Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway: Narratives of History and Memory 9781350024120, 9781350024151, 9781350024137

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: The Man in the Photograph
Acknowledgements
Note on Text
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
0.1 Interpreting Memories
0.2 Remembering Sumatra
1. Building the Sumatra Railway
1.1 Shipwreck and Forced Marches: Arriving at the Railway
1.1.1 The Atjeh Party
1.1.2 POW Transport Ship Sinkings
1.2 Building the Railway
1.2.1 The Romushas
1.3 The ‘Other’ Railway
2. Writing the Sumatra Railway
2.1 Diaries of Captivity
2.1.1 Self- Censorship and Exhaustion: Keeping a Diary in Camp
2.1.2 The ‘Mini- Memoir’ of Captivity
2.2 ‘Always Three Months Away’: Memoirs of a Railway Line
2.2.1 Authorizing the Memoir
2.2.2 Narrating the Non- Narrative
2.3 ‘A Life for Every Sleeper’: The Poem of Hell’s Railway
2.4 Lists and Libraries: Alternative Imaginaries of the POW
2.4.1 Camp Libraries
3. Guard Your Tongue
3 .1 L earning a New Language
3.2 Code- Switching in Camp
3.3 Control and Resistance
3.4 Communicating the Untranslatable
3.4.1 The Kongsi
3.5 The Camp Interpreter
4. The Body of the Prisoner
4.1 Medical Treatment on the Sumatra Railway
4.1.1 The Hospital at Camp Two: John Wyatt
4.1.2 The Medic in Art: Patrick Kirkwood
4.2 Accepting the POW Body as One’s Own
4.3 ‘Nil Abnormal Detected’: The Haunting of the ‘FEPOW’ Body
5. Aftermath
5 .1 Repatriation and Resettlement
5.1.1 The Claim for Compensation
5.1.2 Creating ‘the FEPOW’, Continuing the Kongsi
5.2 The Postmemory of ‘the FEPOW’
5.2.1 The Charles Thrale Exhibition
5.2.2 Post- War Responses
5.2.3 Transgenerational Perceptions of ‘the FEPOW’
5.3 The Postmemorial Archive
Afterword
Appendix: Research Resources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

War, Culture and Society Series Editor: Stephen McVeigh, Associate Professor, Swansea University, UK Editorial Board Paul Preston, LSE, UK Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London, UK Debra Kelly, University of Westminster, UK Patricia Rae, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada James J. Weingartner, Southern Illimois University, USA (Emeritus) Kurt Piehler, Florida State University, USA Ian Scott, University of Manchester, UK War, Culture and Society is a multi- and interdisciplinary series which encourages the parallel and complementary military historical and socio-cultural investigation of 20th and 21st-century war and conflict. Published Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War, Gerben Zaagsma (2017) Second World War British Military Camouflage: Designing Deception, Isla Forsyth (2017) Women, Warfare and Representation: American Servicewomen in the Twentieth Century, Emerald M. Archer (2017) Forthcoming The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens: Film and History, Nicole Beth Wallenbrock (2018) The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and American Civil War Memory, David J. Anderson (2018) The Irish Myth of the Second World War, Bernard Kelly (2019)

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway Narratives of History and Memory Lizzie Oliver

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Lizzie Oliver, 2018 Lizzie Oliver has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design: Clare Turner Cover image © Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Oliver, Lizzie, author. Title: Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway : narratives of history and memory / Lizzie Oliver. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: War, culture and society Identifiers: LCCN 2017021724 | ISBN 9781350024120 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350024144 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945–Concentration camps–Indonesia–Sumatra. | Prisoners of war–Indonesia–Sumatra. | World War, 1939–1945–Personal narratives, British. | World War, 1939–1945–Prisoners and prisons, British. | World War, 1939–1945–Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. | Indonesia–History–Japanese occupation, 1942-1945. | Railroads–Indonesia–Sumatra. | BISAC: HISTORY / Asia / Japan. | HISTORY / Asia / Southeast Asia. | HISTORY / Military / World War II. | HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. Classification: LCC D805.I55 O45 2017 | DDC 940.54/725209232105981–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021724 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2412-0 PB: 978-1-3501-1890-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2413-7 ePub: 978-1-3500-2414-4 Series: War, Culture and Society Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Stanley, John and Rouse and for all your fellow men

To be clean (really clean), to sleep between sheets, to get enough to eat, to get medical attention, to be free from louse, to be shaved, and to have a haircut, and best of all to be free. These things make life . . . an earthly paradise. Albert Simmonds on release from Sumatra, September 1945

Contents List of Illustrations Preface: The Man in the Photograph Acknowledgements Note on Text List of Abbreviations

ix x xviii xx xxi

Introduction 0.1 Interpreting Memories 0.2 Remembering Sumatra

1

1

9

2

Building the Sumatra Railway 1.1 Shipwreck and Forced Marches: Arriving at the Railway 1.1.1 The Atjeh Party 1.1.2 POW Transport Ship Sinkings 1.2 Building the Railway 1.2.1 The Romushas 1.3 The ‘Other’ Railway Writing the Sumatra Railway 2.1 Diaries of Captivity 2.1.1 Self-Censorship and Exhaustion: Keeping a Diary in Camp 2.1.2 The ‘Mini-Memoir’ of Captivity 2.2 ‘Always Three Months Away’: Memoirs of a Railway Line 2.2.1 Authorizing the Memoir 2.2.2 Narrating the Non-Narrative 2.3 ‘A Life for Every Sleeper’: The Poem of Hell’s Railway 2.4 Lists and Libraries: Alternative Imaginaries of the POW 2.4.1 Camp Libraries

3 7

11 12 14 22 26 29 35 37 40 45 49 51 52 55 57 59

viii

3

4

5

Contents

Guard Your Tongue 3.1 Learning a New Language 3.2 Code-Switching in Camp 3.3 Control and Resistance 3.4 Communicating the Untranslatable 3.4.1 The Kongsi 3.5 The Camp Interpreter

65

The Body of the Prisoner 4.1 Medical Treatment on the Sumatra Railway 4.1.1 The Hospital at Camp Two: John Wyatt 4.1.2 The Medic in Art: Patrick Kirkwood 4.2 Accepting the POW Body as One’s Own 4.3 ‘Nil Abnormal Detected’: The Haunting of the ‘FEPOW’ Body

87

Aftermath 5.1 Repatriation and Resettlement 5.1.1 The Claim for Compensation 5.1.2 Creating ‘the FEPOW’, Continuing the Kongsi 5.2 The Postmemory of ‘the FEPOW’ 5.2.1 The Charles Thrale Exhibition 5.2.2 Post-War Responses 5.2.3 Transgenerational Perceptions of ‘the FEPOW’ 5.3 The Postmemorial Archive

68 73 75 78 78 81

88 89 92 97 100 105 108 111 114 116 119 122 123 125

Afterword

131

Appendix: Research Resources Notes Selected Bibliography Index

133 137 159 167

Illustrations Figures 1 Japanese paratroopers land in Sumatra, 1942. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

10

2 Portion of the Sumatra Railway built by Allied Prisoners, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

12

3 SS Junyo Maru, March 1933. Courtesy of Walter E. Frost and City of Vancouver Archives.

16

4 Huts at Pakan Baroe, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

30

5 Albert Simmonds’s diary. Courtesy of David Burchell.

45

6 Message from H. Q. ALFSEA to all newly released Allied POWs, 1945. Courtesy of Michael Nellis.

66

7 Camp life in Medan, 1942. Stanley Russell. Courtesy of Museon.

93

8 Aerial shot of Pakan Baroe. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

106

9 Inside living quarters at Pakan Baroe, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

106

10 Aerial shot of Pakan Baroe as liberated POWs are airlifted from Sumatra, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

109

Map 1 Location of camps along the Sumatra Railway, 2015. Courtesy of Phyllis and Tim Pettitt.

23

Preface: The Man in the Photograph I never met my grandfather. As I  was growing up my mother spoke of him with deep fondness, and his photograph remained ever-present in our home. It was (and still is) a large gold-framed picture that sits proudly atop the piano that my grandfather once played. It was a picture that became sacred in our household, that gave a message to me when I was young that the handsome face I looked at, even though I had never known it in flesh and blood, was a face to be remembered. As a young girl I learned that the black-haired, bright-eyed, moustached man called Stanley Russell – an uncanny doppelganger for the actor David Niven – had been a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War. I also knew that he had worked on a railway while he was in captivity. In time, a copy of Eric Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man appeared on one of Mum’s bookshelves, and through a clumsy process of assumption and conjecture I concluded that my grandfather must have laboured on the Burma–Siam Railway. This was the ‘death railway’ that I had heard so much about: it was several years before I realized that it was not the only railway to have been built by forced labour in Southeast Asian wartime. Whenever it was mentioned, my grandfather’s past would be spoken in hushed tones. Through those stilted conversations I came to understand that the man whose picture shared the spaces in which I grew had walked with a stick periodically. What I did not know until much later was that the stick had been a reminder of a beating that my grandfather received towards the end of the war. It was a beating that had left him in the camp ‘hospital’, carrying an injury that became infected. I know, now, that this was a potentially fatal combination. The ‘hospital’ in question was a makeshift hut in the midst of the mud and mosquitoes of the Sumatran jungle. The man who had been beaten was already chronically under-nourished and overworked. The bright eyes and glimmering smile in the photograph did not betray that my grandfather had left captivity as a frail, fragile skeleton who could not walk: a stretcher-case, airlifted out of Sumatra in the first weeks following the discovery of his camps by the liberating troops. It was twenty years after I first began to imbibe consciously his story, that the eyes of a man that I had never known – but nonetheless whom I felt as if I knew

Preface

xi

deeply – would stare out into my world again. This time he stuttered out from a computer screen, lifting a paper-thin arm in an apparent wave. It seemed an acknowledgement to the world around him, perhaps even an attempt to doff his homemade headscarf to the camera – or, of course, whoever was working it. The film whirred on and I could have missed him with ease, but it was the hint of a smile, the movement at the sides of his lips that made me press pause, rewind and watch again. And again. And again. Yes, a David Niven face it definitely seemed to be – a very thin David Niven – but still, this was the sort of vague reference that I had; a man that I did not know looking like a man whose films I had never watched. And yet there, right in that glint of an eye and crook of the lips, seemed to be the link to a brutal past to which – in an equally crooked way – I somehow belonged. The film was one of many archival reels that I  had stumbled across in my trawls of the web. In form it was nothing much different from others that I had seen, unnervingly silent as the black and white pictures displayed their record of mid-1940s’ devastation. In some I had seen shipwrecked bodies rescued from the water; in others, men were feeding their campmates the great globs of boiled rice that sustained them, barely, for years. In all of them were the emaciated forms of men, walking gaunt, or lying on bamboo beds and stretchers with improvised bandages and medical apparatus all around them. It was always the eyes, sad and yet fierce, that held my attention: the kind of eyes that are often described as ‘haunted’ and, in turn, come to haunt. But this particular seven-minute film was special for two reasons. First and foremost, this film contained images of a man that I believed to be the same man in the photograph on Mum’s piano. It was recorded in the moments before he was airlifted from the main base camp of the Sumatra Railway. I had verified as accurately as I could that it was my grandfather: I knew the date that he was put on a Dakota out of Sumatra, and it corresponded exactly to the date that the film of the Dakota leaving Sumatra was shot. I knew that my grandfather was attended by the blonde-haired nurse who also appears in the film; and I knew that he was one of the stretcher cases, of which there were eight for that flight on that day. That film, hidden in the archives of the Australian War Memorial, also showed eight.1 The second reason that made this film special was that it was a film of liberation, of hope and dreams of a future – a future that would one day come searching for the past and all that it meant. It was a film that allowed Mum to see the day that her father started on his journey home, a journey that would lead him to meet his wife and bring up five children. As he waved and gave a slight smile to

xii

Preface

the camera, he was not to have known that he was also waving seventy years into the future, and that his daughter would share the wave with his granddaughter – and together, sitting at a kitchen table, they would wave back. In the autumn of 2003, during the first semester of my master’s programme, I studied Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a two-volume graphic novel that tells the tale of Spiegelman grappling with his parents’ history as prisoners in Auschwitz, and the legacy of that history upon his own upbringing. I  wrote an essay on the haunting of Speigelman’s dead mother’s wartime diaries. Central to this essay was a scene at the end of the first volume of Maus, in which Spiegelman discovers that the diaries have been destroyed by his father. Another member of the seminar group said that they did not believe this part of the story, and that Spiegelman probably added it for dramatic effect. I disagreed and found myself telling the group that I knew that things like that could happen because it had happened in my family, too. I knew that the past was sometimes hidden, and that – as Speigelman’s father tries to explain – ‘these papers had too many memories’, even if I did not understand why those memories should also be secrets.2 Spiegelman’s novel inspired me to make a concerted effort at reading the papers my mother had passed to me: the diaries that my grandfather kept every day as a prisoner from March 1942 until August 1945. After several re-reads and some initial research on the place names that he mentioned, I realized that my grandfather had not been in Burma at all, but on the island of Sumatra. During the Second World War, Sumatra had been part of the archipelago that made up the Netherlands East Indies, today’s Indonesia. I had not heard of a ‘death railway’ being built there, and I wanted to know more. I sat at my computer and began to conduct some fairly haphazard internet searches for ‘Sumatra Railway’, ‘prisoners of war’ and the names of places my grandfather mentioned in his papers – Sibolga, Logas, Moeara, Atjeh. There was no real order to my search. I would find photographs that showed me what the landscape around him may have looked like, or where these places even were. I transcribed the diaries that my grandfather kept and populated them with the images that I found of items that he obtained in the camps, and added references to the prayers and the books of which he made record. My search became a slow imagining of time on Sumatra through the things that my grandfather had seen, read and written. It was not an easy search. Books that claimed to tell the story of POWs of the Japanese gave no mention of the Sumatra Railway. Indeed, any mention of Sumatra at all was brief and generally grouped with POWs on Java and Borneo, as if the disparate stories of these very different islands could be told in one short summary. One of my greatest frustrations was the concentrated focus in these

Preface

xiii

accounts on what was always termed ‘the’ death railway. This frustration was not out of disregard to the horrific story of Burma–Siam. It was a lingering guilt that I had made the same assumption as many: the assumption that there was only one ‘death railway’, of denying my grandfather’s history and thinking – just as others had told survivors from Sumatra – ‘no mate, you were in Burma’.3 It was during my searches that I happened upon the ‘FEPOW Community’ – a body of largely private researchers who were making investigations in the hope that they would find answers to their own family histories. In comparison to others I knew a great deal already. But it was fascinating to find a group of people talking about POWs of the Japanese, since it meant that my search had a connection that was recognizable to others: the history of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War (the FEPOW). I was a member of a FEPOW family. The acronym appeared to give some meaning to what I was doing: because he was a ‘FEPOW’. It placed my grandfather into a group of POWs of an apparently different kind, and into a discourse of collective remembrance. In the spring of 2006, Mum and I attended the inaugural ‘Researching FEPOW History’ conference,4 the brainchild of a group of people, many of whom are the children of former POWs, who had been affected by the history of the Far Eastern camps and wanted to share their knowledge and their resources with others. To the conference we took lists of all the men who were mentioned in the diary. One of those names was John Hedley and, most wonderfully, John was at the conference too. While we talked, he read through the lists. His eyes widened as he began to tick off the names that he knew, so many of them, because John had been in the same camps as my grandfather – captured in Padang on 17 March 1942, road-building in Atjeh, and then railway construction from 1944. John told stories that were connected to many of the names. Some of them were tragic, others were funny. We knew that he had finished when he went back through the list, found a particular name, tapped on the paper – ‘and that one’, he said, ‘still owes me a fiver’. He looked up, winked, and went on to say that this was the first time in many years that he was able to speak of ‘my boys’ and have listeners nod in recognition at the names of which he spoke. John’s own excitement at seeing that list, and even the fact that such a FEPOW conference was taking place, was enough to help me feel confident that some of these stories from Sumatra wanted to be heard. Telephone conversations with, and visits to, John became a regular part of our lives. There were probably, with hindsight, questions about the experience and its aftermath that I could have been asking. But what was gained by talking with John was an appreciation of the way that he, as an individual, chose to remember

xiv

Preface

and tell of his time as a POW.5 John was instrumental in informing my view of the Sumatra Railway as, first and foremost, a personal story. It was a story that still had a living memory in the form of a remarkably sprightly 90-year-old gentleman who still wore a cravat and was much sharper than my own, rather musty notion of ‘history’. Other FEPOW families can search for many years for small pieces of information, be it a clue as to the ship on which their loved one voyaged to Southeast Asia, which camps they inhabited, or even how or where they died. Indeed, even this search had started decades previously in the 1960s, when Mum was a teenager avidly learning Geography. A chance conversation about Malaya with her father triggered a fascinating aside from him to her: ‘I know, I was there.’ It was such an exciting and baffling revelation. There was my Mum, listening wide-eyed as she heard about the bright colours of tropical rainforests while sitting in an industrial town in the northwest of England. It seemed to be such an exotic part of the world for her schoolmaster father to have made a place. It was an extraordinary mystery. The answers to how and why he was there would come only much later. Through many days and weeks of piecing together his story, I came to know that Stanley Russell was imprisoned in March 1942 in Padang on Sumatra. From there he was moved to Gloegoer camp at Medan. He became a member of what was known as the Atjeh Party of prisoners and was sent road-building prior to working on the Sumatra Railway. By the end of his imprisonment he was very close to death, but he survived with treatment, first in Bangalore and on repatriation in Liverpool. I knew that his early death, before any of his grandchildren were born, was attributable in part to the experiences that he had endured on Sumatra. So, if I already knew all of this, what exactly was left? What was the next part of the search really about? In working through that, what I found was not just a desire to learn more about what had happened to my grandfather. It was a wish to learn about the story that he and his campmates told. I wanted to know how things happened and how, ultimately, they did that very telling.

The Men It is not possible to learn about the Sumatra Railway, and the forced marches and shipwrecks that happened on the way there, without encountering the determination and courage of individual men who ensured that their stories were preserved after they returned home. It is their diaries, memoirs and oral history

Preface

xv

recordings that form the basis of the information that is now available about this part of the Second World War. By using excerpts from these it has been possible to create a narrative of their labour, the terrain through which the railway was built and the different camps that POWs inhabited. They are a huge part of this book and the impetus for this work. A small number of men managed to maintain detailed diaries and notebooks during their time on Sumatra and somehow managed to keep them protected safely throughout captivity and their voyages home. Several others wrote post-war memoirs and spoke to institutions such as the Imperial War Museum, in an effort to create a record of their experiences for future generations. All the British men who laboured on the Sumatra Railway are named on the nominal roll accompanying this book, which can be accessed for free online at www.sumatrarailway.com. The words and stories of the following individuals appear throughout this book – without them, my own could not have been written. In alphabetical order: • Gunner John Boulter, Royal Artillery; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Lieutenant Frank Brewer; became POW in Banka Straits, 17 February 1942. • Flight Lieutenant Robert Fenton Braithwaite, 153 Maintenance Unit RAF; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 8 March 1942. • Aircraftman Thomas Holman Chatfield, Far East Command RAF; became POW on Java, 20 March 1942. • Lieutenant Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, MRNVR; became POW at Baroes on Sumatra, 1 April 1942. • Petty Officer James Cuthbertson, HMS Repulse; became POW on Bangka Island, 2 March 1942. • Lieutenant Ronald James Grant Dallas, 3RD The Kings Own Hussars; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 1 April 1942. • Captain George Duff y, United States Merchant Marine; became POW of the Japanese (passed from German hands) at Batavia on Java, 6 November 1942. • Lieutenant David Eustace Martindale Fiennes, RNVR HMS Sultan; became POW in Bangka Straits, 15 February 1942. • Corporal Joseph Graham Fitzgerald, RIMU RAF; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 8 March 1942. • Aircraftman Derek Robert Fogarty, 1 Squadron RAF; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 8 March 1942.

xvi

Preface

• Aircraftman Frederick George Freeman, AHQ; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 8 March 1942. • Corporal Wilfred Owen Greenwood, 84 Squadron RAF; became POW at Garoet on Java, 18 March 1942. • Captain James Gordon Gordon, 9TH Coast Regiment RA; became POW at Singapore, 15 February 1942. • Flight Lieutenant Basil Ashmead Gotto, 100 Squadron RAFVR; became POW at Bencoeloen on Sumatra, 8 March 1942. • Lieutenant Arthur Hesford, became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Private Patrick Hadoke, captured 2 May 1942; died 26 June 1944 in the sinking of the Van Waerwijk. • Sergeant Peter Goodwin Hartley, 5TH Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Lieutenant John Hedley, 1ST Mysore Infantry FMSVF; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 18 March 1942. • Sergeant Patrick Francis Kavanagh, 3RD Negri Sembilan Battalion FMSVF; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 11 June 1942. • Captain Patrick Murdock Kirkwood, Indian Medical Service (Malaya Command); became POW at Rengat on Sumatra, 20 March 1942. • Captain Walter Ernest Hermann Lang, became POW in Bangka Straits, 15 February 1942. • Aircraftman John Geoffrey Lee, 84 Squadron RAF; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 8 March 1942. • Leading Seaman William Lovesey, HMS Jupiter Royal Navy, became POW on Java, 17 March 1942. • Lieutenant James Matheson, Force 101 SOE; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Lieutenant Dudley Shields Matthews, Force 101 SOE; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Sapper John Edward Roden Parsons, JVE FMSVF; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 28 March 1942. • Aircraftman James Douglas Pentney, 81 RSU RAF; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 3 March 1942. • Gunner Penry Markham Rees, 77TH Heavy Anti-Aircraft RA; became POW at Garoet on Java, 8 March 1942. • Signalman Kenneth Robson, 3 Malaya Command Signals; became POW at Garoet on Java, 8 March 1942.

Preface

xvii

• Lance Corporal Stanley Kay Russell, 18TH Division Royal Signals; became POW at Padang, Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Sub Lieutenant John Sharples, HMS Laburnham RNVR; became POW at Tjilegon on Java, 7 March 1942. • Leading Aircraftman Albert Bernard Simmonds, 250 AMES Unit RAF, became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Aircraftman 1ST Class Walter Raymond Smith, 153 Maintenance Unit RAF; became POW at Tasikmalaya on Java, 8 March 1942. • Lance Bombardier James Surr, 48TH LAA Regiment Royal Artillery; became POW at Garoet on Java, 17 March 1942. • Warrant Officer Claude Goodwin Thompson, 100 Squadron RNZAF; became POW on Java, 8 March 1942. • Leading Aircraftman Roland Henry Curtis Tindle, 605 Squadron RAF; became POW on Java, 20 March 1942. • Corporal Rouse Osbert Voisey, 151 Maintenance Unit RAF; became POW on Java, March 1942. • Chief Petty Officer Leonard Walter Williams, HMS Dragonfly Royal Navy; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. • Surgeon Lieutenant John Cameron Wyatt, HMS Exeter Royal Navy; became POW on Celebes (now Sulawesi), 1 March 1942.

Acknowledgements Without my Mum, Anne, this project would never have started. She introduced me to Stanley – the man in the photograph – and his beautifully poignant record of captivity. I would not have known the history of the Sumatra Railway had Stanley’s story remained silent. I am deeply thankful to Mum for her support, readings and encouragement to continue, and I will remain ever proud to carry Stanley’s words with me. Many thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research; also to the School of English at the University of Leeds – in particular John Whale – and the Imperial War Museum for their generous support. During my time as a PhD student I  was fortunate to be guided by two brilliant supervisors. The late Rod Suddaby, former Keeper of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, had an infectious passion for preserving the extraordinary stories of ordinary people. He is missed deeply. Jay Prosser provided much wisdom and inspiration throughout my time at Leeds; his belief in this project, his readings and his light have been a blessing for many years. I am enormously grateful to the following researchers, museum professionals and writers who have shared their time and expertise at various stages of this work: Bernice Archer, Suzanne Bardgett, Mathew Boswell, Gilly Carr, Jane Flower, Geoffrey Gill, Damien Lewis, Clare Makepeace, Stuart Murray, Meg Parkes, Pam Stubbs, Stephen Walton, Jenny Wood. Adam and Lisa Harris kindly provided me a warm and friendly ‘home from home’ during my many visits to London. A particular mention must be made of the Farrell family – Jamie, Jeffrey and Amanda – for the hard work that they continue to do to honour the site of the railway on Sumatra itself, and for all of their help and enthusiasm. I am immensely appreciative of the veterans and their families who have spoken about their experiences and given generous permissions for the use of materials in this book. In particular: Kathryn and James Burkhill, Ivor Fiennes, the late Terry Hadoke and his wife Barbara, Imogen Holmes, Margaret Martin, Michael Nellis, Alan Percy, Phyllis and Tim Pettitt, the late James Surr, Rouse Voisey, James Walker and Gregory Yapp. Particular thanks go to David Burchell and his family for their gracious support and permission to use Albert Simmonds’s words for this book’s epigraph. All efforts have been made to contact the relatives

Acknowledgements

xix

of the men mentioned in this book, but I would be delighted to hear from the families of: Frank Brewer, Thomas Chatfield, Joseph Fitzgerald, John Parsons, Kenneth Robson, Jack Saunders, Charles Thrale and John Wyatt. Part of Chapter 5 previously appeared as L. Oliver, “ ‘What Our Sons Went Through’:  The Connective Memories of Far Eastern Captivity in the Charles Thrale Exhibition, 1946–1964’, in Journal of War and Culture Studies 7:  3 (2014): 236–52. and is reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis, http://www. tandfonline.com. Museon gave kind permission to reproduce one of the artworks of Stanley Russell that is held in its collections. A separate mention is due to my big brother, Pete, who showed us bright stars on dark nights; Kristin, Shona and their families for being there through it all; and peer reviewers and editors at Bloomsbury, Rhodri Mogford and Beatriz Lopez, who guided me so helpfully through this process. Finally, to the other two bears who make up our three – Ollie and Faith: for your patience as I read, for bringing me countless cups of tea as I typed and for all the laughter in between. To you both, my love.

Note on Text Throughout, I  have retained place names and spellings as they were in 1945, when Malay was the lingua franca of Sumatra rather than Bahasa Indonesia as spoken today. For example, I  refer to modern-day Pakanbaru as ‘Pakanbaroe’ (the ‘oe’ would be pronounced as ‘u’), Aceh as ‘Atjeh’, Jakarta as ‘Batavia’. The Burma–Thailand Railway is referred to as the Burma–Siam Railway. Exceptions occur where source materials have used variant spellings or modern place names.

Abbreviations ALFSEA AMES COFEPOW FEPOW FMSVF IRCC IWM JVE LAA MO MVG NCO NIOD POW RA RAF RAFVR RAPWI RASC RIMU RNVR RNZAF RSU SOE TNA YMCA

Allied Land Forces South East Asia Air Ministry Experimental Station Children of Far East Prisoners of War Far Eastern Prisoner of War Federated Malay States Volunteer Forces International Red Cross Committee Imperial War Museum Johore Volunteer Engineers Light Anti-aircraft Medical Officer Malayan Volunteers Group Non-commissioned Officer Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Prisoner of War Royal Artillery Royal Air Force Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees Royal Army Service Corps Radio Installation Maintenance Unit Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve Royal New Zealand Air Force Repair and Salvage Unit Secret Operations Executive The National Archives Young Men’s Christian Association

Introduction

In 1942, the idea of running a railway system across Sumatra was not a new one. Exploratory fieldwork had initially been commissioned by Dutch authorities in the late 19th century. This was mainly concerned with the idea of creating an accessible trade route between the Sumatran port of Padang and Singapore. Early expeditions were carried out by W. H. Ijzerman in 1891; a further expedition was undertaken in 1908, by K.  J. A.  Ligtvoet and Van Zuijl. Finally an expedition by W. J. M. Nivel on behalf of the Netherlands Indies’ Government Railway and Tramway Department began in 1920, with detailed findings published in 1927.1 Deemed a ‘difficult-to-execute and costly project’ particularly at the time of the Great Depression, plans for a railway were shelved by the Dutch government during the 1930s. Furthermore, a railway on Sumatra was considered an impractical trade solution at this point since the line ‘would run through an uninhabited, inhospitable region, rife with malaria’.2 Such challenges, however, did not deter the Japanese during the Second World War. By late 1942, due to embargoes enforced by the United States, Japan was suffering a chronic shortage of fuel. Thus Sumatra, an island rich in natural reserves of coal and oil, was identified as being able to offer Japan the valuable resources that it required. Such resources would then allow Japan to continue its effort in creating a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere:  its vision to lead an Asian Empire free from Western influence. To ship resources to mainland Singapore and onto Japan, it was therefore necessary to transport coal from the northern parts of Sumatra to the western shipping ports at Padang. A railway across land removed the need to send cargo ships to Padang, through ‘waters extremely vulnerable to Allied attack’.3 With a large workforce available to them in the form of POWs and forced slave labourers (romushas), the construction of a railway provided a good opportunity for Japan to exploit Sumatra’s energy reserves. With these plans formulated, in December 1942 a core team of Japanese engineers arrived in the town

2

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

of Pakanbaroe. This was to become the base camp of the Sumatra Railway. In March 1943, approximately 100,000 romushas began to excavate the foundations for the line. Romushas worked and lived in appalling conditions with no medical treatment and very little basic shelter or food: 80,000 of the romushas who were conscripted onto the Sumatra line died during its construction  – a mortality rate of 80 per cent.4 One year after excavation work began, intelligence reports to the British War Office in April 1944 suggested that the Japanese were considering: the construction of a trans-Sumatra railway in order to facilitate transport from South China to the Indian Ocean and also probably with a view to the quicker reinforcement and supply of their garrisons on the west coast of Sumatra if necessity should arise.5

Although there was no indication in these reports that Allied troops were being used as labour on the line, by December 1944 it had been understood that the ‘construction southwards from Pakanbaroe . . . connects with Moeara . . . thus possibly linking the North Coast and West Coast Railways for the first time [and of] considerable importance to the Japanese’ in terms of defence and the supply of troops. In May 1944, the first contingent of Allied POWs had arrived at Pakanbaroe from Java. A  total of 4,968 POWs laboured on the Sumatra Railway between May 1944 and the day of Japan’s surrender – the same day of the railway’s completion – 15 August 1945. POWs were predominantly Dutch (3,866), but also comprised British, Australian and New Zealander troops (1,066), Americans (15) and 1 Norwegian.6 During the construction of the Sumatra Railway, 673 Allied POWs died.7 The majority of deaths were attributed to malnutrition and tropical diseases such as beri-beri, malaria and dysentery.8 However, these figures do not include the nearly 2,000 POWs who died when ships transporting them to Sumatra to join labour forces on the line were sunk by Allied submarine fire (see Chapter 1). Although the field of POW studies is diverse, scholarly attention on the Far Eastern experience has tended to focus on historical analyses of camp structures,9 camp entertainment10 and the medical impacts of incarceration.11 Interviews with former Japanese guards have also been undertaken for both book and television.12 Central to the studies of captives in the Far East has been to date the experience of Allied POWs who laboured on the Burma–Siam Railway, or who were incarcerated at Changi in Singapore. Very little detailed critical attention has been given to the experiences of POWs who were incarcerated by

Introduction

3

the Japanese across Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, Borneo and Japan itself. Further, despite the mass of material available both in published memoirs and in public archives, the modes of representation adopted in the life-writing of former POWs from across the Far East – and what their narrative choices can reveal about the POW experience  – have not been the subject of any detailed study. My research begins to address these gaps. By necessity it takes influence from several theoretical disciplines. Cultural debate on memory and war representation coincides with discourse analysis and ideas of transgenerational transmission. Ultimately, too, my work is steeped in analyses of the literary – the act of telling personal stories and, fundamentally, listening to the stories told by others. In this book I explore the ways in which former POWs have represented their experiences through different life-writing genres. I then draw on their writings to examine the relationship between those modes of representation and the responses to the history of Far Eastern captivity by second and third generations. In doing so, I work with the concept of what Marianne Hirsch terms ‘postmemory’, which encapsulates the relationship that younger generations have with the past traumas experienced by other family members.13 I show that postmemorial responses to the stories of Far Eastern incarceration were developing in the immediate post-war period, and how younger generations now create archives of their own through which to express their response to histories of captivity.

