by Peter Brune
During lengthy interviews over three days with the author in Sydney, Sergeant Frank Baker was able to give us an insight into ‘U’ Battalion’s RAP. In the 2/19th Unit History, Newton recorded that Captain Hinder left Changi with a modest supply of equipment and drugs:
. . . some mercurachrome, acraflavine, dressings and bandages, a few splints, 502 indigestion powder [a superfluous item], some mag sulph. (epsom salts), some charcoal powder and creosote pills for dysentery, 1500 atebrin tablets, 2 lbs. of quinine, 3 syringes and 3 needles, 500 M & B 693 tablets.38
Further, Newton recorded that Hinder had no instruments issued to him and possessed few of his own. Such a medical supply was not exceptional either in volume or content. Captain Richards of ‘A’ Force, however, left Changi with more. But the point is that Richards’s supply was looted in transit—through no fault of his. Hinder’s was not.
We have recorded Sergeant Frank Baker’s initiative in scrounging medical supplies, equipment and Marmite in Singapore. Those items were to prove invaluable as a supplement to Hinder’s original stocks. Frank Baker:
I’d worked on the Godowns in Singapore and just because I knew the value of medical supplies . . . I had amassed a fair amount of stuff of different kinds—bandages, things like that . . . any medicines that I thought may have been of some good. But there weren’t many medicines that were any good to you, because first of all they deteriorated if you kept them any length of time, and secondly, you didn’t really know what you would treat with them. So . . . I was being practical . . . bandages, instruments . . . if I came across them, I’d hoard them. So the result was when I went up, even without knowing that I was going to be in the RAP, I took a fair amount of medical gear.39
That gear was not turned over to Hinder.
No, I kept it . . . because he told me to. He’d say to me after a sick parade, ‘Oh, what have you got in your box of tricks?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, what do you want?’ Oh so-and-so. It might be ‘Yes’ . . . Sulphalidamide [sic] tablets for instance, I had managed to get quite a few of those . . . not at the Godowns, these came from a couple of offices in Singapore that they sent us in to clean up the furniture . . . and I got in there and looked around for anything that might be useful, and that’s something I found . . . but it would be a rare occasion when you did that [hand out rare medicines].40
It was a ‘rare occasion’ because the original supplies—both Hinder’s and Baker’s—were sparse. And the reason Baker was told to keep his own supplies was a matter of security. Possible searches and the ever-present threat of the Kempeitai—which materialised in the base hospital camp at Tarsau—forbade central storage and widespread knowledge. The burning question then is how often did Newton receive supplies through Boon Pong and what quantities were involved. Baker: ‘These are things that would have happened between Hinder and Newton. Possibly the other officers knew something about it, I don’t know.’41 But Baker was aware of one fact: Hinder operated his RAP on the Railway with many more drugs than he began with. During other interviews with ‘U’ Battalion veterans, Baker was told that there was evidence of foodstuffs and some small quantities of drugs ‘appearing’ for some patients. Baker agreed:
. . . it worked because Newton had access to whatever there was. For a start, see, Newton used to just use a bulk buying system off the barges up there . . . That was pretty well known! . . . Newton would do any of that! Any kind of deal you like! Newton could be as unscrupulous as you like. I mean there’d be no holds barred. If it was for our benefit . . . He wouldn’t be worrying about who he hurt, or who he didn’t hurt on the other side.42
We do not, therefore, have any real idea of the exact volume of drugs that were delivered to Newton’s ‘U’ Battalion by Boon Pong (or from other sources) or how often they were supplied. But some idea of the availability of the priceless drug emetine hydrochloride—used chiefly to combat dysentery—can be gauged from the ability of individuals to sometimes obtain it. Private Jim Stewart, ‘U’ Battalion:
I remember Halloran, and he’ll hate me for telling you this . . . he borrowed 50 Bhat off a bloke in our battalion so that they could buy drugs for a bloke called Lindsay Robb who had amoebic dysentery . . . this fella had sold a gold watch with a jewel attached to it to the Thais and had a fair bit of Thai cash . . . and Halloran borrowed this on the understanding that he would give the bloke a pound a Bhat when he got home. And he did. Fifty Bhat and paid the bloke fifty pound when he got home! And the bloke took it! That was the bad part about it . . . four pound a week, five pound a week was a very good wage in those days! Robbie . . . had been sent back to Tarsau. Halloran got this money, gave it to Gerry Hurst who went back to Tarsau, got himself declared sick, so he could look after Robbie . . . [The] drugs were available from a bloke called Boon Pong.43
