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

by Peter Brune

  At one stage Bertie passed, I heard Bert Mettam going past . . . his comment was, ‘Pitches, [Private John Pitches] you don’t deserve this,’ [he was carrying him] he was a signaller with us . . . and the background of Pitches was that when we’d first become POWs Pitches isolated himself from everyone. He went out on working parties but he very much concentrated on Pitches by himself. Never had a mate . . . and he was older compared to James [Kennedy] and myself [Pitches was 37] . . . But in this march on this particular night, Mettam went past carrying Pitches [fireman hold]. When it was starting to get light, Bert went past again and he’s got Pitches and he said, ‘You don’t deserve this Pitches, there’s so many blokes a lot sicker than you are.’ And Pitches’ only comment in a drawl sort of voice was, ‘You don’t have to worry Mettam, I’ll be dead by tomorrow.’ And he died the next day.77

  Private John Pitches succumbed to cardiac beriberi.78 He sleeps in Thanbyuzayat Cemetery in Burma—one trek too many. According to Rod Beattie’s records, Pond’s party suffered 142 deaths on the Railway.

  In the end, Pond’s party is a striking example of a commander on the Railway who, despite the best of intentions, was incapable of availing himself of the very same supply opportunities that prevailed just across the stream at the British camp. In short, the very plight experienced by the British when compared to the Australians at Tonchan, applied in reverse at Takanun. Lieutenant-Colonel Pond:

  Full advantage could not, however, be taken for the benefit of the men until the last month or so at TAIMONTA for a Japanese soldier was always in charge of the kitchen and dictated policy therein completely, even to the extent of giving orders which resulted in good food often being ruined and made unpalatable. It was always a struggle to get food from the Japanese and the provision of food by the party would have resulted in less being provided by the Japanese. Separate cooking however was always done for the sick ‘under the lap’ and latterly we were able to cook additional food in the kitchen.79

  In an interview with the author, Private Paddy O’Toole, a most impressive scrounger, was asked whether Pond might have been able to recruit the services of some of his scroungers within the unit for the greater good. The answer was both rapid and blunt: ‘Yes!’

  Lance-Corporal John Roxburgh: ‘Put it this way, I think we were what you’d call a disorganised bloody rabble, we had no bloody blokes [senior officers] in charge of us.’80 Captains Ben Barnett, Adrian Curlewis and Roy Mills and his orderlies were, in addition to WO Bert Mettam, acknowledged by Roxburgh and others during interviews with the author as being notable exceptions. Unlike Captain Newton, Pond made few demands of his officers, was lax in establishing camp infrastructure and was unable or unwilling to rort the system to save his men. Lieutenant-Colonel Pond was certainly no Captain Reg Newton.

  Konkoita, Taimonta and Nieke are but three Railway camps now lying under the vast Vajiralongkorn Dam. Rod Beattie has, during periods of low rainfall and corresponding low dam water levels, located the sites of a number of these camps, and found artefacts there. Along the approach to the dam, Rod pointed out the occasional embankment and the course of the Railway. We drove north, to where Nieke used to be. Soon we arrived at one of the most notorious camps along the infamous Thai–Burma Railway: Shimo (Lower) Songkurai. In mid-May 1943, the 2/30th and 2/26th Battalions occupied this camp for some two months.

  We stood on a large rise and surveyed the surrounding landscape. Beattie: ‘You’re standing on Cholera Hill.’ It was terribly hard not to develop an almost immediate state of depression there. The 2/30th’s George Aspinall took a series of forbidden photos during his service as a POW. His photo of Cholera Hill is easy to relate to when you stand on the hill. To have been carried there and deposited in this two-tent ‘hospital’ with its bamboo floor, to have had a bamboo disc fitted to your wrist for identification purposes, while your life was literally draining away with gushes of vomiting and white diarrhoea, was to know that the end was probably near. Incredibly, as we stood there, Rod scratched in the discoloured earth of the cremation site and noticed a small metal disc just showing above the soil. He picked it up, cleaned it and handed it over to be deciphered. We found it read ‘The Great World No 2577’. It seemed to be some sort of token. One can only ponder about its owner. Possibly it belonged to a despairing patient or an orderly who was jeopardising his chances of survival in the selfless care of others. That token must have evoked memories of taxi dancers, drinks and side shows, and of better times—that’s what most Railway POWs longed for. They longed for Changi, Changi was home.81 The disc is now in the hands of Rod Beattie and his Kanchanaburi museum.

