by Peter Brune
Pond recorded the inevitable, if late, Japanese response:
. . . eventually the Japanese military police became much concerned.
. . . Colonel Galleghan—the senior of our group of parties—was rebuked by the Japanese for lack of discipline and was told that officers would be held liable for failure of discipline.32
Criticism of Galleghan here would be unfair. But in the light of this incident, ‘Black Jack’s own treatment of officers such as ‘Weary’ Dunlop and ‘Roaring Reggie’ Newton for a supposed lack of discipline would seem hypocritical and unfair. Pond also clarifies another issue that saw a clash between Galleghan and Newton back in Changi in December 1942. Major Alan Thompson’s Changi diary for 21 December: ‘Return of Working Parties . . . A.I.F party of 1,200 march in. Discipline bad, party ate all its Red Cross supplies before returning.’33
Captain Reg Newton had commanded part of this group. According to Newton, ‘another donnybrook ensued’34 between the two headstrong commanders, with Newton claiming that the Changi units had been given their Red Cross supplies and that—pointedly—Galleghan had done the same thing when on a working party with his men. Lieutenant-Colonel Pond had also handed out his Red Cross supplies. Pond: ‘Red Cross comforts were received on the 4th October 1942 . . . Distribution of the main items was arranged on a weekly basis to last six months.’35 No commander or POW could possibly know whether he was destined to return to Changi, or whether he might be shipped and entrained elsewhere, or, for that matter, whether any issued Japanese supplies might be confiscated upon re-entry into Changi. It seems that all units in Changi and around Singapore consumed their Red Cross supplies, but that the incident was used by Galleghan to admonish only one commander: Newton.
The last issue of importance to our journey from Changi and its work parties to the Thai–Burma Railway is a brief insight into leadership in the former and how it affected the latter. We have noted Lieutenant-Colonel Galleghan’s order in early August 1942 when in command of Changi that area commanders were to supply the names of majors and captains who ‘were physically fit for field officer duty’, and that officers might be required to swap formations in order to structure the ‘force’.36 We have also recorded his attempt(s) to remove ‘Weary’ Dunlop from his command because he was a ‘non-combatant’ officer. Further, we have identified the at times aloof, self-indulgent manner in which some Changi officers conducted their commands and lived. Although not applicable to all officers, Galleghan’s notion that commanders chosen for Thai–Burma Railway battalions should be from field officer ranks only would prove a mistake. Lieutenant-Colonel Pond made a critically important observation as he left his work party camp: ‘On the evacuation of the area camps, the Havelock Road area was left very dirty by Fairley’s party and Quick’s lines were shocking, so that 250 other men were requested to clean up. Indians then moved in.’37
The above will prove but one example of flawed command choices. If Major Quick’s lines were ‘shocking’ on a Singapore work party, his chances of effectively commanding troops on the Thai–Burma Railway—where hygiene standards and camp organisation were to prove a matter of life and death—were slim. Another commander in identical circumstances would view the Japanese and his selection of officers for his party in an entirely different manner—with very different results.
The Australian POW experience on the Thai–Burma Railway forged many bonds. Sergeant Bert Donaldson, 2/19th Battalion: ‘My POW mates are more important to me than my own siblings, my own brothers and sisters. I’m more concerned about their livelihood than I am about my brothers and sisters. Seems a bit hard doesn’t it, but it’s true.’38 Most Australians have some concept of the brutality, the hunger, the slavery, the mateship and the sacrifice on the Railway. And much of this legitimate legend is embodied in the story of that great Australian ‘Weary’ Dunlop, and the symbolic stage or setting for that adulation has been Hellfire Pass. We now turn to a much wider Railway study, and particularly to the impact of a number of commanders upon their men’s chances of survival. There are new heroes—some commanders, others doctors and their orderlies—and they figure in equally dramatic situations.