0.1 Interpreting Memories Throughout this book I bring to light the life-writing of British former POWs who laboured on the Sumatra Railway during the Second World War.14 The majority of my primary materials comprise the diaries, oral histories and memoirs of former POWs held in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London. To complement these materials and to corroborate the accounts that I have drawn upon, relevant documents held at The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, the Second World War Experience Centre in West Yorkshire, the regimental museum of the Northumberland Fusiliers at Alnwick, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Museon in The Hague and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies have also been consulted. In Chapter 1, I draw on those materials to provide the contextual history of the Sumatra Railway. It moves from a summary of the railway’s construction through to a critique of why its story has not passed into popular memory. This

4

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

section details the sinking of POW transport ships en route to Sumatra, including one of the most fatal maritime disasters in history and the forced march of 500 men in late 1944. The voices of former POWs describe the crude methods by which the railway was constructed, and the appalling conditions that POWs experienced. These are powerfully exemplified through excerpts from the narratives of the British men who witnessed them. My comparison of the Sumatra Railway with the Burma–Siam line considers the make-up of the labour force, the respective health of POWs at the time of the work and death rates across troops from all Allied nations. My analysis engages with existing studies of labour on the railways, for example, those by Clifford Kinvig and Henk Hovinga. This critique of the two railways, plus additional documentary evidence of postwar responses to Far Eastern captivity, informs my discussion as to why narratives from the Sumatra Railway have been overshadowed in post-war popular memory. In Chapter  2 I  identify the different life-writing genres that have been adopted by POWs, and former POWs, to relate their memories of captivity. I examine these narratives for what they can reveal about the experiential and affective aspects of captivity. Life-writing as a form can provoke affective responses among readers largely because of what Philippe Lejeune has termed the ‘autobiographical pact’.15 This pact creates a form of contract between writers and their audience, asking readers to accept a tacit message of the genre: that the ‘presuppositions of performance and autonomy’ are adopted by life-writers to encourage a readership in its ‘belief in a kind of identity’ of the narrator.16 This autobiographical pact is critical, therefore, in enabling life-writers like former POWs to transmit the experiences and affects of their captivity effectively. The audience needs to believe the voice of the writer, needs to feel spoken to, engaged and wanted. As I consider in later chapters, this has crucial implications for a writer and reader who may relate to one another through inter-generational and familial bonds, too. The most common genres found in POW archives generally are diary and memoir. There are two camp diaries from Sumatra described here, with one exceptionally detailed diary from the Sumatra Railway itself. I find that diaries were multi-functional for POWs as they were used to create historical records, enable personal expression and help them to assimilate their experiences. The last is clear at significant moments in the year, such as at Christmas, when longer entries become ‘mini-memoirs’:  retrospective and comparative accounts of a year’s captivity. Fundamentally, this use of the diary challenges common theories of trauma as being worked through after an event has taken place. POW diaries

Introduction

5

offer evidence that captives engaged in self-reflection and analysis of their own situation throughout the experience itself. Likewise, my discussion of memoir evaluates the personal significance of this genre for survivors, especially in enabling them to recount their experiences to relatives. I find that memoirs reference additional sources, include forwards written by former campmates, and writers have asked proofreaders and other assistants to check and format their documents. These memoirs, therefore, do not conform to traditional notions of trauma narratives that are replete with gaps and silences. Instead they offer detailed chronological narratives that show their authors making concerted efforts to ensure that their writing is historically accurate and authoritative. My conclusion to the second chapter explores the importance of literature in captivity more broadly. This includes a key element of the mental and intellectual life of POWs that has not been considered before: imaginary libraries. These were created by POWs when physical books were not available to them. They enabled men to engage with, and be comforted by, their memories of familiar cultural forms while they were experiencing deprivation and disease in extremely unfamiliar surroundings. These imagined libraries offer extraordinary insight into the minds of POWs and the cultural imagination that sustained them through a brutal captivity. In Chapter 3 I consider the specific linguistic features of POW life-writing. In practical terms, foreign language learning was a fundamental part of camp life. But I also identify how a polyglot camp discourse combining English, Dutch, Malay and Japanese came to support and represent camp life on Sumatra. Comparative analysis of contemporary notebooks and later memoirs shows how these different languages offered various opportunities to POWs, for example, through developing friendships, negotiating for provisions and intellectual stimulation. Through my examination of the lexical choices made by POWs I propose a new term for the subtle nuances of language use in captivity: POW camp discourse. To do so, I apply Bakhtinian theories of discourse to understand the ways in which the social contexts of specific words are embedded silently into the linguistic choices made by POWs. Through this I illuminate how POWs developed an intricate system of communication, by which different languages played specific roles in the management of the camp. I end this chapter by highlighting the significant role that the camp interpreter played on the Sumatra Railway in negotiating the confrontations that occurred between captors and captives. It was not possible in the early aftermath of the war for loved ones to know which camps their relatives had inhabited. Histories of camps such as those along the Sumatra Railway were simply unavailable, and so relatives drew on

6

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

the experiences of POWs from other geographies of Southeast Asia to attempt to understand what fathers, uncles, sons and husbands had been through. Therefore, in my final two chapters, I broaden this study from specifically the Sumatra Railway to chart the early post-war narrative of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War (the ‘FEPOW’). In Chapter  4 I  focus on the visceral, bodily experiences of the POW. This begins with a summary of the vital work carried out by British Medical Officers on the Sumatra Railway, and the efforts of POW artists to record the events that they witnessed. This develops into a discussion on the challenges to representing captivity that are created by the experience of physical suffering. Insight is gained by reading the memoirs of men who were held captive on Sumatra and wrote later of how they viewed themselves when confronted with the prolonged degradation of their own bodies. This leads to the medical experiences postwar through the case study of one former POW on the Sumatra Railway, which exemplifies how families witnessed the slow decline of loved ones following their repatriation. The brutal physicality of incarceration pervades every narrative from former POWs, be they written or drawn. This penultimate chapter illuminates how it leaves ‘a tapestry of sadism and dysentery’ – but also survival – across the history of the camps.17 My final chapter examines the legacy of the ‘FEPOW’. It aims to illustrate why the case studies that this book provides  – of the narratives from the Sumatra Railway – are important to tell more broadly. They strengthen not only our understanding of past atrocities, but also of the impact that those events can have on generations to come. Typical impressions of former Far Eastern POWs often portray a group of men who did not speak about their experiences. I challenge that representation to show that former POWs did speak, but that they chose to do so through public, collective forums. For example, they told their stories by becoming involved in the claim for compensation from the Japanese government, or through contributing to social club newsletters. Out of this, a public figure of ‘the FEPOW’ emerged, a figure that has been perpetuated in the image of the Children of Far Eastern POWs (COFEPOW). Through this final chapter I  argue that despite the centrality of the European concentration camps to its development, Marianne Hirsch’s theory of ‘postmemory’ is equally applicable to the history of the camps in the Far East. To do so I bring together material obtained from a touring exhibition of Far Eastern POW artwork, contemporaneous newspaper cuttings, copies of the official publication of the Red Cross, Far East, and the journal of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association (RBPOWA). This

Introduction

7

concluding discussion shows that the postmemory of the Far Eastern POW began to emerge in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, but continues to develop as second and third generations reflect on their role in the remembrance of the camps.

0.2 Remembering Sumatra Although it took almost as long to build as the railway that joined Thailand to Burma, the Sumatra Railway has received very little attention in post-war studies of the conflict in Southeast Asia. For example, the official Encyclopaedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War produced by the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) includes only a cursory mention. The most detailed reference in this work is a two-line summary of the fact that prisoners were shipped from Java ‘to build a railroad from Pekanbaru to Muara for the transportation of coal to the coast near Padang’.18 The main focus, even in this encyclopaedia of Indonesian history, remains on those shipped from the Netherlands East Indies onto the Burma–Siam Railway.19 Even in today’s village of Pakan Baroe children play and hop on and off the rusting remains of engines and railway carriages. They do not have the slightest inkling that the rusting toys between their kampong huts are the mute witnesses of a nightmare that was once a reality.20

A study of the ‘mute witnesses’ of the Sumatra Railway was first published in 1976, just over thirty years after the line was completed. This was Henk Hovinga’s Eindstation Pakan Baroe 1943–1945 –Dodenspoorweg door het oerwoud (titled The Sumatra Railroad for the English edition published in 2010). Hovinga’s study was complemented by Neumann and van Witsen’s ‘documentary’ of events on the Sumatra Railway, setting out the ‘facts compiled [by the authors] during and immediately after the war’ and published in Holland in the early 1980s. Subsequent editions of Hovinga’s text have revised various inaccuracies that made up the ‘facts’ of Neumann and van Witsen’s efforts. Hovinga’s work is based on interviews and other correspondence with more than 100 former POWs, the vast majority of whom are Dutch.21 Aside from Hovinga’s research, the most comprehensive sources relating to the construction of the Sumatra Railway appear online. Jamie, Jeffrey and Amanda Farrell have undertaken a painstaking project on Sumatra itself to track the railway, map the coordinates of key locations such as camps and work yards and continue to conduct tours

8

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

of the route for the relatives of former POWs and other interested parties. The work of the Farrells has culminated in a rich photographic archive of the site of the railway as it is today.22 The most well-known story from the Sumatra Railway is that of Judy – an English Pointer who accompanied POW Frank Williams into the camps at Medan and later onto the railway. Judy was officially registered as a prisoner and was awarded the Dickin Medal (the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross) in May 1946. A much loved and treasured companion to the men in Medan and on the railway, Judy’s remarkable story is now the subject of at least three biographies, and therefore I have not repeated her tale at length here.23 In the available published materials about captivity in the Far East during the Second World War, there is a distinct absence of the voice of British POWs who laboured on the Sumatra Railway. This book provides a space for those voices. Previously cast aside as the story of the ‘other’ railway, these are the words of the men who wrote the tales ‘of those months of slogging’.24

1

Building the Sumatra Railway

During the Pacific campaign of the Second World War, Japan regarded the island of Sumatra as a vital target, being rich in oil and coal and placed strategically in terms of reinforcing Japan’s military stronghold in Southeast Asia. Coupled with the Malay peninsula, Sumatra was a ‘foremost fortress’ in the development of the Empire of Japan’s long-term ambitions to create its ‘Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere’. This was envisaged as a bloc of Asian nations that were to be free of Western influence.1 Although intense guerrilla fighting occurred in the northern provinces of Sumatra for some weeks, southern Sumatra was overtaken by Japanese forces relatively easily. Precious oil reserves in Palembang were controlled by Japanese paratroopers by 14 February 1942 – one day prior to the fall of Singapore (Figure 1). Larger troopships converted from passenger liners and other vessels had left Singapore carrying women and children from early January 1942 onwards. However, Allied troops  – including some late-in-the-day attempts at forming official escape parties – were still leaving the Malay Peninsula in smaller boats between 10 and 15 February. They were ultimately told to ‘leave Singapore . . . by any means they could find’.2 It was an exercise that, for some, would make Dunkirk look like a ‘picnic’ in comparison.3 In their attempts at escape, many men and women would make the treacherous journey through the Straits of Malacca from Singapore to the western coast of Sumatra in lifeboats, motorboats, Chinese junks and small wooden Malayan fishing vessels known as sampans or koleks. Although short at forty miles, that crossing was far from easy. It took several days of hard rowing in blazing heat against strong currents. The shocking backdrop of a burning Singapore lay behind them, and the uncertainties of an unknown land were ahead. Japanese bombers circled above, and mines littered the waters. Initial routes that had been planned out would often change according to the hazardous circumstances that troops faced along the way: ‘anchorage and shelter were sought in small islands en route; some of these also served as staging points, allowing transfers between boats’.4 Not all those who set out on

10

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Figure 1 Japanese paratroopers land in Sumatra, 1942. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

this journey survived, but many kept going to reach the island of Sumatra. They included John Hedley, who had been working as a rubber planter in Malaya prior to the breakout of war, and had enlisted with the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force (FMSVF). During the escape attempt, Hedley hoped that from Sumatra they could ‘pick up a ship to India, Australia or anywhere else’.5 Those hopes would soon falter. The last large ship out of the Sumatran port of Emmahaven sailed on 3 March 1942. This was the Dutch steamer, De Veert, which reached Colombo safely on 9 March; the ship that sailed prior to De Veert, the Rooseboom, was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean.6 After these departures the few attempts made to leave Sumatra were in small sailing boats, but the large majority of troops spent the next two weeks ‘hoping like hell that something might happen and we would control the Japanese – but we never did’.7 With the Japanese already occupying the southern provinces, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the island, and the Netherlands East Indies as a whole, surrendered. The Japanese took full control of Sumatra on 17 March 1942, with Allied forces gathered in the island’s capital of Padang as POWs.8 During the early months of captivity, large groups of POWs who were held initially in Padang were sent to various camps across Sumatra. Many were moved to the provinces of Palembang and Medan. Among the tasks assigned to working parties at Palembang was the construction of an airfield, and from Medan POWs were sent to labour at docklands, to construct temples and build roads.

Building the Sumatra Railway

11

One of the most significant moves from Padang took place in May 1942, when 500 troops (498 British and 2 Australians) known as the British Sumatra Battalion were shipped on the England Maru as part of a convoy of POW transport ships that was headed for Mergui in Burma. Here they would join up with POWs who had been captured at Singapore, to work on forced labour projects on the airfield at Mergui. Later in the year they moved to Tavoy in Burma and finally arrived in November 1942 at Thanbyuzyat in Thailand. It was here that this battalion was conscripted onto what was to become known post-war as the ‘Death Railway’.9 But there were other railways, too. In May 1944, two years after the British Sumatra Battalion left Padang, the first of just fewer than 5,000 Allied prisoners of war joined 100,000 indigenous slave labourers in the construction of a track that was to run right across central Sumatra.

1.1 Shipwreck and Forced Marches: Arriving at the Railway Running a length of just under 140 miles (220 kilometres) the Sumatra Railway began from the port town of Pakanbaroe. It gravitated north-east across the island through thick jungle, swamp land, mountains and river valleys to Moeara. The route of the track was planned so that the new line would be linked to an existing one on the island, thereby joining eastern ports with those in the west. Furthermore, two mines located at Sapar and Karoe would be connected by a small tributary line, allowing coal to be hauled up the track and shipped away from Sumatra to Singapore and beyond. Conversely, military supplies could be shipped to the island and then transported to Japanese troops overland by rail. In March 1943 – approximately one year before any POWs arrived at the base camp town of Pakanbaroe  – tens of thousands of romushas were set to work, excavating the foundations for the railway. POWs would write later of having worked along the route of ‘a track that had been scraped, literally scraped out of the earth, by natives and our forward parties, in front of us’.10 The conditions in which the romushas worked were inexorable. As POWs arrived at Padang from Java in May 1944, one of them – Kenneth Robson – found ‘death . . . in the dull eyes of the natives who filled the outside of the compound . . . in the coughs that racked the skin and bones that were their bodies. In the excreta, which lay around in the dirt, with blood suspiciously colouring it’.11 The sight, smell and sound of those bodies – the ‘dirt covered shells of men’ and ‘their women, just as thin just as dirty’ – were to be found from end to end of the line.12

12

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Figure 2 Portion of the Sumatra Railway built by Allied Prisoners, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

The large majority of POWs drafted onto the Sumatra Railway were shipped from Java on large freighters and passenger liners converted by the Japanese for transportation purposes. The first contingent arrived from Java in May 1944, with further ship-loads arriving over the course of that year. One other large group of POWs to labour on the railway was known as the ‘Atjeh Party’. This group was initially part of the main band of men who were captured and held in Padang from March 1942. They were later taken to the northern area of Atjeh to build roads and, in late 1944, were forced to march to the centre of the island in order to assist with the construction of the railway track.

1.1.1 The Atjeh Party A report given by Patrick Kavanagh on the conditions at the base camp at Pakanbaroe gives a glimpse of the physical situation faced by POWs, which was – he says simply – ‘hopeless in all cases’. The space allotted to each man was very small; about 140 men to a hut built by ourselves, and always leaking. The 1,500 of us at Pakanbaroe had a section of the

Building the Sumatra Railway

13

river, 12 ft. by 40 ft. for bathing, cooking etc., and we were just below a coolie camp in which the Japanese had placed a number of dysentery victims. Medical supplies were nil, the Japanese flatly refusing to supply anything at all. Food for the patients in the hospital hut was 150 gramms of rice per day, and for the men in working parties 250 gramms.13

The shock of the hardship experienced by POWs on the Sumatra Railway is embodied in the narratives from the Atjeh Party. This was a group of 500 men, comprising 300 Dutch and 160 British troops (split across the forces), and approximately 40 Australians and New Zealanders.14 The Senior Officers for the British contingent were Owen Henman and medic Patrick Kirkwood. Prior to road-building in Atjeh, these men had experienced relatively comfortable conditions at Gloegoer camp in Medan. At Gloegoer, there were ‘properly tile roofed hongs’ (huts/sleeping quarters) and a ‘shower room’ at the end of each.15 The ‘general health all through much better’ and here POWs experienced a ‘much more complete diet’.16 Apart from the working parties that were sent to build a temple, Hedley recalled that exercise regimes at Gloegoer had consisted of ‘moving oil barrels from one side of a compound to another . . . to keep us occupied I think’.17 Or, as John Parsons noted in his diary of December 1942, during the day POWs were ‘free except for preparing vegetables as required’.18 However, the move to Atjeh brought a distinct shift in the living environment and working conditions for the prisoners. In March 1944, the Atjeh Party was forcibly marched ‘a hell of a long way’: 85 miles from Gloegoer up to Atjeh.19 With a lack of adequate rations and men being forced to drink from streams along the way, dysentery was rife. This brutal march began on 13 March 1944 and took just six days, with severe exhaustion and heavily blistered feet a major problem among all troops as they finished. As soon as they arrived in Atjeh, on 19 March, the working parties joined romushas in road-building.20 You started at one end at Khota Chani and another group started up at their end at Blankedjaran. Worked towards each other . . . Cut out the jungle. All the hills. It’s in the mountains, so you were cutting the road out of the hillside. First of all the trees would be felled . . . If you came across rock there would be a party which would have the use of explosives, of gelignite. There would be a hole bored in and the stuff jammed down and packed up, light the fuse, run like hell, and then hope for the best. And then back to your tools.21

Along with much harder labour at Atjeh, there was a deterioration in accommodation. Atap huts (huts made from palm leaves and bamboo) were built by POWs on their arrival at the new camp, ‘about a foot off the ground, a platform,

14

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

again of the local sort of bamboo . . . just to hold you off the deck a bit. And that was all. Built round a square’.22 In total, eleven POW camps were built and inhabited along the 40-mile road, with incidents of injury and illness on the increase. Having experienced these conditions for the best part of a year, in October 1944 the Atjeh Party were moved once more. This time they marched the 85 miles in less than three-and-a-half days (including an eight-hour night march) – with many of the men suffering dysentery and wearing no footwear. At best, they had boots ‘broken to bits and tied up with string’.23 John Hedley’s handwritten notes provide key dates of all the transfers between camps that this group made, including the route and time taken for the march from Atjeh, 6–9 October 1944. Total march of 136 km (85 miles) took 81 hours including rest periods. This march, together with the lack of food over the last 8 months, was the direct cause of many future deaths among us. After 8 months of heavy work road building, many men had no footgear of any sort and had to march barefoot.24

Despite the promise from guards that they were on the way to a ‘rest camp’, the Atjeh Party was promptly sent to work on the Sumatra Railway  – split between Camps Nine and Fourteen in thick jungle.25 And thus, arguably the most exhausted prisoners on Sumatra were placed into the most challenging conditions and terrain, to make up the most unrelenting working parties along the railway – organized as they were in a continuous shift rotation 24 hours per day.26 By the end of 1944, John Parsons felt that the general health among the men had become ‘very bad’: In Aceh [sic] our chief troubles were diarrhoea, dysentery, oedema – caused by deficiency of diet. Since we’ve been down here [Petai] there appears to have been a lessening of oedema but an increase of dysentery and a certain amount of malaria . . . 1944 has been a bad year for us and we are all pleased to see the end of it.27

Faced with such conditions the maintenance of contemporaneous records of the Sumatra Railway became exceptionally difficult, although in Chapter 2 I examine how this was still possible for a small number of men.

1.1.2 POW Transport Ship Sinkings The majority of POWs who laboured on the Sumatra Railway were shipped across to the island from Java. For these early groups, experiencing the conditions on the transport ships and on Sumatra itself was when ‘the blow fell’. Although the work that they had carried out on Java was ‘physically hard, we

Building the Sumatra Railway

15

were young and reasonably fit. We had no reliable news, but all were optimistic, with our sense of humour intact’.28 However, conditions on board the POW transport ships were cramped and degrading. Furthermore, two of the transport ships were torpedoed by Allied submarines – the crews of the latter not having identified the ships’ cargo as human. The ships that the submarines hit, killing nearly 6,000 in total, were the Van Waerwijk in June 1944 and the Junyo Maru in September 1944. In 1946, James Gordon gave a detailed account of the Van Waerwijk disaster, having been in charge of the British men who were transported on this ship in the hold. Here they ‘had approximately 2’ 6” × 5’ 6” × 4’ 6” in which to sit or lie with such kit as they possessed’. Such cramped conditions meant that the effective distribution of rations was almost impossible. It was only after vigorous remonstrations with their guards that twenty-five men at a time were allowed to leave the hold and go onto the deck for quarter of an hour each, to get some fresh air. At 14.00 on 26 June 1944, carrying 1,190 POWs in the hold, the Van Waerwijk was torpedoed by HMS Truculent. Nearly 200 died in the sinking. Survivors were taken to the River Valley Road camp at Singapore, possessing ‘nothing except the shorts in which we stood up, and not even those in some cases’. Although a small amount of clothing was handed out by the Japanese, it took ‘at least three weeks’ for eating utensils and basic footwear to be provided. Despite their lack of strength or fitness, many of these men were transported back to Sumatra after one month in Singapore. They were sent to assist with the construction of the railway, malnourished and suffering the physical effects of long-term imprisonment, forced hard labour and now, shipwreck.29 Owing to the difficulties for submarines in identifying the cargo of these vessels, it is thought that more than twenty POW transport ships (commonly known as ‘hell ships’) were sunk by Allied torpedoes during the war in the Far East. The sinkings led to nearly 11,000 POWs losing their lives, plus thousands of romushas.30 By far the deadliest of these disasters, and indeed the deadliest disaster in maritime history at the time, was the sinking of the Junyo Maru in September 1944 (Figure 3). Conditions on the Junyo Maru were as cramped and filthy as other transport ships. But alongside the 2,300 POWs on board, there were 4,200 romushas beaten down into the hold, too  – a total cargo of 6,500 individuals crammed together with standing-room only. On 18 September 1944, at 16.15, the Junyo Maru was torpedoed by the HMS Tradewind just off the west coast of Sumatra. She took less than an hour to sink, killing 5,620, the large majority of whom were romushas.31 Unable to swim and terrified, most remained on the ship’s deck as

16

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Figure  3 SS Junyo Maru, March 1933. Courtesy of Walter E.  Frost and City of Vancouver Archives.

she sank: of the over 4,000 romushas who were forced onto the Junyo Maru, only 200 are thought to have survived.32 Despite having been a POW on Java and Haroekoe for the two years previous, Frederick Freeman’s post-war memoir tells of the sinking of the Junyo Maru within its first few pages, placing the event at the forefront of his experience as a POW. We had a captured Dutch corvette for an escort but at the first explosion it scarpered and was soon out of sight, leaving us in the middle of the Indian Ocean, just a mass of wreckage and bodies. After about 6 hours in the water I was picked up by the (returned) escort vessel and taken to Sumatra.33

Once on the island, and just like those from the Van Waerwijk, the survivors were given little in the way of clothing or medical attention. As a result, more men died in these initial hours after rescue due to the effects of exposure and pneumonia. The following day, the survivors were driven in cramped lorries to Pakanbaroe. Here they met up with fellow POWs with whom they had previously been in camps on Java.34 They rallied round and gave us what they had to spare in the way of clothing and eating utensils – which was not much; just a few old coconut shells to drink out of and a few bits of tin to make platters of.35

This group of survivors from the Junyo Maru were given very little time to recuperate from the experience. They were soon moved again, this time to Camp Three along the railway. Here, a bridge was to be built across the Kampar Kanan

Building the Sumatra Railway

17

river and – resting as it was on the banks of the river – it was a camp that would flood several times. The rains came and . . . as the line was run right through the jungle the embankment acted as a dam and quite a lot of the line was washed away. The Japanese were very agitated by this and we were turned out at all hours of the night to try to save it. To do this we had to wade through the water, balance on the line and push sleepers along with our chests till we came to the break, then we had to lay the sleepers criss-cross under the line so that the water could run underneath.36

With poor quality materials and unstable foundations, these experiences would recur during captivity as bridges collapsed each time the river waters swelled. Indeed, inhabitants of each of the camps faced challenges specific to the terrain in which they worked and sheltered: the swampland, river bank and virgin jungle brought with them diseases and difficulties unique to each. What agonies were undergone by those men who tunnelled through the mountains with the most primitive of tools, can only be described by those who had some hand in the work.37 The camps along the Sumatra Railway38 Camp 1: Pakanbaroe, base camp. Occupied: May 1944–October 1945.

This is thought to have been the only camp along the Sumatra Railway that was completely fenced by barbed wire.39 Flooding was common here.40 Mainly Officers inhabited this camp, with many not enlisted into working parties. This reflected the terms of the Geneva Convention, which stipulated that Officers were exempt from working parties. There was also a dentist based at Camp One. During captivity, men travelled down the length of the railway line to visit him. He worked without anaesthesia: ‘the patient would sit on a log . . . another man would hold his head back whilst the dentist got to work, and several of us would stand round the unfortunate patient and grunt and groan with him; not much help but he would get plenty of sympathy and support’.41 Construction materials for the railway were unloaded and stored here before being forwarded to other camps. A hoist was placed on the bank of the Siak River for unloading rails from supply ships. When chance allowed, the pier was used as a diving board and fishing platform by prisoners. Base camp also incorporated a workshop until June 1945 whereupon it was moved to Camp Nine at Logas. This workshop was a hut ‘where tools could be repaired as they were often damaged and broken on the railway’.42 Near to the end of captivity, Kenneth Robson was based at Camp One: ‘The food was extremely poor, no canteen, no fires allowed for cooking . . . the work was mainly slapping clay on to what appeared to be a very large air raid shelter. Rumour was rife, that when it was finished it was to be our grave’.43 When the camp was finally closed on 17 October 1945, the remaining inhabitants were transferred to Camp Two to await repatriation.