  On the morning of 15 May 1943, the men of trains 3 and some of 4 (chiefly the 2/26th Battalion), under the command of Major Tracey, arrived at Lower Songkurai. Later, 581 members of the 2/30th Battalion who had left Changi on train number 5, with a further 70 on train 6, arrived there on 17 May, under the command of Major Noel Johnston. After the torment of their forced march to the ‘promised land’ of better camps, food and facilities, the scenes that greeted them were devastating: ‘. . . a collection of roofless and dilapidated native huts . . . four 100-yard huts . . . a smaller hut for the guards and a little hut for the kitchen. The whole area of the camp was less than three hundred by one hundred yards.’82

  A small stream lay at each end of the Lower Songkurai camp, which was to constitute the sole water supply for some 1800 Australians. Cholera hit Lower Songkurai immediately. Captain Lloyd Cahill (Australian Army Medical Corps) diagnosed the first case on 17 May and when he became sick, two medical officers were sent forward. We now come to the arrival in our story of another Railway hero, one who, like ‘A’ Force’s Lieutenant-Colonel Bertie Coates, deserves the same status and fame as ‘Weary’ Dunlop.

  Major Bruce Atlee Hunt was born at Glebe in Sydney on 23 February 1899. He had served in the Great War with the 8th Field Artillery Brigade in 1917, and after the Armistice, had journeyed to London where he completed a year’s study in medicine at King’s College London. After subsequently graduating in medicine at Melbourne University, and serving in a number of Melbourne hospitals, Hunt qualified as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1928. He then moved to Perth, where he joined the Second AIF in August 1941. The following month, Hunt sailed to Malaya with the 2/13th Australian General Hospital. He was ‘. . . broad shouldered, balding early, with aquiline features and walked with a curious short-stepped shamble’.83 Hunt’s work in Changi at the combined hospital was notable for combating a dysentery outbreak and for undertaking a dietary analysis of the Changi ration. But it was on the Railway, against all the odds, that Bruce Hunt triumphed.

  In a POW environment, news of acts of selflessness, great determination and sheer guts travel like wildfire. Hunt had established such a reputation from the time ‘F’ Force left Bampong. Private John Boehm had been left behind by his 2/29th Battalion early on the trek through illness. He would subsequently join the 2/30th at Lower Songkurai:

  I was with him [Hunt] on the way up, I remember marching beside him, he was talking about the First World War. He was a man of over six feet . . . a raw boned man, wiry, he’d march like no one’s business . . . very straight to the point, no mucking around—a very likable bloke.84

  Hunt repeatedly marched back and forth along his column, instructing his orderlies how to best look after the sick and struggling, carried men’s packs and arranged where possible for those in need of a brief respite to stay behind under the care of others. But it was at Tarsau that the legend of Bruce Hunt really began.

  Prior to the departure of his party from that camp, Hunt had gained a Japanese doctor’s permission to leave 37 men behind—27 with infected feet and ten dysentery cases. However, the Japanese guard gave permission for only ten of the 37 to stay. When Hunt defiantly paraded the 37 and stood out in front of them, the Japanese corporal immediately attacked the interpreter, Major Wild, and set upon him with a fist to the face and an even more painful bamboo stick to the crutch. Hu
nt was next, and wrote that he: ‘. . . was immediately set upon by three guards. One tripped me, while others pushed me to the ground. The three men set about me with bamboos, causing extensive bruising of the skull, hands and arms, and a fractured left 5 metacarpal bone.’85 Inspiring, but hardly a new occurrence on the Railway. According to a bystander, it was what happened next that was truly stirring. When the watching POWs became restive, a nasty but futile incident might have occurred, but the defiant Hunt exclaimed: ‘Keep out of this you blokes, this is my fight!’86 When approached to travel north by truck, Hunt ‘deeply resented’ the idea and further exclaimed, ‘My duty is to protect the men!’87

  Hunt, Captain John Taylor and fifteen orderlies arrived at Lower Songkurai to assist Captain Lloyd Cahill on 18 May 1943. The night before, one man died of cholera. On the 18th, twelve suspects were immediately placed in the new cholera ward: ‘Cholera Hill.’ Despite the fact that the whole camp was inoculated on 19 May, cholera deaths mounted. We are blessed with a comprehensive diary written by the 2/30th Battalion’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Ron Eaton, in which a consistent record of Hunt’s activities at Lower Songkurai becomes clear. Eaton, 27 May 1943:

  There have been 22 cholera deaths to date . . . Total cases at present 55—situation now all but out of hand medically. Major Hunt, S.M.O., places responsibility on us to help ourselves. He and John Taylor and Lloyd Cahill have been lion men—marvellous show—goodness knows how they keep up. Bob Howells after chat with us in which we agreed if any action were to be started it would have to come from Bruce Hunt and selves. Went to B.H. this morning and put position frankly. Whole show just plainly up to us alone. Recce of area—jobs to be done at which camp C.O. plus Bn. COs attended then straight to Japs. B.H. put fear of death into them.

