(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