18

Camp 2: Pakanbaroe (3 km south), hospital, or ‘death camp’. Occupied: May 1944–November 1945.

Camp 2a: Simpang Tiga. Occupied: May 1944–October 1945.

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

This camp was set up by the first arrivals from Java. They were followed by former inhabitants of Camp One when ‘it was taking too long to get to and from our place of work’.44 Camp Two was quickly instated as the main hospital camp, although Neumann and van Witsen report that this was also ‘the hub of the forage system for all other camps’.45 Patrick Davis (Camp Commandant for Allied troops on the Railway) states in his report that Camp Two became ‘officially the sick camp’ in July 1944.46 Owing to its status as hospital, the cohort of men billeted here changed continuously. See Chapter 4 for details of the work of British medical officers. This camp was described as being a ‘large sprawling camp’ by John Boulter when he arrived here at the end of captivity in 1945. He recalled that there was a ‘slight slope’ in one section, with a stream at the bottom. This was ‘dammed to provide a small pool’ in which liberated men ‘wallowed, washing ourselves with real soap’ – it was the first full wash for more than three years. ‘All were washing away as if to wash away the three years of misery. Reality in the shape of the cemetery was just across the stream. It covered the slope and vanished over the crest, a forest of crosses. Most of the crosses were marked only with numbers so it wasn’t easy to find the grave of friend’.47 As the designated hospital, mortality rates in Camp Two were inevitably high. Jack Saunders was often attendant at each burial ceremony that would take place at the end of the working day: ‘They [the bodies] were not very heavy and most of us were losing weight daily because of the shortage of food and the poor quality of what we were getting. When a funeral took place the body was not put into a coffin . . . but were wrapped in a ticker mat, which is something like we knew as a rush mat and then sewn up. There was only one chaplain with us, and he was the Roman Catholic padre. He conducted a proper service every time a death took place.’48 Patrick Davis announced Japan’s surrender in Camp Two on 24 August 1945, but working parties had already ceased going out by 20 August. After the surrender, storerooms were opened by prisoners where they found extra supplies of clothes, food, medicine, Red Cross parcels and mail that had been withheld.49 The last British and Australian men were transported out of Camp Two on 22 September 1945, the remaining Dutch waited until 25 November. At the end of the war, this ‘became the collection point for all of the remaining ex-prisoners of war from the camps 1, 3, 9 and 11’.50 Sanitary conditions at this camp were particularly poor, with large numbers of dying romushas discovered here when Allied POWs arrived on the railway.

Building the Sumatra Railway

Camp 3: Taratak Boeloeh 17 km from Pakanbaroe, on the north bank of the Kampar Kanan river. Occupied: May 1944– October 1945.

19

This was the administrative hub for British POWs on the railway. The British interpreter Ray Smith was based here (see Chapter 3). Working parties moved here from Camps One and Two to save travelling time during each shift. Therefore the prisoners here were predominantly those who were initially shipped from Java. POWs were also transferred to this camp for recuperation from treatment in Camp Two. There was a low mortality rate in this camp – only thirty-one POWs died here. This was attributed to the actions of RAF medic Robert Braithwaite and his ‘careful and conscientious work . . . His actions were all motivated by the desire to obtain more food and medical supplies for the men under his charge and to alleviate their sufferings as much as possible. Vitamin extracts were made in the crudest manner imaginable and injections of Vitamin B given to many men’.51 In Camp Three, British POWs inhabited ‘five huts on one side of the jungle path, and opposite was one hut for the guards, and a smaller hut-cum-office for their young officer. At the end of our row of huts there was the cook house. About a hundred yards in front of us was the river from where all our water had to be fetched and boiled before use’.52 On 28 September 1944, the Japanese made a propaganda film here.53 Its location on the bank of the Kampar Kanan made Camp Three prone to flooding at high tide. Heavy flooding on 9 November 1944 caused the camp to be abandoned, and a new barracks and graveyard were built on higher ground. From Braithwaite’s camp reports we know that:54 • Working parties usually received one day’s rest per man per week – but once ‘they worked three weeks without a rest and often missed the rest day at other times’. • ‘The work was hard. It consisted of heavy hammering . . . carrying rails and railway sleepers. Sometimes it was 10 pm when they returned to Camp’. • During wet season, men worked ‘waist and neck deep in water all day for several weeks building a bridge. This caused much diarrhoea and debility’. • Protests were made to the Japanese by medics about sick men being made to work: they were told not to do so again otherwise such appeals ‘might result in an increase of the number of men asked for’. Jack Saunders notes that a concert party was formed here and put on evening shows of popular plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest. A four-men ‘orchestra’ consisting of a saxophonist, violinist, drummer and bugler also provided entertainment to ‘brighten our life’.55

20

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Camp 4: Taratak Boeloeh – opposite Camp 3, south bank of the Kampar Kanan river. Occupied: July–October 1944. Camp 5: Loeboeksakat, 23 km south of Pakanbaroe, south bank of Kampar Kanan river. Occupied: July 1944– March 1945.

Camp 6: Soengeipagar, 36 km south of Pakanbaroe, south bank of Kampar Kanan river. Occupied: October– December 1944. Camp 7: Lipatkain, 75 km south of Pakanbaroe, on the south bank of Kampar Kiri river. Occupied: December 1944. Camp 7a Lipatkain, north bank of Kampar Kiri river. Occupied April–June 1945.

This camp included survivors from the Junyo Maru disaster. It was based in an area of swampland, so work here was particularly challenging. Bridge building across the river took place here.

Most survivors of the Van Waerwijk disaster inhabited this swampy and boggy camp. Tigers and elephants could be seen here. Being located on the edge of the thick jungle meant that the work rate of POWs slowed down. Hovinga states that the work rate halved from two to one mile per day of track laid. He notes that ‘at a few particularly heavy stretches, near the point where the two sections were supposed to meet, the emaciated men were not progressing more than a couple hundred metres per day’.56 Another camp located in swampland. Some men here had been transferred from Camp Five. A notoriously fierce guard nicknamed ‘Pig Face’ by the POWs was killed by a tiger here.

On 28 June 1945, POWs from Camps Fourteen and Fourteen-A were transferred here (including members of the Atjeh Party).

On 28 June 1945, POWs from Camps Fourteen and Fourteen-A were transferred here (including members of the Atjeh Party). This camp was created for the purpose of constructing a replacement bridge over the Kampar Kiri River. The original collapsed on 30 March 1945, during a flood. This camp also included a shipping yard for receiving goods that had been sent across the river from Pakanbaroe. Camp 8: The working conditions deteriorated rapidly at Camp Kota Baroe, 111 km south Eight. Working parties left camp before sunrise and of Pakanbaroe. returned after dark. Large numbers of men subsequently Occupied: January–June fell sick and therefore the size of the working parties 1945 reduced although the sick were also sent out onto the line. Generally, however, it meant that heavy work was distributed among a much smaller number of men than planned. A storage depot for equipment and resources was created here since the distance from Pakanbaroe was becoming too far for quick transit.

Building the Sumatra Railway

Camp 9: Logas, 142 km south of Pakanbaroe. Occupied: June– September 1945.

21

This was the site of an old gold mine on Sumatra. Working parties intensified here, with men transferred from Camps Fourteen and Fourteen-A in June 1945 (including members of the Atjeh Party). A workshop moved to this camp from Pakanbaroe at around the same time, to assist with the repair of tools. On 25 August 1945, POWs were informed of the Japanese surrender. However, they remained here and were transferred by train to Camp Two towards the end of September 1945. Prisoners leaving Camp Eleven stopped here for one night in August 1945, on their journey back to Pakanbaroe. Camp 10: Twenty-four-hour working parties were in operation Loeboekambatjan, here to ensure that the railway was completed on time. 160 km south of The POWs billeted at Camp Ten watched the ceremony Pakanbaroe. that marked the completion of the railway on the same Occupied: July–August day that Japan surrendered, 15 August 1945. On 21 1945. August, all POWs at Camp Ten were transferred to Camp Two. Camp 11: The working pace was the same here as at Camp Ten, Koeantan River 1, in the and many men were sick from exhaustion. Uniquely, Koeantan Gorge. POWs and romushas worked together at this point on Occupied: August 1945. the line to speed up work. The location of the camp in a narrow river valley caused difficulties in creating adequate space for sleeping quarters. ‘For this number of inhabitants there are too few hutments and therefore sleeping accommodation is in two tiers above each other.’57 This camp is where the two ends of the Railway were joined on 15 August 1945. Camp 12: Koeantan River Again, the narrow river valley constricts space for the 2, in the Koeantan Gorge. camp. Sleeping arrangements were made in only one Occupied: July–August hut, this time with three tiers. ‘A very difficult terrain 1945. and this section of the track is probably one of the worst to build on account of natural barriers’ – that is, through mountain wall, across river.58 Bridges here were very unstable due to their poor construction and so they would shake as trains crossed. Camp 13: In March 1945, men from the closed Camp Five were Moeara, 220 km from moved here to speed up progress from the Moeara end of the railway. The camp at Moeara was originally built Pakanbaroe. Occupied: March–July at the joining of two rivers (the Koentan and Oembilin). 1945. There was a flood in April 1945 and therefore at this point the camp was moved to the north bank of the Koentan. Two wood storage sheds were turned into shelter for POWs in the Moeara railway yard.

22

Camp 14: Tapoei, and Camp 14a: Petai, approximately 120 km south of Pakanbaroe. Occupied: November– June 1945.

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

These two camps were built so that POWs could create a branch line that served the Sapar and Karoe coal mines. POWs arriving were members of the Atjeh Party. Coal was mined by romushas, and forwarded in lorries. POWs loaded the coal into freight cars as part of this work. ‘A fairly decent kitchen was constructed along with a hospital and a clinic . . . The sick received half rations and were given little opportunity for convalescence. Although the workload was initially bearable, the Japanese later required that recovering patients also be put to work.’59

1.2 Building the Railway If three small ‘sub’-camps are included, there are currently known to have been seventeen camps inhabited by Allied POWs at some point during the construction of the Sumatra Railway (Map 1). The invaluable work of the Farrell family in tracking the route of the railway on Sumatra suggests that evidence from more camps (and perhaps of more camps) is yet to be uncovered.60 In chronological terms, these camps were not constructed one after another, and in particular there were two key deviations. First, the necessity to collect and transport coal from mines at Sapar and Karoe meant that the construction of a tributary branch of the railway was prioritized midway along the line. This was located at Tapoei and Petai, approximately 120 kilometres south of the town of Pakanbaroe. POWs laboured on the branch line from October 1944 until June 1945, and so the camps at Tapoei and Petai, despite being among the first to be inhabited, were numbered as the last. Second, in March 1945, when the Japanese deemed the progress on the railway to be too slow, a party of POWs was transferred to Camp Thirteen in the town of Moeara. From Moeara they could work on construction simultaneously from the other direction. The two ends of the track joined in the gorge between Camps Eleven and Twelve, and a ceremony to mark its completion took place on 15 August 1945 – the day of the Japanese surrender. Escape was not possible. On a jungle island where the local communities were as fearful as the military prisoners held there, ‘there was no perimeter to keep the prisoners inside as there was nowhere to go anyway’.61 Indeed in camps along the Sumatra Railway there was very little barbed wire – often absolutely none  – nor bamboo fences. There were few (if any) safe places to hide and there are no records of any prisoner escaping from the Sumatra Railway.62

Building the Sumatra Railway

23

Map 1 Location of camps along the Sumatra Railway, 2015. Courtesy of Phyllis and Tim Pettitt.

POWs were informed that they were ‘on loan to “The South Manchuria Railway Construction Company” ’, and the construction work was undertaken under the control of the Japanese 25th Army.63 The Japanese sun became more than the symbol of the nation holding the men captive. It created the temporal framework to a POW’s daily routine: POWs did not work to Java time (as the Western part of the Netherlands East Indies would have typically), but to Japan Standard time. This meant that POWs were getting up to work in the dark at what would have been around 4.30 am Java time. When the first POWs arrived at Camp One at Pakanbaroe in May 1944, they had no firm idea of the work to be done, but Jack Saunders would write later that they ‘took it for granted that it was a major job’. After we had had the tenko [roll call] we were marched a short distance to where the work was to begin. We saw at once that we were to build a railway. There were piles and piles of railway lines ready for use, an assortment of tools to use

24

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway on the job, spades, shovels, pick axes, two sizes of sledge hammers, seven and fourteen pounders, chunkels (like a spade with the blade fixed at right angles to the handle) and a drill known as a ‘dassy’64 . . . lastly there were stacks and stacks of sleepers which had been no doubt cut and prepared by the natives from various trees out of the jungle. Some of them were much too soft for the job as they had used rubber trees for some of these sleepers and they split very easily.65

Construction methods were primitive and monotonous. Owing to the singletrack design, shunting yards and switching points were built at several places to enable trains to pass and/or change direction. Working parties would be grouped into small cohorts of men, and Ray Smith, who worked as an interpreter in Camp Three (see Chapter 3), recalled that each man was designated a specific role: 1) Rope men. 2) Marker men. 3) Sleeper men. 4) Rail men. 5) Dassi men. 6) Bar men. 7) Hammer men. 8) Noko66 men and 9) Jointing men.67

For Smith, the first two roles were the ‘cushy numbers’, since the job of laying and marking the rope along the route of the track did not require the stamina demanded of the other men who were sawing, hauling, laying and hammering the sleepers and rails. Thus, sleeper and rail men had extremely demanding jobs, having to carry the wooden and steel slabs on their shoulders to the marked-out points along the line.68 Joseph Fitzgerald described the process of carrying and laying the rails: The first carrying party, about ten in number, with cloth pads on their shoulders, positioned themselves at intervals along the length of the rail, then lifted it onto their shoulders . . . Each man would probably carry one hundred weight over rough ground possibly barefooted . . . The ‘Lifting off ’ party, also about ten in number, would be in position, and at a word of command, the rail was lifted from shoulders and dropped to the waiting sleepers.69

The weight of the sleepers and rails was not the only challenge faced by the carrying parties. The ‘narrowness of the side footway’ and the ‘soft soil’ made carrying them barefoot along the track precarious. Furthermore, being situated on the Equator meant that in the heat of the sun, the rails would burn so hot that they could not be picked up with bare hands – hence the cloth pads that Fitzgerald recalls on the shoulders of the carrying parties.70 Once the rails had been lifted from the shoulders of the carrying party and laid down, then came the turn of the ‘dassi men’, ‘bar men’ and ‘hammer men’ to position and prepare them for fixing to the sleepers.

Building the Sumatra Railway

25

As soon as the rail joint was made, the rail was positioned on the sleeper, and a hammer party drove in a few spikes spaced along its length. Shortly afterwards the second rail on the other side of the track would be down, positioned by wooden rail gauges, and lightly spiked.71

Each working party was overseen by Allied Non-commissioned Officers (NCOs), one of whom would be entrusted as the ‘Gauge Man’. Fitzgerald gives no especial focus in his account to the rail gauge, but to Smith this seemed an ‘almost sacred’ piece of equipment to the Japanese. It was kept, when not in use, in a soft-lined case. The gauge itself was made in Varnished & Polished Hardwood & and all the fittings to it were polished & machined Brass. It looked somewhat like a large ‘Spirit- level’. It had two hinged pointers on the lower edge. One of these could be slid along & secured in any desired position. When both pointers were at their nearest to each other, this represented the Standard Gauge between the inside surfaces of the Rail Lines (1.067 metres – 3ft 6 inch).72

The senior NCO in charge of the gauge would be responsible for the safety and proper use of this tool, ensuring each rail was positioned accurately. After this had been confirmed, the laying of new rails continued – and would do so until ‘all the rails to hand were in place on the track’.73 Almost immediately, men were under extreme mental as well as physical duress: Our legs stumbled along . . . the hot baked clay, kicking into mounds and throwing tired sagging bodies off balance. On and on relentlessly, urged on by shouting Japs, we proceeded to build the line. We were growing, in spite of ourselves, to become more and more proficient in the job. Our captors, cursed and kicked, screamed and exhorted us to more effort . . . Somewhere ahead maybe there was something to eat, something to drink. Not a meal to look forward to, to enjoy, but just something to fill that gnawing painful hole and moisten those dirty cracked lips . . . Work a bit faster and stop for a quick smoke. Smoke that parched mouths even more and hit empty stomachs hard, but soothed, just for a little while. Pick up that hammer again, you’re behind now . . . In with a peg, up with the hammer, down it comes, misses, and clangs on the lines . . . A screaming voice penetrates the mists, and as you straighten up . . . a fist, a piece of wood, a rifle, something, hits you on the side of the face, and in your weakness, the mind now a blanket of deadened misery, down you go.74

The sensory overload of physical pain, exhaustion, heat, noise and hunger plagued the men as they worked, urged on only by the slightest hopes of a break, meagre

26

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

rations or a cigarette because ‘the greatest relief for this hunger was smoking’. So significant was this short respite that, Claude Thompson remembered, even the doctors ‘recognised the value of tobacco’ in keeping hunger and tempers at bay.75 This process was repeated day after day for fifteen months until the railway was complete. When written in such a methodical way, Kenneth Robson pointed out, all this ‘sounds terribly well organised’. But with men dropping weak and sick, designated roles could change quickly and ‘in practice everyone had to take part in all facets of the work’.76

1.2.1 The Romushas Military POWs were not alone in their work on Sumatra; indeed, tens of thousands of local labourers had arrived to build the railway during the twelve months before them. As the war in the Far East progressed and increasing demands were placed upon Japan’s economy, a shortage of labour supply had prompted the military administration to look to its occupied territories to support the war effort. And so, along with recruiting thousands of Malays, Tamils and Koreans, the island of Java was identified as a source of plentiful – and cheap – labour. Javanese workers were known as romushas (the Japanese translation for the term ‘coolie’) and were put to work across Southeast Asia. They experienced wholly unsanitary living conditions, brutal labour regimes including corporal punishment and the provision of little-to-no medical care.77 Between 1942 and 1945, millions of romushas were recruited on Java, often forcibly, but the precise numbers of individuals involved are unknown. This is due to haphazard record-keeping by the Japanese, the destruction of any extant records upon Japan’s surrender in August 1945 and the fact that families were generally not officially informed of a romusha’s death. Some research suggests that as many as ten million romushas were recruited, although these were not all employed for long periods of forced hard labour.78 It is, however, generally accepted that over 300,000 romushas were transported outside of Java for labour purposes and, due to the appalling conditions in which they existed, only about 77,000 – 26 per cent – survived.79 Approximately 120,000 romushas were conscripted onto the Sumatra Railway alone. Although some initial estimates following the end of the war placed the death toll of romushas on the Sumatra Railway at 25,000,80 the most recent research places this figure over three times higher at 80,000: an attrition rate of just over 80 per cent.81 Despite these numbers, romushas and POWs rarely inhabited the same camps, although in the depths of the jungle they did work side by side. Romushas were not provided

Building the Sumatra Railway

27

with any official rations by the Japanese and they created makeshift camps in the jungle. Neither did romushas receive any medical care. Along with the lack of sanitation and the absence of the routine and order that was imposed within the military camps, the romshas had few – if any – support systems to draw upon for survival. It was clear from what the military prisoners saw ‘that [the romushas] were far worse off than we’.82 Even in comparison to the little recorded history of the POWs on the Sumatra Railway, references to the romushas are scarce. In recent years some progress has been made to put these histories on record. The work of Paul Kratoska has been invaluable in recovering the experiences of Southeast Asian communities during the Second World War.83 Likewise, second-generation photographer Jan Banning has undertaken a crucial project in recording a small number of survivor testimonies from former romushas who laboured on the railways in Sumatra, Thailand and Burma. Through Banning’s stark portraiture and his conversations with survivors, we learn that a former romusha, Sardi, was a teenager when he was taken by Japanese troops from a rice field on Java and shipped with thousands of others to the neighbouring island of Sumatra. Once on Sumatra, Sardi was sent to labour on the railway and as part of his work he was ordered to bury the dead. One of the bodies that he encountered was that of his friend, sick but still alive. Despite his friend affirming ‘I’m not dead yet,’ Sardi was forced to continue with the burial. This was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in this world. He was buried the way you would a water buffalo, that’s what we call that on Java. If you bury a human being then you put him into a coffin or you wrap him in a shroud.84

Another former romusha, Damin, also talks of sick romushas being buried alive: ‘I saw with my own eyes how seven people, still groaning, were tossed into a hole.’85 Unable to write letters to inform his family of his whereabouts at the end of the war, Damin remained on Sumatra. ‘All those people who died’, Damin said, ‘are like pebbles that got stuck in a sieve. I am a grain of sand that slipped through.’86 In POW narratives, any mention of romushas is brief. Jack Saunders wrote that following the death of a military prisoner at Camp Three, the body would be buried ‘at a convenient spot nearby, and usually near a very tall tree’. Saunders remembers that, as part of the burial rites that the POWs performed for their fallen comrades, ‘we would get a fairly large board and write the name of the person on it and . . . a Native Coolie [would] climb up the tree and nail the board across the tree – it could then be seen from quite a distance away’.87 These were not the only tasks that the ‘native coolies’ carried out for the POWs. When the river overflowed, a ‘gang of native coolies’ were sent ‘to build new huts for us’.88 These

28

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

huts did not provide full protection from the elements because Japanese troops limited the materials that romushas could use:  when the rain came, the huts leaked.89 However, these huts built for the POWs will have been far more protective and spacious than anything the ‘native coolies’ experienced for themselves.

Relations between Dutch and British POWs As this chapter indicates, camps along the Sumatra Railway were inhabited by predominantly Dutch and British military POWs, with a smaller contingent of Australians. Furthermore, the clearings for each camp were created by the tens of thousands of romushas who worked, and died, along the route of the track. Relationships between the various nationalities of POWs were not always easily managed: tensions and resentments brewed between different groups. Former POWs at times provided similar recollections to those of Kenneth Robson: that the Dutch and British ‘did not get on together, they just put up with each other’.90 The Dutch across Indonesia at times felt abandoned by British forces prior to the surrender, and British troops could be envious of the relative abundance of provisions that Dutch POWs (having been resident on Sumatra) had at their disposal during early captivity: ‘There was distrust and enmity between Dutch and British. We had nothing. The Dutch had all they could take into camp, put it that way. And so I suppose jealousy in one way crept in quite a lot and there wasn’t all that much good blood between the two groups of people. But we were all living under the same roof so to speak.’91 Such binary distinctions of having all or nothing, however, belie what was a complex situation. Despite the challenges, many strong relationships were in fact forged between individual POWs of different nationalities. ‘There was an extraordinary Dutch doctor’, recalled Wilfred Greenwood, ‘and actually I tracked him last year, I got a charming letter from him. I thanked him from doing what he could, which heaven knows was remarkably little, he could get one’s morale up I suppose.’92 Chapter  3 explores how these more constructive relationships are made evident in the life-writing of POWs and former POWs through the linguistic choices that they made. ‘You had to [get on]’, said Leonard Williams, ‘because if you didn’t and you argued and all that amongst yourselves, that made matters worse anyway.’93 It was prudent to learn languages and forge relationships with the various groups in captivity. Even if there was wariness between the groups, foreign language development enabled constructive communication and cooperation among POWs:  for mutual support, to exchange goods and to share the vital skills and knowledge that helped each man to survive.

Building the Sumatra Railway

29

On the return to base camp at Pakanbaroe at the end of the war, Claude Thompson noted that the ‘dilapidated atap huts’ at Camp Five were still standing, ‘and it looked as if it was occupied, probably by natives’.94 His assumption is more than likely correct, for the situation for romushas at the end of the war was dire. The early post-war confusion on Sumatra was compounded by the threat of an uprising of local insurgents fighting for a free Indonesia. This meant that sourcing aid for thousands of romushas who required urgent medical care was a major and politically fraught challenge. When British and Dutch liberating troops entered Southeast Asia, they focused initially on repatriating military POWs and civilian internees. The repatriation and care of romushas who had been transported outside of Indonesia was overseen eventually by the Dutch Indies government and would take years. Even arrival back on Java had no guarantee of survival. With little support available, ‘living corpses’ would be seen walking in the streets, some ‘ “laying down beside the road, at the markets, in . . . movie theatres to wait for death. Rats feasted on the fly-covered corpses” ’.95 For the romushas who were ‘shipped to their deaths’, who died among jungle vegetation, by the side of railway tracks or in abandoned camps, there was no ceremony. The graves – where they existed – were left largely unmarked: as Jan Krancher wrote, ‘their nameless graves dot a large portion of Southeast Asia’.96 With survivors often illiterate, desperate and separated from their homeland, the recovery of their experiences has been a slow but precious process. They remain part of a history that urgently requires more attention.

1.3 The ‘Other’ Railway Identifying the number of Allied POWs who had been on the Sumatra Railway was a difficult task post-war. The Japanese Prisoner of War Information Bureau (Furyo Jōhōkyoku) did not create a systematic POW registration system until 1944, and on their capitulation many administrative documents were burned or otherwise destroyed.97 However, Dutch researchers have established that 6,764 POWs were originally destined to work on the Sumatra Railway. This includes the 1,796 POWs who died as a result of the Van Waerwijck and Junyo Maru disasters.98 Of that total figure, 4,968 POWs arrived on the Sumatra Railway, predominantly Dutch and Indonesians (3,866), but also British, Australian and New Zealanders (1,066), American (15) and 1 Norwegian. Of those working on the railway construction itself, 673 died99 with common

30

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Figure  4 Huts at Pakan Baroe, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

causes of death including beri-beri, malaria, dysentery, malnutrition and pellagra.100 This equates to a mortality rate among Allied POWs labouring on the Sumatra Railway of 13.5 per cent, although it was higher among the British and Australian contingent than the Dutch (16 per cent and 13 per cent respectively). The lower mortality rate of the Dutch POWs is likely attributable to the financial clout, extra kit and local knowledge possessed by the Dutch troops as they had lived on Sumatra prior to the Japanese occupation. These overall mortality rates were lower on the Sumatra Railway compared to approximately 22 per cent on the Burma–Siam Railway, and an average across Far Eastern camps of 27 per cent. These all far outweigh the mortality rate of less than 5 per cent within European POW camps.101 The mortality rates for POWs on both ‘death railways’ are outstripped of course by those for the romushas. As previously noted, approximately 80,000 romushas perished during the construction of the Sumatra Railway (nearly 81 per cent), with a similar number dying on the Burma–Siam line.102 Although the Sumatra Railway was half the length of the Burma–Siam Railway (220 kilometres vs 414 kilometres), it took almost the same number of

Building the Sumatra Railway

31

months for POWs to complete (15 vs 16). Progress was approximately sixteen kilometres per month slower on Sumatra than in Burma and Siam.103 This slow progress each month indicates specific difficulties for those on Sumatra, two of which dominate the narratives of former POWs. First, the terrain on Sumatra was foreboding. The railway construction had to navigate through a ‘chain of mountains’, the ‘rolling hills of volcanic and sedimentary rocks’ and the ‘swampy and jungle-covered’ lowlands characterized by long rivers, sandbanks and mudflats. Second, having already been incarcerated, malnourished and forced into hard labour for over two years beforehand, the initial general condition of the Sumatra Railway workforce was poorer than that on Burma-Siam (the building of which began relatively early in captivity).104 Certainly the impression given on conditions by Robert Braithwaite, senior medical officer at Camp Three, suggests that mortality rates would have risen had the war not ended when it did.105 Indeed it is likely that all would have died fairly soon following the railway’s completion. Accounts from former POWs state that some were forced to carry out ‘day long digging of large six foot six wide, thirty foot long, six foot deep holes in the ground’ – a mass grave in which all POWs were to be buried once the construction of the Sumatra Railway was completed.106 Narratives of former British POWs who laboured on the Sumatra Railway are rare. This even remains the case where nationwide appeals have been made to the general public to tell their stories. For example, as part of the BBC’s online People’s War project more than 47,000 stories were uploaded but no search results appear for ‘Pakanbaroe’/’Pekan Baru’. Although the term ‘Sumatra Railway’ brings back forty-six stories, the large majority of these accounts are from those men from the British Sumatra Battalion who were captured on Sumatra but then transported to work on the Burma–Siam Railway.107 Likewise, examination of official reports and documentation reveals patchy data and a frustrating notion of the ‘mute witness’ of the Sumatra Railway through history.108 An end-of-war report on the conditions of camps in the Netherlands East Indies and marked for preservation as part of ‘official’ history makes no reference to a railway on Sumatra. The only detail that this report offers is that ‘there seems to have been three camps in the Pakanbahru area . . . but whether all at once or at different times is not clear. They contained Dutch prisoners, and British prisoners arrived there from Java in February, May and October 1944’.109 Information outlets for families did not disseminate better data. During the Second World War, the Department of the Red Cross and St. John War Association produced The Prisoner of War, a journal for the relatives of men held captive by enemy troops. From February 1944, this journal was supplemented