While the men of ‘U’ Battalion had a communal approach to survival, and were fortunate enough to have a strong leadership infrastructure and access to Boon Pong and his barge supplies of food and occasional drugs, further desirable commodities were obtained through the activities of small groups of men or by individuals. It has been recorded that every ‘D’ Force POW left Changi with a pair of shorts, shirt, boots and handkerchief. From their arrival at Kanchanaburi until the end of their time on the Railway, the sale of clothing, watches and rings allowed individuals to buy supplementary food supplies. Inevitably, as had occurred in Changi and elsewhere on Singapore Island, one often used an ‘agent’ for this risky venture. Sergeant Jack de Loas was one of them:
I used to do a lot of dealing with the Thais, I used to put on about three pairs of shorts, and three shirts on the railway, and I’d sell them to a Thai, take the shirt off and he’d take it and give me the money . . . so [later] I only had what I started off on, a pair of shorts and a shirt . . .44
And then there were others who turned the act of scrounging into an art form, and conducted it on a most impressive scale. In all interviews with members of ‘U’ Battalion, one POW stands out for scrounging: Private Arthur ‘Shorty’ Cooper. Sergeant Bert Donaldson:
. . . he was game, and he had a team with him. There was Arthur Cooper, Norm Crowther, Merv Alchin, Frank McKinnon and they had a cook and bottle washer, Vince Lawrence. They were in the 20th Battalion, but they were in ‘U’ Battalion . . . game as Ned Kelly! He’d get it from the engineers [steal through the attap in their store hut], anywhere he could scrounge it from, he’d go up the line, or they would, two or three of them, go up the line in the middle of the night to get stuff . . . he brought four gallon tins of salted pork back into the camp, a lot of it straight into the kitchen, some of it he kept himself . . . they got onto sugar, bags of sugar . . . and put some of them in the scrub . . . one or two of them back into camp . . . they were pretty heavy to carry . . . they’d be a mile or two mile away . . . they’d spot it off in the daytime and knew what they were after, and back they’d go at night. Newton wouldn’t organize that, but he knew it was going on, because it was helping the kitchen . . . that was Shorty! They’d do anything!45
We now come to hygiene. It has been stated that dysentery—particularly the amoebic variety—was the principal cause of death on the Railway. The main cause of dysentery was the unsanitary conditions in which POWs were forced to live. Captain Rowley Richards christened the problem ‘faeces, food, fingers, flies’.46 In attempting to combat dysentery Hinder and Newton again worked closely together. Sergeant Frank Baker:
He’d [Hinder] go down to the kitchen and inspect the kitchen every day, make sure the mosquito nets were over the food, and make sure there wasn’t a fly about that could get near anything, although you couldn’t keep them all away . . . I had to stand at the head of the mess parade and as they went past I had to see that—we had a kerosene tin of boiling water, kept boiling all the time—they dipped their mess gear in there, and sterilized it before they went through to the mess parade. And that they washed it afterwards and that they sterilized it afterwards . . . that was done meticulously, for every meal . . .47
All kitchen utensils were also meticulously sterilised and, where possible, Newton sited latrines—and supervised their maintenance—according to Hinder’s advice. Lieutenant Frank Ramsbotham (affectionally known as ‘sheep’s arse’) referred to ‘the old bottle outside the latrine’ and ‘told the men to wash your hands where you could.’ He remembered a Dutchman caught defecating in the open who had his nose rubbed ‘in it’. When a Dutch officer complained to Ramsbotham, he was told that ‘. . . don’t worry I’ll issue instructions for my men to do it every time they see you fellows shitting where they shouldn’t be . . .’48 However, all the precautions, no matter how stringently enforced, could only minimise the killer called dysentery. In treating it, Hinder variously used charcoal by the tablespoon, Epsom salts (to ‘flush’ the system already being cruelly ‘flushed’) and Condys crystals wrapped in rice paper and taken with water. For the very lucky and very few, emetine hydrochloride or Sergeant Frank Baker’s dwindling supply of sulphanilamide might be administered.
