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 by kempei. I was dubbed by dug-out regular officers as Jap-happy, a form of Jap-happiness which in the long run enabled me to abstract straightforward news items from the Japanese camp commandant’s newspapers, surreptitiously brought to me by my own CSM, Frank Stadden, who worked in the Jap office. He then pressed them and returned them. By reading between the lines, we were able to follow, for example, the stirring movements of the American marines in their systematic re-capture of the islands in the Pacific. When a news item ran, ‘Our heroic Japanese soldiers made a strategic withdrawal from Colombangara’, it was a pound to a penny the marines had re-taken Colombangara.
When the atomic bombs dropped prisoners had varying degrees of unease about the reaction of the Japanese Army to the Emperor’s broadcast, many believing that bushidō extremists would try to kill them. This was particularly the case in a country under the influence of Count Terauchi but if orders to kill prisoners existed, in Thailand at any rate it appeared that the kempeitai had filleted them from the offices of the various HQs. It was left to the British Division of the International Prosecution at the International Military Tribunal Far East, B & C Offences, to reveal what may be the only unfilleted document.90 It was found by ex-prisoner Jack Edwards at the Kinkaseki Mine in North Taiwan. The document emanated from the Taihoku prisoner-of-war camp and was addressed to the commanding general of the Taiwan kempeitai. The document is listed by the British Division as Document No. 2071 (certified as Exhibit ‘0’ in Document No. 2687). It describes the reply to Taihoku’s query about ‘the extreme measures for prisoners-of-war’ and runs as follows:
The time and method of this disposition are as follows:
(1)The Time.
Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual disposition may be made in the following circumstances:
(a)When an uprising of large numbers cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms,
(b)When escapees from the camp may turn into a hostile fighting force.
(2)The Methods.
(a)Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.
(b)In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.91
The timing of this document (1 August 1944) has added point to those who know that in the summer of 1944 senior officer-prisoners secretly ordered named officers to act as key personnel in a putative mobile infantry brigade. I myself was nominated as Staff-Captain ‘Q’ to serve, as I discovered later when I arrived, under Major R.A.N. Davidson 4PWO, Gurkha Rifles, as DAQMG and Lt-col C.E. Morrison, 1 Leicesters, as DDST.
Detailed documented accounts exist of the militaristic take-over as a criminal course since 1931. One could say, with Ienaga Saburō in his book, The Pacific War, that a Great East Asian War lasted from 1931 to 1945. He argues that the use of prisoners-of-war on forced labour was only one aspect of the Army’s general violation of International Law. The effect of the take-over led to inevitable side-effects such as training to breed vicious fighters with a penchant for brutality against enemy prisoners. The tendency of Japanese to react to constant pressure with an explosion of irrational destructive behaviour was only too well-known to prisoners in Burma and Thailand. The conduct of the Japanese Army in the Pacific War was far inferior to their disciplined behaviour in the Russo-Japanese War.
Eight captured USAAF men were vivisected in May and June 1945 at Kyūshū Imperial University in experiments to test human limits of resistance to pain. For example, a prisoner had saline injected into his bloodstream to find the quantitative limits before death