32

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

by a special eight-page edition, Far East. This was used to distribute information more effectively than could happen with a publication that was ‘concerned mainly with the affairs of prisoners of war in Europe’.110 Initially Far East was intended to be a monthly supplement, but by the third issue it was clear to the editors that this was not going to be possible.111 Since news from the Far Eastern camps was received ‘at irregular intervals’, Far East was published in a similar manner.112 Between February 1944 and December 1945, twelve issues were published. The journal offered what information its writers and editors could about the camps. It included reprints of letters and postcards received from POWs and civilians interned in the Far East,113 and official reports from International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) inspectors who were permitted to visit ‘a few camps in the northern area [of Japan’s occupied territory]’.114 Attempts were made by the editors of Far East to provide a spread of information geographically, and regarding both civilian and POW camps. Being part of the southern territories, visits by the IRCC were not permitted to camps on Sumatra. This meant that very little official news from this island was available. The first mention of the Sumatran camps is found in the seventh issue of Far East, published May 1945, with a report that ‘about 600 British subjects’ were being held as civilian internees on the island ‘but that there may be a certain number still unreported’. The brief article goes on to offer what was in fact a key piece of information regarding the specific whereabouts of the contingency of POWs who were labouring, at the time of the publication, on the Sumatra Railway. The article noted: ‘the writers [of the civilian letters from Sumatra] were all former residents of Malaya’.115 This was a small clue, because the POWs captured at Padang on Sumatra in March 1942, and who remained on the island for the remainder of their captivity, were also officially recorded by the Japanese as being held captive in ‘Malayan POW camps’.116 Nonetheless, it was not until the tenth issue of Far East, published in September 1945, that ‘fifteen camps containing P.o.W. have now been located in Sumatra. Of these, five contain P.o.Ws from the United Kingdom, of whom there are some 1,800’.117 The ‘fifteen camps’ was a conservative estimate, and included camps at Medan and Palembang as well as some of those along the railway. The existence of the railway itself was not reported. It remained, until liberated men could speak to their families, unknown. The first detailed accounts from Far Eastern POWs that emerged into the public domain were those offered by survivors of the sinking of the Rakuyo Maru. This was a vessel that the Japanese were using to transport POWs from Singapore to Japan in early September 1944. The Rakuyo Maru shared the same

Building the Sumatra Railway

33

fate as that of the Van Waerwijk and the Junyo Maru. Indeed, the Junyo Maru was torpedoed on the same day that the final survivors of the Rakuyo Maru disaster were picked up from the water. Sixty men survived the shipwreck of the Rakuyo Maru and some returned to the UK.118 These men had laboured on the Burma– Siam Railway, and the sheer scale of that project inevitably dominated post-war narratives from the Far East. As historian E. H. Carr asserted, ‘numbers count in history’;119 and they count later, too, when the stories of that history are being told and heard. The Burma–Siam Railway was by far the largest forced labour project in the Far East during the Second World War with the workforce totalling approximately 64,000 POWs.120 Consequently, in the aftermath of repatriation, some former POWs from Sumatra felt as if they were ‘other’ to ‘the’ Death Railway, or sensed that ‘quite enough’ had already been told. Everyone naturally knows the Burma Railway because that was the first one that was discovered by the relieving troops at the end of the war. And by the time they got to us, they’d seen quite enough horror and we were just sort of second hand . . . [Sumatra is] now known among POWs as the ‘other’ Railway, rather slightingly I think. Anyhow, we’re rather particular about keeping the distinction.121

Wilfred Greenwood’s belief that ‘relieving troops’ had discovered the ‘Burma Railway . . . at the end of the war’ is not accurate. The Burma–Siam line had been completed in 1943 and prisoners who laboured on it were not liberated for another twenty months. Yet Greenwood’s narrative demonstrates a curious exchange between the stories from the two railway lines. The ‘other’ railway – an ‘otherness’ that was for the men from Sumatra a ‘distinction’ – was simultaneously not perceived as being ‘other’ or ‘distinctive’ enough by listeners, once the men were liberated. In 1945, as the stories from the doomed Rakuyo Maru were being published in newspapers and reported in the House of Commons, some efforts were made by official organizations to shield relatives from the details contained within them. Notably, articles in Far East glossed over the atrocities of the Japanese camps – ‘horrifying reports which it is not the concern of this journal to dwell upon’.122 Indeed, one of the survivors of the Rakuyo Maru wrote a double-page spread for Far East that attempted to appease the concerns of families: ‘I know by the way I felt during my two and half years that our greatest wish was for you not to worry.’ Subsequently these men tried to assuage the ‘worry’ of readers of Far East about, for example, the lack of clothing available to POWs, by stating that ‘you were better off ’ because ‘for one thing, if you had clothes you would be more uncomfortable on account of the

34

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

lice’. Likewise, the punishments that were received by POWs were portrayed with a diminished severity (‘it’s not because, usually, the Japanese wants to be cruel or torture you. It’s the fact that they have always been used to being beaten themselves’). There was much focus instead on captive men ‘sitting down on their bunks or on the floor’ listening to a campmate read, or a ‘lot of fellows’ making musical instruments and generating ‘a good feeling’ by singing while they marched from the railway to the camp.123 With the refusal of official organs such as Far East to ‘dwell’ on atrocity, coupled with being unable to report from Sumatra, men returning from the island faced several challenges when talking to loved ones back home about their experience. It is for these reasons that their life-writing became so valuable.

2

Writing the Sumatra Railway

‘It must surely be impossible’, Thomas Chatfield mused about his captivity on Java and Sumatra, ‘for the written or, for that matter, the spoken word, to convey the sensation of the stinking smell of fear and filth’.1 Aircraftman Thomas Holman Chatfield became a POW aged 28 when he was captured on Java, 20 March 1942. Although brief in nineteen typescript pages, the notes that Chatfield recorded in 1981 about his memories of captivity repeatedly question the stereotypical image of the Far Eastern POW. His reminiscences of POW life are not focused on the supportive bonds of mateship. Instead they mention the times, less popularly acknowledged, when deteriorating camp morale created an atmosphere in which ‘stealing and fighting were rife’ among POWs themselves, and where ‘corporal punishment by our own troops’ was considered ‘the only effective remedy’.2 Chatfield tells us about the humanity of prisoner life, of the drudgery and the danger. Furthermore, he acknowledges the struggle to find a way to speak his truth. It is surely ‘impossible’, he tells us, to be able ‘to convey the sensation’ that he experienced. What Chatfield wants to tell does not come easily to him. Reflecting the apparent impossibility of the task he has set himself, we can find that his notes remain disjointed. Consequently, they do not flow smoothly into one another but read as a sequence of anecdotes, jumping through brief moments in captivity. In half a page of typescript his jottings move through the work conditions that he endured – ‘easier for a short period’ – through to ‘much suffering caused by Happy Feet’3 and the relief that POWs found for this painful and irritating condition. Yet the same half-page of notes covers quieter times when POWs were able to keep themselves intellectually stimulated – ‘lectures and study periods were organised, and I  managed to run a course in bookkeeping’. He skips again quickly, as if his mind could not focus on one aspect of captivity for too long, to contemplation of the war more generally, which was ‘always going to be over in three months and the possibility of defeat did not exist’.4

36

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Each one of the short anecdotes that Chatfield includes in his notes could be the start of a much longer exploratory narrative on the effects, impact, incidents and ailments associated with captivity in the Far East. Instead they remain as stand-alone thoughts ‘in terms of work’, the ‘quiet period’, the ‘suffering’ and ‘blessed relief ’.5 Thus Chatfield’s notes reflect the tangential nature of observations often found in a personal diary, as the writer documents brief episodes that become definitive moments for a day. Chatfield did not to my knowledge develop his anecdotes into a longer narrative, as other former POWs did, and so a reader finds a document that is presented like a diary ‘simply as a record’.6 The diary is not the only genre that Chatfield’s notes evoke. They form a sequence that works exactly as memoir does, to ‘personalise history and historicise the personal’.7 And though the date and time of the events that Chatfield records may be uncertain, there is still a general chronological structure to his story. He begins with the start of his captivity on Java, works through to his time on Sumatra and ends with his own perceptions of the response to troops returning home. This is a story that Chatfield and others like him clearly wished to tell. In his opening lines, and paradoxically by professing an inability to do so, Chatfield immediately impresses ‘the stinking smell of fear’ onto his reader’s mind. In Kate McLoughlin’s survey of the literary representation of war, the hyperbolic technique known as adynaton – that is, the refusal to directly speak of events while alluding to their extremity – is a common trope of war writing. According to McLoughlin the ‘suggestive power of the absent referent’ is likely to cause a reader to ‘envisage horrors exceeding anything that straightforward description could invoke’.8 In Chatfield’s case, by stating that the ‘stinking smell of fear’ is ‘impossible to convey’, he is automatically suggesting to his readers a level of fear that is beyond his powers of ‘straightforward description’. Nonetheless, the very idea of having a reader is important to Chatfield. Despite their brevity, his notes offer a significant glimpse into the desire of the former POW to tell his story and, crucially, for it to be heard in return. The wish ‘to convey’ implies an active search by Chatfield for an audience who will read, engage with and develop a response to his words. In this search, Chatfield discovered challenges. At the end of his collection of anecdotes we find that he may have kept the notes brief for other reasons, too. Post-repatriation, Chatfield discovered that telling the story of captivity was ‘very difficult’ for him, and the responses that he received from others contributed directly to this difficulty. Not only has everyone else their own war stories but the experiences of Japanese POWs were quite beyond their ken. I gave up when an aunt said ‘Poor dears, didn’t they even give you clean sheets!’9

Writing the Sumatra Railway

37

Chatfield’s struggle acknowledges how telling a story at home was difficult when family members were unable to fathom the enormity, and strangeness, of the POW experience: it was ‘quite beyond their ken’. Indeed, both Ben Wicks and Julie Summers have written on the strains and pressures faced by British families who welcomed men home from the Second World War. Both studies emphasize that the men returning in 1945 were much changed – physically and personally – from those who had gone away and been missed in the intervening years.10 Chatfield adds that an older brother had told him on his repatriation that he ‘must be careful of water for drinking’ despite the fact ‘I had been drinking water downstream from latrines for months!’.11 In these few lines, Chatfield’s ‘notes’ remind us that listening to difficult histories can be as challenging as their telling, because ‘everyone else [has] their own war stories’ too. Stories that, as Tim O’Brien’s tales of Vietnam reminded us, they will all carry.12 In writing and reading stories that have emerged out of conflict, O’Brien offers two modes of ‘truth’ that a personal narrative of war may adopt. First, a ‘happeningtruth’, which reflects the facts of an event that can be chronicled; second, a ‘storytruth’, which comprises the physical, psychological and affective experiences of the people involved. O’Brien writes that the ‘story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth’, precisely because it tells us of the impact on humanity of events that took place in history.13 Thus, in personal narratives from the Sumatra Railway there is the happening-truth of the forced labour and tropical diseases suffered by thousands of men. However, due to the dearth of accurate official archives, it is impossible for a contemporary reader to know these happening-truths without reading them through the story-truths of life-writing. It is that story-truth with which this chapter is concerned: the various genres of life-writing through which POWs and former POWs represented, and attempted to make sense of, their experiences. By drawing on the different functions offered by life-writing, I find that men were able to move beyond the confines of captivity, breaking boundaries figuratively when they were not able to do so literally in the camps.

2.1 Diaries of Captivity Diary is the rarest form of Far Eastern POW life-writing. I have identified only two daily diaries kept by British POWs on the Sumatra Railway itself. Additional diaries were maintained in the camps inhabited earlier in captivity, such as at Medan, or among contingents of men who were held on Sumatra but did not spend any time on the railway (e.g. those held at Palembang).

38

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

The scarcity of diaries from the railway camps does not demonstrate a lack of will on the part of POWs to record their experiences. On Sumatra, amid a railway construction project running through deep swamp and thick jungle, paper was a precious and dwindling commodity. Thus, it would only have been used for writing where POWs did not barter with it in exchange for other goods, sell it in order to obtain additional rations and resources, or roll precious cigarettes with it. Owing to their scarcity, the diaries that did survive the long years of captivity and the voyage home become a significant genre for identifying the minutiae of everyday life in a POW camp. They are also fragile, fading documents, with thin paper browned and torn, covers peeling away and the handwriting not always easy to decipher. Their fragility resonates with what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer refer to as ‘testimonial objects’: objects that ‘trigger memory’. Objects that are connected to ‘a particular place and time’ in such a profound way that these objects in themselves come to speak for, and of, ‘experiences subsequent generations can barely imagine’.14 One of the diaries that was maintained along the railway and later donated to the Imperial War Museum was kept by John Parsons. Parsons was a friend of John Hedley (Chapter 1) and also a member of the Federated Malay States Volunteer Forces (FMSVF). The diary that Parsons kept comprises four small fading notebooks plus approximately fifty sheets of loose paper, including the backs of six type-written letters that Parsons received from his parents (‘Pom’ and ‘Mamie’), dated 1941–1943. With these letters, Parsons created diary space for 1945. Each letter is inscribed with a handwritten note from ‘Mamie’ in thick black ink  – all but one using the same final words, ‘I love you with all my heart.’ In a letter dated 25 April 1943, Mamie writes that she makes ‘so many plans for your future’, and in the hope of that ‘future’ tells him to ‘keep as cheery as you can’, not knowing that it would be another two-anda-half years before they were reunited. To maintain his ‘cheer’, Mamie sent Parsons constant updates about her garden:  the years that Parsons is away are recorded through the seasonal changes and various crops of fruit and vegetables that Mamie produces. The garden just now is beautiful. Oh, John, how I wish you could see it. There are some beautiful apricot coloured foxgloves out for the first time. The long bed is lovely with pyretheums, poppies, irises, foxgloves and campanulas. The roses are out and the pansies are beautiful. Your greengage has a great many plums on it, and so has the plum against the wall . . . The apple trees in the garden have plenty of fruit . . . Do you remember the autumn you were at home and you and I wrapped each apple up in paper and put them on the shelves?15

Writing the Sumatra Railway

39

Through her letters, the garden becomes a sanctuary, a place of nourishment that holds memories of moments that they had shared – ‘the autumn you were at home’ – and that they had once enjoyed together – ‘you and I wrapped each apple up’. Clare Makepeace has written that ‘the strength’ that POWs across Europe were able to draw from reading letters from loved ones ‘was considered to be so powerful that it was deemed to verge on physical sustenance’.16 Here, that ‘sustenance’ figures prominently in the produce of the garden, too. But it also creates a poignant connection between the two lives. While Mamie writes of the fruits in each season, Parsons simultaneously notes in his diaries the significance of the ‘garden party’ for supplementing basic rations in captivity: scraps of vegetables such as green leaves and sweet potatoes that the men were able to grow in the camps. Thus during his final year of captivity, as Parsons used the back of Mamie’s letters to create additional space for his diary, the presence of Mamie’s writing creates the enduring impression of an imaginary interlocutor.17 When he could not respond in kind to Mamie by letter, Parsons was able to imagine and maintain his tie with her by adding his own daily news to the reverse of hers to him. And so, as Mamie was telling of the minutiae of her life, Parsons’s diary was filling with his.

POW Mail on the Sumatra Railway Letters and postcards were not commonly or regularly received by POWs on the Sumatra Railway. Far Eastern POWs had much more restricted (almost non-existent) contact with home compared to those across Europe. In the latter camps, a POW could send ‘between two and five letter-forms home per month . . . plus four postcards. A letter-form consisted of just twenty-four lines, a postcard only eight’.18 In comparison, POWs on Sumatra were, at best, able to send less than a handful of twenty-five-word postcards during the entire duration of captivity. Generally, the wording would be chosen from a selection prewritten by the Japanese administration. Sending mail to the camps was also challenging. In the first of the letters that John Parsons retained, Pom – his father – writes on 8 March 1941, that families in Britain have received the instruction ‘that all letters must either be typed or written in block letters so I am writing as I think it would take your Mother all night’. Three weeks later, on 29 March, Mamie is ‘most laboriously learning to type’ – and the effort, consisting of thirteen fairly short sentences, ‘has taken 3 hours, so do please appreciate it’. By 16 May 1943, Mamie is back to ‘getting Pom to type this for me as it takes me so long’.

40

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Within his daily diary entries from the Sumatra Railway (November 1944 onwards), Parsons records just four months in which he received mail from home: • On 11 November 1944, he received a bundle of letters and postcards – including thirteen letters from Mamie; with two more postcards and a letter card arriving on the 21st of the same month. • On 9 January 1945, Parsons receives the letter from Mamie dated from two years previous, June 1943 – the letter that tells him about fruit trees blossoming in the garden. Four more letters arrive on 26 January 1945. • On 18 May 1945, a postcard arrives from a friend, ‘Polly’, which cheers Parsons because he is able to learn that blackouts are ‘over at home’. • On 24 August 1945, the day that the men on the railway learned that the war was over, Parsons received three postcards from Mamie  – the most recent dated January 1945. From the long delay between sending and receiving letters, it is clear that mail for prisoners was not often distributed within the camps. Thus POWs were not always able to read the messages that were sent to them by family and friends. Where they did, these communications were treasured and brought comfort to the men: on a rare day off from working parties in December 1944, Parsons used the time to ‘re-read all my mail’. In February 1945, James Pentney received his first communication from home since December 1941 – ‘It didn’t say much but it told me there was a world outside, away from all this, a world I had almost forgotten’.19 To examine letters and postcards from captivity in further detail, an extensive six-volume study of Far Eastern POW mail during the Second World War has been compiled by David Tett. Volume 2 of Tett’s work specifically focuses on mail to and from the camps across the Netherlands East Indies.20

2.1.1 Self-Censorship and Exhaustion: Keeping a Diary in Camp John Parsons’s diary is written in pencil in tiny, tightly spaced script. There is barely any space left at the edges of each page. The crammed leaves display the precious nature of every scrap and inch of paper that he could obtain. Yet, despite the valuable contemporaneous detail that the diary contains, some of the most significant events in captivity, particularly the punishment of POWs by guards, may not have been recorded at all. Diary-keeping for the POW was a prolonged act of self-censorship as the writer remained ever-conscious of the

Writing the Sumatra Railway

41

‘frequent unscheduled searches for such items, or radios . . . under the threat of death for such offences’.21 Parsons transcribed his diary thirty years after repatriation, and wrote in the introduction that ‘the consequences for me would have been somewhat unpleasant’ had the diary been discovered by guards. As a result, ‘this necessitated recording only those events to which the Japanese would not take too violent exception’, as well as hiding the diary  – although Parsons added a note to the later transcription that he was ‘uncertain as to how and where’.22 Secreting a diary was most essential during the searches that were carried out by guards. If discovered, the contents of a diary risked provoking reprisals and punishments of the very nature (and potentially worse) than those that would have already gone unrecorded in its pages. John Sharples – a prisoner on the neighbouring island of Java – managed to keep a diary during the first half of his captivity and wrote, too, of this act of self-censorship. My diary omitted all reference to some activities which were pursued in the prison camps of an under-cover nature or which related to gross Japanese illtreatment of POW. Had such references been made and my diary been discovered during the not infrequent searches of our belongings, the consequences could have been calamitous, not only for myself, but also for many of my fellow POW[s].23

The potential for ‘calamitous’ repercussions meant that POW diaries were often, by necessity, a carefully sanitized version of events in captivity. Nevertheless, diaries are a valuable form historically and for families too, being temporally framed records and reflections that can unearth for younger generations the fine detail of camp life. Diaries are also inherently personal, even if at some stage they are made public. It has even been argued that the ‘lack of premeditated structure’ (where a writer does not know beforehand what the daily content will be) may assist war diarists in particular to ‘express their emotions’, to ‘escape from’ military roles and to ‘come to terms’ with their experiences.24 Subsequently we can see that diaries are diverse forms of life-writing in terms of the multitude functions that they can have. Prisoner diaries specifically can offer a means of ‘empowerment’, or a ‘replacement for physical retaliation’ against captors. In this sense, maintaining a diary of captivity means that lifewriting becomes both an ‘act of memory and of psychological assertion’.25 The physical document of the diary itself – as much as its contents – comes to represent the need for the diarist to remain in control, in a small way, of his identity beyond that of ‘prisoner’.

42

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Becoming POW after the First World War In her monograph on POWs from the First World War, Heather Jones has identified a marked tension between the brutality suffered by men during captivity and the need for them to ‘return to peacetime norms of masculinity’. Indeed, Jones remarks that it may not have been politically expedient in the aftermath of the First World War to remember the violence of POW life, particularly as government officials attempted to conclude reparative peacetime agreements.26 Consequently, Jones suggests that popular representations of incarceration during the 1920s onwards avoided any allusion to the POW as ‘powerless or humiliated’. Instead, narratives were created that showed POWs ‘mastering captivity’.27 Therefore, for those becoming POW during the Second World War, they had only a ‘murky, subjective frame of reference’ for captivity.28 The memoir of Joseph Fitzgerald confirms as much: We knew about POWs in Germany in WW1, and from a small amount of news from the countries in the current conflict, which indicated humane treatment. We anticipated much the same from the Japs. How wrong we were!.29 At least one POW on the Sumatra Railway, Gerald Tait, also served in the Great War.30 He belonged to a band of men who became POWs during the early 1940s and had potentially been subject, as Jones has shown, to a ‘selective amnesia’ within cultural memory towards the mistreatment and wider commemoration of the harsh dangers of wartime captivity.31 The status and identity of the ‘POW’ thus required renegotiation. As Ian Mackintosh wrote in his diary in Changi, Singapore, in February 1942: ‘One of the patients, an old soldier, came up to me and said “You are a P.O.W.  now, Sir”, and instinctively I  knew that the initials stood for Prisoner of War, although I had never heard the expression before.’ Mackintosh’s words indicate that although they were trained for various eventualities within combat situations, the vast majority of men taken captive in the Far East were unable to comprehend the life of a POW. Some ‘had never heard the expression before’; neither had they been prepared for living – and surviving – captivity.32

Phillippe Lejeune’s work On Diary is the most comprehensive analysis on the modern form, moving as it does through the unsolicited unpublished diaries of young French women and his own diary-keeping, to analyses of edited and published works. In this, Lejeune determines that the ‘authentic’ or ‘honest’ diary, in being ‘discontinuous’, ‘full of gaps’, ‘allusive’, ‘redundant and repetitive’, is also ‘non-narrative’.33 Thus the diary, in its use of summary anecdotes and reflective jottings, can be regarded as an extended and regular form of note-keeping – much

Writing the Sumatra Railway

43

like that found in the Chatfield collection at the beginning of this chapter. Take, for example, the following entries from Parsons’s diary in March 1945. 12th March/ Down the line, weren’t nattered at for a change but did the hell of a lot of work and were all tired out. 13th March/ 4 kms up the hill, carrying timber for a new Jap billet, must have walked 20–25 kms before finishing and were damned tired. Just the smell of meat for supper. 14th March/ Up the hill, clearing landslides and raising the line. A very good meat – brown bean for supper. 15th March/ Carried barong up to the new Jap billet and then atap-ed it; they really are an impoverished shower, the kit we carried was just trash. Meat for supper. Just recovering from another go of diarrhoea, not as bad as before, but nonetheless unpleasant.

These entries are indeed ‘allusive’, ‘repetitive’ and contain ‘gaps’: they are anecdotal, too. As readers discovering the diaries decades later, we do not know what ‘down the line’ or ‘up the hill’ looked like since Parsons gives no descriptions. All we know about ‘down the line’ is that there was a ‘hell of a lot of work’ but we do not find out exactly what work was on that day. We are left to imagine the jobs of ‘clearing landslides and raising the line’ while being, somewhat euphemistically, ‘nattered at’ by guards. On 15 March, we read that Parsons is ‘just recovering’, but we have not known in the days prior to this that he was suffering any more than usual. A  closer consideration of ‘just the smell of meat for supper’ concludes either that the meat ration was infinitesimal that day (most likely), or Parsons was feeling so sick that he could only smell, rather than eat, his food. Similarly, on 11 January 1945, Parsons wrote: ‘Bill Lovsey [sic] (RN) died this morning. A couple of kerban [sic, bullocks]34 came into camp’. In this entry the death of a campmate is given less space than the prospect of precious protein from ‘a couple of kerban [sic]’. There is no time nor energy to mourn, for death has become a matter of fact – ‘Lovsey died’. Death also reminded others of the need to survive, to celebrate the enduring hope of survival that appears in the next sentence:  ‘A couple of kerban [sic] came into camp’. Parsons is starving and exhausted, his previous entries have told us that he is ‘absolutely worn out although I really don’t do much’.35 He has seen another man die, but he has also seen a means, in the bullock, of staying alive a little longer. The story of experiencing incarceration in the Far East is recorded in the daily entries of the diary; the story of how such deprivation was survived lies in the gaps and discontinuities between the sentences. A POW’s means of survival often hides in the words that remain (and, for some, remained) unsaid.

44

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

The days written about by Parsons are not the full days as they were lived. ‘Up the hill, clearing landslides and raising the line’ followed by supper would not have been the only events in Parsons’s day on 14 March. Either out of exhaustion, the fear of being caught, or the sheer banality of captive life (and perhaps all three), the day is edited by Parsons as he writes. Thus we ascertain that it is his work ‘up the hill’ that left him exhausted and particularly appreciative of the ‘very good meat – brown bean’ served back at camp in the evening. Nothing else impressed upon him, or at least nothing that he wished, or was able, to record. Parsons’s diary was a documentary record, confined by the restrictions and dangers of camp life. As a form it restricted the written word to that day and that moment. In the years following captivity, this necessary truncation of the day comes to reinforce for readers the sense of mundane repetition that occurred throughout POW life. It also reminds us of men being trapped by the boundaries and prohibitions that were imposed upon them while they were in captivity. On occasion, such truncation is not always so marked. What the availability of a small amount of paper meant to POWs who chose to write was a chance not only to record their experiences but also to reflect on them when they could through longer, more detailed entries. These sorts of entry are more prevalent in the diaries that were kept in other camps on Sumatra rather than the railway. It is particularly the case, for example, for the early months spent in Medan where time, energy levels and resources were generally much more plentiful than later years spent in the jungle. The diary of Albert Simmonds, a POW in Gloegoer (Medan), is evident of this ability to spend a greater amount of time, and paper, recording daily life (Figure 5). Space for Simmonds was precious too, clearly indicated by the tiny cramped pencil notes that are ubiquitous with the Far Eastern POW diary. As with others, Simmonds takes care to record the recurring details of captive life: rations received (and mail, if any), work done, illnesses suffered. But the entries are longer than any that Parsons managed on the railway – every day receives ten or more lines dedicated to it. At times, Simmonds chooses not to censor what he has seen – particularly during September 1942 as POWs refused to sign forms that promised that they would not attempt to escape captivity. The Officers in Hong 5 are still holding out: food has been smuggled into them by a rope over the back wall, but 2 Dutchmen were caught passing in a string of loaves and got a terrible beating with belts, ropes, a sword and scabbard. They were tied to a post all night long after the most unbelievable savage beating up which made ones blood run cold.36

Writing the Sumatra Railway

45

Figure 5 Albert Simmonds’s diary. Courtesy of David Burchell.

These are not the same as the curtailed notes that we read from Parsons, the man exhausted from long shifts laying railway lines in the jungle. Yet, a reflective mode of diary writing does appear at very specific moments in Parsons’s later time on the railway. During these moments, a reader is able to detect that working parties have slowed because Parsons adopts a distinct shift in genre. He moves away from recording short daily diary entries to writing what I term annual ‘mini-memoirs’ instead.

2.1.2 The ‘Mini-Memoir’ of Captivity Between Christmas and New Year for three years, 1942–1944, John Parsons wrote entries that are several paragraphs in length. The diary ends during Parsons’s journey back home in October 1945, containing no summary for the months of that year spent in captivity. These entries are comparatively complex

46

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

pieces when read following the daily notes that are generally no longer than two or three lines. The ‘mini-memoirs’ also have a different function from that of the notes: rather than recording events happening at the time, they recap in summary the previous twelve months. During the traditionally festive period, when memories of home were likely at the forefront of Parsons’s mind, New Year invariably brought a period for reflection. Clare Makepeace has suggested that diaries provided POWs in European camps a ‘place where they could exist and survive in an alternative reality’, imagining time with family members on special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries. This, Makepeace suggests, enabled POWs to synchronize their thoughts at moments when they were fairly sure that loved ones would be thinking of them, too.37 In Parsons’s diary for Christmas Day 1944, he writes that he has ‘suffered far more from nostalgia than before’ suggesting that as conditions deteriorated, he increasingly needed to imagine that world beyond the day-to-day life of the camps.38 By adopting the form of his ‘mini-memoirs’, then, Parsons created a focus for his contemplation. Notably, the mini-memoirs are each structured by the same themes and are set out under specific headings that Parsons uses every year: ‘Food’, ‘Health’, ‘The Day’. The latter was changed to ‘Working Parties’ in 1944 – a reflection of the intense period of hard labour that began for POWs on the Sumatra Railway in this year. Following these three specific sections, a ‘General’ summary concludes with subjects such as morale, pay and mail received. By tracing one of the themes over the course of the three mini-memoirs, a reader can use the diaries to discover a rare example of how a POW’s own perspective of his situation developed throughout captivity. For example, on the theme of ‘Health’: 1942: The general health all through has been much better than I  had dared to hope. 1943: Was again very good, the chief complaint still being ulcers and a few cases of malaria . . . I personally feel much fitter since I’ve been out on working parties and I think that the good health generally is due to the continuous working parties. 1944: Compared with last years, the health has been very bad . . . Since we’ve been down here [on the Railway] there appears to have been a lessening of oedema but an increase of dysentery and a certain amount of malaria.

