The Forgotten Highlander Read online

  Riddled with dysentery, malaria, beriberi, tropical ulcers and disease, with bare, blistered feet and wearing just our Jap-happies, we paraded every morning shortly after sunrise. The sun would come up about 6 a.m. and by 7 a.m. you had to be up, have had your food and be ready to go out on the work party. The cook signalled breakfast by rattling a tin and everyone rushed to join the queue. One of the POWs served us – a cup of rice and a cup of boiling water, the same unappetising affair as on the railway, the rice again littered with all sorts of maggots, flies, lice, bed bugs and greyish weevils. Not that I was bothered. I was so hungry and so focused on staying alive that I devoured any food no matter what was in it or how it was contaminated. The cooks again had the advantage. They survived best, never doing hard labour and always better fed. With a bamboo ladle they would scoop up the rice and then skim the top of it using a paddle. Of course how much you got depended on how hard they pulled the ladle through the rice. As the men queued every eye fixed on that ladle, counting virtually every grain. I can see it still. We were in a desperate, horrible state.

  Men would often try to call off sick. But it was the Japanese who decided whether or not you were sick enough to be off. You had to be very ill not to work. You were usually safe if you had tropical ulcers, coupled with dysentery or malaria. Yet having just one or the other would not be enough to save you from work. The tropical ulcers I had picked up on the railway were pretty much healed up. So despite continuing to suffer from dysentery and dehydration, during the three months I was at River Valley Road I was never allowed off work. Men died like flies but I never found out the fatality rate in my time there. You never knew how many were dying because you were away at work every day; they died in the so-called hospital wards and had been buried before you returned. There was a part of you too, to be honest, that didn’t want to know.

  After all I had been through I had decided to stay apart from everyone else and focus totally on survival. I lived a day at a time in my own little world, a private cocoon, and adopted the position of self-sufficient loner. To survive each day required maximum concentration and alertness. It also meant that you had to conserve every possible ounce of energy. If someone spoke to me, I replied but there was no memorable sense of community. I was so damned tired all of the time that it was an effort to do anything but survive. Self-preservation had become the name of the game for me.

  After parade we had to walk three miles to the docks. On the way you could see some of the local Chinese or Malayans moving about – the usual cosmopolitan Singapore population. At Changi some Malayans had worked as guards but we had Japanese and Korean guards at River Valley Road. The Japanese treated the Koreans very badly and they in turn treated us even worse. We were always piggy in the middle, getting beatings from all sides. The Koreans were probably more brutal. They would hit you with anything they could lay their hands on and wouldn’t know when to stop. The Japanese seemed more measured in the force they used and what they used against us.

  We had no interaction with the locals on the walk to the docks – that was definitely taboo. The Korean guards walked in front and alongside you, and would beat you if you even looked at civilians. And even if you did manage to establish contact with the locals you had nothing to barter with anyway, so it was pretty hopeless even to try.

  Once we arrived at the docks we were set to work straight away unloading bags of rice and sugar from various ships the Japanese had brought in for supplies. Whether they were Japanese ships or ones they had captured, I was unsure. We were always unloading, never on loading duty for some reason. We would pick up the heavy bags from the dockside and take them on our shoulders or backs to the warehouses known as go-down sheds. By now the sacks were heavier than us. I weighed less than a hundred pounds and our terrible, decrepit and weak physical state made the tough work that we performed without any shade from the relentless Asian sun unbearable. Every muscle, sinew and joint ached in the searing and relentless heat. Inevitably we would often drop the bags from our shoulders or backs. For the poor soul who dropped his load it was always a moment of terror when the sack burst open on the ground. All hell would break loose and you braced yourself for the inevitable beating, praying that it would be over with quickly. The Japanese would go mad and beat us with anything they had to hand. Blows would rain down from sticks, bamboo, fists and rifle butts.

  There is no doubt that some of the guards enjoyed inflicting these beatings and vied with each other to see who could administer the most pain and suffering. I used to drop a sack at least once a week – sometimes twice a day. I remember thinking that the beating would never stop. They would usually last two or three minutes, which felt like an eternity. The guards could land a lot of blows in that time. Because I had been beaten repeatedly on the railway it was sort of commonplace to me. Yet every time your dignity really hurt more than the pain. It was the fact that you couldn’t fight back that really hurt. If someone is hitting you and you can’t fight back . . . it’s just the worst. It broke your spirit as much as your bones. They would beat you right down to primate level very quickly.

  When I witnessed other men getting beatings I was just glad it wasn’t me. I had become anaesthetised to the suffering of others but I would feel sick when I saw someone in a worse physical or mental state than me getting the treatment. To see a grown man on the ground crying and howling, begging his tormentors to stop, was very hard to take. Your reaction to the beating meant a lot to the Japanese. If you caved in and showed fear, they would go at you harder. But if you showed that it wasn’t hurting, they gave up. It seems the wrong way round – you’d think they would go easy on you if you were weaker. But the Japanese mind worked in strange ways.

  We usually toiled until sundown – at around five or six in the evening, depending on which Japanese officer was in charge. If he were fed up, you might get finished early or alternatively they could make you work later under arc lamps until the ship had been completely unloaded. You tried to do the least amount of work possible while always looking busy. But the slower you went the more pain you had with the weight of the bags on your back – and the Japanese knew it. You would take the bag from dockside to the go-downs as quickly as you could and walk back as slowly as possible via a different route. You could go behind piles of other bags and hide for a bit. There was a lot of dodging of labour. Some men would do one journey to the go-downs and nip behind the stacks of sacks and stay there for up to half an hour.

  After a long, ten-hour shift at the docks we were searched with our hands above our heads. You really had nowhere to hide anything, whether it was food or whatever. If they did find something on a worker, the man would be severely punished. He might be forced to stand with something heavy above his head all night and day or the guards might even call in the military police, the dreaded Kempeitai. It usually had to be something very serious in Japanese eyes for the military police to come. When they came and took people away the prisoners were never seen again.

  I was utterly exhausted on the trudge back to camp. The only thing that spurred me on was the thought of getting a cup of rice. It was dark by the time you got back and after some food you went to your hut, which was in darkness from sunset to sunrise. Most of us just crashed out to sleep.

  The days turned into weeks and then into months. There seemed no end to our misery. Then one day while working on the docks we were suddenly herded on to a large ship. None of us were given any prior warning, not even our officers. We were soon to find out why.

  On 4 September 1944, nine hundred British POWs were rushed up the gangway of the Kachidoki Maru, a ten-thousand-tonne cargo vessel that had been named the President Harrison before it was captured from the Americans. Using sticks the Japanese drove us like cattle aboard the ship and down into the holds. We could never move fast enough for them. The liner had two holds, both quite obviously not made to accommodate human beings, yet they wanted around 450 of us in each. The lads below were shouting, begging and pleading for the Japanese no
t to let any more men in. But the louder they shouted, the more frenzied the guards became and down we went into the depths of hell.

  Nothing in all of our suffering had prepared me for anything like this and even today I can scarcely find the words to describe the horrors of the Kachidoki Maru. By the time I got down to the hold I had nowhere to sit. It was standing room only, all of us packed like sardines, with no toilet facilities. Most had dysentery, malaria, beriberi and all manner of tropical diseases. Once inside and the hold crammed full, the Japanese battened down the hatches, plunging us into a terrifying black pit. At that moment the most fearful clamour went up as claustrophobia and panic gripped the men. Many feared they were doomed and began screaming and shouting. Yet a strange tranquillity overcame me. I felt resigned and just thought, This is it. I thought that we would never get out alive and would never see home again. You felt resigned to accept this as your last. I could only think that they were taking us out to sea to sink the ship and drown us all. Our captors were capable of it. I had seen that they were capable of anything.

