Читать книгу Across the Three Pagodas Pass - Yoshihiko Futamatsu - Страница 10

INTRODUCTION

Ewart Escritt

A horror story of brutality, inefficiency and inhumanity may be described by a writer from a totally different culture in terms which we in a Christian society must find inadequate. It is fascinating to uncover, so far as we can, the reasons lurking behind such apparent inhumanity and to describe the actual situation in which these things took place.

Futamatsu himself was a dedicated professional railway engineer and also, like his CO, fair-minded, always ready to see both sides of an argument. During the Pacific War he was not greatly affected by the militaristic propaganda with which the Army flooded the nation in ‘the dark valley’ of the 1930s. His commander had read engineering at Tokyo Imperial University, but of course, as a regular soldier, he had to comply with superior orders which in theory emanated from an Emperor who was still divine.⁷² I suspect that Futamatsu heroworshipped his Colonel, and the Colonel certainly recognized his subordinate’s professional skill. Their association ripened into warm friendship.

The Thai-Burma Railway was a necessary concomitant in the Japanese Army’s assault through Burma into India, one which came to the fore as a result of the US Navy’s successful action off Midway Island in the Pacific in 1942 when most of Japan’s aircraft-carriers were sunk or damaged. The British Far East Naval Squadron took control of the Indian Ocean, in particular of the Andaman Sea off the coasts of Malaya and Burma, so it became vitally necessary for the Japanese Army to develop an overland trucking route across the Three Pagodas Pass and on to Moulmein in Burma, to facilitate their invasion of India.

Looking ahead to the possibility of some such eventuality, Imperial Japanese Army General Headquarters in Tokyo had taken on a civilian railway engineering expert in 1939. Using Thai maps, Kuwabara proposed the building of a railway to connect Thailand with Burma. He calculated that it would take two years to complete. Officially ‘The Railway to link Thailand with Burma’, it became known as the Thai-Burma Railway.

Plans for a railway from Thailand through to Burma had previously been investigated by German engineers working for the Thai government in the 1890s, and independently by the British early in the twentieth century. One line of entry involved a route from their colony, Burma, to reach Pitsanlok in northern Thailand. The other involved a railway from Thailand through to the Andaman Sea coast in Burma. IJA GHQ chose the latter (which the British had abandoned as impossible to execute) despite the facts that the climate, health conditions and distance involved were against it. Local Thai had grave doubts of its success.

Uniquely among civilized nations Japan declined to ratify the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners-of-war. Since the early 1930s militaristic propaganda, in the dark valley of that decade, insidiously boosted the medieval concept bushidō, ‘the way of the warrior’. Forgotten was the chivalry of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 when a beleaguered Japanese general surrendered with all his men and returned to Japan with honour after the war. Now, in the 1940s, an enlisted soldier pledged to commit suicide rather than surrender in battle, and if hit by disease to lie at attention in his quarters. No dressings were issued to them or to their prisoners apart from quinine and creosote pills: hideous tropical ulcers resulted in seventy amputations, done by Australian, British and Dutch surgeons with what limited equipment they had managed to carry in their packs on the march.

Such, in practice, was how the Japanese Army interpreted the way of the warrior. These prisoners were sub-humans who had surrendered in battle. The Japanese could not ratify the Geneva Convention because it was impossible, they said, for Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen to surrender. Given that they were not engaged in a situation of forlorn hope, this theory held water in the Malayan campaign. At the surrender parley at Bukit Timah General Yamashita asked General Percival how many Japanese prisoners the British were holding. ‘Not one’, was the subdued reply. And in their campaign across the Pacific islands the magnificent bravery of the American marines was matched, some might say obscured, by the wholesale suicides of the Japanese defenders, military and civilian alike. On the island battlefields there, a Japanese soldier would feign dead, holding a concealed hand-grenade, to take one marine with him into oblivion. In their ‘octopus pots’, the Japanese equivalent of the marines’ foxholes, they would wait for their enemy to get close and then destroy him with a grenade.

But, if when all seemed lost, they were faced en bloc with defeat, they tended to be lost, typically looked for a higher order, and sat on the fence. When the atomic bombs dropped, I was ordered on 17 August 1945 to Bangkok from the remote foothills near Nakhon Nayok where the Japanese were preparing their obligatory ‘last stand for a decisive battle’. My job was to act as Staff Captain ‘Q’ on Ex-PW HQ we set up to get ourselves out. The twenty thousand fully armed soldiers in Bangkok under a one-time head of the kempeitai had not surrendered because the C-in-C of the Southern Army in Saigon, Field Marshal Count Terauchi Hisaichi, was a hard-liner who would not accept a merely broadcast message from his Emperor. I had commandeered a Japanese soldier with a jeep and told him to drive me to the Japanese HQ. A priority was to find staging camps in which we could house ex-prisoners from the worst cholera belts on the railway, and by good luck my driver had found me the empty Law University, across the padang by the Royal Palace. Like my nineteenth-century college, Keble, it was built on the corridor system but unlike Keble it had only one latrine. So I asked the General for a working party of soldiers to dig latrines. It sounds foolhardy but after three years we knew our Jap. The General hesitated, passed the buck, and told me to take my request to the colonel commanding prison camps in Thailand. My driver took me a hundred yards down the same road, and I presented Colonel Nakamura Shijō with his general’s superior order, a meirei. In ten minutes I had my squad and they worked like blacks on the job. This small episode illustrates a facet of the Japanese character not always appreciated in the West.

The Count’s final surrender filtered through to us in Bangkok on 8 September. The Emperor’s brother, Prince Kanin, had been flown out from Japan in late August to give him a personal order face to face.

Futamatsu is guilty on occasion of chop-logic, that form of disputacious argument endemic in Japanese philosophical passages. Examples occur, for example, when he tries to gloss over the reason why the Japanese Army could not allow his Government to ratify the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-war, and in another passage when he attempts to leave it as an open question whether the Army committed violations of the Convention or not. Again, he disputes unconvincingly the post-war stigma of ‘Death Railway’. However, he does rehearse articles in the Convention which were violated, but tends to argue that the terrible conditions in which the railway construction took place constitute for it a special case. And he tends also to regard as ‘retaliatory action’ any attempt to bring offenders to book in the War Crimes Trials.

He was born in 1912. He graduated in engineering at Kyōto University in 1936, going down in that year into Japan National Railways’ head office as a civil engineer in their construction bureau. He was called up in 1941 into a specialist bridging company of gunzoku (civilian auxiliaries of Japanese nationality) and served with a railway regiment on the West coast line of Malayan Railways on bridge repair, notably across the Krian River, during the campaign to capture Singapore. In June 1942, he was seconded, in the rank of Captain, to the HQ of 9 Railway Regiment with responsibility for survey of the projected Thai-Burma Railway and for design of bridges up to the frontier at the Three Pagodas Pass. He became professional railway engineering adviser to the regimental commander, Colonel Imai Itaru, and on the railway’s completion in October 1943 he commanded a battalion, in the rank of Major, on line-conservation on the Thai side, patching up rail track and repairing bridges which increasingly had come under RAF and USAAF attack. In August 1945, he was sent to Saigon to expedite transport to Thailand of replacement locomotives exported from Japan.

After the Japanese surrender he was ordered back to Thailand, and was interned in military prisoner-of-war camps at Nonhoi near Bangkok and later near Nakhon Nayok, which is 40 km from Prachinburi station on the north-east line of Thai Railways. In April 1946, he was moved to a camp half-way between Nong Pladuk and Banpong, and was repatriated in July 1946.

He re-entered Japan National Railways, from whom he retired in April 1960 at the age of forty-eight in order to become chief engineer on subway works on the Kōbe high-speed railway. Subsequently, he worked with a consultant engineering company in Tokyo and Ōsaka.⁷³

In the Japanese Army a railway engineer is a specialized sort of engineer. The commander of a railway regiment is normally a graduate in engineering of a reputable university and the officers, warrant officers and NCOs are specialized technically. During the Pacific War army ranks were as follows, in downward order of rank: shōgun (army commander), taishō (general), chūjō (lieutenant-general), shōshō (major-general), taisa (colonel), chūsa (lieutenant-colonel), shōsa (major), taii (captain), chūi (lieutenant), shōi (second-lieutenant), minaraishikan (cadet officer), juní (warrant officer), sōchō (CSM, staff-serjeant), gunsō (serjeant), gochō (corporal), heichō (lance-corporal), jōtōhei (superior private), ittōhei (first-class private), nittōhei (second-class private). An RSM was a juní, a brigadier was ryodanchō, not of general officer rank but an appointment for a senior colonel. Collective nouns were shōkō, commissioned officers, heitai, soldiers, heisotsu, private soldiers. Strictly speaking, each of the above ranks was prefixed by rikugun, Land Army, to distinguish it from kaigun Sea Army, i.e. Navy. During the Pacific War there was no separate Air Force. The Army had its own aircraft, the Navy its own separately, and rivalry between the two arms was carried to ridiculous extremes.

The railway had its starting point at Nong Pladuk (80 km from Bangkok on the southern section of Thai National Railways), its terminus Thanbyusayat (about 50 km from Moulmein on the India National Line to Ye on the Burma coast), with main construction bases at Nong Pladuk on the Thai side and at Thanbyusayat on the Burma side.

The line ran from Nong Pladuk 50 km to Kanchanaburi (always abbreviated by Japanese railway engineers and by prisoners-of-war to Kamburi,) crossed the river Mae Khlaung at Thā Makham, and continued thence alongside the river Kwae Noi upstream as far as the Three Pagodas Pass, descended thence along the upper valley of the river Zami and crossed the Taungnyo mountain range to Thanbyusayat, at which point it converged with the India National Railways line to Ye on the Andaman Sea coast. In the event it ran for 415 km through mountainous jungle, rose to about 275 meters above sea level and was built with prisoner-of-war labour using picks, changkuls, cold chisels and mallets, gunpowder, saws, derricks and pulleys, with local dredgers and cement-mixers for concrete well-crib bridge-piers and bridge-abutments.

The route followed that used in antiquity by Burmese raiders who came over the Three Pagodas Pass and crossed the Mae Khlaung by a liana and bamboo footbridge at Ban Thā Manao near Lat Ya before moving on to assault Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand.⁷⁴

Railtrack gauge was set at one metre, a gauge common to southern region railways making it possible for trains to run straight through to Singapore, again from Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Moulmein in Burma, and again as far as Rangoon. Planned transport volume was three thousand tons a day each way. Rails were shipped up from dismantled Sumatran and East coast Malayan Railways. The line had also a theoretical purpose of developing a commercial transport route between Burma and Thailand. Construction materials available in the area with other necessary materials were to be supplied by the Thai and the Japanese governments. It was to cost 700 million yen.

Military construction forces were laid down as one railway HQ, two railway regiments, and one railway materials depot, with auxiliary units as needed, i.e. gunzoku (of Japanese nationality) and heiho (of non-Japanese nationality, in the railway’s case Koreans). Labour needed was specified as local coolies and prisoners-of-war, as appropriate.

For Kuwabara’s projection in 1939 IJA GHQ had had prepared aerial survey maps to scale 1:20,000, which on the Thai side covered the Kwae Noi but the Kwae Yai (the Mae Khlaung) only as far as the immediate Thā Makham area.⁷⁵ It followed, therefore, that as this emanated from the highest authority Futamatsu had no option but to plan the main river-crossing at Thā Makham instead of the traditional crossing at Ban Thā Manao near Lat Ya. The latter would have elongated the line by about 25 km but would have eliminated the need for a cutting near Chungkai and a plank viaduct beyond it which together cost the lives of many prisoners.

The situation he faced was made the more difficult by the criminal negligence of the Thai Government’s contractors who failed to press ahead with the lorry highway which was necessary in this monsoon climate. The most elementary exercise in work-study had evidently not been done by them. At the time Futamatsu was unaware of the Thai contract. When I told him about it after the war, he commented that the narrow jungly track via Lat Ya to Ban Thā Manao (mis-named Ban Thā Dan by the engineers) was then still the narrow jungly track described by Pavillard in his book, Bamboo Doctor.⁷⁶

Errors in place-names inevitably arose because of the difficulty of transliterating Thai script into Japanese syllabics. In this instance Ban Thā Dan is much further upstream, is in hilly country and has no river-crossing.

In the Imperial War Museum in London there is a Japanese railway engineer’s trace of the Thai-Burma Link Line. It is in scroll form reading from right to left but has been folded and there are cracks along the folds. It is also rubbed and stained so that some kanji (ideographs) are illegible, others hard to decipher. It was found at Kamburi after the Japanese surrender by an agent of Standard Vacuum Oil, who passed it to his Bangkok manager, Nai Tack Fee, who gave it to his opposite number in Asiatic Petroleum Company (Royal Dutch Shell), C.F. Colchester, who had worked on the railway as a prisoner-of-war, and he presented it to the Imperial War Museum in 1954.⁷⁷ From internal evidence, it was made for the transport section of 5 Company of 3 Battalion, 9 Railway Regiment.

On this trace only the main Bangkok-Singapore line is marked as a ‘line in operation’ and the Moulmein-Ye line as ‘uncompleted’. The Moulmein-Ye line was in fact completed in 1925. It was described in Railway Gazette International (3 April 1925) as being 89 miles long, made through difficult country with annual rainfall of 367 inches. There were 200 bridges. No roads existed and heavy material had to be conveyed up tidal creeks in country boats.⁷⁸ The line had been surveyed by 1898. On Waterlow & Sons’ map of Burma railways of that date the track is marked as ‘surveyed’, with stations planned at Moulmein, Paauk, Kawthut, Taungbon and Yemyoma (terminal, i.e. Ye). From Pa-auk runs a ‘suggested’ track through Ataran and Thanbyusayat to the Three Pagodas Pass.⁷⁹ Probably the first general reference to the Moulmein-Ye line is in The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1929 in which the map of Burma shows it as an existing railway.⁸⁰ From internal evidence the trace in the IWM must have been drawn no earlier than August 1944.

At this time Thailand, Muang Thai, the Land of the Free, was a constitutional monarchy, Pratet Thai, controlled by a military dictatorship under Field-Marshal Phibun Songkhraam. When the Japanese Army marched in on 9 December 1941, he had no option (after a token show of resistance) but to capitulate. To the tourist it is the land of Buddhism, of brilliantly-tiled pagodas, of national observances and ceremonial dancing, of historic ruins, of elephants, often gorgeously apparelled, and of lovely women (particularly if below the age of thirty). The Thai are sticklers for prestige.

Yellow-robed priests with shaven heads are a common sight, begging as mendicants under the eaves of houses, haughtily giving no thanks for oblations, treated like buddhas. In modern times, after that brief interlude under Japanese occupation, the Thai have switched from their former anglophile culture to a brash American substitute.

It is essentially an agricultural economy. Educated Thai are generally less proud of their modernity than of their wild forests and mountainous terrain, of their teak and of the long rivers on which it is log-jammed down to the sawmills.

In the history of the railway, for various reasons several towns and villages have their importance. Nong Pladuk, for example, an insignificant cluster of dwellings, was the initial starting-point of the railway. But of the considerable complex of sidings, workshops, foundries, godowns, military barracks and prisoners’ compounds, not a trace remains today. All signs of the railway’s worst bombing raid are wiped away. Two kilometres from Nong Pladuk is Kommā where is Wat Kok Mor, the lovely Buddhist temple near which Nong Pladuk’s dead were buried. The wat remains, but the dead have been exhumed and today lie in the large cemetery at Chungkai.

In the Pacific War, Kamburi (Kanchanaburi) was at first a Japanese airstrip and finally a prison camp in which officers were segregated when the Japanese began to fear a paratroop invasion. It was seldom out of railway records. Here the Japanese erected a monument ‘to ease the souls of the prisoners’ who became victims of their captors’ own neglect and brutality. It was dedicated in March 1944. On a marble plaque on a concrete pillar set on the large plinth of one of the four corner buttresses was engraved in English:

IN MEMORY OF DECEASED PRISONERS OF WAR 1944

The vast Allied cemetery here had been the scene of annual ceremonies held by the Thai, British and Australian governments to commemorate these men, held in the same spirit as the epitaph on the cemetery on the slopes of Garrison Hill at Kohima in Burma:

When you go home

tell them of us and say

for your tomorrow

we gave our today

The real name of Chungkai, known to every ex-prisoner on the railway, is Khao Poon. Here, too, is a very large cemetery, but the place is also infamous for a cutting through a rocky hill. The line of the projected railway route curved round at the waterside at its foot. In the normal way one would plan a tunnel here but the regiment’s men had no tunnelling experience so Futamatsu had to plan a cutting which in the event proved to be 100 metres long, maximum depth 40 metres, and about ten thousand cubic metres of rock had to be excavated, a cutting which cost the lives of many prisoners.

Further along is a high cliff on the North bank, the ‘103 km’ point (calculating from the village of Nong Pladuk where the 0-km post had been set up on 5 July 1942 to mark the point at which the Thai-Burma Railway was to branch off from the main Bangkok-Singapore line on Thai National Railways). The cliff face rose about 50 metres up from the water and continued along for about 200 metres, the wall-face rising perpendicularly and topped by a luxuriant growth of trees and shrubs. There being no straight alignment at riverside level, it was decided to make a direct run halfway up the cliff face and build a plank viaduct. This, too, cost many lives.

Konkuita in the jungle was the site of the joining-up of the Burmese and the Thai sides of the railway construction. No. 5631 tank engine, decked with the Thai and the Japanese ‘poached egg’ national flags, brooded nearby in a cutting, an AA-gun post was set up, and the GOC presided at a ceremony at which the two regimental commanders drove gun-metal dog-spikes into an ebony sleeper to fix the final rails. One of the many legends tells how an Aussie prisoner prized out these ‘gold’ spikes and sold them for a large sum to a lurking Thai. Each commander was presented with a commemorative replica, which was cast with the date shōwa 18nen 10gatsu 25 nichi along one side, 25 October 1943. One is preserved as an heirloom in Colonel Imai’s family. For engineers a bronze medallion was struck to commemorate the occasion.⁸¹ The site of the ceremony is now buried deep under water in the Khao Laem hydro-electric dam, which is 90 metres high, 910 metres water surface-level 155 metres above sea level. The dam covers 42 km from its most southerly to its most northerly points. Power-turbines, capacity 300 megawatts, are in tunnels in the Khao Laem mountain with spillways for rivers. The Kwae Noi had to be diverted for about 500 metres during construction.⁸²

The Three Pagodas Pass has the central pagoda marking the frontier boundary, the other two being in Thai and Burmese territory respectively. Each is about 6 metres high. They are now a shining white trio, having been restored after the war, but I have seen a colour photograph of them as they were when the railway was built, the steps crudely roughened by time, lichen-covered, lacking part of their finials at the top, encroached upon by saplings and trees. Their Thai name is phra chedi sam ong which means ‘the three religious spire-shaped temple towers’. The village near the pass is called Paya Thonzu (thonzu is a religious numerative, paya means ‘pagoda’).

All these places were emblematic of a hideous task, hideous alike to prisoners and coolies and engineers. The Japanese made up many plaintive songs like these:

We are men drenched in soaking rain,

gritting our teeth, gritting our teeth ...

But if you wait, Spring comes again,

and boats come up again.

Left behind at home my darling child no doubt has grown.

How is my wife’s health? Has anything changed?

We shiver in our dreams.

Even when the wind drops, tigers lurk in rubber groves.

Leaves fall and scatter. Why do they scatter?

News, news of our homeland –

Shall we hear soon in August?

Why do stars loom low on a Panga Forest night?

Now in our dreams we think, think, think of home,

and wait for a boat to load, to greet a boat.

In rubber groves in Panga Forest our final lodging to die,

Sparse shade, leaves and branches overhang,

Even today showers impend.

If you visit our comrades’ honoured graves

(mists crowding in, dimly dawn comes calm in the forest)

railbed grows chilly, mists penetrate your body ...

We made a banner of remembrance of our comrades

who refused to die defeated, it was soiled by rain,

it was a collection of autographs, and we set it up

on top of a hill.⁸³

In Chapter 30 Futamatsu remarks that ‘those who have to spend a long time in the jungle realize that their object in life becomes that of staying alive’, and that ‘the curfew orderly made men forget the toils of work and when night fell the fields and hills of home floated under their eyelids, and in their dreams they saw their family friends’. Officer prisoners and senior NCOs were lucky in one respect, that they had, or developed, a strong sense of responsibility for their men, doubly lucky when men of their own unit were in the same camp. Indian Army officers were unlucky because their men were all segregated from white men (and pressurized to join the INA, the Indian Army of Independence). The Dutch, as the RAPWI (Returned Allied Prisoners-of-War and Internees) handbook told them after release in 1945, had a strong sense of survival, had an overpowering urge to look after themselves. We found they tended to jump queues at the cookhouse, a memory which caused an amusing incident when MV Orbita carrying British ex-prisoners home in October 1945 was passed in the Mediterranean by a Dutch liner. Her identity was announced over the tannoy and a spontaneous roar went up from Orbita of ‘Eten halen’, the Dutch phrase for our cookhouse call of ‘Come and get it!’

That too many Australian officers were privately ashamed of themselves for being undemocratic, scilicet being officers, was completely cancelled out by the astounding way an Australian soldier did everything he could to help his cobbers.

But in the jungle along the river-banks lurked unseen a remarkable neolithic archaeological find. In 1943, a Dutch archaeologist recorded in his brief diary, ‘March/April 1943, at Bankhao, found palaeoliths’, in fact pebble tools and polished adzes. Luckily this prisoner survived. He was Dr H.R. van Heekeren, and in 1960 his Government proposed to the Thai Government a joint Thai-Danish Prehistoric Expedition. They found a large number of sites in caves and on mounds in open spaces, unearthing over forty skeletons of which ten could be determined as female and twelve as male. Twenty-six of them could be determined as under thirty years of age, eight below forty, only two over forty. They were found at levels varying between 75 and 180 centimetres. Associated finds were earthenware vessels, personal ornaments and ritual objects. The most frequent finds were stone adzes, but there were also barbed harpoons, barbed arrow-heads, spearheads, and a fishhook made of animal bones, and a knife blade made from the shell of a freshwater mussel from the river. Stone bark-cloth beaters and baked-clay spindle-whorls showed that these people wore clothes, and baked-clay pellets were possibly used as missiles with a pellet bow for hunting small game. Around one skeleton’s neck shell beads were found in the form of small buttons with a perforated hole in the middle, arranged in two rows along with cylindrical stone beads. Arca shells perforated for suspension and animal bones perforated longitudinally seem to have been used as ornaments. The finds were those of an area inhabited by a Neolithic people c. BC 2000, probably living in small settlements on mounds near the River Kwae Noi, with an economy based on some agriculture and domestication of pigs and cattle augmented by hunting and fishing. Their pottery shows well-developed manufacturing techniques and their tools reveal a differentiated inventory of stone, bone and shell manufacture. Their stature was nearly the same as that of today’s Thai, but their life-span was short, averaging at death below forty years. They buried their dead in the settlement and the abundant presence of pottery and other burial gifts suggests a belief in an after-life.

But in 1943, above ground in the camps, on sleepless nights when, carried away by intolerable homesickness, a man went outside when the guard was not looking, above the jungle trees the Southern Cross twinkled in the night sky. In Chapter 30 Futamatsu also describes how his ‘surroundings were spread out in a hushed silence like that on an ocean floor’. The tokay’s cry rang out. When would this railway at last be opened to traffic?

Had he but known them, he might have echoed in his thoughts songs sung by Japanese soldiers in their fruitless, battered exposure on Guadalcanal Island:

No matter how far we walk

we know not where to go

trudging along under dark jungle growth.

When will this march end?

We hide in the dark during the day

and dare to move only at night,

Deep in the lush jungle of Guadalcanal.

Our staple food, our rice, is gone,

we eat roots and grass.

Along ridges and cliffs we lose our way,

leaves hide the trail.

We stumble and get up, fall and get up…

We are covered with mud from our falls,

blood oozes from our wounds.

We have no cloth with which to bind our wounds,

and flies swarm to the scabs,

Yet we have no strength to brush them away.

We keep on falling down, we can’t move.

Many times have I thought to kill myself.

The railway achieved prominence in the West initially as the result of debriefings of prisoners whose unmarked ship, the Rakuyo maru, in transit from Singapore to Japan, was torpedoed by an Allied Forces submarine which rescued them. This was reported by Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, to the House of Commons on 17 November 1944.⁸⁴ John Coast, R. Norfolks, gave the railway its soubriquet ‘Death Railway’ in his Railroad of Death (Commodore Press, 1946). He became press officer, FO, Bangkok, and later press attaché to President Soekarno of Indonesia.

The Geneva Convention for the treatment of Prisoners-of-War has over thirty-five articles but in the context of the Thai-Burma Railway eight stand out in particular.

1.They must not be employed on unhealthy or on dangerous work.

2.Daily work must not be excessive. They should be allowed a rest of twenty-four consecutive hours, preferably on Sundays.

3.They must at all times be humanely treated and protected, particularly from acts of violence, from insults and from public curiosity. Reprisals against them are forbidden. They are entitled to respect for their person and honour.

4.Their food ration shall be equivalent in quality and quantity to that of depot troops of the detaining nation.

5.Clothing, underwear and footwear shall be supplied to them.

6.Each camp shall possess an infirmary where prisoners shall receive attention of any kind of which they may be in need.

7.They shall be allowed to receive individually parcels of foodstuffs and clothing.

8.Intellectual and sporting pursuits shall be encouraged so much as is possible.

An important life-line for prisoners was a chequered one, secret radios. It was a complicated story. The Naval Barracks at Kranji on Singapore Island had not been entered since capitulation, and a party of prisoners was sent, with Japanese permission, to clean the place up. They found the electric light could be made to work, so the Japanese, while the devastated city lighting system was being restored, kept the party there on the cleaning job with a Japanese guard. In a small storeroom leading out of the transformer room the party found shelves stacked with radio valves of all sizes. These they ‘won’ and hid. There was some intercommunication between various prison-camp areas on the Island, contacts such as ration parties, exchange of scarce resources and so on, always with a Japanese guard accompanying them. In the secret radio context there were three in particular, first the main camp at Changi, second the Kranji cleaning party, and third the camp near Bukit Timah on the golf course where prisoners were navvying for Japanese shrine-carpenters who had been sent from Japan to build a shrine like a small temple, the Shōnan Shrine, to ease the souls of Japanese soldiers killed in the Malayan campaign to capture Singapore. At the Ford factory at Bukit Timah the Shrine party found some 50-gallon drums of petroleum jelly, needed with Japanese approval by Roberts Hospital at Changi. The Kranji party managed to smuggle out a good-stock of 1½-volt valves which the Shrine Party in turn managed to smuggle into Roberts Hospital inside a petroleum jelly drum. Meanwhile the Royal Corps of Signals had been alerted at the start of the exercise and their artificers got busy making miniature wireless sets concealed in the bottoms of officer-type water bottles, to be activated by small 1½-volt batteries. From then on, each party sent from Changi to Thailand carried with them a wireless set and batteries, both ingeniously concealed in various ‘obviously necessary’ utensils.

Independently of the Kranji development Captain John Beckett, 2 Cambs, built a secret set in Sime Road PW camp on Singapore Island in 1942, but on arrival at Chungkai in Thailand with a box of components he was at a loss how to know how to operate in jungle conditions. Luckily he came across Lieut. Tom Douglas, RCOS, who in civilian life was a BBC engineer and expert in wireless construction. With Beckett’s components Douglas built several sets in officer-type water-bottles. Their efforts are described in detail in The 18 Division Booklet, issue for 1988–1989, pp. 5–11.

The first upset in a Thailand camp occurred when a kempei (Japanese secret policeman) grew suspicious, overhearing a prisoner’s casual talk which suggested that he knew something of what was happening in the outside world. At first the kempei thought someone must have smuggled into camp copies of the forbidden Bangkok Chronicle, an English language periodical for that polyglot city, edited under Japanese supervision by pro-Japanese Thai. Without warning the camp guards, kempei made a snap search for the periodical during which a wireless set was discovered and three prisoners were beaten to death. From that point onwards security drill for wireless sets was made extremely rigorous. Only selected officers and warrant officers were entrusted with the news from New Delhi and they were always given it a fortnight late. The prisoner had to say that any item overheard by a kempei, Japanese guard, or Korean heiho, came from ‘an educated Thai on a ration-detail’ down in the local town. The dangers run by Boon Pong, as I mention later, became even more obvious when he was smuggling ‘canary seed’ into a camp up country.

There were some narrow escapes by the courageous men operating these sets. At Thā Sao, Captain Biggs, RCOS, who had carried a set up in October 1942 in Lt-Col McOstrich’s party from Singapore, had the set concealed in a blanket on his bedspace and the batteries and earphones in two haversacks hung up on pegs. One day when Biggs was down at the cookhouse as messing officer, Colonel McOstrich was told by the Japanese that a search was about to be made. With great presence of mind another prisoner said he urgently must go to the latrine, was given permission to do so, and warned Captain Biggs who immediately returned to the hut and stood at his bedspace. As he arrived the Japanese discovered the earphones and set up a great hullabaloo and chattering as they examined them. Biggs swept blanket and set off the bedspace behind him and pushed them with his foot under the sleeping platform. The Japanese excitedly searched his bedspace and found the batteries, chattering and crowding around. Biggs stooped down, lifted set and blanket up off the floor and replaced them on his bedspace. The Japanese then searched underneath the sleeping platform and found nothing. Biggs explained he was hoping to light his end of the hut with the batteries and incredibly the Japanese bought the story. It was lucky they were kempei: the camp staff would not have done so, batteries being permitted only for use by Japanese camp staff.

Charlie Mott, one of Chennault’s Flying Tiger pilots, was associated with radio set batteries. He was shot down when raiding Tak airfield in Burma and 8 January 1942, and after hospital operations in a Japanese military hospital in Bangkok was put into Nong Pladuk prison camp with a pair of shorts and slippers. We rallied round (I gave him a blanket) and he quickly established himself in our society – he had played chess for his State, would lie on his blanket and play eight of us simultaneously on home-made chess sets. Our RASC drivers took to him for his engineering skill and elected him to be the Officer in charge of 62 Truck & Motor Pool of about 200 RASC and other drivers hauling rations up to camps as far as the Three Pagodas Pass. When the Japanese motor-transport got as far as Thā Sao, a prison camp radio set was carried, in a tin covered with rice to the camp perimeter fence and Charlie ran leads from a lorry-battery insider the Japanese MT compound. The contact worked spasmodically for about a year.

The worst example of kempeitai reaction took place at Kamburi in September 1943 when a wireless set was discovered. Seven officer-prisoners were brutally beaten with heavy bamboo rods over a period of three days as a result of which two of them, Captain Hawley, SSVF, and Lieutenant Armitage, RA, died. The seven prisoners’ terrible ordeal included vicious kicking and punching of body and face, intermittent beating with the buckled end of leather belts, and immersion overnight in a water-filled ditch. The kit and personal effects of the two dead men were never found, presumably destroyed by these bullies, who buried the bodies behind the camp guardroom. When the Japanese, fearing a paratroop landing, segregated all officer-prisoners into a single camp at Kamburi at the far edge of the padang alongside the railway, the padang which in the earlier stages of the occupation had been a Japanese airstrip, the problem arose of how to transfer stocks of about 300 1½-volt batteries accumulated in the Thā Makham and Chungkai camps. Fortunately it had been decided to dismantle the Thā Makham huts and to transfer the big bamboo hut-poles to Kamburi for building new huts there. Liaison was established with an officer-prisoner whom the Japanese had detailed to come over from Chungkai, with a Korean heiho as guard, to visit sick prisoners at Thā Makham. The Chungkai batteries were put into a big army pack with fruit for the sick and placed on top, and the prisoner carried them, under guard by the heiho, passed the Japanese guard-room at Thā Makham. Here they were secreted away and the same night some bamboo poles were selected and filled with batteries and these poles were marked. The following day when the official party of prisoners came over from Kamburi with a lorry, the officer-prisoner in charge of the party, the only one in the party in the know, packed the marked poles first at the bottom of the lorry with the rest on top, and so brought them under armed guard past the guardroom into the officers’ camp. When a set was eventually completed it was built into the structure of one of the clay ovens in the camp cookhouse.

The obligatory ‘last stand for a decisive battle’ referred to earlier, occasioned the move from Kamburi to the foothills north of Nakhon Nayok where they were to tunnel into the rock for the Japanese defence redoubts. Colonel Toosey was in charge, under escort of a Japanese staff-serjeant, of the first party.⁸⁵ I was in charge of the second party after the lapse of a week in July 1945. Nakhon Nayok lay in a large tract of country virtually depopulated of Thai inhabitants by a virulent strain of cerebral malaria, that form of the fever which leaves the sufferer screaming until he dies in a sudden rigour. Contact with Thai underground freedom fighters was thus impossible to establish, and it was decided not to attempt to transfer batteries until later on. The Japanese commander of the officers’ camp at Kamburi, a quite remarkably vicious sadist, Captain Noguchi Hideji, who amongst other things had confiscated the prisoners’ musical instruments, had himself travelled to Nakhon Nayok, and an officer-prisoner who had been compelled to act as his batman took the opportunity of secreting in his baggage a wireless set strapped to a cornet which Noguchi presumably intended to play. When the Emperor made his surrender broadcast, Colonel Toosey had what must have been the ineffable pleasure of requesting Noguchi to supply batteries for the wireless set Noguchi had no idea he himself had brought to Nakhon Nayok.

My own involvement in the railway began in the late afternoon of 5 February 1942 when the final detachment of 18 Division, diverted from Basra in the Gulf for political reasons, was about to land on Singapore Island after low level attacks by Zeros which sank one ship and killed two men of my own company manning a machine-gun post on my own ship whose defence, brilliantly organized by Colonel Thomas, 9 RNF, put three Zeros into the sea off Keppel Harbour. We landed in the dark two nights before the Japanese themselves crossed the Straits and landed on the north-west coast of the Island. On 18 June 1942 my company, 54 Infantry Brigade Gp Coy, RASC, CO Major R. S. Sykes to whom I was adjutant, was the first to travel overland from Singapore to the head of the Gulf of Siam, detraining at Banpong on 23 June to develop what became the Thai base workshops and stores of the railway. I remained at Nong Pladuk until 26 January 1945 when all officers were segregated into a camp at Kamburi, and remained there as a hut commander until late July when I was sent to Nakhon Nayok. When the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki I was ordered to Bangkok to act as Staff-Captain ‘Q’ on the Ex-PW HQ, as I mentioned earlier. That job completed, I flew to Rangoon on 29 September and embarked in MV Orbita on 11 October, disembarking at Liverpool on 9 November.

In the interval between April up to August 1943 the railway engineers’ task, and therefore the prisoners’ task, was to crowd in a volume of work calculated by Futamatsu at over 20,000 cubic metres of spoil a day and 10 metres length on bridge-building. The prisoners’ daily stint was increased, double-shift work was introduced and the working week was made into a ten-day ‘week’. Heavy pressure was put on them, they were beaten with heavy bamboo rods, kicked and shouted at … ‘supeedo’, ‘hurree uppu’, ‘baka yaro’ (idiots), ‘chikushō’ (miserable animals). All this work, the roadbed, the steel bridge, culverts, wooden bridges over minor streams, rail-laying as far as Wanyai and on to Kinsaiyok, was done by what the Japanese called ‘human wave’ tactics.

The Speedo was the prisoners’ version of the Japanese kyūsoku kensetsu, rush-construction. The volume of work may be guessed from facts such as that 688 bridges had to be built of which seven were steel with concrete piers and bridge-abutments. Six of them were in Burma, over the Zami, Apalon, Mezali, Winyaw, Khonkhan and Myettaw rivers, and one in Thailand over the Mae Khlaung river. Few of the others were over a hundred metres across but they included the 200-metre plank viaduct at Arrow Hill. For small spans of 10 metres and larger spans of 70 to 80 metres ‘text-book’ methods were used. For girders on wooden bridges 30-cm squared timbers were used on top of the foundations made by pile-driving. Prisoners recall heaving on a rope ‘fishing’ for a heavy plumb-bob from the derrick, dropping the plumb-bob as a pile-driver, the sweating men singing ‘valdhai la valdhai la’, the Volga boat song. Clamps were used to bolt up timbers, a low safety-factor for such foundations. However, when the bombing started, their construction being simple, they collapsed but being simple could be repaired rapidly, a nightmare job vividly remembered by prisoners. From early 1943 Allied reconnaissance aircraft flew over and were greeted in camps by the Japanese special bugle-call:

To which I set a metric song in the Japanese manner, ‘bakugekiki tonde kuru’ which means ‘the bombers come flying’. In June 1944, the base at Thanbyusayat was bombed but intensive raiding began with the opening-to-traffic of the railway. The six steel bridges in Burma were all damaged by bombing, some in up to seven attacks. In Thailand the Mae Khlaung bridges were attacked ten times between 29 November 1944 and 28 July 1945 by both USAAF and RAF in B24 Liberators, the most successful attack being that of 13 February 1945 when three of the eleven spans fell and most of a rebuilt wooden bridge destroyed.

At Nong Pladuk on the night of 6/7 September 1944, B24s attacked railway sidings at Kommā half a mile from the camp. A petrol train and some ammunition were completely destroyed in a blaze of fiery light visible 50 miles away at Kamburi, but one bomber undershot his target and dropped two sticks across the camp, one of which fell on the central hut causing over 400 casualties including 90 dead and those who subsequently died of wounds. Many men had taken the meagre protection of shallow ground depressions and drains, but most were in their huts in accordance with Japanese standing orders for air-raids. Sjt Watanabe Masaō, admin NCO of the camp, went at once to the bombed area, carried to the hospital hut one of the first casualties, and assisted generally in directing prisoners to drains while the raid proceeded. Again at Nong Pladuk, during the evening meal on 3 December 1944, three formations of B24s raided the camp in waves from about 7,000 feet. The first wave pattern-bombed the workshops and godowns next to the extensive sidings outside the camp, the second covered the bombed area with incendiaries, the third in error bombed the prisoners’ cookhouse and an adjacent hut, killing several prisoners including Major Paddy Sykes, RASC, my CO, an outstanding figure in the camp, loved and respected.

The Japanese were uneasy in the presence of madmen and avoided them. Two Argyll & Sutherland Highlands private soldiers created a phantom dog which they took everywhere with them, threw sticks for him to catch, good-dogged him for bringing them back, gave him drinks of water and imaginary food, waited while he pee’d against posts. The Japanese soldiers and the Korean heiho regarded them as mad, and kept away from them. Some dug-out regular soldiers among the prisoners at Nong Pladuk thought a young gunner officer was a fool or a madman who unfailingly on his own initiative insisted on marching out with the camp working parties past the camp guard-house, gave the guard a ‘two-fingered’ salute, marched them back again at the end of the day with his haversack bulging with the results of barter with Thai women lurking in the bushes at the place of work. Lieutenant Harold Payne, 137 Army Field Regt, RA, was to me one of the minor heroes of the railway. In my mind’s eye I see him today, in his battered slouch hat and tattered scarf, stomping out past the guard to the strains of Colonel Bogey, called by the Japanese ‘The River Kwae March’, played with verve by ‘Ace’ Connelly, a pre-war bandsman and jazz-player, now the prisoners’ ‘Ace’ cornet-player.

Successively British CO of prison camps at Bukit Timah, Thā Makham, Nong Pladuk, Kamburi and Nakhon Nayok was Lt-col Philip Toosey, DSO, RA, whose decoration in the field was for engaging enemy infantrymen over open sights in the battle on Singapore Island, and even so extricating his twenty-five pounders. He became one of the most distinguished among several remarkable camp-commanders whom even the Japanese admired for his courage in standing up to them in the prisoners’ interests.

A different sort of courage was displayed unobtrusively by a middle-aged Thai at Nong Pladuk, the wife of K.G. Gairdner, a civilian internee in Bangkok, who through his compradore, K.S. Hong, got a note signed ‘V’ through to Major Sykes on a ration detail in Banpong. Sykes replied as ‘V/V’. Gairdner went on supplying monthly small packet drugs and 200 to 400 ticals, subscribed by him and fellow-internees. By 1943 when the effects of the Speedo were plainly beyond control, ‘V’ arranged a loan of 12,000 ticals. The notes had to be in 20 ticals, these being the highest denomination issued to us by the Japanese. This not inconsiderable load was concealed in a sack of tapioca flour which the messenger, this time Milly Gairdner, passed to Paddy Sykes in front of a Japanese guard.

Another heroine was Madame Millet, wife of the French consul in Bangkok, untiring in her efforts in raising subscriptions for prisoners’ welfare, for obtaining supplies of medicines, and carrying V/V’s intelligence notes on trips to North Africa via Saigon.

My own private hero was Captain Charles Wylie, 1 Gurkhas, after the war a member of the team who conquered Everest. I was listed to take a party up-country to replace sick and dead prisoners. At the time a very severe attack of amoebic dysentery made me take a precautionary visit to the squatter-latrine, and I passed copious blood which would not stop flowing. The British camp medical officer said I must be replaced and sent to the hospital hut. Hearing this, Charles Wylie at no notice volunteered to take my place on a party which proved to be destined for one of the cholera belts. Typically of the man, he said he had no recollection of the circumstances when I wrote to him after the war to thank him for an act which probably saved my life.

To prisoners the best-known hero was Nai Boonpong Sirivejjabhandu, GM, known to them as Boon Pong. The Speedo greatly increased the number of prisoners brought up from Singapore. Gairdner kept the Nong Pladuk area as his responsibility but asked E.P Heath of the Borneo Company and R.D. Hempson to take responsibility for camps up-country. Heath asked his friend, Nai Clarn of Anglo-Thai Corporation to ask his friend Nai Boon Pong of Kamburi to act as courier to hand over clandestinely-procured money and medicines, at great risk to his life from the kempeitai, which he did as far as Thā Khanun. He became a legendary figure to prisoners. He also supplied camps with ‘canary seed’ (batteries for secret radios). Hundreds of survivors owe their lives to his help.⁸⁶

I ought to mention a particular Japanese hero, an aircraft navigator called Sakurai. Major-general Shimoda Senriki, on a reconnaissance flight as GOC on 26 January 1943, crashed into a teak forest on the slopes of the Mayan Tong mountain, and eleven of the crew were killed outright. Sakurai, however, managed to live only on water for a month, and although severely injured succeeded in struggling out of the jungle where he was found by a search party on 23 February.⁸⁷

Two other heroes of the railway, whose exploits are described in Chapters 29 and 32 in Futamatsu’s book, were Lieutenant Pharaoh Adams, RASC, and Lieutenant Jim Bradley, RE. Adams drove 100 head of cattle, beef on the hoof, for ten days over 120 km of swamp, jungle, mountain and stream to Konkuita, as described in his book, No Time for Geishas (Leo Cooper, 1973). Bradley with nine others escaped from Songkurai. Five of them died in the jungle before reaching the Andaman Sea coast but the survivors were recaptured, condemned to execution, and sent back to Singapore for court-marshal. Their object had been to tell the outside world about the treatment of prisoners-of-war. Towards the Setting Sun (Phillimore, 1982) is his unemotional, historically accurate account, written at his wife Lindy’s insistence as a catharsis to exorcise the nightmares to which his experiences had made him a nightly sufferer. He was deeply indebted to Captain C.H.D. Wild, Ox & Bucks LI⁸⁸ whom the Japanese called nemuranai se no takai hito, ‘the tall man who never slept’, who was always alert, night and day, to his fellow-prisoners’ interests. Wild, fluent in Japanese, was summoned to attend Bradley’s execution as one of the official witnesses required by Japanese military law. He so moved the Japanese colonel by his intervention describing their true motives in escaping and declaring it would be a blot for eternity on the escutcheon of bushidō to execute such brave men, that the colonel burst into tears and countermanded the execution.

Futamatsu was presented by authors Adams and Bradley with copies of their books and his request for permission to include quotations in his own book was given by both authors. They may have been puzzled at times by some passages and by some omissions. Japanese authors tend to give the gist of much of what they purport to quote, at times quote verbatim, and omit passages in the middle of quotes for no apparent good reason. At the bottom of such omissions often lies an aspect of Japanese politeness. It becomes a question of readership. Who are expected to form the author’s main readership? Futamatsu’s book was primarily written for a Japanese readership and he is at pains to leave out some passages likely to offend such readers.

Lieutenant Adams recalls an occasion, shortly after the opening-to-traffic ceremony on 25 October 1943, when an eastbound train stopped at the sidings at Konkuita. ‘It was filled’, he wrote, ‘with Japanese sick and wounded; they had been shut up in those steel 10-ton trucks for many hours, without food or water, and their wounds, all serious, untended since boarding. The prisoners-of-war were moved to pity and many went forward to offer them water and even a cigarette in some cases. The now useless warriors of the Emperor lay in their own filth, and all were nauseated by the stench of their foul matted bloody dressings. Little wonder that the Japanese High Command were callous to us prisoners if they could treat their own kith and kin thus.’⁸⁹ In the autumn of 1944, I had a similar experience when supervising a squad of prisoners repairing the embankment just outside Nong Pladuk station. The cha-wala was just brewing up tea in the old oil-drum used for the purpose, when a Japanese eastbound train of enclosed steel rice-cars drew up alongside. It was filled with Japanese soldiers, some mere youths, all badly wounded, with a lieutenant and a corporal in sole charge. My party saw these wounded men, untended, many with dysentery, some already dying, lying in blood and filth. To a man the prisoners swarmed alongside helping the soldiers to sip mugs of tea, some wiping their faces clean of sweat and dirt. I sensed danger, the corporal looked furious, my Korean heiho from the camp looked restive, so I engaged the lieutenant in conversation, his replies being in very good English. Suddenly I realized it was Inoue Tōjō, my college contemporary. I do not know whether he recognized me but I could see he was almost sinking to the earth with shame. He shouted to the corporal not to interfere. I went on talking to enable him to recover some of his devastatingly lost face, without revealing my own identity. The signals on the line showed green and this horrible incident closed.

After the war Thai National Railways set up a C56 tank engine at Thā Makham station in commemoration of the war years on the railway, which had brought prosperity to a previously under-developed area and greatly boosted Thailand’s tourist trade. To the Japanese, the construction of the railway, despite its calamitous ending, has been claimed as ranking among world engineering feats with the building of the Panama Canal, and after the war two C56 tank engines were repatriated: C5644 makes tourist trips on the Ōigawa Railway Line, where it originated: the other, C563l, which was present at the ceremony on 25 October 1943 at Konkuita, was set up on a metre-gauge set of rails in a corner of the Yasukuni Shrine, the temple in Tokyo which is dedicated to Japanese war-dead. It is kept in apple-pie order by the C5631 Preservation Society, whose members, on a monthly rōta, grease and oil it and polish up the paint.

The Bishop of Singapore made the final summing-up, ‘We must forgive, but not forget.’ Not all prisoners-of-war were angels, not all Japanese soldiers sadistic villains. A few of these risked suspicion of being disloyal, by helping prisoners in various ways. In my own case, a Korean heiho, at a time when prisoners for security reasons were forbidden in the Nong Pladuk camp to learn Japanese, taught me the two Japanese syllabaries (they have no alphabet). He risked torture by kempei. I was dubbed by dug-out regular officers as Jap-happy, a form of Jap-happiness which in the long run enabled me to abstract straightforward news items from the Japanese camp commandant’s newspapers, surreptitiously brought to me by my own CSM, Frank Stadden, who worked in the Jap office. He then pressed them and returned them. By reading between the lines, we were able to follow, for example, the stirring movements of the American marines in their systematic re-capture of the islands in the Pacific. When a news item ran, ‘Our heroic Japanese soldiers made a strategic withdrawal from Colombangara’, it was a pound to a penny the marines had re-taken Colombangara.

When the atomic bombs dropped prisoners had varying degrees of unease about the reaction of the Japanese Army to the Emperor’s broadcast, many believing that bushidō extremists would try to kill them. This was particularly the case in a country under the influence of Count Terauchi but if orders to kill prisoners existed, in Thailand at any rate it appeared that the kempeitai had filleted them from the offices of the various HQs. It was left to the British Division of the International Prosecution at the International Military Tribunal Far East, B & C Offences, to reveal what may be the only unfilleted document.⁹⁰ It was found by ex-prisoner Jack Edwards at the Kinkaseki Mine in North Taiwan. The document emanated from the Taihoku prisoner-of-war camp and was addressed to the commanding general of the Taiwan kempeitai. The document is listed by the British Division as Document No. 2071 (certified as Exhibit ‘0’ in Document No. 2687). It describes the reply to Taihoku’s query about ‘the extreme measures for prisoners-of-war’ and runs as follows:

The time and method of this disposition are as follows:

(1)The Time.

Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual disposition may be made in the following circumstances:

(a)When an uprising of large numbers cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms,

(b)When escapees from the camp may turn into a hostile fighting force.

(2)The Methods.

(a)Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.

(b)In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.⁹¹

The timing of this document (1 August 1944) has added point to those who know that in the summer of 1944 senior officer-prisoners secretly ordered named officers to act as key personnel in a putative mobile infantry brigade. I myself was nominated as Staff-Captain ‘Q’ to serve, as I discovered later when I arrived, under Major R.A.N. Davidson 4PWO, Gurkha Rifles, as DAQMG and Lt-col C.E. Morrison, 1 Leicesters, as DDST.

Detailed documented accounts exist of the militaristic take-over as a criminal course since 1931. One could say, with Ienaga Saburō in his book, The Pacific War, that a Great East Asian War lasted from 1931 to 1945. He argues that the use of prisoners-of-war on forced labour was only one aspect of the Army’s general violation of International Law. The effect of the take-over led to inevitable side-effects such as training to breed vicious fighters with a penchant for brutality against enemy prisoners. The tendency of Japanese to react to constant pressure with an explosion of irrational destructive behaviour was only too well-known to prisoners in Burma and Thailand. The conduct of the Japanese Army in the Pacific War was far inferior to their disciplined behaviour in the Russo-Japanese War.

Eight captured USAAF men were vivisected in May and June 1945 at Kyūshū Imperial University in experiments to test human limits of resistance to pain. For example, a prisoner had saline injected into his bloodstream to find the quantitative limits before death occurred. Air was injected into another prisoner’s veins to ascertain the volume at which death occurred. In the case of another prisoner his lung was excised to find the limits to which the bronchial tubes may be cut before death occurs.

The brilliant novelist, Endō Shūsaku, in his book The Sea and Poison (1958), confronted the problem of individual responsibility in wartime in a study of a doctor who had been ancillary to the test team and on return to civilian practice in peace-time was dogged by his. sense of guilt. Endō’s translator, Michael Gallagher, comments that his thesis is that the West is informed by the faith (he is a Catholic) even when formally rejected: the East is informed by a kind of pantheism so that the East knows no tension of opposites like good versus evil, flesh versus spirit, God versus devil. The East, he argues is a ‘concave’ world which has no God, the West is a ‘convex’ world which has acknowledged the existence of God.

In Tokyo many kempei deserted their units, panicking at the Emperor’s broadcast but not omitting to fillet HQ records of prison camps like Ōmuta in Kyūshū or the interrogation centre at Yokosuka near Yokohama. This overall display of docility is in marked contrast to the spirited dynamic resistance movements in Thailand and Burma during the Japanese occupation. But harsh treatment of Japanese by the Russians in Manchuria had its counterpart in Japan during the predominantly American occupation with GIs frequently accosting women in the street, or actually assaulting them, assaults resulting in women committing suicide or becoming street prostitutes. Victims of robbery by GIs were rarely able to recover their property or receive compensation.