The references to health being ‘again very good’ and then deteriorating when ‘compared with last years’ shows that Parsons continually re-assessed his situation. His comparative analysis of previous years indicates that Parsons referred

Writing the Sumatra Railway

47

back to earlier entries in his diary, and during every New Year attempted to position his existing situation within a broader narrative for his captivity. He shows the ability to measure his current state against what he ‘had dared to hope’ in such a way that alludes to the fears and anxieties that he had. The mini-memoir offered precious time for Parsons to be able to reflect on his situation, which would have been impossible during the exhausting day in day out (‘diarized’) nature of the railway construction itself. The mini-memoir also therefore provides a reader with a lengthier narrative of captivity compared to what was possible within the standard daily diary. It was clearly an important part of Parsons’s diary-keeping, since he maintained the mini-memoirs each year, despite them requiring a much larger proportion of paper than he usually allowed for each entry. When moving beyond the boundaries of the diary’s structure through the adoption of his mini-memoirs, Parsons was able  – at least mentally, figuratively  – to move beyond the boundaries of confinement too. He could step back and assess the deprivation and suffering that he was experiencing and witnessing around him. Indeed, the sensation of time suspended or elongated in these mini-memoirs intensifies the effect of Parsons’s observations exactly because they contrast vividly with the brief diary entries that he usually made. The glimpses of reflective thought that took place during the rest period, etched out between the staccato notes of the railway, break the monotonous rhythm of the diary. In turn, these changes in textual rhythm emphasize how precious any personal recuperation time was to the POW – both physically and psychologically. Furthermore, Parsons’s return after the New Year rest to his short, sharp record-keeping jolts the reader back into the bleak and numbingly repetitive nature of captivity. The latter is intensely difficult to convey through life-writing for any extended duration; only in the POW diary kept over several years does this sensation of monotony and repetition emerge for a reader. Rather remarkably, there is a brief mention in Parson’s mini-memoir from 1944 that ‘we’ve been very fortunate’ compared to ‘what appears to have happened in Thailand and Burma’. Although men were shipped away from the Netherlands East Indies to the Burma–Siam Railway during 1942, there are no known records of movements of POWs in the opposite direction. It is also unlikely that a description of the Burma–Siam Railway was broadcast or heard via any secret radio maintained by POWS on Sumatra. Indeed, in his memoir, former POW Allan Munro confirms that some groups of POWs on the Sumatra Railway ‘knew nothing of the Burma–Thailand line’.39 A  definitive answer for how Parsons knew about Burma–Siam  – and had already started to form his own perception and comparisons of the experience – remains a mystery.

48

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

The most likely sources of this news were the survivors of the Van Waerwijk (see Chapter 1). This band of men will have received word of events from fellow POWs while recuperating in Singapore after the shipwreck in mid-1944. They were returned to Sumatra after one month, and could therefore circulate news of the railway between Burma and Siam that had already been completed by their fellow POWs. Furthermore, Japanese engineers attached to Parsons’s camp may have spoken of their time on the Burma–Siam line. This seems possible since John Boulter wrote in his memoir that on arriving at Logas (Camp Nine along the Sumatra Railway), they ‘met up with more of the engineers fresh from their railway building on what has become known as the Railway of Death in Burma and Siam’. It is not, though, clear whether Boulter became aware that the Japanese engineers were the same on both railways during his captivity, or afterwards.40 Tellingly, for it was the year that POWs arrived on the railway, Parsons’s summary for 1944 is the shortest – health is ‘very bad’, there are ‘continual shortages’ of food and overall, ‘it has been a bad year’. As a member of the Atjeh Party, Parsons had carried out road construction and subsequently endured a forced march over eighty miles down to the railway. With men exhausted, starving and suffering increasing bouts of ill-health and disease, he writes in his mini-memoir at the end of 1944, that morale nonetheless was ‘still fairly high and should last out a few more months!’. This consideration of the morale and the ‘frame of mind’ of ‘the blokes’ was an intrinsic part of Parsons’s reflection. The POW diary, then, is not just a record of captivity. It became a tool for processing a challenging – traumatic – experience. According to the psychoanalytical model of trauma produced by Dominick LaCapra, key to encouraging healing is the recognition that a repetitive memory is occurring – or, being ‘acted out’. This recognition then enables an individual to attempt to regain control of that memory and allow it to be ‘worked through’.41 Similarly for Cathy Caruth – who wrote one of the foundational texts of trauma studies – trauma is an ‘unclaimed’ experience, a ‘forgotten wound’.42 In Caruth’s work, the knowing and claiming of that wound comes only at a later stage through the individual’s repeated attempts to ‘know’ the event. Crucially for both LaCapra and Caruth, trauma does not lie in the ‘event’ itself: it is not in a locatable dateable place, but situated in future attempts to remember and assimilate the event into a narrative of one’s experience. By writing every day in camp, then, the POW diarist went through a form of ‘acting out’ of the experience while he was there. A shift from diary to longerform writing (such as Parsons’s mini-memoir) also meant that the process of

Writing the Sumatra Railway

49

life-writing could enable an interaction between the ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ of the experience. It enabled a POW diarist like Parsons to gain a surprisingly analytical perspective of his years in captivity. It also offered the potential, during captivity itself, for the unknown period of time ahead of him and his ‘blokes’ to be viewed optimistically:  morale, he told himself, ‘should last out’.

2.2 ‘Always Three Months Away’: Memoirs of a Railway Line The majority of the narratives produced by former POWs from Sumatra are memoirs. Derived from the French for memory (mémoires), memoir has become a particularly enduring form of life-writing. Memoirs are documents that make up the ‘literary face of a very common and fundamental human activity: the narration of our lives in our own terms’.43 The latter part of this statement from G.  Thomas Couser is fundamental for the memoir of the former POW, who was often retired by the time that he sat down to write about captivity ‘in [his] own terms’. POW memoirists had much more freedom than the secretive and self-censored diary writer. Sometimes men would write in notebooks soon after they returned, transforming these notes into memoirs in later life. Michael Nellis, whose father was a POW on the Burma–Siam Railway, recalls as a young child watching his father write: There were times when he would sit quietly in his chair in front of the fire, sucking silently on his pipe and gazing into the fire back, deep in thought, he would suddenly move to the desk and pull out the ‘Black Book’ (as we knew it), here he would earnestly write for an hour or more, then having read through what he had written, he would close the book, go back to his chair, fill his pipe with tobacco and with a faint smile of memory on his face, puff away contentedly for a few minutes, before turning and saying something like, ‘Well Mary, what are going to have for tea today then?’ Nothing much you might think, but for Dad, an escape from the horrors he had just committed to paper.44

For Joseph Fitzgerald, life on the Sumatra Railway was the stuff of not one, but two memoirs. Captured on Java in March 1942 at the age of 22, Fitzgerald would transcribe the memories of his POW experiences twice in the course of one decade. First he did so in the 1990s with the production of a single-spaced twelve-page typescript akin to ‘a day in the life of ’ a POW. He returned to the

50

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

story again ten years later and created a ninety-two-page manuscript, bound with an illustrated front cover and complete with appendices and maps. In the short version, A Day on Sumatra’s Forgotten Railway, Fitzgerald (as the title suggests) describes an archetypal ‘day’ on the railway project. In taking his reader for ‘a day’ on the railway, Fitzgerald describes the process of laying the rails through that day into the evening (see extracts in Chapter 1), reinforcing the protracted physical efforts that the railway construction demanded. Interspersed throughout this ‘one day’ are short passages where Fitzgerald refers to events ‘months previously’, the ‘long time’ it took ‘for the feet to harden’ against the terrain, or the medical issues not resolved ‘until long after return to civilian life’. Generally, however, Fitzgerald’s voice attempts to remain as close to activities as they would have happened in the course of one day. With the prevalent use of the present tense he gives an urgency to the work and an immediacy to his memory. As such, the piece reads as if it is one single, prolonged diary entry. Therefore as a mirror image of Parson’s diary becoming memoir, Fitzgerald’s first memoir is ‘diarized’. Like Parsons’s diary it reflects the monotony and routine of life framed as it was by repetitious bugle calls, the ‘infinite’ roll calls, and the mechanistic movements of the working parties sent out onto the railway.45 But while this merging of genres enables Fitzgerald to ‘act out’ (in diary) and ‘work through’ (in memoir) his memory, it also offers the opportunity for Fitzgerald to present the happening-truth of the Sumatra Railway in a form that allows him a chance to offer his story-truth – his personal affective response to the experience. If we move on to the memoir that Fitzgerald wrote a decade later (If You See Any Japs Don’t Shoot – The Dutch Have Capitulated), it is possible to deduce that the experiences described in the first memoir were those from Camp Five on the line. This was a camp that Fitzgerald inhabited during the first three months of his captivity.46 In his epilogue to the first memoir, Fitzgerald points out to the reader that they should appreciate ‘that this account refers to one day of the twelve hundred that survivors endured’, that the men on the railway would yet endure ‘many tasks . . . mundane, exhausting and monotonous to perform’.47 However, given that the bugle sounds four times in this ‘one day’ – from the ‘four hundred’ bugle calls that he says are left, a reader could reasonably assume that this narrative actually occurs during the last three months of captivity when ‘the end’ was near. This small mismatch in chronology highlights one essential aspect of the mental life of the POW: these men were always, continually, desperate for ‘the end’, regardless of the day or time of their labour. Fitzgerald did not know when he was a POW, as he did when he wrote his memoir, when that end would come. As Chatfield added to his notes, liberation was ‘always three months away’

Writing the Sumatra Railway

51

and Parsons noted in his diary that morale needed to ‘hold out’ for a few more months. At the time of building the railway, whether in the first three or the last three months, the point at which ‘the end’ would come was unknown to POWs. Fitzgerald’s memoir tells us that this hope that the ‘end’ was near – only ‘four hundred’ bugle calls away  – sustained many a man through the months and years of his labour.

2.2.1 Authorizing the Memoir The memoirs that I have encountered from Sumatra are the stories of individual men recording their time as POWs, both in and for history. In doing so, all adopt very conventional structures for their narratives: they adhere to chronology as faithfully as possible, and anachronies are exceptionally rare. The majority of memoirs are broken down either into chapters or, at the very least, there are clear section breaks. Rowland Pressdee, a POW in Palembang, did not write a complete memoir but rather created a detailed outline of the memoir that he planned to write. This outline illuminates the processes undertaken by a POW memoirist. It comprises a five-page document including chapter titles, anecdotes to fill out and impressions to relate to his readers. Pressdee’s plan shows the structure to which he wanted to adhere, with ideas such as ‘preface this chapter by describing Brad who was a Bradford-born Australian, a solid man with fantastically black hair and black beard who ran the party with a quiet calm’, ‘more about him [a particular guard] in next chapter’,48 and ‘one can describe the [Japanese] surrender speech’.49 As Philippe Lejeune notes, the ‘illusion of an objective definition’ can be the driving force of a person’s life-writing.50 For Pressdee and other former POWs like him, writing a memoir that also recorded historical events gave an ‘objective definition’ to the subjective need for writing. Consequently, POW memoirists had checks made by proofreaders for ‘all the commas and full stops in the right places’.51 Authors underlined in their memoirs how they intended to provide ‘a true record of events’,52 or asserted that they were recording ‘notes of conditions and events . . . simply as a record’ rather than for personal necessity.53 To assist with this, a process of confirmation has taken place between fellow campmates.54 Correspondence between Jim Surr, Geoffrey Lee and George Duffy shows attempts to ensure that they have the chronology of events on the railway correct, but also a desire to share the personal effects of their captivity with others.55 As Lee writes to Surr: ‘My pension is based on malaria, malnutrition, curved spine due to malnutrition, risk of skin cancer.’56 Chronology and dates, the memoirists tell us, have been checked and verified

52

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

wherever possible. Other sources of information, particularly Henk Hovinga’s history, are referenced and quotations attributed. For example, in his memoir, Boulter states: ‘Having been an avid reader of all books written about the Jap Camps and met with many people involved both Allied and Japanese, I can now take an objective view of many matters and events.’57 Smith’s memoir, too, draws on the early historical research undertaken by Neumann and van Witsen and Hovinga.58 Footnotes appear in memoirs where points are clarified or endorsed by other memoirs that writers have read, or during the conversations that they have had. For example, in his memoir, Frederick Freeman references the writings of Derek Fogarty.59 All of this, of course, indicates the necessity for cautious reading: the wider research and dialogue undertaken by former POWs may have had a potentially heavy influence on their narratives. However, when considered specifically in terms of their approach to life-writing, the figure of the footnote and the citation indicates a scholarly intention to their work. It signifies that for former POWs it was paramount to record the happening-truth, as well as the story-truth, as accurately and authoritatively as they could.

2.2.2 Narrating the Non-Narrative When negotiating the gaps, discontinuities and affective impact of writing their memoirs, former POWs predominantly adopt  – to echo Lejeune  – the ‘nonnarrative’ features already exemplified in Parsons’s diary. Within memoirs from the Sumatra Railway, there are three of these features that occur commonly: (1) the interchangeable use of summarized versus scenic descriptions; (2)  the use of allusive references, and (3)  a continual return  – in the passive voice – to the repetitive nature of daily life in the camps. First, where a reader may anticipate the detailed development of key moments in a story, the memoirs of former POWs tend to subvert expectations. Examples of the lengthy, scenic descriptions (‘scene’) that are employed by former POWs to convey daily camp life have been presented in Chapter 1. However, the passages containing pivotal moments – such as the punishment of a prisoner – are relatively brief in comparison. They appear in sudden bursts (‘summary’), which break the monotony of the camp routine and its narrative. Take, for example, the short description of a beating written by Jack Saunders: [The guards] had got a very heavy piece of the trunk of a tree and they made our man hold it at arm’s length above his head . . . It was more than he could

Writing the Sumatra Railway

53

reasonably do, and when his legs began to give way under the strain, they would beat and punch him until he collapsed.60

Immediately after he recounts this beating, Saunders continues to summarize ‘another morning when I  was having my breakfast’. He requires his reader to absorb the act of a campmate being punished ‘until he collapsed’ and just as swiftly return to the mundanity of POW existence – signalled here by the disappointment and hunger brought by meagre rations and the breakfast ‘so called for the want of a more suitable word’.61 The adoption of summary in the POW memoir increases the affective impact of these narratives. This is achieved through an intense compression of time. It portrays a prolonged punishment and beating (‘until he collapsed’) in just two sentences, while normalizing it alongside the breakfast that Saunders is about to consume. Like the inevitable repetition to be found in the POW diary, such changes in style (summary for describing punishment, scene for working parties and camp routines) encapsulate a major facet of the POW experience: a life of tedium and repetitive hard labour that was swiftly, and at times incoherently, broken with sharp, intense moments of violence. This unsettling of the narrative creates a stark, literary representation of how it would have been for POWs to live with the unpredictable brutality of their captors. It also limits any potential pathos so as to encapsulate the numbing effect of incarceration. After seeing a young Dutch POW sobbing ‘as if his heart would break’, James Pentney divulges that he was ‘glad that [the Dutchman] could show an emotion that we couldn’t. We had no emotion left, no feeling, nothing’.62 Pentney, too, was young like the Dutchman that he describes. Pentney was in his early twenties when he was a POW – but, he wrote later, he felt ‘four times as old’.63 Writing is a selective process, and the writing of memory particularly so. For reasons ranging through literary ability to affective impact, from ethical responsibility to legal accountability, the memoirist will ‘know more than [they] can tell’.64 By saying ‘nothing’, former POWs also refuse to provide a platform for their captors’ behaviour. From documents such as John Parsons’s diary we have seen that narratives about captivity are also narratives of empowerment. In this sense, the memory of brutality becomes a motive to remain mute: memoirists like Saunders rebuke the treatment that they received, censoring the guards’ physical control over them once their own freedom to speak has returned. The need to censor the self during captivity, as we saw with Parsons’s diary, may go some way to explain why former POWs from the Sumatra Railway tend to use allusive references when describing the brutality of the guards towards

54

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

them. The former African American slave Frederick Douglass reminds us in his memoir that a maxim ran among slave communities: ‘a still tongue makes a wise head’. In response, those held captive would ‘suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it’.65 Such habits, drilled into the captive under fear of brutal reprisals, are hard to break. When ordered to mend a pair of boots for a guard on the railway, for example, Jack Saunders writes that he ‘felt scared, knowing what would happen if [the guard] did not approve of the finished job’. We are never explicitly told by Saunders ‘what would happen’, partly because POWs themselves were never certain exactly ‘what would happen’. The guards could be unpredictable in their reactions. Likewise, as Saunders previously acknowledges, ‘there were many horrible scenes of brutality that we had to witness but could do nothing about’.66 In the memory of being able to do ‘nothing’, former POWs often choose to tell ‘nothing’; as Pentney shows us, the numbing effect of a traumatic incarceration meant that ‘nothing’ was the only response possible. Just as we saw in Chatfield’s notes at the start of this chapter, by adopting ‘adynaton’ – alluding to ‘horrible scenes of brutality’ and immediately dismissing them – these memoirists depend upon the ‘power of the absent referent’ to convey their experiences.67 It is as if  – like the former slave girl Harriet Jacobs wrote in her memoir – a former POW is telling his readers ‘you can imagine, better than I  can describe’.68 Reflecting the tone of the Great War poetry of Wilfred Owen (and after whom Wilfred Owen Greenwood, a POW on the Sumatra Railway, was named) ‘the very act of vivifying’ the brutality of a veteran’s wartime experiences also ‘calls attention to the emotional necessity’ for him to fail to remember it.69 Peter Howarth was writing here in reference to Owen’s 1918 poem ‘Insensibility’. In the third stanza of that poem, Owen writes how the men are numb to ‘the hurt of the colour of blood’, to the ‘ache’ of ‘old wounds’ as they ‘drag’ the memory of brutality with them. Like O’Brien’s memoir of Vietnam, Owen’s soldiers ‘carry’ much more than their physical baggage and, in the memory of brutality, are ‘happy’ to ‘lose imagination’ and feel nothing.70 Similarly, POWs on Sumatra could ‘do nothing’, epitomized by Pentney’s response to the sobbing young Dutchman: there is ‘no emotion left, no feeling’. Fundamentally, this numbing of affect is compounded by a third ‘nonnarrative’ feature in memoirs from the Sumatra Railway. This is the continual reference made to habitual, routine activities in daily life. In his 2001 memoir, Fitzgerald writes that having been stung by a hornet in the jungle, ‘I suppose I let out a yell’ and, when working further away from camp during the day ‘I

Writing the Sumatra Railway

55

suppose we must have taken our midday meal’.71 The passive voice of ‘I suppose’ indicates that Fitzgerald’s memory is uncertain, but the drudgery of tone also tells us that these things most likely happened because that is what generally happened. It lends an impression of intransitivity to the narrative  – the men are confined and therefore so too are their abilities to tell a story. In the words of Peter Hartley, ‘one day followed another with monotonous barren sameness’.72 Once more the challenge for the former POW is to convey ‘nothing’. The description of ever-repeated roll calls, rice rations and working parties are where we find the most prominent depiction of what life in a Far Eastern POW camp meant:  mundane, monotonous and harsh routine. Memoirists were not just challenged by the boundaries of camp life therefore, but by traditional conventions of narrative representation where actions and characters may be expected to develop. The construction of the Sumatra Railway was repetitive in its very nature, ‘non-narrative’ to the extreme:  on a regular basis ‘nothing’ happened, and when something extraordinary did happen, there was ‘nothing’ that could be done in response. The former POW from the Sumatra Railway had to attempt to create a memoir out of substantially ‘non-narrative’ events, making the limits of their representation quite formidable.

2.3 ‘A Life for Every Sleeper’: The Poem of Hell’s Railway There is a phrase synonymous with tales of the Burma–Siam Railway that building that railroad cost ‘a life for every sleeper’. Yet the original source of the phrase appears to be a poem, ‘Hell’s Railway’, written not about Burma–Siam but on the tracks running across Sumatra.73 The line goes: ‘Every sleeper claimed a body – every rail a dozen more’, and the apparent misappropriation to Burma–Siam has been embedded into popular culture despite the very first line of the original poem referring to ‘Pakan Baru, where the nightly tiger prowls’. ‘Hell’s Railway’ is, in some versions, dated 1944. This cannot be the case, at least not for the final poem, since its author writes of ‘When the Day at last arrived and when the rest of them were free’, and is also able to tally accurately the number of railway dead – ‘thirty times a score’.74 Penry Rees, a Gunner with the Royal Artillery and captured at the age of 33 in Java, completed his twenty-five-verse poem on release from captivity, a poem that fellow POW Ray Smith regarded as expressing ‘everything that all of us wished to say’.75 Notwithstanding its short length in comparison, the poem reflects the distinct character of traditional epic verse, a genre Rees was likely to have studied

56

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

at school. For example, every stanza is arranged into four lines (a quatrain), and all quatrains contain two rhyming couplets each. Yet, the heroics in Rees’s poem are subtle:  they do not tell of great battles over vast plains and across nations. They may not even suggest heroism at all, given that prisoners across the Far East voiced a sense of shame at ‘being part of a completely defeated army which surrendered unconditionally to a numerically inferior enemy’.76 Rees writes that POW life instigated a new fight for men who were no longer wielding weaponry but still ‘battled for their life’, who attempted to ‘steel their will to conquer’ and ‘force themselves to live’.77 To survive was in itself an act of defiance against an enemy army that judged POW status as shameful: to die by one’s own hands was preferable for the Japanese Imperial Army than its men enduring – let alone surviving – captivity under the enemy.78 The subversion of the heroic thus appears throughout Rees’s use of the regular, insistent but trochaic meter. In trochaic meter, each line consists of an alternating pattern of stressed and then unstressed (or long then short) syllables. This is an iamb in reverse and is reminiscent of the poetry of Blake, Milton and Pope. Therefore the value of the trochaic form essentially rests in its ability to create a forcefulness in its subject, specifically by overriding the conventions of iambic pentameter to which readers may be more accustomed.79 Here, the meter of ‘Hell’s Railway’ creates the rhythm of the train tracks, distinguishable in the stresses placed consistently onto alternate syllables in each line. Only one break or pause (caesura) occurs – albeit the same one twice – and this happens at the moment of a campmate’s death. It was: Tie them in a hurry in an old discarded sack, With a plank of rough-cut timber to support them in the back. It was: Lower them as gently as a withered muscle may, And commend them to their Maker and remain a while to pray.80

The caesura is signalled clearly by Rees in his use of a colon, creating a clear break between the thing to be described (the untidy burial of a POW’s body) and the description itself. The sudden and isolated break in the meter elevates the poignancy of a life wrapped in an ‘old discarded sack’, a sack that is carried and put to rest by men who are ‘withered’ already. Rees’s remembrance of the fallen weighs as heavily as the ‘rough-cut timber’ throughout the poem, and those commended ‘to their Maker’ are not forgotten as he repeats the phrase ‘thirty times a score’. But the caesura is ‘in a hurry’ too. Echoing Parsons’s diary, death was not or could not be dwelt upon by Rees and the men that he depicts in his poem. There was no time in the daily routine, nor energy available in the ‘withered

Writing the Sumatra Railway

57

muscle’ and weary hearts for the men to mourn their comrades. Rees illustrates that POWs could not stop moving or else they, too, risked being ‘discarded’. Subsequently the poem does not stop moving either: after the short pause, Rees picks up immediately with his regular structure and punctuation – reminding a reader that, as in the swift changes of narrative technique employed in POW memoirs, ‘for those they left behind them there were brutish things to bear’.81

2.4 Lists and Libraries: Alternative Imaginaries of the POW Although there was no barbed wire to encircle camps on the Sumatra Railway, strict limits on freedom were nonetheless imposed. For survival, it was essential for POWs to use their imaginations to breach their borders figuratively. One of the simplest and most common means by which this was achieved was the creation of lists and the construction of imaginary libraries. List-making was a fairly widespread preoccupation across POW camps in Southeast Asia during the Second World War. It was also common across different geographies of captivity too. Wartime logbooks distributed by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to prisoners across Europe, for example, were used to compile similar inventories to those created by POWs in the Far East. The rudimentary form of the list enabled prisoners to record some of their experiences without the committed undertaking of a full diary. Former POW Frank Brewer described how the ‘planning of holiday itineraries in Britain, the compiling of long, long lists of books that must be read and the drawing up of lists of personal effects lost in the war in case we should be able to claim compensation’ were ways of expressing ‘nostalgia for good old days’, but also ‘a more practical look forward to the hoped for release’.82 These lists are beautifully exemplified in the notebooks of Brewer and David Fiennes, who were both POWs in Palembang on Sumatra. As a POW, Fiennes took a great deal of care in compiling lists of all the study that he wished to undertake, the travel that he wanted to embark upon and the items that he wished to buy for his home. The lists and their contents were created in order to assist him in achieving his life’s plan, which he also listed in his notebook as ambitions for life ‘before 40’ and ‘by 50’. Before 40 plant a root somewhere in English country – especially if married. Get trees and fruit planted etc. Plan to make life what one would like it to be, not just drift from one day to the next.

58

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway By 50 have a wife, children, an established home in English country, useful interests and undertakings besides the money-making job. Have travelled all over the world. Keep an up-to-date library so that children may learn and use their minds broadly; let them travel.83

Fiennes also included a list of three essential hobbies: ‘Cheese-making. Ham curing and cooking. Goats for milk’. They are always lists that hark of a world in which there are plentiful supplies, loving companions and people with whom to share that world. In dreaming of that world, Fiennes lists the letters that he would write (‘a delight for the sender’s recipient’), the sort of reading that he would do (‘For relaxation. For interest & information’), the sorts of meals that he dreamed of eating every day (‘Big lunch  – long afternoon, high tea after dark’) and at least seven different types of diary and account book that he would keep. Fiennes was not alone in his activity: Frank Brewer carried out a similar exercise in writing up a ‘plan’ for ‘life’ beyond incarceration. This planning included the compilation of lists of clothes for ‘immediate purchase’ and his ‘home requirements’.84 List-making was a valuable exercise for those suffering the privations of captivity. Principally, the activity provided a means to alleviate boredom and highlighted the fundamental need for prisoners to remain active mentally under such harsh physical conditions. Interrogation of POW lists can therefore create a basic picture of prisoner backgrounds, pay, rationing conditions, ‘leisure’ activities and the organization of educational endeavours that took place within camp, such as learning languages, music and history. Midge Gillies writes of lists made by POWs on Sarawak: ‘The mishmash of material kept the reader on his toes. A page of handwritten notes on Russian literature, for example, might be followed by two closely printed lists of horses and the races they had won or lost.’85 Yet while the lists may have ‘kept the reader on his toes’ and the POW’s mind active, they also pronounced the practical need to create a sense of some order out of the chaos and the ‘mishmash’ of captivity. One of the most renowned ‘prisoner lists’ to emerge in recent years dealt with the much more immediate concerns of the POW. This was maintained by Richard Kandler’s father, Reuben, who was a prisoner in Saigon and on the Burma–Siam Railway. Despite the difficulties and dangers in doing so, Kandler compiled a list of the 1,000 men who had been captured in Saigon and then transported to Singapore, recording ‘name, age, occupation, rank, army number and prisoner number . . . next of kin, any other relevant family information and home address’ and, where necessary and known, ‘the cause, place and date of death’.86

Writing the Sumatra Railway

59

More commonly, however, lists made by POWs indicate the importance to them of creating an imaginary narrative that could counteract the lack of freedom that they were experiencing. This ‘imaginary’ was often a narrative of the intensely familiar: of home, having the freedom to read, to travel, to cook, purchase gifts and celebrate special occasions with loved ones. As a genre, the list is – like the prisoner – physically confined by the structure and form in which it appears. At the same time its content, filled with the imagination of the prisoner, conjures a world beyond physical perimeters. It is a world populated with home comforts, the nourishment of warm food and the precious ability to move around, share experiences and communicate freely with loved ones. The broad popularity of list-making across camps in different theatres of captivity demonstrates the importance of the narrative imagination to the morale and continuing survival of POWs through desperate times.

