Descent into Hell: The fall of Singapore - Pudu and Changi - the Thai Burma railway

by Peter Brune

  The majority of the Australians in Pudu were survivors of Lieutenant-Colonel Anderson’s 2/19th, 2/29th, 4th Anti-Tank Regiment and 2/15th Field Regiment soldiers who had fought so tenaciously during the defence of Bakri and Anderson’s column’s fighting withdrawal to Parit Sulong. Of the eventual 70 2/19th Battalion inmates many were survivors of Captain Newton’s HQ Company A and B Echelon, which had been deployed around one and a half kilometres to the rear of 45th Brigade HQ. The Japanese had attacked and dispersed Newton’s rearward force prior to Anderson’s withdrawal. Others, such as Private Charles Edwards, had been left behind and eventually captured after fleeing the Parit Sulong Bridge area.

  After his epic anti-tank gun demolition of the Japanese tanks forward of the 2/29th’s cutting near Bakri, Sergeant Clarrie Thornton also found himself in Pudu. Thornton ‘hadn’t washed for weeks’, other than his ‘wash’ in the swamp during his exit with the 2/29th, and with his hip wound still oozing ‘a vile pus’, was hungry and smelt ‘like a pole cat’.5 Upon arrival, or soon after it, he was to find ten other members of his unit, including Sergeant Ken Harrison and Private Jim Kerr, who had had his seventeenth birthday while cut off in the jungle with members of the 2/29th Battalion.

  The 2/29th members of Pudu were to eventually number some five officers—including one company commander and the adjutant—and 44 other ranks. It is ironic that a number of these officers had been amongst those who had kept the few available compasses and maps to themselves in the swamp near Bakri, and yet had still been captured, while a substantial number of their mapless other ranks had regained their freedom. It is not surprising to record, therefore, that some of these officers were not respected by their men and thus could not perform as leaders in either Pudu or later on the Thai–Burma Railway.

  Notable among the 2/29th Battalion inmates were Lieutenant Ben Hackney and Private Reg Wharton, survivors of the massacre at Parit Sulong. Hackney had suffered a broken leg and numerous bayonet wounds but, according to the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment’s Sergeant Ken Harrison, his horrific physical and mental experience had ‘seemed only to make him grim and unyielding to the guards’.6 But eighteen-year-old Private Reg Wharton was a different story. Harrison observed that, ‘his physical wounds had healed but his eyes were sick and he trembled and the colour drained from his face at the sound of a Japanese voice or shout’.7 In Pudu, Hackney became Wharton’s self-appointed guardian.

  Russell Braddon was one of twenty gunners captured and sent to Pudu from the 2/15th Field Regiment; there were four 2/30th Battalion men from the rearguard party captured after the Gemas ambush; two 8th Division signallers were present; in all, there were five pilots; and, of critical importance to the prisoners of Pudu, were two officers from the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force and Lieutenant Ken Archer and six other ranks from the Federated Malay Straits Volunteer Force. However, the bulk of the occupants of the prison were British soldiers from such units as the Argylls, the Loyals, East Surreys and the Leicesters. During the early weeks of incarceration the morale of some of these troops was poor. As new groups arrived some of the Argylls were prone to demand any of their food supplies; stealing was rife, and most of the ‘good jobs’ had been taken by them.8

  The reader will recall that the commander of the 15th Indian Brigade, Brigadier Challen, had been captured by the Japanese attempting to withdraw from Sengarrang on the west coast of Johore on 27 January. And during that withdrawal, Challen had left Padre Duckworth behind in charge of the wounded. Five days later, it will be further recalled that amidst some controversy, the commander of the 22nd Indian Brigade, Brigadier Painter, had been forced to surrender his force near Sedenak, during fighting along the Trunk Road and railway. Brigadiers Challen and Painter, and Padre Duckworth, also found themselves in Pudu.