PART IV
THE THAI – BURMA RAILWAY
. . . the gods don’t give a damn
Human decency is not enough to provide a shield, it can
only be its own reward—the gods don’t give a damn
Ian Denys Peek, One Fourteenth of an Elephant
27
THE KILLER CYCLE
‘You’re in this other world . . . it’s not this world, it’s not the world you know, or anybody who wasn’t with us knows.’1 The will to survive in Sergeant Frank Baker’s ‘other world’ is a powerful human emotion. It inspires the very best qualities in most men, but in sheer desperation, the worst in others; but the will rarely wavers. We have seen soldiers such as Private Paddy O’Toole going under the wire at Changi and scrounging on the docks at Keppel Harbour. Scrounging and trading on the Railway would be far harder. Paddy O’Toole:
Green stuff see! I used to eat grass . . . bloody green stuff! Horses live on it, cows live on it! It’s not goin’ to do me any bloody harm! Mind over matter. Think positive all the time. I always said to myself and to my mates, I said, ‘Look, if there’s one man going to get out of this to tell a fuckin’ story, it’s going to be Paddy O’Toole!’2
Warrant Officer Bert Mettam: ‘You couldn’t survive without a mate. You had to have someone there who could help you.’3 Private Wal Williams:
See . . . if a bloke got crook, and he just lay there, if no bastard came near him, mate, he was curtains! . . . You’ve gotta go and speak to him, you’ve got to go and sort of buck him up. ‘How [are you] going, mate? You’ll be right, keep getting that bloody rice into you!’ The dixie’d be there. ‘Come on, get it into you!’
‘Oh Jesus, I can’t eat it!’
Eat it!4
Your mates will literally force feed you your rice today, tomorrow, and the next day, and if you have dysentery they’ll also try and make you comfortable by washing the shit off you, your clothes, and the bamboo floor surrounds, over and over again if necessary. When a move to another camp is on they’ll help you there and carry your gear. And if a POW succumbs he will rarely die alone—there are those who perform death watches. The phenomenon of mateship played a powerful part in enhancing survival on the Thai–Burma Railway.
While there was no such thing as a good day in this ‘other world,’ some were better than others. Captain Adrian Curlewis, diary, 29 June 1943:
Two km again to carry vegetables and food for Nips. We still live on dry rice three times a day. Bought a cup of gula malacca [like golden syrup] with a borrowed dollar to flavour the meal. At night was given a cup of coffee by Brigade boys with gula. Heaven! A good night, feeling well in spite of everything. I volunteer for everything and simulate content [sic] and happiness.5
But this existence also has its sinister side. Curlewis, 30 August 1943:
God, how weary I am of squalor, mankind and illness. I live in a tattered tent with nine officers too ill to work, who talk of nothing but their illnesses (my breakfast in the dark as they lie in bed accompanied by boasts of the number of their visits to the latrines at night). My day is amongst foul-mouthed animals who have lost self respect and decency, who rob their mates, who cry to me for help on all occasions and then let me down by lying. Razors have been sold for food, brushes and combs gone, soap almost unobtainable, clothes in rags and dirty, tempers on edge and hope gone. Personally I have succeeded by weary hours of sewing, scrubbing and will power to keep a certain amount of appearance. As I lie now in the tent five officers are sitting on their haunches just gazing at nothing or talking in faded voices—men without hope or, if they have hope, they are fighting for health to get them home. Two are cholera convalescents. Have just supervised 240 men (skeletons) drawing their lunch issue of rice; blasphemy, flies, dirt. God, how I hate it all!6
There were many ways of d
ying on the Railway: dysentery, beriberi, pellagra, malaria, oedema and diarrhoea. And then there’s the seemingly harmless scratch that slowly becomes a creeping, foul, pus-ridden nightmare that envelops the leg or foot, sometimes causes an amputation, and sometimes death. But the mere mention of the word ‘cholera’ would constitute the ultimate form of terror for both the POW and his guards. You can have a mate who is here now but soon unrecognisable and gone within hours. Sergeant Frank Baker worked in a cholera tent:
With the loss of fluid you cramp up, and they cramp and double up and their face becomes . . . this gaunt, shrunken face with their eyes sticking out, and the shuddering . . . that sets in with the limbs . . . it’s cramps . . . it’s serious cramps. . . .you’re in pain all the time and you’re exuding fluids from both ends—it’s the most frightful disease! . . .
