Building Burma's Death Railway: Moving Half the Mountain

October 1943.

Japanese forces in Thailand

celebrate the completion of what would become known

as the Death Railway.

TRANSLATION:

TRANSLATION:

They used to say, you know, fancy you buying a Japanese car

or buying a Japanese television or something like that.

I thought that was a load of nonsense

because that didn't make any difference.

I had my worst...

erm, nightmare...

ten days ago.

Now that's...

70-odd years after.

TRANSLATION:

A third of a million men were forced to work on the railway.

Over 100,000 died.

My original group was 1,700-strong.

By the time that the railway was finished,

erm, there were only 400 left.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

By 1941, the Second World War had been raging across Europe

for several years and was not going the Allies' way.

Setback followed setback.

In the Far East, Germany's ally Japan

attacked US forces at Pearl Harbour,

invaded territories across the Pacific and rapidly advanced

towards Malaya and the impregnable British fortress of Singapore.

Thousands of British and Australian troops

were sent to defend the colony.

For many, this was to be the defining moment of their lives.

People ask me, how is it that you reached the age of 100?

I've said so many times, I have just missed death.

This has happened to me so often

and I've said it's so much of my life that's been luck.

I don't feel old. I don't want to feel old.

I think it's preposterous when I suddenly have a 93rd birthday.

This is crazy.

But...you know...

it's just that life is full and rich and interesting and I love it.

I have never spoken about it

apart a bit with my family, but never really.

There's a certain point where...

you don't, erm...

..want to talk about it.

TRANSLATION:

LOUD AEROPLANE ENGINE

EXPLOSION

EXPLOSION

The Japanese were, I suppose, only about 100k up the Malay Peninsula

from Singapore when we got there.

They were dropping bombs on the docks

and killed a lot of people in the ships that came in

and the docks were full of people trying to get away.

It was absolutely tragic.

We were the last ship in the convoy.

It was about 11 o'clock in the morning

when we were going in there

and a flight of bombers come over...

..peeled off one at a time, come in, bomb us.

EXPLOSIONS

We had got hit several times.

She started to burn, like,

and there was thick columns of black smoke coming along the deck.

I said to my mate, Pat, "I'm going over the side."

So I leave him now...

we're crouched down by the cabins and I get up on the rail,

stand up on the rail, I said to him, "Come on, Pat, I'm going."

It's the last I seen of him.

-REPORTER:

-"In the same dark, steaming, tropical jungle,

"men of the British and Imperial forces go through

"an intensive training course to fulfil the need

"for officers of the Malayan Defence Force. Using collapsible boats,

"they perfect themselves in the methods of jungle warfare."

It was terribly British stuff really, you know.

Tremendously British.

For a time when you should have been training, we didn't,

and so we went really into war not well trained at all.

I mean, we hardly trained. It was crazy.

-REPORTER:

-"The jungle holds many a secret to counter any move

"directed against Singapore or Australia."

Absolutely no preparation whatsoever had been done,

even to clear a field of fire so you could see what you were doing.

We just faced mangrove swamps.

The Japanese, they had tanks.

They had armoured cars.

But they also had bicycles

and those bicycles won their war.

They came down Malaya like a wire through cheese.

36,000 Japanese soldiers closed in on Singapore.

Facing them were almost 85,000 British and Allied troops.

But the Japanese were motivated, experienced

and expert at jungle warfare.

The Allies found themselves constantly outflanked

and outfought.

So we had this brief spell of fighting,

and a certain amount of fairly close-contact fighting,

which is horrific.

We were actually under mortar fire

and my colonel literally lost his head.

There's no question I was always scared stiff...

when one had shells landing near one.

Despite fierce and stubborn fighting,

the Japanese advance continued to close in on Singapore.

Winston Churchill warned his generals

that surrender was out of the question.

We had heard rumours that the Japanese didn't take prisoners,

so we didn't know what was going to happen, like,

but it was a terrible, terrible reflection

of the, erm... the powers-that-be of ours

that were running that show out there.

It should never have happened.

February 15th 1942,

and the unthinkable did happen.

The British commander General Percival surrendered Singapore

to the Japanese.

The white flag went up at about four o'clock on the Sunday.

Churchill would later describe this as the worst moment of the war.

The extraordinary thing is that the Japs, of course,

were completely amazed at having captured so many prisoners.

In all, 130,000 men were captured during this short campaign.

To add to the humiliation of defeat,

they were forced to watch the victorious Japanese generals

drive by.

The Allied prisoners were marched up to the northern tip of Singapore

to the military base Changi.

We learnt that the...

that everyone was going out to this Changi area

and they marched us 18 miles.

People say, what's it like being taken a prisoner of war?

Chaos.

The fall of Singapore and every way in. No law or anything.

When things began to break down, which they did very quickly,

malaria started and then people got dysentery.

The Japs, as part of this,

they literally brought out lorry-loads of barbed wire

which they then told us to put up around a certain perimeter

and that was the first time you could say we were in a prison camp.

You learnt Japanese,

or pseudo-Japanese.

I can still swear in Japanese, but I've forgotten all my Japanese.

They would point to your shoes

-and say...

-HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

..meaning, what is the name of it?

And so you would say, "shit", you see?

And so they would go around pointing at other people's good boots,

pointing and saying, "You number one shit",

meaning that you had a very good pair of boots, and it was hilarious.

We had a lot of fun for about two weeks

and then they suddenly got the message through an interpreter

and then we had to learn Japanese orders.

The Imperial Army had a very tight grip on Japanese society.

They had been fighting a war in the Far East since the mid-1930s

and were the driving force behind Japan's territorial ambitions.

All young men were conscripted at 21

into a tough and brutal training programme.

THEY ROAR

By June 1942, the Japanese advance had continued across the Pacific

and up into Burma, towards India.

With an urgent need to move supplies,

the solution was to dust off an old British plan to build a railway.

The railway itself was only about 415km long.

That's not an enormous distance

at all to link it up with Rangoon,

So they could bring people to Saigon,

across to Bangkok and then take them on the railway

right up to the Burmese frontier.

So, really, the railway was not a long railway in those terms,

but it was through the most hellish conditions to make it.

The Japanese realised they had a vast pool of potential labour

in their prisoners at Changi.

Things always changed in these camps,

and some months later I was called to

the orderly office and told I was put on a draft

to go to a holiday camp.

There was about 600 of us that were selected

and we were taken down to Singapore and loaded onto trucks.

And then we had a train journey to Thailand from Singapore.

There were 32 in my own particular truck and that meant that only

a certain small percentage could actually sit down at any one time.

And you had all your kit was stuck in the centre, like, you know.

There was no sanitary conditions and all, like, you know.

Absolutely appalling.

This is where... the real degradation starts.

And that journey lasted five days.

We went up to the first place we stopped in Thailand,

was a place called Ban Pong.

That was

an ex-Japanese camp there.

The Japs had been stationed in there

but the camp was under about a foot of water.

I had a large box of Winsor & Newton watercolours

and I had to throw the box away cos it'd have been too obvious

but I kept about six to eight or ten little palettes

and, of all things,

those little paints lasted me for as long as I wanted them.

And we were taken up the river.

We were going to start up the transit camps

and they dropped us off then at 20-mile intervals

to go into the jungle and start clearing the jungle,

because there would be the main body of men coming from Singapore

and they would be marching up the jungle track

that followed the River Kwai.

And then we were told,

"All men march."

150km.

I mean, the question of escaping

was something on occasion you thought about

but very quickly dismissed

cos you had at least 1,200 miles of sea,

with lots of islands in between, admittedly, but 1,200 miles before

you'd get to safety or 1,200 miles up-country onto the Burma front.

If you fell by the wayside

and couldn't go any further and nobody could help you,

you were left to die, or they made sure you died.

It's called the death march.

The POWs, already weak and ill,

were forced to build a railway track for the Japanese

through the mountainous jungle terrain.

Then we had to climb up about 1,000 feet in this June monsoon,

of course, and it was just appalling.

You took two steps and slid back two in the thick jungle there.

And we started clearing the jungle for where the railway trace was

going to go through. So that was the first introduction to the actual job.

And so it gradually got worse from then on.

EXPLOSION

They had so much cheap labour.

Like, apart from us, they had the native populations of these places

that they took over, like, you know.

They had brought up something like

about a couple of hundred thousand natives from down in Malaya

and that, like, you know, with promises of, oh, a great life,

but lots of them died in the jungle. Yeah, yeah.

I forget how long, but two or three months it was monsoon.

For the first quite a few weeks at this camp that had no rooms,

we just ate, worked, slept under the rain.

It was really a problem of supply.

The only communication was the river.

And, being a time of the monsoon, the rivers tended to flood

and this rendered it almost impossible for supplies to get up.

All we got was supposed to be 250g of rice.

That usually came in the form of rice full of weevils and so forth,

so we ate any vegetation that we could.

Snakes were very good to eat if you could get them.

The first one I killed was by accident and I just banged...

It takes a lot to kill a snake because they thrash, you know,

a tremendous amount. I said, "We've got something to eat," you see.

He said, "Do you know what you've just killed?"

And I said, "No." He said, "That's a king cobra."

And I haven't the faintest idea what this thing was.

But it didn't matter, really.

The lizards were quite nice.

They were quite big. They were maybe up to about 18 inches long.

Quite big, like, you know, and we'd just kill them, skin them

and cook them.

Either grill them or put them in some water and cook them in a pot.

The men were now starving,

but the Japanese had refused to sign the Geneva Convention,

which protected the rights of prisoners of war.

If our men misbehaved, if the Japanese said they did -

the misbehaviour was nearly always stealing food -

then we were all, as officers, lined up and had what's called bintos.

That is an officer, a Japanese officer, comes up

and gives you a really hard bang on your face and so on, in front

of all the men, to try and teach them that they shouldn't steal, you see.

There's nothing wrong with the ordinary Japanese people.

No, it was the Japanese army was the problem, like.

Especially the army, like. They were taught to be brutal.

That was part of their life.

You know, it was no...

It was something that you have a job to understand

but right from the top of their headquarters,

right the way down through the army, they were...

They were even brutal to one another.

If somebody tried to escape and they were caught,

they wasn't pleased with just shooting them.

No, no. They had to torture.

If you weren't working hard enough, one thing they would make you do

was you'd have to stand and hold a stone above your head. Once you...

I mean, when you're weak anyway, if you put both arms up,

you start to feel faint really quickly.

And so you would drop the stone.

So we learnt you dropped the stone fairly quickly and picked it up,

which was better than collapsing,

because once you collapsed on the ground they knocked you about

and kicked you all over the place.

So you'd probably get more damage through fainting than...

So, you had to play the game, really.

I was coming back from the latrine one night

and one of these Korean guards started to be homosexual with me

and I...

Without thinking, I just kicked him in the spot where no man wants

to be kicked, and he fell to the ground screaming and hollering.

I got beaten up for a night and a day

and the following night.

Until I...

I no longer remember much, other than the pain and so on.

And then I was put in the black hole.

That, really, was probably the one time when I felt this was the end.

Sweat boxes, they used to put them in. Put people in.

Made of bamboo, standing about that high off the ground,

and they were made of small, thin bamboos.

Constructed... They were made

so they weren't long enough for a man to stretch right out in

and they were so low, you know, that you couldn't sit up properly

so that you were cooped up in there like, you know, and you could get,

perhaps, you'd be sentenced to, perhaps, for sentence things,

you'd get a fortnight's punishment in there.

By mid-1943, the Japanese were still fighting in the north of Burma.

But, short of supplies and troops,

the war was no longer going their way.

We saw Japanese going up to the Burma front.

We watched the Japanese troops

and they were unbelievable in what they put up with.

There were times where the treatment and even the food they got,

perhaps it was generally better than ours but not much.

It was such an urgent project to get a line through

so they could feed them all at the front, the troops.

This is what the railway was about.

So there was this urgency about the whole thing.

It was called the speedo movement. It got worse and worse and worse.

We had to work harder and harder and so on.

As anxiety to get the railway finished grew within

the Japanese ranks, the death rate amongst the POWs

and native workers increased dramatically.

If my sick parade got too large, a Japanese private...

Cos they wanted... Everyone had to work for the Japanese.

A Japanese private would come along - a non-medical private -

take my sick parade and, as long as a man was fit enough to stand,

then they were fit enough to work and off he would go.

One of the most difficult sections of the construction

was an area called Hintok,

better known as Hellfire Pass.

When they were making these big cuttings,

which were done largely with hammer and tap,

they used a certain number of charges to blow the rock

and one of their games was occasionally

they would fire a charge without telling anybody.

So some people got very badly injured with flying sharp rock.

I mean, why? You thought, "What's the sense of all this?"

We went out in the morning with all the tools that had been issued

and, after work, when we returned,

there had to be a roll call of everybody,

all the tools had to be handed in

and if one was short - there were usually a few short -

then we had to parade.

Incidentally, with practically every day,

the odd one or two dead who died out there,

they had to be put down at the end, at the side, in order to prove

that the same number had returned as went out in the morning.

Every morning, I psyched myself up to survive that day.

That day only.

Because every day was never as good as the last one.

It was never good.

There was never any hope.

Never any hope.

In Konyu camps, I think, every disease imaginable was there,

but the worst one, with the most lives lost, was cholera.

And the Japanese themselves were scared...

..and we had to burn these bodies.

That was, I think, perhaps the low point of my experience up there.

I mean, looking back now,

I can hardly believe I experienced all this.

The medical officers,

in my opinion,

were absolute angels.

They had no drugs to work with, not even an aspirin.

A colonel in the hospital camp at Changi,

Colonel Weary Dunlop,

an Australian,

did fantastic work.

Weary Dunlop, this most wonderful Australian surgeon.

A man I can't praise enough.

I had something on my forehead. He was going to take it off.

There wasn't any anaesthesia for it,

but I think it was melanoma or something he was worried about.

And beside us was another table

and there was an Australian who was

really almost a skeleton, really,

kneeling on it with his bum in the air because Dunlop wanted to use

a proctoscope, which was made in the camps, actually.

And I remember him looking into this man's bottom, you see,

and he had this lovely Australian voice and he said,

"Oh, yes," he said, "I think I've seen you before."

And I nearly fell off the table.

We were rolling about. What a lovely way to greet your friend, you know.

At one camp alone,

over 120 legs were amputated in a single year.

Operations, mostly amputations,

as a result of these jungle ulcers...

..were done with a saw borrowed from the Japanese, which they said

they wanted back cleaned after the operation or operations.

They did occasionally produce a bit of sake

so that people could be put out to some extent.

I said to him, "I've got this ulcer. What can I do?"

He said, "Well, I'm sorry. I've nothing to give you.

"I don't have any drugs.

"But if you go down to the latrine,

"pick up maggots,

"count them,

"put them on top of your ulcer

"and let the maggots do their work."

I said, "Well, what will they do?"

"They'll eat all the rotten flesh."

And he said, "There's a good chance you'll get a clean wound."

I'd been badly... They'd kicked my nose in.

I had a bad fractured nose and a hole between my eyes

and I couldn't see anything.

I was next to an Aussie who'd had his leg cut off that morning.

A big Aussie.

And, I mean, it was routine stuff under the most crude circumstances.

We were lying on bamboo.

And, anyway, in the middle of the hut was another man

who was in my own regiment and he had an ulcer that was getting...

It was granulating quite well.

It was in a far better condition to hundreds of the others round him.

And he was kneeling up and hugging his knees

and rocking like so many of the ulcer patients did out of sheer agony

and pain and he kept on saying,

"I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die."

And this Aussie said, "Look, mate,"

he said, "If you're going to die, hurry up and bloody do it.

"I want some sleep," in this lovely Australian voice.

And we were falling about. It was hilarious.

But in two hours, he was dead.

And I remember the Aussie in the morning, he said,

"Oh, Christ!" He said, "The last thing anybody ever said to him."

The railway was finally completed in October 1943,

on schedule, but at the cost of over 120,000 lives.

The POWs and local workers who died building the railway

were buried where they fell.

One life lost for every sleeper laid.

The jungle was full of British dead.

You know, we buried them, a lot of them, where they fell.

You know, we left 12,000 dead up there,

quite apart from the wreckage that survived, you know.

But it had all been for no purpose.

Within months, the war had turned against the Japanese

and the Allies started to regain lost territories.

NEWSREEL: These converted Hurricanes, now called Hurribombers,

carry two 500lb bombs tucked beneath the wings.

Down there, somewhere in that tangled wilderness, lies their target -

or rather that's where their target lay.

After this heavy pounding,

there'll not be much hospitality left in it for the Japanese invader.

I think some of the officers... I think Weary Dunlop had had some

intimation from somewhere that things were getting pretty sticky.

We had this huge camp with huge pits around it

and a big band at one side

and they'd put a machine gun into the wall at one end,

which really told us

quite a lot about what they were intending to do, anyway.

But, still, we didn't know.

And then, of course, within about nine or ten days,

they had Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that finished it.

It was just saved by the bell, really.

The Japanese had ceased to fight

from that time onwards.

We knew then that we were officially free.

Japan surrendered to the Allied forces

on the second of September 1945.

The POWs were at last free men.

The Allies had retaken Singapore and, a couple of days

after that, they were beginning

to march the Japanese - by then, prisoners.

And one of our divisional people, soldiers, was, you know,

like people do, sort of just watching what was going on

and at one point he turned to his pal and said,

"Look at those poor buggers. Now it's their turn."

And that, to me, sums up the attitude of the ordinary soldier.

We had a sergeant major, a British sergeant major,

that was in our camp. We didn't have any officers with us.

And what he said was... He gave us a bit of good advice.