2.4.1 Camp Libraries POWs could also, when they had the opportunity, enjoy narratives that had been created by others. Literature – and literacy – are intrinsic to the ability for captives to ‘escape’ and crucially, to survive their confinement. Within African American slave narratives, for example, literacy equated to freedom. Thus Harriet Jacobs was able to read in her garret hideaway once she had become ‘accustomed to dim light’. She wrote later that this brought ‘great relief to the tedious monotony of my life’.87 Frederick Douglass, too, understood the importance of literacy when he realized that his captors saw ‘education and slavery’ as being ‘incompatible with each other’. Being able to read, and eventually to write, meant that Douglass was able to ‘utter [his] thoughts’. Such an achievement provided Douglass with ‘the valuable bread of knowledge’. To the slave, learning to read had become as sustaining as food.88 Being able to read was a fundamental pleasure to POWs across the Far East, too, particularly as other entertainments could at times be scarce. Unlike in camps such as Changi and along the Burma–Siam Railway89 theatrical performances rarely took place in the camps along the Sumatra line. Almost permanent ‘speedo’ conditions diminished dramatically the time that was available for rest, let  alone entertainment. The diary of John Parsons records one ‘cabaret’ being performed on 1 January 1945, as it was granted a ‘holiday’. In December 1944, the Japanese are noted to have produced ‘a propaganda cinema show at night, poor photography, all warlike stuff ’, although no other details have yet come to light as to what this comprised or how this ‘show’ was staged.90 Peter

60

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Hartley remarks that Christmas 1944 (the one Christmas of captivity that this group of POWs spent on the Sumatra Railway) was seen in with ‘no jollity, no Christmas dinner’.91 In Gloegoer two years previously, the same men had put on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: ‘The whole production’, Hartley wrote, ‘was a skit on the prison camp life’ with the words of the songs and script revised.92 Indeed, in his diary from Gloegoer, Albert Simmonds notes the ‘Panto of “Snow White” . . . Very dirty. Very good’.93 Prior to work beginning on the Sumatra Railway, libraries were set up by POWs – one of which was based at Gloegoer in Medan. In his memoir, Peter Hartley describes how this library was ‘made up of all kinds of English books’ that had been removed from Dutch houses in the area, or ‘surrendered by individual prisoners who had hitherto guarded them’. Dutch as well as British POWs donated books, and ‘quite a representative collection resulted, covering all shades of writing, some very old and in any other circumstances probably unreadable, others quite up to date’. Alongside The Bible and the works of Shakespeare, books that Hartley remembered were Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and even a collection of Winston Churchill’s speeches Blood Sweat and Tears.94 Reading was a distraction from the horrors of camp life – in some cases literally so. As Harold Goulding, who spent time on Java and Palembang in Sumatra, recalled:  ‘We were advised officially by our doctors to read whilst we were eating so we couldn’t see’ that there were maggots in the food.95 Many books in the camps were contemporary to the time, showing that the modern novel remained for a little while accessible to POWs on Sumatra. These books were likely to have been shared from Dutch provisions on the island itself and from the few books that men had saved when they escaped Singapore. Many of the books that POWs read on Sumatra were by writers from the 1930s onwards, a period that W. H. Auden termed in his poem of the same name, the ‘Age of Anxiety’. It was an age that saw the world go to war for a second time and where the narratives of novelists and poets would once again be called upon to represent ‘a war imagined’.96 For those men who had not read much previously, Hartley noted that they ‘began to taste the delights of book reading for probably the first time in their lives’. Emphasizing the importance of literature in maintaining the morale of POWs, the creation of this library was considered to be ‘one of the most important events’ of early captivity on Sumatra.97 The diary kept by Simmonds during his first year of captivity at Gloegoer corroborates this assessment from Hartley. In his pocket diary, Simmonds wrote – like Parsons – in pencil, covering every page from corner to corner in the tiniest

Writing the Sumatra Railway

61

writing. The writing is so cramped that it is difficult to determine where one entry ends and the next begins, indicating how writing space came at such a premium. However, the library was so important to POWs that between April and December 1942 Simmonds used this limited space to record the books that he read, and even the days that he ‘changed library book’. This latter note is made five times by Simmonds in October 1942 alone, on 5, 17, 22, 26 and 28 of the month. Very few weeks pass where Simmonds does not update his reading record, often with one or two-word reviews of each book. The autobiography of Margot Asquith was ‘not very good’, Tomorrow for Apricot by Ursula Bloom was ‘a bit poor’, Topper Takes a Trip by Thorne Smith was ‘quite funny’, Fame Is the Spur by Howard Spring was deemed ‘excellent’.98 Literature read by Simmonds ranged from Reader’s Digest compilations through to short stories, novels and some non-fiction titles. The ‘Century Of ’ collections published by Hutchinson & Company during the 1930s appear to have been stalwart editions in the camp library, as Simmonds worked his way through A Century of Sea Stories, A Century of Creepy Stories and A Century of Detective Stories. Other books recorded in Simmonds’s diary include P. G. Wodehouse’s Damsel in Distress (3 June 1942), D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (1 August 1942), Edgar Wallace’s The Guv’nor (19 August 1942)  and John Galsworthy’s Beyond (26 December 1942). On 19 December 1942, the camp library received ‘a lot of New York Times’ that were dated from the middle of 1941, although Simmonds does not state from where these arrived. The newspapers made ‘quite interesting reading for a change’. Although the newspapers will have provided some, albeit out-of-date, information about world events, this ‘interesting reading’ also held another appeal. Within a day of the arrival of the papers ‘all the photos of the women cinema stars & pretty society girls’ had been cut out by POWs in Gloegoer and stuck ‘upon the wall in their bedspaces’.99 In time, recipes would become the pinups. What would you say was the dirtiest book you’ve ever seen or read? I’ll tell you mine. It’s How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn. It’s a nice, thick book and took a lot of reading, and why I say it was pornographic is because . . . nearly every chapter had a very long, detailed and loving description of a meal. I certainly read this and drooled . . . I used to hire it out to anybody who wanted to read it. I had a huge waiting list.100

Harold Goulding wrote of his time on Sumatra that ‘some people used to go round with their little notebooks and ask other people for recipes, which they would write in the books . . . People used to lie down on their own and read

62

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

them, often out loud and really get some sort of satisfaction, very sensual in nature, by just reading food out loud’.101 Thus we know, from Simmonds’s diary, Hartley’s memoir and the notebooks and reminiscences of others, that reading was integral to the daily lives of POWs for at least the first half of their captivity on Sumatra. Concurrently in England, Penguin Books launched a Forces Book Club, and this was followed in March 1943 by its POW Book Service. Relatives of POWs joined the Service by subscription, paying three guineas per annum, although six-monthly and quarterly subscriptions were also available. Through the Service, ten books were packaged per month and sent to the individual POW. However, it seems that this was only offered to the relatives of POWs imprisoned in Germany and Italy – I have found no mention of any books being sent to, or arriving in, the Far East. If they had, it is unlikely that Japanese censors would have approved the entry of these parcels into the camps. Penguin archives regarding this Service were destroyed, but it is clear that the selections made for the Service were dominated heavily by the popular fiction writers of the time. Authors such as Conrad, Bowen and Galsworthy, as well as classic literature including several titles by Jane Austen, made it onto the list.102 Literature had become a world of ‘solace and reaffirmation’ for popular audiences in the aftermath of the First World War. It offered a ‘familiar ground on which Englishmen could regroup both to explore, and to find some alternative to, the nightmare of history’.103 So it is of little surprise that this literature found its way into, and was highly prized within, the prison camps of the Second World War, too. Thus as some men ‘began to taste the delights’ of reading for the first time, those in camps more remote than Gloegoer created the next best thing:  imaginary libraries. These imaginary libraries were, in essence, lists like the others. They were lists of books to read, books that had been recommended by campmates or lists of books already read and that a man thought that he might like to read again. Crucially, longer lists of passages remembered (or to remember) were transcribed for that purpose. David Fiennes in Palembang transcribed poetry from the likes of Milton, Chesterton, Stevenson and Browning. He interspersed these with his own poetry, in which he then dreamt of those poets – Chesterton and Gilpin are found riding through ‘all mind’s gates’. Poetry was a place for escape, but also uncertainty. In a note to himself to return and edit the piece, he writes: ‘A feeling of horror should pervade it – doubt, a tottering mind’. Fiennes’s notebooks are miniscule and he made the most of the space available to him by including his own ‘anthology’. This was an extensive

Writing the Sumatra Railway

63

record of the library that he would one day like ‘to buy and read’, including the works of Adrian Bell, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde and Galsworthy. The anthology should, he felt, cover subjects such as:  ‘English countryside, travel, history, Russia, classics, [and the] latest scientific developments’. ‘Reading’, Fiennes noted to himself, ‘was for relaxation . . . interest and information’ but should also ‘be planned and directed’. And so, the imagined library enabled a man to maintain some mental ‘direction’ in captivity, too.104 Books for the POW were part of the ‘delights of civilisation’, John Boulter recalled in his 1975 memoir. They were a treasured discovery, too, when they were found inside some of the parcels dropped by Allied planes into Pakanbaroe in the days immediately following liberation.105 Thus it is not too much of a stretch to consider that such prized possessions guarded zealously by POWs will have retained their influence long after release. Indeed, the stylistic choices made by POWs at times suggest an influence from modernist techniques (Fitzgerald writing about the minutiae of his ‘day’ on Sumatra), adventure stories (in the memoirs of Fitzgerald and Saunders), and epic verse as reflected by Rees. In the chapter that follows, then, I explore the linguistic characteristics of the stories that former POWs came to tell. Moreover, I consider the challenges of transmitting those stories through the specificities of language that evolved along the Sumatra Railway.

3

Guard Your Tongue

What fun you will have, recivilising an ear which has heard no music, a palate unjaded by caviar and Burgundy, a nose sensitised to the merest whiff of fish frying five miles away, an eye which has seen no skirt for 3 ½ years until one appeared out of the sky this morning attached to a parachute and encasing a strange soft-voiced animal with a Sydney accent.1 When David Fiennes wrote to his mother on 15 September 1945, one month after his release from captivity in Palembang, he imagined that she would have ‘fun’ in ‘recivilising’ him while he would find the experience a little ‘bewildering’. His latter conclusion was based on the challenges that newly released POWs had already faced in reading newspapers dropped into their camps from the planes of liberating forces. These papers were included in efforts to get supplies to Allied personnel as quickly as possible in the first weeks after Japanese surrender. ‘During the past month’, he wrote, ‘various copies of the People, the Sphere, Punch, News of the World etc. have descended from heaven.’ It was ‘a sort of primary and secondary education before reincarnation’, Fiennes ruminated – but it was an education that proved ‘almost unintelligible, being filled with D days, VE days, GI Joes, people who frat, etc.’ It would be ‘fun’ for his mother, he thought, but ‘a bit bewildering’ for him.2 One of the things that Fiennes found most ‘bewildering’ was something that he could only describe as the ‘unintelligible’. In the camps, a group of men supported one another to decipher the newspaper reports: ‘We put the best brains on compiling a glossary and are now pretty good at unseen translation.’3 Former POWs needed to learn the entries in this ‘glossary’ fairly quickly:  VJ Day, RAPWI, and in the not so distant future, their own designation as ‘FEPOWs’, a term to which I return in detail in my final chapter. Fiennes’s words give a hint of the fear that POWs from across the Far East felt upon release: that his own stories would be as ‘unintelligible’ to his mother as the string of post-war acronyms had been to him.

66

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Such fears were not alleviated by the instructions given to former POWs by Allied authorities. The communication of stories of captivity from the Far East, at least at first, was actively discouraged by officials overseeing repatriation procedures. The first tranche of men leaving Rangoon were informed explicitly by Allied Land Forces South East Asia (ALFSEA) Command to ‘not say anything to anyone’ until they had provided a written statement to interrogators from MI9, a body tasked with investigating attempts at escape and evasion (Figure 6).

Figure  6 Message from H.  Q. ALFSEA to all newly released Allied POWs, 1945. Courtesy of Michael Nellis.

Guard Your Tongue

67

The wording of the initial ALFSEA warning was particularly fierce: Your story if published in the more lurid and sensational press will cause much unnecessary unhappiness to relatives and friends. If you had not been lucky enough to have been recovered and had died any form of unpleasant death at the hands of the Japanese you would not have wished your family and friends to have been harrowed by lurid details of that death . . . That is just what will happen to the families of your comrades who died in that way if you start talking to all and sundry about your experiences. It is felt certain that now you know the reason for this order you will take pains to spare the feelings of others.4

A slightly altered version of the same command told men from the outset to ‘guard your tongue’ against ‘talking too freely’.5 The invocation of a ‘guard’ on their tongues recalled the repression of the past three and a half years, and implied the continued need for close self-censorship, and what Fiennes had called ‘unseen translation’ at all times. Included at the bottom of both leaflets is the same phrase: ‘You are not to say anything to anyone until after you have written out your statement and handed it in.’ This tells us that on repatriation, the narratives of former POWs of the Japanese were treated in two ways: first, there was an enforced silence stopping men from saying ‘anything to anyone’. But there was also what Grace Huxford has termed an ‘enforced telling’ too – of relating captivity narratives ‘to interrogating officers’ under order.6 These early warnings conveyed the message that ‘interrogating officers’ were allowed to know the ‘lurid details’ of what men had witnessed and experienced as POWs, but that their families and those attempting to help them in the aftermath (‘anyone’), could not. Very few examples of these harshest warnings exist, suggesting that it was recognized fairly quickly that a gentler approach was required. A less emphatic ‘Warning As to Publicity (Press, Broadcasting and Careless Talk)’ is more commonly found in collections of POW papers. This concerned itself with forbidding individuals to ‘publish in any form whatever, or communicate, either directly or indirectly, to the Press’ those accounts ‘which concern the existence of an official Escape Organisation’.7 Nevertheless, a theme of having to ‘guard’ language and censor records can be traced throughout the stories of the Far Eastern POW. Just as there were dangers inherent in the maintenance of diaries in captivity, former POWs were being told to keep ‘guard’ of their ‘tongues’ and – regardless of their experiences – to ‘spare the feelings of others’. I demonstrated in the first two chapters that former POWs from Sumatra still wrote their stories, despite the barriers, challenges and historical misconceptions that stood

68

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

in their way. In this chapter, I explore how a culture of ‘unseen translation’, and what I term POW camp discourse, created a very specific challenge not to the telling but to the transmission of those stories.

3.1 Learning a New Language The lingua franca of Sumatra during the period of Japanese rule was Malay. The Indonesian language spoken today, Bahasa Indonesia, is a standardized version of the Malay dialect. So in practical terms, language learning was an essential aspect of surviving camp life. The camps along the Sumatra Railway were by the nature of their population (and like all camps in the Far East) polyglot communities. There was a varied use of language combining Malay, English, Japanese and Dutch. Some men also knew Tamil and the Hokkien dialect of Chinese. With both peoples employed pre-war as plantation labourers, there was a valuable reason to develop and maintain knowledge of these languages when bartering for goods outside the camps. Other POWs knew European languages aside from English and Dutch, and even ‘tried to learn Greek’ or Latin while in captivity.8 Some POWs such as John Parsons and John Hedley had been living and working in Malaya on rubber plantations prior to the war and had developed knowledge of languages such as Malay and Tamil since ‘all planters had to take an exam in the Tamil language . . . so we all knew a bit of Tamil and we all knew a spattering of the local lingo Malay’.9 Acquiring a foreign language offered various opportunities for the development of new friendships and support networks. It also enabled POWs to negotiate with a broader range of campmates for additional food and resources. Furthermore, language learning increased the ability for self-protection, provided intellectual stimulation and even allowed POWs to develop skills that could assist in their plans for a future beyond the camps. As an example, learning Japanese commands and thus being able to respond promptly and correctly helped to some extent in protecting a POW against the brutality of punishment. Likewise, learning Malay was advantageous when bartering with locals for additional foods to supplement rations. For some of the British POWs, learning Dutch encouraged the formation of new and ‘great friendships’ with the ‘native troops who were with us’. The development of these friendships, where they occurred, offered a level of solace and companionship to POWs. However, such friendships also brought with them the potential to exchange, share or purchase items that supported their survival. As Claude

Guard Your Tongue

69

Thompson recounts of his friendships with Dutch POWs: ‘They were wonderfully kindhearted and often if they had managed to get extra food would share it with me.’10 For those POWs with access to notebooks or paper, learning a new language was made much more possible since they were able to create, recite and revise physical lists of lexical items. These records of new vocabulary often sit alongside other lists in their surviving notebooks – lists that, as detailed in Chapter 2, contain a plethora of daydreams. Such list-making  – to quote Umberto Eco’s extensive analysis of the form  – would have provided both a ‘practical’ and a ‘poetic’ function for POWs, depending on the intention with which their lists were created and reviewed.11 In their ‘poetic’ guise, such lists show that despite the confined mental and physical space that was offered by a sparse amount of paper in a prison camp, there was still a desire among POWs ‘to reiterate that the universe of abundance and consumption’ was available to them, particularly while they existed on starvation diets and their lives were characterized by the absence  – rather than the abundance  – of things.12 Arguably the most ‘practical’ of these lists, however, were the foreign vocabularies. These served a useful purpose in fighting ‘the biting canker of increasing mental inertia’, negotiating the linguistic demands of the Far Eastern camps, and developing skills that were transferrable beyond captivity. Frank Bell’s Undercover University tells the extraordinary story of the ‘University of Kuching’, in which Bell set up an ‘organised educational programme’ for the teaching of modern languages to POWs held captive in Sarawak, Borneo. This foreign language programme was devised into full-term dates with examination periods. Languages covered were Dutch, Spanish, German, Russian and French, with a class in Urdu also convened. By the end of the war, forty-one ‘diplomas’ in modern languages had been awarded by Bell to his fellow campmates.13 In Palembang, Frank Brewer split the pages of his pocket notebook into five tightly squeezed columns, headed ‘English’, ‘Chinese character’, ‘Hokkien’, ‘Malay’, ‘Dutch’. Most of the entries are written in ink, a precious resource that in comparison is rarely in evidence in the contemporaneous papers that I have collated from the Sumatra Railway. In his columns Brewer recorded the vocabulary for a wide array of words. Brewer focused predominantly on English to Dutch translation. This was no doubt because Dutch was the language that he most required in order to communicate with other POWs in the same camps. The verbs that Brewer learned included ‘to think’, ‘to tire’, ‘to work’, ‘to write’, ‘to recover’, ‘to instruct’, ‘to weep’. The nouns included:  ‘conscience’, ‘commander’, ‘family’, ‘swelling’, ‘poison, ‘corpse’, ‘grave’, ‘credit’, ‘chicken’, ‘duckweed’. On

70

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

neighbouring Java, John Sharples’s translations included verbs such as ‘blow’, ‘break’, ‘call’, ‘carry’, ‘choose’, ‘cut’, ‘die’, ‘drink’, ‘endure’, ‘fall, ‘fight’, ‘forget’, ‘fly’, ‘help, ‘hold’, ‘know’, ‘laugh’ and ‘leave’.14 Like Brewer, Sharples designed his lists in tabular format – English, Dutch, Tamil and Malay. Although POWs imprisoned in Palembang did not mingle with the men labouring on the Sumatra Railway, in the absence of surviving notebooks from the railway, their geographical proximity provides a valuable indication of the languages in use on the island at the time. When we read through these lists of words, an impression begins to form of the demanding, unforgiving life that POWs lived. The vocabularies conjure the locally different worlds in which they were living, and the sort of communication that was necessary between the men as a result. This follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of discourse:  that embedded within each word are the ‘contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’.15 Thus, while providing a reader with the definitions of foreign language terms that were used in the camps (and that also appear in diaries and memoirs), the POW lexicon as found in these notebooks also evokes the corpses and the graves at which the POWs wept, the families to which they would want to write, the need they felt to barter and to obtain credit, and the conditions that they endured while experiencing a chronic state of malnutrition and disease. Evident in these word lists is the development of a specific camp discourse. That is, the words used by POWs evoked both the polyglot contexts within which they lived, and the histories of expression to which their words belonged. What Bakhtin refers to as the ‘contextual overtones’ of vocabulary resonate through these lists.16 For example, the evidence that Frank Brewer was learning and recording the Dutch terms for ‘grave’ and ‘corpse’ suggests that he was joining Dutch POWs in mourning the losses of their campmates. In learning the term for ‘credit’, he was bartering with them for food and other provisions. These words tell us that Brewer was held captive alongside Dutch personnel, but also provide the context of that captivity:  death and burials were a part of the world that he inhabited, and they were as necessary to communicate as the need to scrounge for extra food. The very strictly ruled ledgers of Malay into English into Dutch give referential meaning to foreign objects and foodstuffs (e.g. atap/attap, obat, parang, kerbau – see the passage that follows), but also resonate with the strange and yet meagre foods, new smells and tastes, the sounds and sights of the jungle up-close, Japanese commands and tropical diseases that became an ‘infinity of names’ for POWs to remember.17

Guard Your Tongue

Common terms found in POW narratives from Sumatra Atap/attap Roofing made from palm and bamboo leaves. Examples of its usage are given as follows:  ‘the bamboo full of bugs, our clothes with lice and boring beetles in the poles and atap above us, showering sawdust down on to us’. ‘The billets are attaped and about 40 mtrs long, 140 to a hut’;18 ‘Eventually we straggled into camp and were shown into a crude atap hut which was to house us for we knew not how long. These atap huts were crudely made with the usual six-foot platform of rough nine inch by one inch boards along the length of each side’;19 ‘There was no food for the first day, there was no kitchen anyway, just four poles and an attap roof. The attap thatching was made from the dried fronds of the leaves of the coconut tree, the huts themselves were made from bamboo poles with attap thatching for walls as well as roofs’.20 ‘This draft of 500 travel-weary POWs are set-down on a site with only a deserted number of barracks built from bamboo & atap. (Atap is palm leaves sewn to bamboo rods with rattan thongs)’.21

Kerbau Buffalo/bullock. Presented as a variant spelling, ‘kerban’, in the Parsons diary. For example, ‘About 3 kilos of meat as well as a kerban came in’; ‘A kerban came in and was killed within a quarter hour!’; ‘Our meat issue here seems to consist of kerban carcasses almost daily, so we don’t get much meat’.22

Nasi Rice. For examples of its use see: ‘A nasi-goreng for supper, very good in spite of an almost complete lack of ingredients’;23 ‘Part of our feast [at Christmas 1944] was nasi kuning, rice coloured a bright yellow with saffron, the yellow colouring of curry’.24

Obat Medicine. For example, ‘Still spend most of the night running to the lavatory; the Doc has tried about every obat that there is’.25

Obi rombat Sweet potato. For example, ‘Had mashed obi rombat for breakfast but as there were a lot of bad pieces in it, it was pretty horrid’.26

Parang Large machete-type knife for cutting jungle vegetation. For example, ‘The Jap handed us a parang, and indicated we should cut down stout branches’;27

71

72

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

‘Parangs to cut away through the jungle, which was overgrown with bamboo and other trees and creepers’.28

Sambal A spice-paste used to flavour dishes. For its use, see: ‘Off work but also off rations which is the devil as there was a sambal with a little pork in it for tiffin and obi cayou, meat sambal for supper! All I got was some clear soup and greens water’; ‘Meat and coconut sambal for supper’; ‘a peanut sambal with bits of fried leek and offal cut up in it, all in all I think the nicest meal that I’ve had for ages’; ‘drew breakfast and then the other two meals, rice and a very tasty dry coconut-trassi sambal’.29

Speedo To work faster and harder. ‘[The guards] had one thing in mind however and that was that the whole thing had to be completed quickly. Thus evolved the word “Speedo”, their version of “hurry up” the most used word in their vocabulary.’30

Tenko Count/roll call. ‘A normal day comprised the following tenkos or counts: 1) early morning tenko in the dawn after we had taken our food; 2) working party tenko inside the camp; 3) tenko as the camp guards handed us over to the working party guards; 4)  division into parties and issuing with tools when each section was counted; 5) tenko after the trip to the job; 6) tenko after our half hour lunch break; 7)  tenko when work was finished; 8)  tenko of tools back at station; 9) tenko by working party Japs; 10) tenko by camp guards before being allowed into camp’.31 ‘Always after Tenko, the last counting of the day, group of men would sit around in the near dark, talking, mostly about food’;32 ‘the unfortunate recipient might lose whatever work tool he was carrying. This spelt trouble when the train arrived at the Working Location, & there took place a “Tool Tenko” ’;33 ‘I suffered the usual tenko, but then had to wait around until the purchases were sorted out. I dashed away as soon as I could, and got to my hut.’34

Trassi Shrimp paste. On 18 March 1945, Parsons wrote in his diary: ‘we cleaned out a food store and six of us were given about 150 lbs of trassi.’35

Yasume/yasmé Rest period or break. ‘A “yasme” spent all morning on our beds as the bugs have been so bad the last few nights that I’ve hardly been able to sleep’;36 ‘A yasme and

Guard Your Tongue

73

not before time, it is ages since we had a day off and we all needed it badly;37 ‘He would allow us three men to carry away to the track saying when finished “all men Yasume” meaning that the cubic metre dug out and carried away would complete our days work’;38 ‘The army chaplain would attend to boiling water in a 40 gallon drum in readiness for the meal time of the occasional yasume (break) during our working hours’.39

Former POWs provide translations of foreign language terms within their life-writing, generally in parentheses or using brief explanations. For example, Fitzgerald writes: ‘the Jap said “Barang unka”, which meant we should bring our bags’,40 and Smith explains, ‘Instead of picks & shovels they issued “chunkles”. These are a type of pick-cum-spade, where the spade portion is fixed at right angles to the shaft’.41 John Boulter remembers that, ‘Ubie kayu leaves were bitter flavoured and hard to digest, kayu means wood. Despite our hopes we never received the potatoes only the leaves for our rations’.42 John Parsons offers definitions for foreign language terms in the transcription of his diary, which he made thirty years after release. In his original diary, the definitions and translations are not given. This signals that the use of the foreign language terms had become natural to him in the camps at the time. Being contemporary to the construction of the Sumatra Railway, Parsons’s use of Japanese and Malay terms within his diary exemplifies how these terms were an integral part of the experience. For example, on 3 December 1944, Parsons ‘Had mashed obi rombat for breakfast but there were a lot of bad pieces in it’; or on 16 February 1945, a ‘yasme spent all morning on our beds as the bugs have been so bad the last few nights that I’ve hardly been able to sleep’. There is no active resistance by Parsons to using these terms within his diary. The diary is therefore a significant document in understanding how fundamental this language use was in captivity, since any refusal to accept language change tends to appear for a much longer period in written compared to spoken forms.43 If the use of foreign language terms had not been adopted fully by POWs, Parsons would have been much less likely to use them so consistently within his personal diary.

3.2 Code-Switching in Camp In compiling a glossary of Japanese and Malay terms for his memoir of the Sumatra Railway, John Boulter noted that when adopting foreign language

74

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

vocabulary in the camps ‘no grammar was understood by either party [involved in a conversation]’ and nor was grammar used. Instead, ‘one strung the words together…mixing all three languages perhaps in one sentence, Malay, Japanese and English’.44 Despite the apparent lack of rules, this ‘stringing together’ of languages, both represented and created the identity of the POWs incarcerated on Sumatra in a strange amalgam world. Claude Thompson (a POW in Palembang) agrees that ‘language was quite a feature of our POW life’: If any normal English-speaking person had suddenly found himself in amongst us he would have marvelled at the language and almost certainly would not have understood half of what was said . . . Often our sentences would have words of half a dozen languages plus a very good sprinkling of profanity.45

From these accounts of how language was used in the camps, it is possible to determine that different languages were ‘strung . . . together’ through a linguistic feature similar to that known as code-switching. This is where multilingual communities alternate between two or more languages during the same discursive act.46 As a result of this code-switching we find that for POWs, foreign languages performed a vital function within conversation itself:  they demarcated different roles within the camp routine. Generally speaking, the use of Japanese was limited to the routines associated with working parties (tenko – roll call; speedo – intense working periods; and yasume/yasmé – rest/break); conversely, the use of Malay was reserved for the domesticities of camp life (‘food was almost universally the Malay word makan’ and many specific foodstuffs and dishes were also denoted by their Malay terms – nasi, sambal).47 With this specific designation of languages, I suggest that POWs created a discourse that both capitalized on the multilingual nature of their communities and enabled them to communicate nuanced signals to one another. Without recordings of contemporaneous speech from the camps themselves, it is of course impossible to know exactly how phrases were spoken by POWs. Nonetheless, Boulter indicates in his memoir the ways in which languages were alternated without regard for correct grammatical structures. Instead, ‘one strung the words together in a literal translation’.48 This approach to language does clearly oppose the large body of code-switching analyses available. Studies have found that code-switching is a phenomenon that usually occurs ‘at points in discourse where the juxtaposition’ of two languages will ‘not violate the syntactic rules of either’.49 These analyses are generally undertaken on stable and fully proficient multilingual populations, of which POWs would be neither. Nonetheless it is clear that a form of code-switching that was used to differentiate between

Guard Your Tongue

75

various contexts, activities and conversational participants appears to have been present in the POW camps on Sumatra. That this form of code-switching is also incorporated into the memoirs of former POWs more than fifty years following repatriation signifies its social value for these men both during, and in the aftermath of, the POW experience. Understanding the motivations for code-switching is therefore helpful in explaining why these terms are employed within the writings of former POWs many decades later. As Blom and Gumpertz identified in their examination of the linguistic choices of a small polyglot community in Norway, the ‘context in which one of a set of [linguistic] alternatives is regularly used becomes part of its meaning’. Consequently, it follows that when the term is ‘then employed in a context where it is not normal’ the usage of the term ‘brings in some of the flavour of this original setting’.50 Thus the former POW who writes a memoir is investing his narrative with a ‘flavour’ specific to the culture of the camp of which he is writing. He does this by recalling directly the language used, and the context in which that language lived. The adoption of this language in later life-writing, then, did not just communicate the individual experience of captivity. It invoked a collective knowledge of that experience, which was not explicitly referenced but was inferred through the foreign language words that each writer used. The collective knowledge that existed among fellow former POWs understood what it was like to live the history of the camps. Yet it was a history that, crucially, could be appreciated only by those who heard the words being spoken in their original context. To recall Fiennes’s letter, this context would remain ‘unintelligible’ to readers in the post-war years: conveying their stories to others, using language not easily translated, remained a ‘bewildering’ task.

3.3 Control and Resistance From the start of captivity on Sumatra in March 1942, language was employed directly by guards as a tool to subjugate the men who had fallen captive to them. As soon as POWs arrived in the camps, ‘from all time, all commands were given in Japanese’51 and ‘enforced ruthlessly’.52 Former POWs tell of roll calls that were ‘done in Japanese, the drilling too’.53 Japanese was also enforced within internment camps and across the local population of the Netherlands East Indies. Indeed, the occupation of the Netherlands East Indies saw Japanese become a mandatory school subject, the calendar changed and local time switched to

76

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Tokyo time, ‘meaning that sunrise and sundown now occurred ninety minutes later’.54 For military prisoners it was imperative, Harold Goulding recalls, to learn ‘Japanese military commands and also numbering’ as quickly as possible. An innocent misunderstanding made by a POW could lead to a guard ‘really beating him up very very hard indeed’.55 This is corroborated by Arthur Baxter, who remembered during an oral history interview that ‘the only Japanese we could speak, or most of us anyway, was when they used to do daily musters’ several times each day: And the only way they could do it was by Japanese guards standing in front of the line of troops and [counting the men in Japanese], so . . . each day, you’d try to stand in exactly the same place. If you were fourth in the line that day, you’d try and stay in fourth in line every day. And of course it was mucked up if somebody was sick and didn’t turn up and of course the Japs used to go furious if you called out the wrong number, but we could all eventually number up to a hundred. Or ninety-nine, I couldn’t go past ninety-nine.56

Language had become a tool through which to subjugate POWs – this was ‘the only way they could do it’ – and also through which to demean and punish if POWs made a mistake (guards were ‘furious if you called out the wrong number’). Yet, such levels of control also imply resistance. The commands issued to POWs and the impositions of ‘orders usually given’ in Japanese57 opened up what is known as a ‘space for linguistic returns’. Essentially, this means that there is ‘an opportunity for the subjected to retort and subvert’:  for POWs to resist their oppression through language.58 One form of such linguistic resistance is ‘the oppositional discourse’ developed by subjected groups ‘as a conscious alternative to the dominant or established discourse’. Such ‘oppositional discourse’ is sometimes referred to as an ‘antilanguage’.59 This ‘anti-language’ typically sees a group of subject peoples using mutually recognizable terminology between its members in order to denote significant features of the world around them. Crucially, the group adopting an ‘anti-language’ will use new terminology that excludes speakers of the dominant discourse. On Sumatra, we see that POWs developed their own ‘anti-language’ slightly differently, since these men did not create a ‘new’ vocabulary, although it was new to many of them. Instead they adopted phrases and words from the different languages that they heard in use around them. In doing so, POWs made powerful statements of resistance by embedding within each word the ‘contextual overtones’ of their captivity: for example, by creating a domesticity that was expressed through the Malay language, POWs developed roles for

Guard Your Tongue

77

themselves (gardening, cooking, teaching), that were external to those created through Japanese command. ‘Humour’, Midge Gillies has asserted about Far Eastern captivity, also ‘offered one way of hitting back’ at the ‘insistence on hierarchy’ among the military ranks of POWs themselves.60 This humour was also a means of ‘hitting back’ at the ‘insistence’ and ferocity with which POWs were pushed by their Japanese and Korean guards. As such, the ‘oppositional’ power of an alternative discourse – in this instance, of humour – was used to rally against the ‘disciplinary properties of discursive practices’ that were employed against POWs by their guards.61 On the Sumatra Railway, this opposition and resistance was displayed by POWs in the personal demeaning and belittling of individual guards themselves. Thus, POWs would lampoon their own stereotypes of Japanese and Korean cultures, and mock personal traits. Most notably, they would designate nicknames that often exaggerated the physical characteristics of guards. At Camp Three there was ‘Gladys’ so named because he was ‘effeminate’, ‘The Chinaman’ merely because he ‘had moustache’, along with ‘Rubber Neck’, ‘the Aga Khan’, ‘the Wrestler’, ‘the Basher, ‘the Old Man’, and ‘The Yid’.62 In other narratives we find ‘Snake face’ who ‘spread a load of rumours’,63 or a ‘squat barrel shaped Jap’ who was ‘agile as an ape’ and as a result was ‘promptly nicknamed Gorilla’. They were accompanied by ‘the Rat, the Butcher, Tom Thumb . . . and so on’.64 Saunders remembers that there was: ‘King Kong’ a huge man, very well built and always boasting of his strength . . . Then we had ‘Hatchet face’ a much ‘milder’ man who seemed more understanding . . . in contrast to him there was the ‘Basher’ who was vicious and brutal in his behaviour towards us.65

These nicknames dehumanize, and often animalize, individual guards. They do so in a way that belittles the captor. It is no small irony that Saunders calls them ‘pet names’ rather than nicknames. For Fitzgerald, such ‘pets’ included ‘the Rat’, ‘the Snake’, ‘the Pig’ and ‘Gorilla’, and he recalls that ‘Black Joe’ had ‘a voice like a bull’.66 The humour of such nicknames maintained a sense of resistance, of ‘hitting back’ when physical retaliation was impossible. It is portrayed succinctly, too, by novelist Tan Twen Eng in his description of civilian internees in Malaya: giving ‘the worst of the guards nicknames . . . made us feel, if only for the briefest instant, that we had some control over our lives’.67 Michel Foucault suggests that because of its intimate connection with human experience, discourse is an authoritative concept. For Foucault, discourse holds a certain ‘power’ that ‘translates struggles or systems of domination’, and is ‘the

78

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

thing for which and by which there is a struggle’.68 Just as Eco describes being seized by ‘the fear of being unable to say everything’ in list-writing, Foucault identifies the ultimate ‘power’ of discourse. It was a power for which the POWs retained their ‘struggle’. By developing a culturally charged discourse of their own, POWs developed a ‘system’ through which they could find a way to ‘say everything’. They subtly invoked different meanings through the words that they spoke. As a ‘system’ of communication among oppressed men who needed to ‘translate’ their ‘struggles’, camp discourse was a key element of resistance against their very oppression.

3.4 Communicating the Untranslatable In every community there are what Salman Rushdie terms ‘untranslatable’ words:  words that encapsulate the culture and ‘contextual overtones’ of that community. Such words can be ‘unintelligible’, as David Fiennes wrote in the letter at the beginning of this chapter, to an ear unaccustomed to them and a reader who did not experience their social context. We have also found that such words present a challenge for readers of POW life-writing, attempting to uncover and recover (translate and interpret) the memories and experiences of captivity. Even in-depth knowledge of Japanese, Malay and Dutch is inadequate to enable cross-cultural, inter-generational communication of the context of the camp itself: in translation, something is always lost.

3.4.1 The Kongsi One of the most socially significant untranslatable words in POW camp life is kongsi – ‘a short word’, Salman Rushdie could well have written about it, ‘but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance’.69 As a word taken from Overseas Chinese communities populating Sumatra (predominantly Hokkien Chinese), kongsi is common parlance across Southeast Asia and has taken on a variety of meanings since the 18th century. For Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, kongsi could mean a company or commercial venture that centred on an agreement to share profits and resources. Thus gold and tin mines could be run in this way, although other usages saw kongsi adopted in reference to temples, clan associations or secret groups or brotherhoods that would use the term to describe themselves. In all forms, ‘the idea of cooperation and sharing is at the heart of the word’.70 As such it came to resonate in the POW camps not only through the literal idea

Guard Your Tongue

79

of providing company and support, but also the deeply personal and essential bonds that developed between POWs as a ‘mutual protection group’: KONGSIES – In my experience loners were a rare breed in the camps. Instead, the general practice was for two, three or more men to form their own little mutual protection group called a Kongsie, the meaning of witch [sic] is a ‘small combine’. The group pooled its resources and each member took the others ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’, an arrangement which, undoubtedly, ensured the ultimate survival of many prisoners.71

In the POW camps, kongsi referred to a small group of two or three men who helped each other survive the tough monotony of POW life. They shared food and other provisions, cared for each other when sick and generally supported each other through each day in the camps. The reference to the traditional Christian marriage vows underlines the performance of domesticity that was enacted through the kongsi ‘arrangement’. This ‘arrangement’ was made by POWs in order to pool together their meagre ‘resources’. It was a physical necessity that ensured, or at the least went a great way to assist, ‘ultimate survival’. In the POW camps, the concept of – and reliance upon – mutual aid provided by the kongsi was of profound importance. In his memoir, Claude Thompson defines kongsi as meaning ‘company’, but the activity of the kongsi played a much more important role in the daily life of a POW than this translation manages to convey. For in the camps, Thompson says, the kongsi ‘shared everything’. The ‘extra spoonful of rice’ that one of them might have purloined during mealtime would be shared with the other members of his kongsi. If one member of the kongsi was sick and remained in the camp for the day he would – if capable – clean living areas or mend clothing. He might even cook a morsel of food or brew a hot drink for when the working parties, and other members of his kongsi, came back from labouring on the railway line. This provision of mutual support served as a psychological boost to the POWs, as much as it did a physical necessity. Thompson, writing in 1996, could ‘still remember the joy of a hot cup of coffee or tea when I  came back exhausted’. This small offering represented an acknowledgement from another man that he empathized with the feeling of returning to a sparse POW camp after many hours on the railway line. It was a warming comfort for a ‘shivering’ body ‘exhausted’ from jungle toil. And it reminded a man that another person ‘did [his] best’ by him for as long as their arrangement stayed in place.72 The kongsi was, after all, an arrangement that did not always succeed or end happily. When he was sick in Palembang, Harold Goulding overheard his kongsi

80

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

‘mate’ trying to obtain his personal belongings in the belief that Goulding would not survive his illness: ‘lying there like that and hearing my property being disposed of before I was even gone made me very, very angry’. Inevitably, ‘I changed mates, which could be done by mutual agreement (i.e. my saying ‘****’ off, you ‘****’ and his reply, ‘You too, mate!’ This was the POW equivalent of a judge awarding a decree nisi, made absolute)’.73 The kongsi, then, certainly meant much more than the translation of ‘company’ allows. Without forming these basic and fundamental connections, Claude Thompson did not believe that he or his kongsi partners ‘would have made the grade and come out alive’.74 The few lines that Thompson writes – the contents of which I have repeated here – is the only reference that he makes to his kongsi throughout the entirety of his memoir. Yet it was undoubtedly one of the most significant factors of his POW experience in terms of supporting him to ‘come out alive’. The kongsi was precious. It was also ‘untranslatable’, as an experience and a bond. As a result, those ‘untranslatable’ connections between men were signified by the word that came to be ‘untranslatable’ itself. Claude Thompson’s belief in the power of the kongsi was not unwarranted and nor was it unusual. Kenneth Robson recalled: The tenderness shown to mates who were ill, almost without exception was remarkable. The help offered and given to those less fortunate (if possible), the flashes of humour, sometimes real sometimes forced, all helped to keep that spark of hope and sanity alive. This was when friends were friends, when hunger tightened the bonds even as it weakened the body.75

Jim Surr writes that his ‘companion’, a man named Roland Tindle, died from the effects of dysentery and malaria in April 1945 in the hospital in Camp Two on the railway.76 As Tindle’s ‘only companion’, Surr ‘inherited his personal belongings, which consisted of his ring, photographs and kit bag with a few toilet instruments’. Despite his intentions to return the photographs and ring to Tindle’s relatives ‘if and when I got home’, Surr also reminds us that he was an inhabitant of the hospital camp (Camp Two) and therefore unfit for work. This meant that, as a sick man, Surr did not earn his pay. Eventually Surr sold Tindle’s belongings to acquire money for additional rations. In Surr’s view the kongsi had made the ultimate sacrifice:  ‘I always think Ron had to die that I  might live, because if I had not been left with his possessions and being unable to work I would not have survived.’77 The kongsi meant survival, both psychological and physical. It is this ‘partnership’ and connection that the men came to ‘still remember’ and foster, many years following liberation. Burgeoning from the kongsi in the camps, local Far

Guard Your Tongue

81

Eastern POW (FEPOW) clubs were established across the United Kingdom in the post-war years  – ultimately represented by the National Federation of FEPOW Clubs and Associations, which was formed in 1951 (see Chapter 5). In the spirit of the kongsi, traces of all that went unsaid but that were embedded into the discourse of the camps, continued – untranslated – long after liberation.

3.5 The Camp Interpreter In 1988, in his mid-sixties, Walter Raymond Smith  – known as Ray to his friends – took ‘a most beautiful’ trip to Southeast Asia and on his return home he ‘put Typewriter to Paper’ and decided to ‘record the story of my earlier visit to that area of the World, under very different circumstances!’.78 Those ‘different circumstances’ saw Smith become a POW on Java in March 1942, before being transported to Sumatra in May 1944 as part of the first cohort of troops to labour on the railway. However, construction work was not to be Smith’s only duty while he was on Sumatra. Having initially been based at Camp One, and then Camp Two, in July 1944 Smith was told by Wing Commander Davis (Commandant of all POWs on the Sumatra Railway), that he was among the party of men who had been chosen to set up the third camp along the line. The conversation (which I will never forget) went something like this – ‘I understand that you speak Japanese’. I was ‘stunned’ & replied to the effect that I had been ‘helping’ when there had been trouble out on the Railway Line. I tried to emphasise that I did not speak Japanese. He went on to explain that No.3 Camp was about to be set up . . . & that he wished to have an ‘all-British’ administration instead of the customary Dutch & for that reason he required an English Interpreter. The suggestion to say the least was ridiculous. He was quite serious in his intentions & concluded the interview by saying ‘I’ll give you seven days to think it over’. I went away a very worried person.79

After one week Smith attended a second interview with Davis and informed the Wing Commander that, having thought over the proposition, he was not going to accept the position of ‘English Interpreter’. Davis’s response was unequivocal: ‘You are going.’80 It was a decision that caused Smith a great amount of anxiety. He found himself unable to sleep both before and after he had left for ‘No.3 Camp’ – a move that was made on 14 July 1944, to a camp that had been originally set up ‘in the sweeping curve of a wide river’. This river was the Kampar Kanan, which would breach its banks more than once, causing serious flooding and forcing

82

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

the inhabitants of Camp Three to move to higher ground on 19 November 1944. In his capacity as ‘Official Interpreter’, Smith was no longer required to go out with working parties to the railway every day. Instead, he was expected to be on call at all times in case there was a requirement for interpreting services to aid conversation between guards and POWs. Accordingly, Smith’s ‘first brush with the Japs’ came quickly. On his second day in Camp Three Smith was required to interpret proceedings at the disciplinary hearing of another British POW who, while stealing sugar from Japanese supplies, had been caught by the guards. The POW placed under questioning was Jack Saunders.81 Saunders was in the same group that had moved to Camp Three in July 1944, but he required some dental treatment and this could be carried out only by the dentist who was located back at base Camp One in Pakanbaroe. As this necessitated a trip being made down the railway line, Saunders describes in his memoir how the Japanese would wait until a small group of approximately six POWs needed to visit the dentist, and then, when one of the lorries was visiting Camp One, this group would be taken along too. Following his treatment Saunders made the return journey to Camp Three, sitting on sacks of rice and ‘other foodstuffs’ in the back of the lorry.82 Some of those ‘other foodstuffs’ were sacks of sugar, and Saunders realized that it was upon this that he sat. ‘The temptation’, Smith tells his readers, ‘was too great’ for Saunders.83 I hadn’t tasted sugar for a long time, possibly two years, so I naturally thought that this was too good a chance to miss . . . So, looking towards the cabin of the lorry, I pushed one hand into the sack of sugar. After opening the flap of my side pack and put some into it, I did this several times, I suppose when I decided I had enough, there was probably half a pound of sugar in the bag. I then fastened the bag and did my best to look innocent.84

That attempt to look ‘innocent’ was not successful: one of the guards travelling in the lorry with the POWs had seen Saunders moving the sugar into his pack.85 Smith’s story slightly differs here, as he tells of the lorry driver noticing sugar ‘in the folds of [Saunders’s] tunic & thereupon searched him & found the booty’. Whichever is the more accurate, both memoirs agree that if Saunders ‘didn’t have toothache before, then he was left after a beating, with some more aches & pains’.86 As Saunders recalled: [The guard] knocked me down several times telling me to get up after each time and I can well remember after a short time, being so punch drunk I thought there were about five guards hitting me . . . After going unconscious, I was revived with a dousing of water and after a minute or so he would start again.87

Guard Your Tongue

83

Following the beating, Saunders walked back into Camp Three, chastizing himself for stealing the sugar while also wondering whether he would suffer any further reprisals as a result of his actions. Saunders knew that on arrival into camp, the incident would be reported by the guard to the Japanese Officer Lieutenant Nagai. At this point, Smith – in his role as interpreter – was sent for by Nagai who instructed him ‘to command all camp occupants to “fall in” in front of the barracks’.88 This punishment ‘in front of the barracks’ appears likely to have come later in the day, after an initial consultation with Nagai, because Saunders remembers a discussion happening indoors between Captain Armstrong (the British Officer in charge of Camp Three), Lieutenant Dallas (who had witnessed the incident and was also camp Adjutant) and ‘Smith our young interpreter’ lined up in front of Nagai’s table. Sitting behind the table, Nagai toyed with a revolver throughout the conversation.89 Saunders writes that despite the tension and the threat of the gun between them, Nagai and Armstrong eventually agreed that as a consequence of the theft he would go without extra rations for one month. He was also ordered to carry out additional work inside camp every morning and night, before and after the usual working party out on the railway construction. Nagai’s revolver was not fired, but Saunders was required to undergo further punishment ‘in front of barracks’, as Smith recalled. So it was that during the evening roll call, ‘the guards brought out a table and stood it in front of the prisoners and then they brought a chair from the office and stood it on the table’. Saunders was then required to stand on the chair and, ‘through the interpreter’ his campmates were told ‘to look at this “English Thief ”. Here was a man who had abused the Japanese hospitality and disgraced his friends by stealing sugar’.90 This carried on until the roll call was over. The earlier discussion between the Japanese and British Officers and Saunders is summarized in Saunders’s memoir. He includes a brief acknowledgement that ‘as this was all spoken through the interpreter, I understood everything that was said’.91 ‘Everything that was said’ by the interpreter, however, was not necessarily ‘everything that was said’ by Nagai. Saunders’s absolute confidence in Smith’s ability to translate the conversation is an amusing contrast to Smith’s account. As the interpreter, Smith admits that he ‘understood’ rather less. In fact, he ‘didn’t comprehend one single word’ spoken by Lieutenant Nagai. When he [Nagai] paused, I turned to Lt Dallas & said to him, ‘I don’t know what he is going on about, but I know the subject’. I then extemporised by saying to Dallas ‘It is wrong to steal from the Imperial Japanese Army’. This he repeated to the assembly. After a while (whilst wondering when Nagai would stop) I found myself repeating what I had said earlier.92

84

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

That the man who mediated between the Japanese and British is referred to as the camp ‘interpreter’ rather than the camp ‘translator’ is indicative of the way in which he worked. The use of ‘understand’ in Saunders’s memoir and ‘comprehend’ in Smith’s signals much the same point: Smith’s role was one that went beyond a literal translation of words from one language to another. Instead, Smith’s role was to attempt to ‘understand’ and to ‘comprehend’ the words being spoken by the guards. He needed to interpret the meaning beyond those words, interpret the nuances within them, and communicate them as best as he could to his fellow POWs. He did not always ‘know what [the guard was] going on about’, but he definitely needed to ‘know the subject’. Linguists tend to use the three terms – understand, interpret, translate – interchangeably. Yet the subtle differences in approach implied by these activities are essential depending upon the context of their application.93 In POW memoirs of the Sumatra Railway, the ‘camp interpreter’ is not just translating Japanese words into English words. By necessity the interpreter had to ‘extemporise’.94 For Smith to meet the needs of his audience (both Japanese and English) it was crucial to ‘know the subject’ and convey the meaning – the significance – of the words. It was not adequate to simply repeat the specific words in a different language. First and foremost Smith needed to ensure that the other POWs understood – ‘It is wrong to steal from the Imperial Japanese Army’ – even if this was not the exact word-for-word translation of Nagai’s speech. As Michael Billig has pointed out in his analysis of the language of war, in order ‘to understand something dangerously unfamiliar and seemingly incomprehensible, familiar categories of meaning have to be applied’.95 It was these ‘familiar categories of meaning’ that Smith needed to convey to his campmates. Smith’s interpretation of Japanese communications then assisted his fellow POWs in giving the guards what they hoped would be an acceptable response. For example, he knew that it ‘did not help a POW if I told him that his chances of “getting off ” were small, & hopelessness spread over his face’. Instead, Smith needed to manage the reaction of a POW by carefully choosing the meaning that he conveyed throughout his interpretation.96 Following the experience of Saunders stealing the sugar, Smith was determined to ‘improve my knowledge of Japanese’ and he received as a gift – from a Dutch interpreter who was working in Camp Two– a Japanese–English vocabulary book. However, he learned that any improvement in his ‘knowledge of Japanese’ was not as vital as his ability to interpret each situation in which his services were required. Smith’s role, therefore, was to mediate between the different elements of camp discourse:  ‘On every Official (& unofficial) Meeting between the Japanese Command & the Camp Leaders I had to be present.’ Even

Guard Your Tongue

85

when a second interpreter fluent in Japanese arrived at Camp Three, Smith’s attendance was still the ‘preference’ for the Japanese. He had developed what he referred to as ‘the “art” of interpreting’.97 When having to give instant translation of a speech by an irate Japanese, there were times when I  did not put the precise question to the ‘offending’ POW. Instead I might say to him, ‘When I finish speaking, nod your head up & down’. As the POW did so, then the Jap got his answer most quickly.98

Smith’s situation was not unusual. In Palembang, the camp interpreter developed the skills of understanding ‘the subject’, condensing and interpreting for his campmates. James Cuthbertson remembers that, during an incident when the camp resisted signing ‘non-escape’ forms and were subsequently assembled for punishment, a Japanese official ‘went on for several minutes’. Despite this announcement being ‘several minutes’ in duration, the interpreter ‘told us in two sentences what he had said; then the General spoke … for a further five minutes. Then the interpreter told us in three more short sentences what he had said’. The ‘art’ of interpreting was well practiced in camps other than those on the Sumatra Railway, too.99 Everything that was left unsaid during each consultation between guards and POWs needed to be assessed, interpreted, and then a decision made on how best a POW should respond. This could alternate between a word of apology, or to ‘nod your head up & down’, or to be silent and await a further question. ‘Without realising it’, Smith recalls, ‘I had branched into “applied psychology” ’. Despite being the ‘preference’ among the Japanese, Smith was ‘not really [in] an enviable position’ in the camp, ‘since by experience you knew that certain Japs did not trust you’. Consequently, the role that interpreters undertook was not just concerned with communicating Japanese orders to the POWs but in appeasing the guards too. He was required to give ‘explanations’ on behalf of the POW – often in the knowledge that the POW was lying and that the guard was already suspicious – and to offer ‘a twist of explanation’ where this may help the POW avoid ‘corporal punishment’. Smith had to anticipate and attempt to control the response of the POW. After all, a sign of ‘hopelessness’ was as risky to him as the interpreter as it was to the ‘offending’ POW.100 If the guards deemed the response unsatisfactory, Smith’s abilities would be questioned and punished, too. When communications did not go smoothly, ‘the one standing the nearest received the first whack and that was invariably the interpreter’.101 Even when the case against the POW ‘failed’, if the Jap was eager for revenge, he would still find a motive for severe punishment. In that case the POW would be inclined to blame the Interpreter for wrongly stating his case! Some ‘way out’

86

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway POWs, although utterly mistaken, would believe that the Interpreter had ‘sided’ with the enemy. Heaven forbid!102

In his history of the Sumatra Railway, Henk Hovinga adopts the term ‘interpreter’ in reference to Dutch POWs Kraal, Visser and Simons who also carried out translation in the camps. In his book, Hovinga reports that interpreters were either idolized as saviours or mistrusted and regarded as ‘a little too friendly with the Japanese’.103 Smith, and other men like him, were both interpreter and (mis) interpreted, creating an ambiguous but authoritative role in mediating camp discourse. The key to their ‘art’ was expediency: of not giving ‘instant translation’ even when it was required. It was not even to interpret ‘the precise question’, but the context within which that question was being asked. The interpreter needed to make quick judgements on the ‘irate’ nature of the Japanese, the ‘question’, the offence and the likely punishment. In a clear demonstration of the power of camp discourse, the role of the interpreter represented the necessity to mediate between the dominant discourse and the ‘anti-language’ – between the controlling guards and the resisting POWs – and create a mode of expediency, extemporizing and explanation.

4

The Body of the Prisoner

The degradation of the human body can be found throughout the life-writing from former POWs on the Sumatra Railway, as it can in stories from POW camps right across Southeast Asia during the Second World War. The sound of the bugle for morning reveille brings aching and tired bodies out of a fitful sleep. Bodies are forced with little break into another day of hard, physical labour. The mechanized movements of ‘tired sagging bodies’ perform the same tasks for hours.1 They trudge wearily as they march to and from the camps. There are the overpowering bodies of guards, also suffering, but with the haunting authority to deliver pain and torment to the bodies of the POWs at any moment. There is a stench that comes from bodies suffering with dysentery and rotting ulcers. And there are dead bodies that lay waiting to be buried at the end of each working day. Funeral parties are made up of the half-alive bodies of surviving comrades. In these narratives, the privations of the body are relentless. One of the earliest post-war memoirs of Far Eastern captivity was Russell Braddon’s Naked Island, published in 1952 and illustrated by Ronald Searle. Naked Island details the Australian’s experiences on the Burma–Siam Railway and at Changi. It also includes an especially vivid sequence that details the effects of tropical disease on the human body, and the primitive way in which these problems were treated in the camps. Sometimes, tropical ulcers developed from scratches while on working parties  – ulcers that the POWs who were on the Sumatra Railway recall as being so deep and wide that the men ‘could put a fist into’ their wounds.2 To treat these ulcers on the Burma–Sim line, Braddon writes that a nursing orderly would ‘dig his spoon firmly into the stinking pus until he had reached firm flesh . . . draw the spoon carefully down one side of the gaping wound and up the other’ while the patients were ‘not moving nor uttering more than a few small grunts’.3 A similar treatment was used on the Sumatra Railway. Sometimes the ulcers had to have some of the putrid flesh scraped away, this was usually done with a spoon and was a very painful procedure, so much so that

88

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway you needed a piece of wood to bite on whilst it was done. Another trick was to stand in the river up to the thighs and small fish would come along to peck away at the putrid flesh of ulcers on the legs.4

In his memoir, the silent stoicism with which Braddon saw his fellow campmates bear the pain of ulcer-cleaning led him to describe a sense of ‘shame’ at his own reaction. He vomited or fainted each time that the ‘small craters round my ankle bones’ were scraped clean. Aware of the stoic ‘grunts’ of his campmates who were suffering from larger ulcers, Braddon stifled the urge to scream ‘with terror and with pain’. Both the scream and the grunt are indicative of the untranslatable: the physical pain of a body experiencing the process of degradation, a pain so great that words become superfluous. The ‘grunts’ of campmates increase to the ‘scream’ that Braddon wanted to make, and his vomiting leads to an eventual loss of consciousness altogether. The world of the prisoner, beyond his own physical pain, has collapsed with him.5 As Elaine Scarry argues in her powerful monograph on pain, and in reference to the torture experienced by a prisoner specifically, pain ‘comes unsharably into our midst’.6 Aligning her work with the discourse of trauma, Scarry argues that while pain ‘cannot be denied’ by the sufferer, pain ‘cannot be confirmed’ by their witness either.7 Braddon could not deny the pain of his own tropical ulcers, but it is his own admission that ‘I shall never know the pain [his other campmates] bore’.8 Thus former POWs could tell stories of pain in captivity, but could do so only ‘unsharably’: the pain would not be shared by readers; they could only read of the grunts and screams that were made inside primitive bamboo huts.9 So how did former POWs come to view the starvation and brutalization of their own bodies? And how did loved ones witness the effects of their suffering, once they were repatriated in late 1945? In the pages that follow, I describe the work of the medic on the Sumatra Railway, the POW artists who recorded pictures of what they saw and the medical impact of incarceration in the post-war years.

