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