  We knew nothing about these ships, which would become infamous in the annals of Second World War history as ‘hellships’ – a fleet of dozens of rusting hulks used to shuttle supplies and prisoners around Japan’s Far Eastern empire. Some of the most appalling episodes of the war occurred on these ships in which men driven crazy by thirst killed fellow prisoners to drink their blood. In some cases prisoners trying to escape from the seething mass of hysterical captives were shot by Japanese soldiers guarding the stairways from the holds. Some voyages took weeks with only a handful of prisoners surviving. Men drank their own urine. Sick prisoners were trampled to death or suffocated. The sane murdered the insane and wondered when it would be their turn to go mad. Cannibalism as well as vampirism was not unknown and even Japanese medics were shocked by what they found when the holds were finally opened. In the case of the Oryoku Maru, where insane prisoners killed fellow men for their blood, only 271 men survived out of 1619. The experience of one Dutch group was fairly typical: of 1500 men shipped from Java to Rangoon to work on the Death Railway, 200 died and 450 were unable to walk on arrival in Burma. Nineteen of the fifty-six hellships were sunk by submarines and aircraft and a total of 22,000 allied prisoners died during agonising voyages to the slave camps in Japan and Taiwan.

  Down in the sweltering bowels of that ship we suffered for thirty-six hours before we got underway. The Japanese had been assembling HI-72, a tightly packed convoy of around a dozen ships with destroyer protection for the voyage to Japan. Unknown to us there was a second hellship in our convoy: the Rakuyo Maru, carrying around 1317 British and Australian prisoners.

  There must have been at least one officer, a warrant officer or a sergeant major somewhere in the hold. But they certainly didn’t make themselves known. Discipline had gone. Everyone, whatever their rank, was in the same situation. All of us just wanted to survive and were prepared to do anything to ensure that happened. It would have taken a very brave man to try and take command of the men in the hold in those conditions. It would have been suicidal.

  The heat down in the holds was unbelievable. The longer the hatches stayed shut, the hotter it got. With all of the bodies tightly packed together temperatures quickly reached well in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. We began losing body fluid awfully quickly and dehydration became a big problem. As did stomach cramp. I was suffering from dysentery and dehydration, which were pretty much perpetual for me. In three and a half years I never really had a proper bowel movement.

  I never thought anything could ever match the terror of the railway. Being in the hold was worse. At least while slaving on the railway you could move. And you had fresh air.

  Air must have been coming into the hold from somewhere otherwise we would have all suffocated to death, though some men did. It felt like we were breathing in the last of it. When the ship began to move you realised within hours that anything was possible. Maybe we would be sunk deliberately and drowned as the Japanese had done to other prisoners.

  Then another dread thought struck me. Submarines. The Kachidoki Maru had no Red Cross markings painted on it. I would later learn that none of the hellships bore any indication that POWs were on board, as they were required to do by the Geneva Convention. Red crosses were, however, painted on Japanese ammunition carriers. My fears that without markings we were a target for our own side were to prove all too justified.

  As we sailed out of Singapore harbour on 6 September, in Hawaii signals officers of the US Navy’s Fleet Radio Unit Pacific were listening in to Japanese radio traffic and intercepted messages relating to our convoy and its course. On 9 September orders were issued to three US submarines. Two days later on the night of 11 September, in the shipping lane known to American crews as ‘Convoy College’, the USS Growler broke the calm surface of the South China Sea, south of Hainan Island. As the crew of the Growler checked out the overcast skies that threatened rain on the horizon, the bow of the USS Sealion II was the next to emerge from the depths and sidle alongside the Growler. One and a half hours later the USS Pampanito joined the compact. The wolf pack was formed. The submarines were so close together, around a hundred metres apart, that the captains were able to shout to each other and forge their attack plans. As they separated to take up their positions in a stretch of water out of range of Japanese aircraft, the captains wished each other happy hunting and dived. They were in high spirits and had nicknamed their wolf pack ‘Ben’s Busters’, after the Growler’s audacious skipper, Commander Ben Oakley. They knew each other well and had spent the previous month harassing Japanese convoys and sinking freighters in the South China Sea.