On 4 April 1943, ‘U’ Battalion was taken from Kanchanaburi by truck to Tarsau, which was the Japanese HQ for Number 4 Group, and also that group’s base hospital. Here Newton met the British CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Knights, and arranged that half of his officers’ pay for each month was to be spent on any of his men sent back to hospital. The Battalion’s work at and around Tarsau consisted mainly of building embankments and the digging of cuttings. At this time Major Quick’s ‘T’ Battalion was employed further back at Wampo on the construction of a viaduct and an embankment, and Major Schneider’s ‘S’ Battalion was forward at Kinsayok and later Hintok. Newton did not, at this time, know of the whereabouts of Lieutenant-Colonel McEachern and Cough’s ‘V’ Battalion. Judging by the ration scale mentioned by Newton for his men at Tarsau, and the availability of extras from the British canteen there, ‘U’ Battalion’s time at that camp was tolerable.
It was at Tarsau that Newton first had to deal with theft amongst his men. It was a not uncommon problem on the Railway. A watch was stolen, and when the culprit was caught he received the penalty of having to run the gauntlet of about a dozen men. Private Jim Stewart was among them: ‘. . . I didn’t have the heart to belt him, but some of them did . . . but I remember that bloke came out the end of the gauntlet . . . it frightened the living daylights out of him, he could see what could happen.’49 But the long-term penalty far outweighed the short-term physical pain. Sergeant Frank Baker: ‘The humiliation is dreadful, and also the feeling of loneliness . . . you are dependent on those other fellas, no matter what happens you’re a part of that team, and if you are ostracized from that team, you’re completely lost . . . a dreadful situation!’50
On 1 June 1943, Newton was informed by the Japanese Group 4 commander that ‘U’ Battalion was to move about five kilometres along the line to Tonchan South. Before the move, Newton made a number of astute administrative decisions. The first was the appointment of Captain Bill Gaden (2/20th Battalion) to stay behind at Tarsau ‘to look after “U” Battalion chaps and Australians generally’.51 This statement seems broad and almost bland, but its importance was monumental. In blunt terms, Newton was aware that ‘charity would begin at home’, and that an Australian administration was best placed to serve Australian interests. Gaden was therefore entrusted with ensuring that officers’ and ORs’ pay—given at Tarsau—would be spent on the Australians under his care, and that their food would be prepared by cooks left behind. But the critical task given Gaden was to maintain contact with Boon Pong, and arrange for supplies to be redirected to ‘U’ Battalion further along the line, until Newton could re-establish direct contact.
After a five-kilometre trek carrying their tents, kitchen equipment and gear, Newton’s men scaled a narrow, muddy and slippery track and arrived ‘onto a flat where there were a large number of British camped under Lieutenant-Colonel “Peanut McKellar”’.52 Here, on 2 June 1943, Captain ‘Roaring Reggie’ Newton and the men of ‘U’ Battalion first met Gunso (Sergeant) Aitaro Hiramatsu, ‘the Tiger’, and from that very moment a battle of wits and cunning between captor and captives was to rage.
Private Gus Halloran remembered the Tiger as being:
. . . big for a Japanese . . . He had a huge chin, he was a big dark skinned fellow . . . about five feet nine . . . with this big, long, ugly, angular face.
