LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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

Скачать книгу