  In the hold of the Kachidoki Maru the torment went on. The noise was constant and deafening, an awful cacophony of throbbing engines, moaning, coughing and occasional panic-stricken screaming the background music for this latest torture. The chilling screams of the mad and insane would stop abruptly. I didn’t know how they were dealt with but I could imagine . . .

  I was completely stuck where I was in the hold and could not move. No one could. You couldn’t sit or lie down, you couldn’t even go down on your haunches, there was so little room. You didn’t really want to lie down anyway. It was a sea of human waste and you risked being trampled. You had your space and protected it with your life. Quite literally. You stayed strong, protecting your space with elbows and fists. By any means necessary. By this stage it was every man for himself. Each person had their own problems to resolve, their own life to save. Strangers surrounded me, all British but none of us knew each other. The only noise coming from outside the hold was the steady shudder of the ship as we crawled along. At least it felt like we were crawling. The noises inside continued getting louder as men kept panicking or shouting out in pain.

  The smell inside the hold was indescribable, a repugnant stench. An overpowering mixture of excrement, urine, vomit, sweaty bodies, weeping ulcers and rotting flesh clogged the atmosphere. There was no way we could get any fresh air. Even when the Japanese opened the hatches it didn’t really help that much – you were still breathing in what was already there.

  In the darkness we had no way to keep track of time. But at some point on that first day of the voyage the battens were taken off and the hatches opened wide. I was stuck a long way from the hatch but could see the blue emptiness of the sky, a distant, tantalising beacon of freedom that from down there looked as close as I would ever get to it again. Some men, maybe forty or fifty or so, were allowed to go up on deck. Not the rest of us. That started a terrible mêlée. People climbed over each other, scratching and scrambling. It was sheer pandemonium. I supposed that the men allowed on deck could use the toilet arrangement that hung over the side of the ship. But letting fifty men use the toilet would have taken a long time and it would have been an especially long time for the impatient Japanese, so I doubt whether more than one or two were allowed to go. It did allow a lovely cool breeze to come inside the hold and ease some of the
airlessness momentarily. While the hatches were open, the guards lowered down a single pail of rice. Even the most peaceful man alive turned into a real scavenger. We were fighting for our lives. When the men got put back down in the hold they found that their places had been taken over by other prisoners. Space was at such a premium. That caused more fights to break out. It is impossible to describe fully just how horrendous the conditions were. During the whole journey the guards opened the hatches just three times. I never got up on deck. I suspect that some allowed up managed to hide somewhere on the deck. I know I would have. It would have been worth the risk. Anything was better than being down in that dark hold. If anyone got caught, they would in all probability have been killed. At the very least they would have had a serious beating.

  When the guards closed the hatches again, plunging us back into darkness, the feeling of complete desolation, total resignation, returned. Thirst became our biggest problem. People don’t understand what real thirst truly is. You start to hallucinate and see mirages, and that is the most dangerous thing. People died down in the holds from suffocation or heart attacks. The men who died were not taken away. Their bodies lay among us.

  The second time the hatches opened the bucket of rice came down nearer to where I was. Someone threw a lump of rice and I managed to catch it. I wolfed it down. Rice becomes water and that is what I needed to abate my thirst. At no time during this terrible journey did the Japanese give us water; we relied on the occasional rice ball for it. The terrible stomach cramps induced by the lack of food and water defied belief. The pain doubled me over. This was a slow and painful death.

  Six days out of Singapore I wondered how much more I could take. Then in the distance came a muffled explosion. Right on cue we had sailed into the trap set by the American submariners, who were determined to sink as many of the vessels they believed to be carrying oil and rubber as they could. At two in the morning the USS Growler had fired at the convoy sending our escorts fanning out. Then in one of the most daring manoeuvres in American naval history the Growler took on the Japanese destroyer Shikinami bow to bow. At a range of a thousand yards, Commander Oakley slammed three torpedoes into the Shikinami. She was only two hundred yards from the Growler when she sank. Oakley hit another two vessels before withdrawing to rearm.