B and C Class War Criminals included men who had no real chance of defending themselves and were executed. An example of mistaken identity (taking the charitable view) when the wrong man was to be put to death was Captain Wakamatsu Shiguō, commandant of Kilo 100 camp in Burma and later of the hospital camp at Nakhon Pathom in Thailand. According to testimony by prisoners at both those camps he was a humane man of principle, kind to prisoners and exerting his jurisdiction by protecting as far as he could the men under him. At Singapore in September 1945 Major Robbie Robertson, RAE, confirmed these views in his defence, and related how the Moji maru transport in which he himself was a prisoner was bombed in the Andaman Sea. In her stern she was carrying explosives, a fire broke out, and a Japanese officer left his cabin and with no regard for his own safety threw the explosives overboard. This was Captain Wakamatsu, under whom Major Robinson later served in Kilo 100 camp. The court commuted Wakamatsu’s death sentence to life imprisonment on 13 August 1946, yet despite this he was hanged by the Australians on 30 April 1947 at Singapore, an act of retaliatory judgement without retrial. His story, first told to me by Robbie Robinson, was set out in the Asahi newspaper on 4 October 1982.

The militaristic take-over of 1931 re-asserted the right, written into the Constitution of 1898, of giving the war ministers in the Cabinet direct access to the Throne. In 1913, the Constitution had been changed to allow retired officers to serve, but in 1936 the regulation was changed again making the Army and Navy ministers men on active service only. Thus the Army could topple the Cabinet by refusing to nominate a serving officer to serve as minister.

In 1940, Army Minister Lt-General Tōjō Hideki transferred Lt-general Nakamura Aketo, commander of Yamashita’s 5 Division, ‘for violating orders to avoid a clash in advance of the Japanese takeover of French Indo-China’. Nakamura emerged as commander of the kempeitai and by 1945 commanded all 50,000 forces in Thailand, the General with whom my encounter has been described.

Japan’s last war? It is possible that the economic development of the Pacific Basin, with its transfer of world dominance from the Atlantic to the Pacific, would leave Japan powerful enough to influence a consolidation of Australasia, China, and ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines), and realistic enough to remember that in war the winner does not take all.

After the war Futamatsu published An Account of the Construction of the Thai-Burma Railway in 1955, and my correspondence with him since 1979 culminated in his illustrated pamphlet, Recollections of the Thai-Burna Railway in 1980. The tale had come full circle from marines in the Pacific to his recreations of the railway. As a Buddhist, he might stress how we all are recreated in an unending series of afterlives leading (we hope) to a predestined nirvana. For Christians, life after death goes on ‘out there’ in a heaven each individual imagines for himself. For the Agnostic, Flanagan and Allen sang of the dawn which comes again after dreams underneath the Arches:

We are men drenched in soaking rain,

Gritting our teeth, gritting our teeth …

But if you wait, Spring comes again,

And boats come up again.

He had been distressed by inaccurate, biased articles and books by Australian and Japanese journalists, and by the brilliantly acted but grossly distorted denigratory account of Japanese railway engineering talent put over in the film version of Pierre Boulle’s novel, Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai, which has been widely shown in Japan under the title Bridge built in the Battlefield. Ex-prisoners-of-war, to whom a preview was given, tried to get excised some of the worst errors, but to no avail. Futamatsu determined the time had come for a definitive history to be published while Japanese and Western survivors were still alive and could verify his statements. His book was published in 1985, a greatly more detailed work than his earlier two pamphlets – an objective, unbiased account, historically accurate, Across the Three Pagodas Pass: the Story of the Burma-Siam Railway, of which my edited translation follows.

Boulle’s 1952 novel contained fewer impossibilities than did the 1967 film, but none-the-less the two principal characters, Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness) and Colonel Saitō (played by Hayakawa Sessue) are caricatures of type-cast Indian Army officers and of Japanese officers passed over as unfit for front-line service. Boulle was unaware that a railway engineer took precedence over a mere prison-camp official. The bridge in the novel was a wooden bridge and so was the bridge in the film which was built in Sri Lanka. In the novel it was not blown up. The real bridge over the Kwae Yai was a steel bridge with eleven steel spans of 20-metre pony-type Warren curved chord half-through trusses. It was, of course, blown up, but by bombing and not by sabotage.

Personnel employed on the railway included about 11,000 Japanese military, 61,106 prisoners-of-war, and 182,948 Asiatic coolies. Of the prisoners-of-war 12,399 were recorded as having died before leaving Thailand and Burma, and it has been estimated that over 90,000 Asiatic coolies died on this work.

My translation is edited to remove a few redundancies, to simplify a few tautologies and to omit detail such as the initial formation in Japan of gunzoku railway engineering units, of small interest to Western readers. The translation is followed by a fuller bibliography than you normally find in works for the general reader.

To the Western reader the intrinsic quality of the book lies in four directions. First, the author is at pains to present the truth in detail about the construction of the railway. Second, he tries to present a case, unconvincingly, for playing down what lay behind a Western journalist’s slur, ‘the death railway’. Third, he describes the real reason why the Japanese did not ratify the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-War, but works the case round to a doubt in his own mind as to how far the Japanese Army violated its clauses. Fourth, justifiable professional pride in the techniques and skills of a civilian railway engineer makes him sceptical of the professional regular soldiers’ attitudes.

Futamatsu printed twenty-eight small photographs in his original Japanese text. They cover the following places and persons: Railtrack over Krian River: Seletar airfield burning: railway stations at Singapore, Nong Pladuk and Banpong: the 0-km post at Nong Pladuk: looking at the Mae Khlaung crossing-point in July 1942: the plank viaduct at Arrow Hill: the Mae Khlaung steel bridge: the same after being bombed: Colonel Imai Itaru: jungle along the Kwae Noi: labouring at earthworks: air photographs of the steel bridge: Kamburi and Kinsaiyok areas: hut construction: work with elephants: The Three Pagodas Pass: C5631 engine decorated for the joining-up ceremony: the cemetery at Kamburi: the memorial monument at Thā Makham (six photographs are ascribed to Sugano Renichi, six to Geoffrey Adams).

His sensitivity is illustrated by his reply to a haiku I wrote on receiving a copy of an autographed photograph of himself taken at Wanyai camp on 12 November 1943. He is immaculately spruced up in formal uniform but I was immediately impressed by his youthful look. The haiku ran:

Wanyai no

Futamatsu kakka

Seinen yo

Which I translate as ‘Senior Officer Futamatsu at Wanyai … but he’s only a youth!’ In his reply he quoted a haiku he himself had written on an occasion, in the Wanyai area, which is translatable as follows:

In my mind’s eye I see again

Peacocks flying over the river at dawn

In the jungle valley.

The remarkable sensitivity of well-educated Japanese in poetical contexts was particularly well illustrated by Sir Laurens van der Post in his article in The Times of 25 January 1989. Describing the Emperor’s reluctance to go along with the Army’s determination to act in a way which led to the air attack on Pearl Harbor, he used ‘the most powerful weapon at his command in speaking of his own distaste for war in the symbolism of a favourite poem of one of the great transitional emperors, Meiji’. Emperor Meiji’s poem runs:

Yomo no umi minna

harakara to omou yō ni

Naze namikaze no

tachisawagaruramu?

A friend of van der Post has translated this difficult poem: ‘If all oceans are really brothers, why then are the wind and the waves raging?’ Laurens van der Post goes on:

In the dead silence that followed among the Chiefs of Staff, Hirohito went on to say that this poem was an expression of peace and that he had always cherished it and sought to guide his life by it. I believe it was with a heavy heart, full of regret and a sense of doom, that he stayed at the head of his people in the war that followed. The great Admiral Yamamoto warned against the attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘You will go only to awaken a sleeping giant.’ Moreover the Emperor’s way was also the way of the noblest Japanese spirits.

Ewart Escritt

Oxford

February 1990