I never put my fingers in my mouth for years after I came back. I would not put my fingers in my mouth for anything . . . you knew that that finger could kill you . . . you didn’t handle your food, you didn’t handle anything that went into your mouth . . . habitual.7
For the majority of POWs, a cholera case, whether he was alive or dead, was to be avoided at all costs. Private Jack Coffee:
. . . he [an NCO] came, he says, ‘Look, I want four blokes for a light duties job.’ He said, ‘I’ll make sure you get full rations.’ That sounds good, didn’t have to go to work that day. He said, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ The morning comes. ‘What’s the job?’ His name was _______ He’d died. [Coffee goes on in tears.] He says, ‘Here he is over here, you’ve got to go and burn him.’ I said, ‘Jesus!’ It’s not something you do every day of the week. The four of us, we went out, ‘What are we going to do?’ So we built a pit, filled it with bamboo, and set him alight. But as the time went on, it was a bloody disgrace [the failure of the cremation] . . . while I was looking at it, another bloke had just died so they cart him up and, ‘One, two, three,’ They threw him up on the pyre . . . it was pretty horrific.8
At a number of camps along the Railway the cremation pyres would burn all night, during the day and all night again, and the distorted, wasted corpses would be burned in their dozens. The lingering image of risus sardonicus—the pre-death sardonic grin caused by spasms of the facial muscles—and those roaring infernos would haunt observers long after captivity. And today, over 70 years on, at some of the sites where those fires burnt, the ground is still discoloured.
When the Japanese invaded British Burma in December 1941, they sought to gain access to its key raw materials of oil and wolfram (tungsten), and also to cut the road from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in Yunnan province in China, which was the only Allied supply link to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Army. The offensive began on 16 December 1941 from southern Thailand and had the initial objectives of the airfields at Victoria Point and Mergui. Japanese forces subsequently moved through Three Pagodas Pass and Mea Sot and pushed on to Rangoon (Yangon), which fell on 9 March 1942. The next month Lashio was captured and the Allies had thus lost the prized Burma Road. By the end of May 1942 the British had been forced back over the Indian border.
The naval battles of the Coral Sea (5–8 May 1942), and Midway (4–6 June 1942) redressed the balance of naval power in the Pacific War. The Japanese had relied chiefly on their merchant shipping to supply their Burma army via a long and tenuous line of supply down the Malay Peninsula and around the Straits of Malacca to Rangoon. Further, that shipping needed at least some naval cover. A railway from Nong Pladuk in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma would greatly alleviate the Japanese commitment to both forms of shipping.
The day after the Japanese surrender, a Dutch officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Warmenhoven, assumed command of the Railway and began interviewing a number of Japanese senior officers. Warmenhoven: ‘They admitted the decision that the line should be built must have been taken immediately after and maybe even before the invasion of Siam but they rather suggested all action was taken on the spur of the moment.’9 At around the time of the fall of Singapore in February 1942, a rail route from Nong Pladuk to Thanbyuzayat was ordered, which was followed by Southern Region Army’s Railway Control directive the next month that preparations be made for its construction. The Japanese deployed two of their railway regiments—each of around 2500 officers and other ranks—to the project. The 5th Railway Regiment was given the task of constructing about 135 kilometres of rail from Thanbyuzayat to Nieke, while the 9th Railway Regiment was made responsible for the rail running north from Nong Pladuk Station (approximately 286 kilometres).
The building of the Thai–Burma Railway was a seemingly impossible task. It entailed carving a pathway through utterly inhospitable terrain involving the shifting of 3 000 000 cubic metres of soil and rock; the building of 4 000 000 cubic metres of embankments; and the construction of a monumental fourteen kilometres of bridges. This was to be achieved despite the lack of an immediate labour supply and the means to get the necessary heavy machinery required to build it into such inaccessible locations.10
The Japanese surmounted these obstacles by the employment of slave labour. Scattered across their newly acquired empire were what they considered to be the lowest form of life: prisoners of war. Here was a disposable labour force: housing it, feeding it and keeping it healthy mattered not; and as one former English POW described his work capacity as ‘one-fourteenth of an elephant’, simple arithmetic would furnish the necessary number of POWs required to accomplish any given labouring task. The toil was backbreaking and the progress glacially slow, but there was an irresistible force at work. The Railway would be built. The engineers on the Railway were to simply requisition their labour force in the numbers required according to the magnitude of the task at hand. Lionel Wigmore:
The railway workers were organised by the Japanese into Groups or Branches; some branches had as few as 2,000 workers, others as many as 12,000. Two prisoner of war groups—Nos. 3 and 5—functioned on the Thanbyuzayat [Burmese] side of the railway; four—1, 2, 4 and 6, plus about 10,000 workers who came under Malayan Prisoner of War administration (as distinct from the Thai one)—worked forward from Bampong in Thailand.11
By examining ‘A’ Force in Burma and a Battalion in each of ‘D’ and ‘F’ Forces in Thailand—with pertinent digressions—we are able to tell the story of each main section of the Railway and provide three styles and standards of leadership, and the impact they had upon the prisoners’ chances of survival.
In 2007 Frank Taylor of Kokoda Treks and Tours and the author met Rod Beattie in Kanchanaburi in Thailand. This marked the beginning of an inspiring Thai–Burma Railway education, and a multitude of spirited discussions and research sharing. At the time of writing, Rod Beattie was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Manager for Thailand; he was the Managing Director of the Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, Kanchanaburi; he is a civil engineer; he has served in the Australian Army; has spent over sixteen years of his life tracing, mapping and exploring the Railway in great depth; and he and his wife have also cleared the famed Hellfire Pass. Both Taylor and Beattie are extremely knowledgeable about the history and the technical aspects of the Railway.
The first lesson learnt from Beattie concerns the standard of the Japanese engineering:
The Japanese engineering on the Railway is very, very good. I was trained as an engineer while I was working for the Queensland Main Roads Department. So my job was to design and build roads, and highways and bridges . . . and when I go out there and walk all over this Railway—beautifully built. Because you’ve got bigger embankments there, thirty or forty or fifty or sixty feet, and sixty-five years later, they’re still perfect . . . the batters [the slopes of the embankment] are perfect; there’s no soil erosion . . . [Their bridges are] technically fine! Nothing wrong with the wooden bridge! A lot of people just rubbish wooden bridges, because they’re made of wood . . . so were most of ours until not that many years ago . . .12
And Rod knows exactly where the Japanese gained their bridge designs:
&n
bsp; No doubt about it whatsoever! The Japanese used the Merriman-Wiggin Engineer’s handbook. That’s just a standard engineers’ handbook of the time, everyone was using it. If you have a look at Railway trestle bridges in Australia . . . western Queensland, western Victoria . . . exactly the same design. That’s engineers! We were taught not to memorise everything just remember where the book is.13
As our trip unfolded, Beattie would not hesitate to stop on a seemingly nondescript stretch of highway, order you to gather your gear and walk you through the jungle wall until another hidden world eventually opened up: embankments, cuttings and bridge sites. He would calmly machete a thin, metre-long piece of bamboo, splinter it against rock and threateningly point out what such a weapon could do to a prisoner’s back—or head; and he had us scramble down an embankment, pick up a large rock and carry it up. As the research journey progressed, Beattie and Taylor would provide a number of experiences which gave us some concept of the Railway itself, and the practicalities of POW camp life.
Late in April 1942, the Japanese informed AIF HQ Changi that 6000 of its troops would be required to ‘proceed by sea to an unknown destination’.14 When the Japanese were told that supplying this number of men would necessitate the recall of a large proportion of men on work parties on Singapore Island, that number was halved.15 On 7 May, the Japanese issued a warning order which prompted the Australians to structure a brigade size force of 3000 POWs to be known as ‘A’ Force.16