He was obviously a very strong man and he came with a reputation that had preceded him . . . a horror man . . . he’d had a bad reputation for killing Poms, and we all treated him with a great deal of scepticism. We thought—this is going to be very doubtful.53
Private Walter ‘Banjo’ Patterson: ‘He was the ugliest lookin’ one I ever seen I think! He looked like some terrible crook!’54 And he acted like one. Hiramatsu caused no less fear in his own men than in the Australian and British POWs. We have discussed the Japanese propensity to employ corporal punishment on their own. Very soon the Australians witnessed a frequent pattern of brutal bashings by the Tiger—to either POWs or Japanese guards. Sergeant Jack de Loas: ‘He was very erratic. Some days he’d be quite alright and other days he’d be completely mad . . . he’d call you up and give you a bashing for nothing. He’d stand you up there and he’d give you some punches on the face—three or four.’55
As we have seen with our ‘A’ Force study, each and every Railway force would record its own unique experience of their guards and engineers. The names and locations were different but the behaviour was constant. To the men of ‘U’ Battalion, such names as ‘The Boy Shoko’ (a baby-faced young officer), ‘Stackem’ (given to bashing POWs with a pick handle), ‘Silver Bullet’, ‘The Mad Mongrel’ and ‘The Kenyu Kid’ would become notorious and never forgotten. Gus Halloran: ‘You had blokes like the Black Prince who would attempt deliberately to knock a bloke off the bridge. This sort of thing. You had some very unpleasant people who got their kicks out of pure sadism . . .’56
But ‘U’ Battalion did meet what would appear to be a very rare guard. Given to warning the Australians of an impending search, or at times bailing them out of other misdemeanours, the men christened him ‘AIF Joe’. Gus Halloran:
He was a pleasant fellow . . . he was big even for a Korean . . . supposedly a Christian; supposedly Catholic . . . but he was certainly kindly disposed and he . . . was very refreshing in a desert of people who were not particularly pleasant. Everyone liked Joe and Joe liked being liked.57
Newton called Tonchan South ‘not the best of areas, although we were alongside a delightful stream . . .’58 When you stand beside this ‘delightful stream’ and Rod Beattie points out that Newton’s ‘U’ Battalion was within some few hundred metres of it, that the ‘large’ British camp was on the other side, and that a substantial coolie camp was located upstream, it takes some considerable time to fathom how the fortunes of three geographically close camps could have had such diverse—and in two cases utterly tragic—outcomes. And then Private Charles Letts’ dictum at the start of chapter 23, that ‘it all depends on your shoko [officer]’ returns to haunt you.
We have quoted the English POW Ian Denys Peek, who said that ‘the Gods don’t give a damn’ in his book, One Fourteenth of an Elephant. It is certainly an appropriate theme for our Railway study. Peek chose to mention few names of persons in his book. His chapter 5 deals with his time at Tonchan and his dates and content make it clear that after his arrival there, he came under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel McKellar, and that from 2 June 1943 the men of Newton’s ‘U’ Battalion were his Australian ‘neighbours’. If the Gods didn’t give a damn, Peek makes it very clear that the British officers at Tonchan South didn’t either. The day after his arrival from Wampo as a part of a large contingent of around 1600 men, McKellar addressed the new arrivals. Peek was staggered: ‘. . . he is in full uniform, badges of rank, Sam Browne leather all polished, cap exactly right on his barbered head, clean shaven this morning, boots polished and everything laundered and pressed.’59 With the CO’s batman holding his sun umbrella over him, Pe
ek observed that McKellar made it crystal clear that the ragged and emaciated men in front of him ‘should have pride in ourselves’, and there was an ‘unmistakable sneering disdain and a cold hatred in his face as he surveys us’.60
Peek also refers to the Tiger, and the fact that the British had heard of his ‘exploits’ long before their arrival at Tonchan. But the interesting point is that to Peek, the Tiger’s name was ‘Staff-Sergeant Furobashi’—quite possibly a grim play on words. The fact that there was more than likely only one ‘Tiger’; that the dates for Peek’s time at Tonchan and Newton’s match; and that the Tiger’s description by Peek and those recorded during our interviews with the Australians also match would seem ample proof that ‘Furobashi’ was in fact ‘Hiramatsu’.
Peek’s accounts of McKellar and the Tiger clearly show that the latter had totally intimidated, humiliated and subsequently dominated the former. In McKellar’s eyes the Tiger was junior in rank and had humiliated him to the point where he avoided him at all costs and would not argue, plead or protest on his soldiers’ behalf. When the Tiger later threatened the officers and cooks with work if the pace of the Railway construction was not increased, the officers finally protested to him en masse, which Peek observed, caused the issue to ‘fizzle out’, so that ‘the cooks go back to their normal duties and the officers to their bridge-playing and books’.61 And all this while literally hundreds of British ORs at Tonchan South—who had been there for months—were lying around the camp, desperately sick, unable to work, unable to therefore earn pay, and were therefore on absolutely minimal rations—with impending death their persistent companion. Peek observed that they had:
