble the radio receiver.
Back in Singapore, we had heard rumors about the labor camps—that life there was hard—but there had been no specific details. Within our first half hour in Bang-pom, we learned from the “staff” and from prisoners who had arrived a week before us that we would be working on a railroad that was far from finished; that “up country” there was even less food and fewer medicines; that the Japanese would make us work as hard as we could; that we would be beaten; and that many men had died. I had a few anxious moments, but those soon passed. The prospect of death was so unappealing that I chose to ignore it: life, I thought, was bound to go on somehow until my new and real life would start, after the war was over.
In all, the Japanese brought about 200,000 Malays, Tamils, Chinese, Javanese, and other natives of Indonesia to Thailand, together with 61,000 Allied POWs, to form a slave labor force numbering more than a quarter of a million men. Personally, I never met any of the Asians who labored on the railroad. But they were there all right. Their fate—in terms both of fatalities and of suffering—was even worse than that of the POWs. It has been estimated that the death rate among the hundreds of thousands of Asian workers on the Burma Road, many of them accompanied by their wives and children, was as high as 80 to 90 percent.
In Bangpong I met a Dutch acquaintance from Changi who had arrived two months earlier. Sam was a prosperous truck driver now. He boasted that he had even managed to gain weight since his Changi days. He told me how he traded contraband with yellow-robed Buddhist priests. Tools and other supplies vital to the construction of the railroad, he confessed, had a habit of disappearing from his truck into the jungle. The gang of junior Japanese officers who organized the operation rewarded the POWs participating in their racket with extra food supplies. “When you look beneath the surface,” Sam said, “you’ll find that the Japanese are even more corrupt than we are.”
His usual cargo was rice. Although the Japanese required a meticulous accounting of the number of bags he transported, there were ways and means, he said, to skim off a small quantity from a bag or two. He’d drop this priceless booty off at one of the POW kitchens. “I’m giving it to our own and to the Aussies,” he said. “Some of them limey cooks have sticky fingers. They have a habit of keeping the goodies for themselves.” Sam offered to arrange for me to join him and become a driver as well as a black marketeer. It was the only insurance policy, he claimed, against being sent on to Burma. “There’s cholera up there,” he said. “You should avoid those camps at all cost. You go up there, you’re as good as dead.” But Sam made me feel nervous, and I did not quite trust him. “I can’t drive,” I said. “I can teach you in an hour,” he said. But he could not persuade me. My longing for new adventures had left me; I preferred to stay with my friends and companions in H-Force. Also, I had grown accustomed to my friends, a group of men in whose midst I felt somewhat sheltered and protected.
But the encounter with Sam also left me numb. He painted a picture of cholera, famine, and brutality. He also brought me the news that Frans had died of amoebic dysentery shortly after his arrival in one of the work camps. He had been a champion to the end, Sam said. The most beaten-up prisoner of all.
A few days after our arrival in Bangpong we were told to pack our belongings. At midnight we were ordered to fall in and start marching. We passed through the gate in the flimsy fence around the camp of Bangpong, and on that first leg of our journey we marched for six or seven hours along a paved road. There were around two or three hundred prisoners, with half a dozen Japanese in front, an equal number walking alongside, and another five or six bringing up the rear. Although weakened, most of us were able to sustain the brisk pace set by our Japanese guards. But even on that first night’s relatively easy march, some POWs did not have the stamina to keep up. They were prodded and beaten by the Japanese rear guard. The Japanese had bayonets fixed to their rifles; some also carried bamboo clubs, which they used on the stragglers. We propped up our faltering colleagues as much as our guards would allow us to and carried their few belongings. The total distance covered that night was nearly twenty miles. At-one-and-a-half-hour intervals, we were given a ten-minute rest break.
By the second night the paved road had become a rain-soaked muddy trail. For the next couple of nights we walked two or three abreast. Then the road narrowed further, and we had to form a single line that snaked its way through the jungle. Our guards had disbanded into twos and threes and kept up the pace by yelling at us to move faster. Every once in a while a POW would sit down because he could not go on, or would stumble over a branch, or would simply stop, tensed up and near-petrified from exhaustion and the fear of another beating.
Whatever the cause that slowed us down, forcing a moment’s unauthorized rest, it enraged the Japanese. Cursing obscenities, one of them would push and elbow his way past us to reach the culprit and beat him to a pulp.
On the third day we had our first casualty. After the night’s march we were totally exhausted and laid ourselves to rest in the shade of the trees. One of the men had fallen asleep in an open clearing without noticing the rise of the burning sun. He died of sunstroke.
For five interminable nights we proceeded along a single, heavily trodden service road that was nothing but a slippery, overgrown footpath that other groups of POWs had taken before us. We walked parallel to rail beds that were under construction. On the last days our daylight hours were spent in huts intended for transients. These huts were adjacent to more permanent but equally rickety camps that were empty by day because their occupants, our POW colleagues, were out at work. Sometimes we could hear hammering in the distance. After trying to get some sleep in the heat and humidity of the day, we would continue on our laborious march.
It rained hard and steadily most of the time. Streams of water poured down on us from heavy tropical leaves. The ground was strewn with branches and large roots; we stepped across the charred remains of trees felled and burned to make room for the rail bed.
Near the end of our fourth night, we reached a breaking point. It was almost daybreak, and we were just coming to the end of an exhausting, wet, stop-and-go ordeal. The night’s march had seemed more difficult and tiring than any we had experienced before. We were ordered to get up again after just five minutes, five minutes short of the (bynow-established) ten-minute rest period we had grown to consider a rightful and nonnegotiable entitlement. Some of the men, completely exhausted, could not get back on their feet. Our Japanese guards flung themselves at them, screaming and kicking. I had already started to move but turned around and ran back to where the shouting and kicking was going on. Together with several others, I started yelling at the Japanese to stop. Either the same idea had come to all of us at the same time, or one man’s initiative had prompted a spontaneous reaction in the rest of us. We struck a militant posture. Our guards went on shouting at the top of their lungs. We were shouting, too.