  Immediate result—300 men in camp remain in camp and put to work in camp for balance of day plus assurance of staying for 3 days to put camp in livable order—whole camp . . .

  B. Hunt now has hospital as follows: Cholera on hill—Dysentery ward, Fever ward, total patients 586, which compares with an A.G.H. [Advanced General Hospital].88

  Hunt immediately ordered that fires were to be kept in each hut for the purpose of sterilising eating utensils; all water was to be boiled before consumption; the surface filth from the camp was to be scraped from the area and burnt; old and nearly full latrines were to be fired and new ones dug; and, finally, he gave the POWs of Lower Songkurai a chilling message: ‘If a fly alights on the rice you are about to eat, the grains it lands on must be spooned out and burnt, for I assure you, if one contracts cholera, one dies in great distress.’89 And in a stirring response to his plea for volunteers for the cholera and dysentery patients, Hunt received more offers than he required—75 men responded.

  On 29 May Eaton recorded that the Japanese had ‘broken their promise and we sent out 750 men to work’, which impinged upon the desperately needed work around the camp. This did not deter Hunt. Arriving back at Lower Songkurai that day, he immediately wrote a scathing document which was signed by Johnston, Anderson and Tracey. We have recorded the futility of worded protests. However, in Hunt’s case the document was accompanied by the force of his personality and by the ‘scare tactics’ of a forceful implication that death and suffering were in store not only for the POWs, but for the Japanese, if inoculation and hygiene measures were not observed. Eaton also recorded that while the above-named officers signed the document, they were ‘HIS [Hunt’s] demands’, and that it produced ‘immediate results’.90 Once again, numbers of men were allowed to work in camp rather than on the Railway. Two days later, Eaton reported that Lower Songkurai was under the command of a ‘medical dictatorship’ and ‘advisably so’.91 At this time, there were about 90 patients on Cholera Hill and there had been over 40 deaths. Before the second cholera needle could be given, and before Hunt’s dynamic leadership initiatives could be thoroughly implemented, 101 men out of 209 diagnosed succumbed to this wretched killer.

  Our focus upon the dreaded cholera outbreak amongst the men of ‘F’ Force should not cloud the multitude of other—and common—Railway medical conditions which also took their toll amongst the force. Corporal Arthur Isaac, 2/30th Battalion:

  I had a bloke in my section Tommy Lee . . . a bloke from up the north coast [of NSW] . . . a round faced bloke, not very big, and I went to the hospital hut one day, and Tommy was there. It took me all my time to recognise him, he had beri beri, and it had all gone to the top half of his body. He was almost twice his size . . . and beside him was another bloke, who wasn’t in my section but I knew him very well. He had beri beri and it affected his mid-section, and you’d think he was pregnant, his stomach was out like that. I went and saw them this afternoon, late, I was talking to them there, next morning they’d gone.92

  And there were the ‘usual’ numbers of tropical ulcers. Private Neville Riley, 2/30th Battalion:

  When I was in the hospital . . . an ulcer on the foot, I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t walk. The fluid would start running out of the ulcer . . . pus . . . you’d have a bandage if you were lucky, and they’d take you out, and scrape it out with a spoon . . . scrape the bad flesh out until it started to bleed. The bandage you had, you didn’t get one every day, that was your bandage. What they used to do was take the bandage off . . . and these camps were full of a lot of blow flies . . . and they’d come in droves. And you’d put your bandages there full of pus and muck from your ulcer, and let the flies clean the bloody bandage . . . and if you had a bit of warm water at all, you’d try and rinse the bandage in that, and then you’d put it back over your foot that had been scraped out by the spoon. And that was it! . . . it started off with a bamboo spike that stabbed me just above the toe nail, and it gradually got worse and worse, and it spread between my toes and up my foot . . .

