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 River Kwae March’, played with verve by ‘Ace’ Connelly, a pre-war 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