  It would seem that the strenuous withdrawals conducted by both brigadiers had taken their toll. The 2/19th Unit History would simply record their names and state that they were ‘isolated’ from their fellow Pudu inmates in a cell ‘in with the Japanese Headquarters’.9 Private Charles Edwards would remember seeing them together in a single cell.10 Russell Braddon was more forthright and would claim that:

  There was also one small room in which dwelt two British Brigadiers who seemed to hate all men of rank lower than Brigadier and who asserted their now non-existent authority by urinating anywhere except in urinals . . . and by demanding larger rations than anyone else because of their seniority.11

  If Padre Noel Duckworth had shown great courage and fortitude in his care and protection of the wounded before capture, then Pudu Prison was to prove his finest hour. A ‘rosy-cheeked little man’12 who had been the cox of the Cambridge Rowing Eight, Duckworth was to prove both the outstanding character and inspiration to all within the prison.

  The first weeks in Pudu may have been tough and humiliating, but they gave an immediate insight into present and future Japanese behaviour. To begin with, around 600 prisoners were crammed into the women’s civilian prison area—600 soldiers into a two-storey building built for twenty women internees in peacetime. The 2/19th’s Private Charles Edwards was amongst the first to arrive:

  We were given an area along the top . . . there were 22 steps up to it. It was sort of a verandah. And we laid shoulder to shoulder . . . and there was a guard at the top. By now you haven’t had a shave for weeks, your hair’s grown, your finger nails grow, dirt gets under your finger nails, you’re filthy, lousy . . . you stink, and you’re sweaty. It was just utter chaos . . . the benjos [Japanese term for toilet] were . . . about two metres away with a messing point—the area was so small. Flies, absolutely open to disease . . . We all had diarrhoea or dysentery. We had to bow to the guard and say, ‘benjo’ . . .

  Anyway, I came to my turn to go to the benjo, and I bowed—wouldn’t let me go. Bowed again, said, ‘benjo.’ ‘No!’ Three times I bowed. In the meantime I’d pooed my pants. So I went down to the benjo . . . I couldn’t wash them so I washed them off in the dust. The benjos were just roughly dug trenches. You’d do your benjo and just kick a bit of dirt over it. This awful smell . . . came back up, and I was embarrassed as could be about this stink, so I took my shirt off, and wrapped my pants in it, and lay down. Here’s where the good humour started. I was laying there for a few minutes, and one of the fellows put his head up and said, ‘Edwards, I know why you joined the army—for the glamour of the uniform!’13

  Private Edwards again:

  They had a cook house. They had got cooks, mainly I think from the 2/29th Battalion . . . I would say I was one of the first thirty [Australians] taken prisoner. I got there in time to get two prison dishes . . . they were like sponge cake dishes and the idea was that when the jail was a jail for civilian prisoners, they had a little slot under the door, that the warders slid this little dish in. I was lucky enough to get two of those. But some of the men were eating out of hub caps, coconut shells . . . it was just an absolute rabble—no discipline, no organization, nothing. You’d just go and get fed, and we Australians anyway, would just go and lie down, because the rations were so light, to conserve our energy, we’d just go and lie down.14

  On 14 February 1942, the 2/19th Battalion’s Captain Reg Newton arrived at Pudu with about 30 other prisoners from Malacca. His arrival triggered something in him that defies any adequate explanation. It was as if fate had decreed that a previously unpopular soldier and man had been made for the Pudu, Changi and Thai–Burma Railway experience—for this moment in time. Private Gus Halloran, Signals 2/19th Battalion:

  Frankly, initially, I used to hate his guts. He was full of pomposity . . . but I came to accept Newton as being a pretty good soldier. He’d been in the business a long time . . . he wasn’t terribly popular initially . . . he was bombastic in the extreme . . . a big bloke . . . good build, big voice . . .15

  Sergeant Jack de Loas, HQ Company, 2/19th Battalion:

  He was a very pig-headed man. He liked to have his own way, and everything he said, he thought was right, and he didn’t l
ike anyone else’s opinion about anything, and this is how he conducted his company actually . . . a very hard man to get on with.16

  Both of these soldiers had served with Newton in his HQ Company since the Battalion’s inception. And both are amongst no small sample of the Battalion during interviews with the author who witnessed that transformation in Pudu, or Changi, on the Railway, or during all three experiences. Sergeant Jack de Loas: ‘. . . he went from a bum to a gun [sic] . . . a different man altogether. He became quite servile; someone you could talk to . . . he had two different personalities. Something brought it out of him . . .’17

  After having endured a rough interrogation at the hands of the Kempeitai (the Japanese secret police) at Malacca, Newton took little time to impose his personality upon both the Japanese and the Argylls upon his arrival at Pudu. As he and his party entered the crowded area Charles Edwards observed that: ‘the Argylls wanted to take their stuff off them [and] Newton said, “And who the bloody hell are you!”’18 According to Newton, he demanded and received the Argylls’ names and further ‘asked them how long they had been in the Japanese Army’.19 The Argylls backed off, but the Japanese did not—the newly arrived Australian was comprehensively beaten.

  Newton made two fundamental changes almost straightaway. The first was organisation. Private Charles Edwards:

  By now, there were two or three Australian officers in there—probably more. But they just didn’t do anything. Within one day, Reg said, ‘I’m your senior officer . . .’ And he organized the officers and men into platoons . . . if he gave an order, that was it! And that was the reason why he got Pudu Jail into control . . . ‘we don’t want these bloody Japs to see us without some sort of discipline and order’. And he did it, and the men responded.20

  The second was respect from all ranks. From the time of his arrival, all prisoners were given an equal share of the meagre ration—totally without prejudice and with all meals served in public—with officers served last. Russell Braddon noted that this was ‘a point of etiquette which I saw in no other camp . . .’21 If Braddon had served later in Newton’s ‘U’ Battalion on the Thai–Burma Railway, or with Anderson Force in Burma, he would have noted the phenomenon again.

  The prisoners’ diet took only a matter of weeks to affect their already fragile health. It consisted of rice and ‘cabbage water’, referred to in some accounts as ‘rice and vegetable stew’, and occasional sparse amounts of dried fish. This diet lacked the vitamins B1 and B2, which caused two afflictions: ‘rice balls’ and ‘happy feet’. ‘Rice balls’ began as an uncomfortable chafing of the genitals and scrotum which then often spread down the thighs. After some time, this discomfort led to a splitting of the skin, weeping and rawness of the flesh. Private Charles Edwards remembered putting ‘coconut oil on it, but it used to itch like anything, and the more you scratched it the worse it got, and we walked around with our legs spread’.22 ‘Happy feet’ was another condition caused by the same lack of B2. The prisoner experienced sharp, excruciating stabbing pains in the soles of his feet which denied him sleep, caused him to wander around endlessly seeking relief that rarely came, and eventually caused weight loss, sometimes blindness, and in many cases, he seemed to age. Braddon recalled young soldiers who ‘became suddenly, in physique and expression, old men—shrunken and desperate’.23

  The senior medical officer in Pudu was Captain Collins of the Indian Medical Service. To assist him he had but two British medical officers and a few of his own staff. Their equipment was negligible and drugs non-existent. The period spent by the inmates in the women’s prison area was dominated by widespread dysentery, which was caused predominantly by the closeness of the latrines, the multitude of flies, and the enforced poor hygiene of the horribly inadequate ‘hospital area’—the concrete floor of the former kitchen. Here the patients lay shoulder to shoulder, suffering from their stinking, infected wounds or the passing of frequent, loose and blood stained stools that caused the Japanese to make great haste through the area.

  The truth is that this shameful state of affairs was utterly unnecessary. The prisoners’ lack of the vitamins B1 and B2 could have been easily averted by a small ration of bran, unpolished rice, yeast, or small doses of marmite—all readily available. And there existed no small supplies of the miracle cure for dysentery, which was the drug emetine hydrochloride. It could be taken either orally by tablet or by injection, and later it was to be procured only on the black market with large sums of money and entailing incredible risk-taking. The Japanese were to condemn hundreds and hundreds of POWs to death by withholding it in a whole host of camps. Faced with this multitude of ills, the medical staff in Pudu could only crudely scrape wounds of their infection and, as frequently as possible, wash their patients’ bodies of their filth. For the killer called dysentery, they could only prescribe limited courses of Epsom salts, which, it was hoped, would literally flush the germ out of an intestine already heaving its contents through almost non-stop bowel motions. The deaths in Pudu mounted. On 20 March 1942 alone, twenty men died.