  When I was in the hospital ward up there . . . they didn’t waste anything from the yak, they used to cook the blood and make a little cube about two inches square and about three quarters of an inch thick, and the bloke used to come around the hospital ward. And they’d have a few of these to hand out to some of the blokes. And they’d look around to see who would benefit most. And you’d think, ‘Gee, I hope he picks me!’ . . . a little bit of cooked blood!93

  On 3 June, Eaton recorded that: ‘Bruce Hunt, John Taylor and Lloyd Cahill should all receive highest Award [sic] for their wonderful unceasing efforts. They alone have saved this camp from almost complete destruction.’94 Throughout ‘F’ Force’s tragic Railway saga, Major Bruce Hunt worked tirelessly for the men. Lieutenant Kelsey, 2/26th Battalion:

  Of the scores of memories one has of this remarkable man, one stands out. It is a picture of him visiting the sick, himself exhausted and recently beaten, and pausing to place a hand gently on a feverish forehead, and murmuring in his beautiful accent, ‘Poor old boy. God rest his soul.’95

  But surely, in any military formation, the ORs are the hardest to impress and often offer the most simple, but sincere tributes. Corporal Arthur Isaac, 2/30th Battalion: ‘He [Hunt] was in our camp a fair bit but he used to travel to all the other [F Force] camps as well . . . the blokes thought he was God!’96

  If Major Bruce Hunt was an ‘F’ Force ‘giant’ then a number of ‘little men’ in that force had indeed become very much ‘smaller’. Lieutenant Ron Eaton, 27 June 1943:

  Will never forget sight of hungry faces, the use of fly blown latrines. The sight of hundreds of our men in tattered clothing . . . returning from a terrible day of work in mud & slush in the dark to a meagre food issue to slump and rest on hard floors only to rise the morrow in the dark and eat and go again. And still they smile. There have been some wonderful examples of manhood here and there have been cases showing a deplorable lack of it. The little men become smaller and the big men become giants. Many have been the disappointments.97

  As per Pond’s party at Takanun, there were a number of officers and NCOs who acted out of a determined sense of duty to their men at Lower Songkurai. Lieutenant Eaton was
an example. Corporal Arthur Isaac, 2/30th Battalion: ‘He would go close to being the standout leader, yeah.’98 Corporal Neville Riley held the same view.99 But dynamic leadership is always required at the top. It would seem that Major Noel Johnston’s health suffered from the enormity of events. On 23 May 1943, Eaton recorded that: ‘C.O. quit duties’; on 31 May: ‘Maj. Johnston to hospital—extreme nervous stomach upset—vomited for 10 hrs—thought at first cholera—needs rest—now much better.’; on 6 June 1943: ‘Major Johnston still ill back from hospital but quite ineffective.’; on 7 June 1943: ‘Major Johnston back to hospital—nervous dyspepsia—not well and obviously needs rest.’100

  A number of officers at Lower Songkurai seemed to suffer a similar ailment to some of their ‘colleagues’ at Takanun. Sergeant Stan Arneil, 2/30th Battalion Diary, 21 September 1943: ‘Only one officer has died in this camp, they are all well, have neither ulcers nor itch and are all well shod. But Burns said! The lice have no class distinctions.’101 The lice may not have, but there seems to have been definite ‘class distinctions’ with regards to rations, clothing and privileges at Lower Songkurai.

  Arneil’s diary cites no small number of indiscretions from his officers. He mentions a $10 Thai money loan made by him and a mate to two officers, which was paid back in ‘worthless ruppees’; at number 1 camp Songkurai, he talked of shirts from the dead being taken by needy ORs and a resultant diatribe from an officer about ‘lowness and lack of principle’, when, in fact, that very same officer had acquired items in exactly the same way; of supplies brought into the camp and the ORs receiving token amounts while officers were treated most generously; and ‘the utter spinelessness of two of our officers in not having the courage to ask the IJA for permission to leave a dying man in the cholera ward instead of carting him across to the main camp’ for a check parade. The man died during his short journey.102 Arneil also cited the hope and anticipation by the ORs of a soon-to-arrive consignment of goods for the opening of a canteen. It had taken two carrying parties each of 100 men to bring the supplies into camp. Arneil’s diary recorded the generous officer allowance of 3 October 1943: ‘Officers drew more than a quart of gula each and the same of sugar, four tins of fish, tins of milk and as much soap, tobacco and oil as they wanted.’ The men, Arneil recorded, were limited to ‘7½ pints of sugar for the Company of 250 men’. Further, Arneil recorded, the ORs were given ‘no milk or peanuts and only three tins of fish for the Company’.103 It should again be stressed that such behaviour was not universal on the Railway. What is strongly advanced is that the incidence of what Captain Reg Newton described as ‘drones around the place’ was significant, and further, that in a number of formations it was common. There was a definite pattern to the consequences of weak leadership in Railway camps. Private Jack Coffee was at Upper Songkurai: