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Across the Three Pagodas Pass. Yoshihiko Futamatsu
Читать онлайн.Название Across the Three Pagodas Pass
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781898823339
Автор произведения Yoshihiko Futamatsu
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
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