  Despite repeated requests for medicines, improved rations and the right to occupy the remainder of the empty prison, the Japanese steadfastly refused all pleas. However, Pudu’s commandant did eventually grant one concession. In a cruel response to repeated demands for meat, he allowed Captain Collins and ten on-duty Australians to travel by truck to gather, as Newton recorded, ‘all the meat you want’.24 They drove to Port Sweetenham where the Australian Government had built an elaborate and expensive cold store for the AIF. As they approached the building the stench of rotten meat dashed their hopes. The refrigeration plant had been destroyed by the British and the doors left open. Newton would later record that: ‘Colonel Collins had a few mutton carcasses, all in cheese cloth, brought out and found that the bones were covered with a thin sliver of meat and the bulk of the carcass a greyish green decomposed mess.’25 Taking the dictum ‘waste not want not’ to its extreme, Collins had a number of carcasses taken back to Pudu where the foul meat was scrapped off, and, knowing full well that the remaining meat around the bone would more than likely induce vomiting, still fed it to his patients. After a number of ‘stews’ some men managed to keep small amounts of the vile meal down.

  Two events then radically changed the fortunes of all ‘Puduites’. The first was the eventual employment of work parties in Kuala Lumpur, and the second was the opening of the gaol proper to inmates on 20 April 1942.

  Soon after the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, the Japanese realised—as they did all over their conquered lands—that they possessed a ready-made and cheap labour force. In their eyes it was also disposable. They now utilised it by sending work parties out for labouring tasks such as clearing debris around Kuala Lumpur and undertaking menial tasks normally assigned to Japanese other ranks. The Australians proved most proficient—in all POW situations—in what was termed ‘scrounging’. Across a multitude of interviews, the term ‘stealing’ was almost resented by veterans, particularly with regards to work parties in Singapore. The act of ‘scrounging’ was merely the taking back of goods that were considered ‘British’ property, or the just and proper procurement of rations and equipment that any decent master would have granted his captives—it was always ‘scrounging’, never stealing.

  If the Australians displayed a talent for scrounging, then a number of British subjects who had resided in prewar Malaya and Singapore perhaps as planters, engineers or businessmen were to prove invaluable. Pudu’s Lieutenant Ken Archer was an example. While on a work party in Kuala Lumpur, Archer made contact with a former Indian employee named Paddy Martin, who in turn met with a Dr Gomez, a friend of Archer’s. The resulting trickle of drugs from Gomez to Martin were handed over to Archer’s men at the Central Market, which was about three kilometres from Pudu. When you walk through that market in Kuala Lumpur, it becomes immediately obvious as to how easy such a handover would have been. And then there was the opportunity to buy and sell goods. The original building st
ill exists with its multitude of busy and compact stalls. But the problem was not the receiving of goods but their passage through searches at the Pudu gates. Archer would later observe that:

  Looking back on all the happenings of that period strikes me forcibly how incredibly lucky we were to get away with as much as we did over such an extended period. We would not have been able to get anything in at all only for my four lads . . . who took all the risks in getting the medicines etc into the jail . . .26

  The prisoners of Pudu were finally allowed to occupy the whole of the main gaol on 20 April 1942. This move saw the Australians assigned to the north-eastern wing; the Chinese dissidents the north-western; the Scots the ‘elongated centre’ portion of the gaol; the other British troops in the south-eastern wing; and the officers occupied the south-western wing, with the senior officers housed in the condemned cells at the end. Initially there were six men to a cell but after further requests, the Japanese allowed all of the cells to be occupied on all floors, which allowed for three men per cell. The hospital patients were now transferred from the cramped and filthy kitchen floor in the female section—and its accompanying latrines—to the workshop building on the eastern side of Pudu between the Scottish and Australian wings. Still without such rudimentary items as instruments and beds, the doctors could now at least enhance the comfort and basic hygiene of their patients.