He said...

He advised us

not to take any action against the Japanese.

He said, "You've survived three and a half years of being prisoners."

He said, "Now think of your families.

"Don't do anything stupid that might get you killed," like, you know.

NEWSREEL: Japanese guards were made to carry the sick and wounded

to the quayside, where landing craft will take them

to the hospital ship near the bay.

Other prisoners who are able to walk make their way to the landing

craft which will carry them on the first stage of a happy journey.

From the Far Eastern shores, many have already started a longer voyage,

taking them back to the land they have served so bravely.

We... There was no-one there to meet us, you know, it was...

There was no bands there to meet us or anything like that.

But we were just taken off the boat

and taken to a transit camp there in Southampton.

And we were there for, oh, about a couple of days, like, you know.

And then we were just stuck on a train and sent home.

I used to go out in the morning

and I'd walk the streets of Aberdeen for hours and hours on end...

..looking...

..looking for somebody that I knew.

I was forgetting I had been away six and a half years.

When I got back, I decided I'd forget everything.

"I'm going to start a new life."

I didn't join any ex-prisoner of war outfits or anything.

I wouldn't have anything...

As far as I was concerned, although I'm talking about it now,

I just wouldn't talk about any of my prisoner of war experiences

or anything. No, I'm going to start a new life and something quite new

and I'd have nothing to do with what's happened to me.

That's just happened. It's finished.

It was...

a bit overwhelming with having so many people coming to you

and wanting to know everything about you and all that, like, you know.

They had no understanding of what horrors we had lived through,

like, you know, and how the comparison between people's kindness

and the brutality that we had been experiencing.

It's been very difficult with the family

because I never spoke about it.

My wife died without knowing.

Mind you, she must have seen and felt...the swinging of moods.

She must have done.

And one night, when I had a nightmare,

I finished up with my hands around her throat.

So at that stage, I went into the spare bedroom,

where there was a chair, and I used to sleep in that for weeks.

I couldn't sleep properly for about ten years. That sounds a long time.

I could only just sleep under the surface.

In the camps, you just slept under the surface.

You were ready to move off because

they might come in and start beating people up

or turn everybody out for a working party.

You didn't know what was going to happen by day or night, very often,

so you slept like that.

I knew exactly where everything of mine was

so that I could put my hands on it.

Especially my little few drawing things.

So you were always ready to move.

And when I came home, it was much the same.

I would fold my clothes up, and I still do it that way now,

and I know just where they are.

Well, compensation. I think I'm right in saying that I got £30,

we all did, several years after the war.

We were certainly the worst country of the lot of doing

anything at all to get compensation from the Japs.

I blame it most, well, on politicians

and, above all, the Treasury because we finally got, I think

the figure was £10,000, about,

I'm guessing, 15 years ago. Not much more.

And...

..there weren't many left,

so the Treasury obviously saved a lot of money.

When they talked of trying to get some financial benefit out of it,

that might have done a bit of good for to help to have healed

some of the things for the blokes

but, you know, for me, the...

I have no, as I said, no ill feeling against the Japanese at all.

I mean, I meet Japanese here now - no trouble.

I mean, the Germans, for all what they did,

they have repented and the generation know what happened.

But in Japan, they don't.

No, let the Emperor come and apologise to me.

That might be the answer.

And I will decide whether he's sincere or not.

And, actually, there are two reasons why I don't hate the Japanese.

One reason is it would do them no harm,

but if I hate anyone, it does me harm.

And I've said that the other reason, I'm a Christian

and Christians are taught to love, not to hate.

I can't stand this... The way we all, I suppose - I do it sometimes -

we generalise about people, nations or groups or...

..bankers or industrialists or whatever.

Cos there are some good, bad and indifferent anywhere.

In all, I think I've just been terribly lucky.

I'm very happy doing what I'm doing and I've no regrets, really.

It doesn't matter.

I've been there and I've done it.

All the things I've ever wanted to do. And I have no regrets.

I mean, the fact that I was a prisoner of war

was just a blip in my life, like, you know.

I am determined to live and beat the Japanese,

because I'll outlive them all, I hope.

All those who were involved.

One of the most interesting parts of this was the sheer ingenuity.

You put a lot of people together - there are tent smiths,

there are pharmacists, chemists, all sorts of people.

So you put all these people together and you can begin to start moving

half the mountain and I think that was the sort of corporate magic

of the whole thing, which was so important.

Thank you to them!

MUSIC: "The River Kwai March - Colonel Bogey March" by Mitch Miller