4.1 Medical Treatment on the Sumatra Railway As in other Far Eastern camps, the work of the medical officers (MOs) across Sumatra, and particularly on the railway, was crucial to the physical ability of POWs to survive and maintain their morale. For many men, ‘the care & attention shown by the Doctors & Medical Orderlies in the Sick Bay as well as out on

The Body of the Prisoner

89

the Track was beyond praise’.10 Not only did the medics treat sick and wounded men while being sick and wounded themselves. They were also instrumental in attempts to implement a basic level of camp hygiene, and often remonstrated with the Japanese commandant against meagre rations and the lack of medical supplies. Among the British contingent on the Sumatra Railway, three MOs made a striking impact on the memories of the men who experienced the camps there. Robert Braithwaite was based at Camp Three (his reports appear in Chapter  1 and so are not repeated here). John Wyatt helped to set up the railway’s main hospital at Camp Two before moving along the line. And Patrick Kirkwood, who was attached to the Atjeh Party (Chapter 1), was a key medic positioned in some of the remotest camps on the central part of the line. There were of course Dutch MOs, too, and the men who volunteered as nursing orderlies working alongside them.11

4.1.1 The Hospital at Camp Two: John Wyatt John Wyatt was in the original group of POWs who were transported to Pakanbaroe from Java in May 1944. He was therefore part of the group who set up Camps One and Two. Owing to the number of dysentery cases that developed early into the construction work, the men at Camp Two quickly established a single hospital hut: To call it a hospital was a euphemism. The patients lay in rows on the boarding with whatever bedclothes they possessed and their belongings at their heads.12

Wyatt recalls that at this early point, four British POWs acted as nursing orderlies (along with eight Dutch). These nurses needed to be looked after as much as the patients, since MOs were told by guards that the number of orderlies could not be increased. Therefore, nursing volunteers were ‘kept in three watches of eight hours on and sixteen off in an attempt to conserve their strength’.13 Facilities with which to provide any care were rudimentary. For example, the lack of basic equipment such as bedpans meant that those suffering dysentery were still forced to use the trench latrines outside. Supplies of vital medicine, including quinine tablets for malaria, were minimal. Indeed, Robert Braithwaite reported that large quantities of quinine were held back by the Japanese until August 1945.14 Early in his time on the Sumatra Railway Wyatt managed to obtain a small amount of additional supplies from the Japanese ‘as at this time we had just about the contents of a student’s dissection set’.15 Thus in all camps doctors were forced to be resourceful, and examples of medical ingenuity and

90

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

creativity are common within medical reports and POW life-writing.16 On the Sumatra Railway, old pieces of clothing were boiled and used as dressings for wounds and ulcers. Latex was drained from the bark of rubber trees to provide adhesive for dressings and to close wounds. A potential epidemic of diphtheria was contained by isolating one patient with one member of nursing staff, and boiling all of their cutlery and plates separately in water.17 A solution rich in vitamin B (‘dodek’) was obtained from the husks of rice and valuable in the treatment of avitaminosis.18 The number of cases of malaria was gradually creeping up and tropical ulcers were beginning to be a real nuisance. I syringed each one out with boiled water and when it was clean sprinkled a little iodoform powder into the base and then put a dry dressing over it . . . The long procession of ulcers and cuts seemed never ending but it was not long before sore tongues and sore scrotums began to appear.19

As the number of sick and injured men increased, Camp Two became established as the main hospital camp for the railway. It included ‘a nice big graveyard (an essential part of this kind of camp)’.20 To be sent to Camp Two was viewed by the men as a ‘virtual death sentence’, so much so that ‘if a man could stand he preferred to go out and risk dying on his feet than risk going to No. 2’.21 Joe Fitzgerald recalled being ‘very shocked’, despite being ill with an attack of malaria, to be sent to Camp Two. He remained there until liberation and ‘thought we were doing something unimaginable . . . leaving Camp Two alive’.22 Alongside dysentery, malaria and tropical ulcers, Wyatt began to treat growing numbers of men with beri-beri.23 Many men had swollen ankles after a day’s work but they had nearly all gone down by morning. Those who still had swollen ankles were kept in and most cleared up with twenty four hours rest. But some continued to swell, and in spite of a salt free diet and fermenting beans and spinach got slowly worse. Even drawing off the fluid had very little effect. Several died… .We managed to collect enough money to buy a cow and cooked the liver which was given the beri beri patients with considerable success.

After the hospital was built, Wyatt moved away from Camp Two to go further up the railway line. His memoir contains detailed reports on the treatment of malaria, dysentery, an epidemic of typhus, and surgeries such as that performed on a perforated duodenal ulcer. We had no general anaesthetic or for that matter local either, but the Japanese produced some ether which looked as though it has [sic] been captured in

The Body of the Prisoner

91

Singapore in 1942. We were a bit suspicious of it but as there was no alternative we used it and had good results. The instruments except the scalpel and needles were boiled and left in their water. The scalpel and needles were soaked in carbolic acid.24

Wyatt’s expertise was paramount in ensuring that items were sterilized with boiling water. In implementing his essential strategies, he focused as much as he could – like other MOs in captivity – on the basic changes that he could make to camp life that would support the well-being of the men. In this respect, establishing specific dietary requirements was fundamental. For example, the man with the perforated ulcer was nourished following his surgery with ‘powdered milk obtained from the Japanese . . . and then rice pap and spinach’. Despite the care that Wyatt and his medical teams took, ‘we left behind at each camp a carefully railed in cemetery and as we progressed the cemeteries grew larger’. When he returned to Camp Two upon Japan’s surrender Wyatt found it to be a ‘very distressing place’. The one hospital hut that he had helped to build had become a camp that was ‘nearly all hospital’ with a ‘huge cemetery’ and men dying daily from dysentery, malaria and avitaminosis.25 Two pictures drawn by a Dutch POW on the Sumatra Railway, F. de Jong, highlight the differences in Camp Two between November 1944 when he drew his first picture, and then the same scene again in August 1945.26 These images offer clear indication of the physical deterioration in the men, and their ability to record what they were experiencing. The picture from November 1944 shows the single hospital hut as described in Wyatt’s memoir. In the background is the faint outline of a roofless, timber-frame construction:  the shadow of a larger hospital being built, and the increasing levels of disease and injury to come. The men in the first image are all upright and moving on their feet. The POW in the foreground, carrying a bowl, retains definition in his frame and wears a pair of ‘klompers’ (flat wooden sandals) on his feet, meaning that hard labour on the railway had not yet reached its most intense level. The artist adds fine detail to the drawing, including shadowing on the trees and the hospital hut itself. However, by the time he drew his second picture in August 1945, this definition has been lost. In the second image, there are bodies lying faceless and almost formless. A body being carried on a stretcher is nearly indeterminable from the piece of cloth on which he is lying. There are now four huts, with more bodies lying inside them. Indeed the men who are still standing appear to be predominantly the guards on duty, or they are shadowy stick figures transparent and fading. There is no longer any vegetation on the ground, the men are barefoot

92

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

and the leaves on the trees are represented by basic shapes rather than the fine drawing from the previous November. The artist must be weak too. He may also be hurrying his work so as to hide it from the guards. He is surrounded by malnourished, diseased bodies, each one of them entering a camp from which they have very little hope of return. The medics who worked at Camp Two and along the rest of the railway did not cease when liberation came. Wyatt continued to treat the men as they were airlifted from Sumatra to the military hospitals. While he himself received treatment for malaria Wyatt ‘visited all the patients’ and was ‘given the job of allocating all our men to the various ships’ that would carry them home. In working out the logistics of transportation, Wyatt turned his attention to the psychological well-being of the men: ‘I thought it better to divide them up into batches rather than put most of them in one ship, as contact with new faces would hasten their return to normality’. For the same reasons, he chose not to travel back with his patients nor his campmates:  ‘I had become tired of dealing with all their troubles and illnesses.’ He, too, needed ‘contact with new faces’ and to remove himself from the sight of the sick and wounded men whom he had treated while suffering and surviving himself.27

4.1.2 The Medic in Art: Patrick Kirkwood Just like Wyatt, Patrick Kirkwood was a medic on the Sumatra Railway. Born in India, Kirkwood – ‘following in the footsteps of his own father’ – trained as a doctor and, during the Second World War, he served in the Indian Medical Service. It was the same service in which his father had served as a surgeon. [Kirkwood’s] first posting was in Secunderabad in 1939, but after 2 years was posted to the Asiatic Hospital on Blakan Mati (now Sentosa) and was there when Singapore fell . . . he was ordered to leave Singapore with several wounded servicemen and a medical team aboard the Red Cross launch, Florence Nightingale, on 15th February.28

Caring for the wounded in the aftermath of the fall of Singapore, Kirkwood transported some injured troops to a hospital on the island of Singkep. Once fit enough to continue with an escape voyage, the group travelled along the Indragriri river to Sumatra and it was here, in the town of Rengat, that Kirkwood – along with his patients – became a POW of the Japanese on 23 March 1942. Kirkwood was a prisoner at Gloegoer and designated MO for the Atjeh Party. Kirkwood’s efforts as a medic were noted in the reports of returning men,29 in

The Body of the Prisoner

93

Figure 7 Camp life in Medan, 1942. Stanley Russell. Courtesy of Museon.

their memoirs and their art. Fellow POW at Gloegoer and member of the Atjeh Party, Stanley Russell, created a comic strip to tell of ‘some aspects of life at Medan’ (Figure 7). In this picture he describes the cramped conditions (a ‘ “sardine” atmosphere’), the unappetizing prospect of another meal of boiled rice (‘men remaining in somnolent posture when the clarion call rang out’) and ‘the dysentery epidemic’. It is in the latter, the third scene of the picture, that ‘poor Dr. Kirkwood’ receives a personal reference. With his unshaven profile on the far right of the picture and holding a steaming cup, Kirkwood is depicted not drinking from that cup, but ‘smelling scores of samples of prime excrement’. From the early days of captivity at Medan, through Atjeh and onto the railway, Kirkwood  – and the medics like him  – would be intrinsic members of this group of POWs. He carried out operations with spoons, performed amputations in the dark: he kept men alive as he, too, fell sick.30 Similar to camps across Southeast Asia, we see that as the medics worked, others were drawing evidence of the conditions in which they worked. Cameras were forbidden in the camps and, although some photographs do exist, the

94

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

paintings and drawings made and kept secret by POWs are essential in telling the history of Far Eastern captivity. In itself, art offered a practical means to help men survive their incarceration. It was an activity that exercised mental acuity during the monotony of POW life. It offered psychological respite and, not the least, created a valuable commercial product in camp. By accepting commissions for portraits from campmates of their wives and girlfriends back home (often copied from dog-eared and fading photographs) POW artists could earn a little money with which to purchase additional scraps of food or tobacco. However, harnessing any creative talents was not just a practical or psychological imperative.31 Through the creation of what Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill have termed ‘documentary art’, the work of POW artists was an essential aspect of enabling the story to endure, too.32 In 2012, a review of Far Eastern POW art collections was carried out at the Imperial War Museum to establish the significance and meaning of these specific holdings. This review identified a number of important and recurring themes within the art of Far Eastern POWs:  portraiture, travel and transport (such as lorries and wagons), disease and medical treatments, entertainment (musical and theatrical productions), living conditions and daily camp activities, topographical studies (including the built environment of the camp and the tropical landscape of the Far East) and cartoons.33 Artwork from the POW camps on Sumatra is rare (and from the Sumatra Railway itself is even more so), and no examples were identified during that IWM review. Being isolated on an island, resources were scarcer than those available to artists on the Burma–Siam Railway, for example. Furthermore, with the majority of the Sumatra Railway constructed under gruelling speedo conditions, it is of no surprise that very little documentation survived from these camps. There are some images from Sumatra that can be found within memoirs and scrapbooks. These are illustrations intended to accompany written texts, rather than standalone portraits or landscape drawings. The most substantial of these are the illustrations created by two men who added their images to their private papers. John Boulter included in his memoir sketches that he had made on his escape from Singapore to Sumatra in 1942. The seemingly serene landscape of a rowing boat nestled in a bay belies the terror with which men escaped mainland Singapore. Boulter created line drawings, too, of early POW life in the camps at Medan prior to moving to the railway. Likewise, Walter Lang’s art offered a distraction from the hardships of captive life. Lang was a POW at Palembang on Sumatra, with many of his surviving drawings focusing on the flora and fauna

The Body of the Prisoner

95

of the island. Lang’s pictures therefore provide a valuable visual depiction of the environment around the camps, rather than of the activity in the camps themselves.34 Amazingly, a small number of sketches from the Sumatra Railway were preserved by Dutch former POWs.35 To date, the largest collection of sketches that I have identified as being produced by a British POW artist on the island of Sumatra during the Second World War is that of Stanley Russell. Twenty sketches by Russell survived captivity, with all drawn between 1943 and 1944 at Gloegoer camp in Medan, prior to the construction of the railway. These are held at Museon in The Hague, a natural history museum that contains a large repository of artefacts relating to the POW and civilian internment camps that were established across the Netherlands East Indies. Notably, the majority of Russell’s pieces are comic in their tone, although his subject matter is typical to that of other artists: the transport of troops in cramped lorries, medical aspects of incarceration, the topography of Sumatra and portraiture of individual POWs.36 Several of Russell’s pieces stand out from other examples of Far Eastern POW art because of the short narratives that they tell, as if they are single pages taken from a longer graphic novel. These tell the stories of working parties who would spend their days loading trucks with rocks and moving oil drums. Russell’s drawings offer, much like a pictorial diary, a narrative of events as they occurred for the captive. In a depiction of dysentery, for example, Russell traces the symptomatic progression of the disease and the rudimentary facilities available to the POW who required treatment.37 As this sketch was drawn prior to the construction of the railway, the figure of the POW at Medan is still relatively well nourished. There is not the darkness and despair that would come later. His muscles have definition, though a protrusion of the ribs is beginning to show in the patient lying behind. Indeed, the building that Russell’s POW lies in is a solid construction, and there is an electric light hanging in the third scene. The man has a blanket that is not yet threadbare, a fairly uncramped bedspace and the absolute luxury of what looks to be a mattress. In the final scene, he leaves the hospital wearing a pair of shorts rather than the ‘Jap-happy’ loincloth that the men wore on the railway (see front cover image). Yet despite these relative comforts, Russell’s depiction of dysentery demonstrates the impact at the time psychologically – it made a sufferer a ‘sadder and wiser man’ even as he remained captive. Russell acknowledged the potential for death – ‘he just wants to die’ – but also an ‘interest in life’ that brought sustenance to his fellow men, perhaps more so than a ‘small piece of dry toast’.

96

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

The inertia of captivity was a strain psychologically, but Russell’s images exemplify the means by which men combated that inertia. They drew, they staged theatre and musical productions, grew vegetables and other plants, set up libraries and language-learning classes, and they fashioned artefacts out of any scraps of material that they could find. As Albert Simmonds wrote in his diary at Gloegoer (and in whose diary Russell sketched further drawings): I see prisoners passing the time by reading books from camp library, sleeping, playing cards, dominoes, chess + draughts . . . Porter38 and others are making works of art in wood, wire, metal etc. from chess sets to model battleships . . . Some are making themselves wooden shoes & stools & tables & clothing. A hive of activity.39

Paintings and drawings were, like the maintenance of a diary, a means of recording captivity while it happened. As a result, the art produced in the camps

An extraordinary friendship: Frank Williams and Judy the English Pointer Although the vital work of the medics, the mutual aid of the kongsi and the spirit of comradeship were crucial to survival on the Sumatra Railway, for one group of men, and one POW in particular, it was an extraordinary canine companion that brought light to an increasingly desperate situation. Judy was a liver-and-white English Pointer who became Prisoner 81A in Gloegoer, Sumatra, 1942. She had initially been a Royal Navy mascot on HMS Gnat and HMS Grasshopper in Southeast Asia, with the latter being torpedoed in February 1942. The survivors of that sinking would go on to become prisoners on Sumatra, experience another sinking (this time of the POW transport ship Van Waerwijk – see Chapter 1) and ultimately be forced to labour on the Sumatra Railway. Remarkably, Judy survived and accompanied the prisoners throughout, having befriended Leading Aircraftsman Frank Williams at Gloegoer camp early in their captivity. Avoiding several threats from Japanese guards to kill her, Judy would ultimately remain Williams’s steadfast companion until her death in 1950. Post-war, Judy received the PDSA’s Dickin Medal for gallantry (the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross). Since the end of the war, Judy’s story has remained the most widely reported aspect of captivity on the Sumatra Railway. She has been the focus of at least three biographies, and features in many histories of animals in war. Thus the focus in this book has been on the men with whom she shared the POW camps of the Sumatra Railway.40

The Body of the Prisoner

97

did not just focus on atrocity and suffering. Through their artworks, POWs often focused on the strategies that they developed to survive: medical ingenuity, musical and theatrical entertainments, and humour.

4.2 Accepting the POW Body as One’s Own Describing beri-beri, a disease caused by malnutrition and specifically the lack of Vitamin C, John Boulter describes how men’s ‘legs filled with the water, their bodies bloated, faces grew puffy . . . Then even after daily puncturing of the skin to drain off copious amounts of water the victim would literally drown in his own water’.41 The irony of beri-beri was that it bloated starving bodies so that they appeared to be overfed. Quite frequently there would be an ‘onset’ in the area of the genitals . . . The testicles were enlarged to roughly the size of a football & had to be ‘carried’ by the individual to avoid the intense ‘dragging down’ pain.42

Similarly John Parsons writes in his diary of ‘blisters from the boots and cuts from walking barefooted’.43 Men would wait for the skin on the soles of the feet to harden against the ravages of the jungle floor, the metal railway tracks heating and burning in the tropical sun, and ‘hookworm, a parasite which entered the body via the feet’. The feet were the site of pellagra, too, otherwise known as ‘happy feet’ and caused by chronic malnutrition. There were leeches in the rivers that ‘would attach themselves to lower limbs’ and once removed would leave ‘an open wound, the breeding ground for future infection’;44 ringworm was ‘disfiguring to see, and itching unpleasant’.45 Malaria delivered a recurring pattern of shivers and fevers, sickness and delirium, countless attacks of which many men would suffer for decades post-liberation. The cramping and violent diarrhoea of dysentery were as ubiquitous as tropical ulcers, and deepened the ‘humiliation’ and ‘self-disgust’ at ‘not being able to control oneself ’.46 These are bodies which, in the period of three and a half years, became ‘wreckages of humanity’, bodies that ‘did not look like men’ but were ‘not quite animals’ either.47 Their thighbones and pelves stood out sharply . . . All their ribs showed clearly, the chest sloping backwards to the hollows of throat and collarbone. Arms hung down, sticklike, with huge hands, and the skin wrinkled where muscle had vanished . . . Heads were shrunken onto skulls with large teeth and faintly glowing

98

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway eyes set in black wells . . . The whole body was draped with a loose-fitting envelope of thin purple-brown parchment which wrinkled horizontally over the stomach and chest and vertically on sagging fleshless buttocks.48

For the POW, assaults upon the skin were ceaseless: the equatorial sun, the punishments, the physical exertion of hard labour, and the diseases and infestations that they carried. The latter could be catastrophic, and often fatal. As the body of the POW was being broken down, the damage was being perpetuated within others, too. Diseases such as dysentery and malaria are communicable, transmitted as they are from one body to the next. It is unsurprising then, that former POWs repeatedly return to the site – and sight – of the skin within their life-writing. It is the skin that frequently appears as the place of injury, the ‘breeding ground’ for disease, the means through which parasites would enter the body. It was the surface of the skeleton that needed to ‘harden’ against labour and the intense heat of the sun. It is the skin that is ‘disfiguring to see’ when infections and parasites attack, the skin that is swollen and bloated by beri-beri, and the skin that shows evidence of the chills and fevers of malaria. When Braddon describes the bodies of his campmates, the ‘meat’ of their limbs ‘looked as if bullets exploded inside them’, with the flesh ‘bursting’ with creeping, rotting ulcers, or ‘torn’ from injuries and working barefoot.49 But by the end of captivity, it is not skin but a ‘purple-brown parchment’ that is ‘draped’ loosely over the skeleton of the captive body. The skin is the medium on which the story can be written, the ‘parchment’ for the narrative of Far Eastern captivity. The writing and reading of the self in the camps becomes an integral part of the POW’s own story. Drawing on the theory of Didier Anzieu’s skin ego, ‘where the ego, the sense of self, derives from the experience of the material skin’, Jay Prosser has described the skin as the surface that ‘holds each of us together’. In this sense, it is the skin that ‘protects us, keeps us discrete, and yet is our first mode of communication with each other and the world’.50 But how is selfperception reconciled and communicated when the body and its skin are damaged? In being unable to write of the grotesqueness of his own skin, Braddon turned to that of his campmates. He writes as an onlooker, describing figures who ‘did not look like men’, of ‘their shins’ and ‘their thighbones’ (my emphasis) without acknowledging that he, too, was one of them and that his body was one of ‘theirs’. It remained a concern to those returning home, too. Writing his memoir, John Boulter felt that people around him would see his thinness and his ‘mepacrine yellow tinted’ face and identify him immediately as a former POW – rather than, he may have hoped, as himself.51

The Body of the Prisoner

99

One memoir from Sumatra offers rare insight into the moment that a POW was first confronted with the image of himself after several years of captivity. Harold Goulding was a POW in Palembang from February 1942 onwards, before being transferred to Changi in Singapore in May 1945. It was in Changi that, for the first time in over three years, Goulding saw himself in a mirror. Although he had seen the bodies of his campmates, their ‘walking and working skeletons’, he had not equated their thin frames and protruding ribcages with his own: ‘or perhaps, more accurately, I couldn’t picture what looking like them really meant’. This changed for Goulding when he was able to take advantage of the relatively more sophisticated facilities in Changi. It was there that he obtained a shave and a haircut courtesy of ‘an open-air barber shop’. Part of the ‘barber shop’ was a full-length mirror in which Goulding saw his reflection, and ‘froze into what must have been catatonic shock . . . I  just could not believe that the apparition I  was looking at was me. There seemed to be no points of recognition at all . . . my thighs were thinner than my knees’. These ‘points of recognition’, or lack of them, were crucial for Goulding. In the same moment that he stared at thighs ‘thinner than my knees’, his own stare was looking back, challenging him to find ‘points of recognition’ on a body that he could no longer recognize as his own. The effect of such self-imposed and self-reflected scrutiny was immediate and profound. By having to confront the emaciated state of his own body, Goulding saw his own death. He ‘decided it was impossible . . . to survive for more than a few months’, and his weight dropped ‘quite rapidly’ at this point.52 Goulding survived probably because liberation came within a few weeks of seeing his reflection. But when writing his memoir forty years later, Goulding was unable to decide whether he had been frightened more at his ‘physical debility’, or at ‘the sight of me stripped naked of civilised sophistication, leaving merely an angry, ferocious savage ready and eager to kill for food’.53 The imagery that POWs use in their life-writing, that is ‘burned’ into their brains, not only describes the physical ‘privations’ that they endured. At once a creation and then a rejection of that same image (‘I can see it vividly . . . yet I still cannot recognise myself ’), this psychological denial of the physical ‘sight of me’ also provides a significant clue as to how POWs survived. They simply could not accept the degradation of the body as it happened. Indeed, Kenneth Robson recalls the ‘humiliation’ of defecating uncontrollably, and that a man’s inability to control his basic bodily functions ‘was accepted by everyone, except yourself!’.54

100

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

4.3 ‘Nil Abnormal Detected’: The Haunting of the ‘FEPOW’ Body In Camp Three on the Sumatra Railway, Frederick Freeman caught malaria. This was likely due to the lack of mosquito nets available to the men in these camps. The malaria recurred regularly for Freeman, and in captivity the only available treatment for the disease was a raw form of powdered quinine, ground down from bark. According to Freeman, this medicine was ‘so rough that it tore the linings of our stomachs and touched off the dysentery again’. Suffering as well from dizziness and headaches caused by the ferocity of the sun, Freeman was declared permanently sick with dysentery and malaria and sent to the hospital at Camp Two. By May 1945, he was well enough to be transferred up the line to Camp Four, where he worked as a tailor and remained until liberation.55 This did not mean that Freeman’s physical difficulties had abated. The impact of captivity on his body dominated the rest of Freeman’s life. Like thousands of other former Far Eastern POWs, Freeman experienced the health effects of captivity for several decades post-liberation and, in his case, up until his death forty-two years later in 1987. Indeed, Freeman’s collection of personal papers documents the unrelenting presence of the past in, and on, his own body. As such, it offers a moving and vivid case study through which to examine how the memory of captivity became quite literally embodied post-war. The majority of the Freeman collection comprises a record of his disability pension assessments, and the claim made by his widow for a continuation of that pension following his death. Over the course of forty pages, the repetitive assessments of pathologists, neurologists, opthamologists and gastroenterologists record the slow and devastating decline in Freeman’s health. His bodily suffering is framed by the clinical discourse of consultants and medical assessment boards. These assessments started in July 1946, and were reviewed at least twice a year by the Medical Board of the then Ministry of Pensions. Additional statements are included, generally provided by hospital consultants with whom Freeman came into contact between his Medical Board reviews. In March 1950, Freeman (five years post-liberation and aged 28) was diagnosed with the ‘effects of malnutrition with associated headaches, malaria’ and ‘nerve deafness’. Otherwise, his pathology was unremarkable, his ‘general condition and nutrition’ at that point were assessed as ‘good’, and the phrase ‘nil abnormal detected’ is repeated in the reports on his ‘heart and systems’. At the same time, March 1950, Freeman underwent a neurological assessment that found him ‘thin, excitable, talkative’ and noted that he ‘had a bad time’ as a POW, and was ‘knocked about definitely’.

The Body of the Prisoner

101

The report notes ‘memory good’ twice and makes the bold statement:  ‘war repressions nil’. Such a statement is uncomfortable to read. The very nature of ‘repressions’ would suggest that these were unlikely to be detected so openly in the early post-war period. Freeman is, however, recorded as being claustrophobic and this is demonstrated in the reports by his dislike of the low roof in the local theatre. It was agreed that he would receive 20 per cent of a disability pension at this point, but would continue working.56 By the age of 37, in February 1959, Freeman is reported as still having ‘frequent headaches’, with sight and hearing problems. Having been an engineer prior to the war, Freeman worked as a bus conductor following his liberation and in this occupation he struggled to maintain his full-time hours. In March 1960, the House Physician at Bevendean Hospital at Brighton reported that Freeman had been an in-patient of the hospital ‘for short intervals for different investigations in the past 3 months’. On admission: the patient was found to be a man of nervous disposition. He had tremors, and was sweating . . . There was tenderness in the whole of the abdomen, mostly around the umbilical region. He was prescribed medication for nerve pain, anxiety and pancreatic malfunction.

Transferred to Brighton General Hospital for further investigations, Freeman was ‘getting a good deal of abdominal discomfort’ with ‘some diarrhoea’ and the consultant physicians treating him believed that ‘anxiety is a major causal factor’. At this point, doctors became ‘reluctant for him to undergo any further investigations’ and put it ‘as plainly as I can’ that holding down employment – rather than being pensioned as permanently sick – was a key strategy in enabling Freeman ‘to be fully rehabilitated’. But this ‘full rehabilitation’ was never to occur:  just over two years later, Freeman was diagnosed as being in a ‘chronic anxiety state’, suffering from ‘sensory disturbances’, and his concentration and memory were both ‘poor’. Although it was recorded that he had ‘no POW dreams’ at this stage, the fact that this history of his captivity reappears (its presence indicated by the noting of its very absence) suggests that Freeman’s ‘tense anxious’ demeanour and ‘severe shakes and palpitations’ were at least in part a legacy of his time as a prisoner.57 Further, Freeman’s pancreatitis had worsened. A stent was fitted into his duodenum to relieve some of the related symptoms. Doctors also became concerned about his nutritional intake: apart from eggs and potatoes that he ingested as ‘sporadic’ meals, Freeman is reported as taking – despite attempts to dissuade him – ‘a fair proportion of his calories as Guinness’. In this state he retired at the

102

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

age of 55, with the disability weighting on his pension having increased to 80 per cent. Just two years later, a note from welfare officers state that Freeman has ‘put his affairs in order’. He cannot eat and he told me that his wife says that he eats less than a cat. He lives on 32 pills a day. He can sleep during the day but not at night. His eyesight is deteriorating and he has hardly any sight at all in the right eye. He had a recurrence of malaria 6 months ago.

Death was preoccupying Freeman. The disease he had contracted in the camps more than three decades previously was still haunting his body, and the repetitive signs of trauma were invoked by the continual recurrence of the disease. And in this report, too, we find the first direct statement that Freeman’s ‘FEPOW experiences’ were indeed troubling him. Now, it says, he has ‘occasional nightmares’. The early declaration of ‘war repressions nil’ are haunting the narrative, too. In the next instalments of Freeman’s assessments, the consumption of Guinness turns to Complan, a nutritional drink generally used by the elderly or infirm when they are unable to face food. Freeman, we read, is vomiting all solid foodstuffs. In February 1987, forty-one years post-liberation and aged 64, Freeman suffered a ‘small gastric perforation’ and a ‘spontaneous oesophageal rupture’ – the surgeries for which led to a diagnosis of carcinoma of the liver with a ‘metastatic carcinoma of the kidneys also possible’. Two months later, on 19 April 1987, Freeman died.58 His collection of papers is a heart-breaking read. Told through the repetitive fragments of these medical reports that cover four decades, Freeman’s tale becomes increasingly bleak. His own words are few and his captivity on the Sumatra Railway is only briefly present. Yet it is never truly absent either. For this was a man continually returning to hospitals, consulting with physicians and undergoing physical examinations that inevitably failed to undo the original statement of ‘war repressions nil’. The donation of these papers to a museum signals, too, a family placing on public record the devastating aftermath of captivity. It is an act that supported Freeman’s own stance when he wrote a short memoir – the purpose of which was to chronicle the impact of captivity, and submit it as evidence towards the claim for compensation made by former Far Eastern POWs in the decades immediately following liberation (see Chapter 5).59 Yet it is clear from the Freeman collection that there was a second narrative being written outside of the pathological assessments and neurological examinations. Freeman’s family were watching him deteriorate, too, as he survived on

The Body of the Prisoner

103

‘32 pills a day’. Writing his memoir became a family endeavour. It was typed by his wife, and includes letters that were written by Freeman to his parents from Singapore immediately after his liberation in September 1945, and from hospital at Bangalore in October of the same year. At the moment I’m writing this in bed . . . with a dose of malaria (my 26th) so you’ll have to excuse it being short and sweet. I’m expecting to get the boat in a few days and when I get home I’ll give you all the ‘gen’.60

In the memoir, he recorded that ‘gen’. He noted how the powdered quinine bark taken in an effort to treat malaria ‘tore the linings of our stomachs and touched off the dysentery’ instead.61 He wrote of arriving on Sumatra following the Junyo Maru sinking: ‘I was stark naked as I had used my G string to bind up a rope burn from my wrist to back of shoulder. This was my total kit.’62 And he described the work that POWs carried out on the railway: One of the worst jobs was when we had to drive piles in the river to support the bridge. We left the camp at daybreak and had to build up the embankment with sand, which another party of men had to dig out of the side of a hill (No. 4 Camp) . . . We then had to lay the sleepers and track. This was the heavy task as the lines were about 10 yards long and in our state of health it took 30 men to manhandle it into position.63

Freeman’s memoir ends with an addendum from his daughter, telling of how Freeman and his wife, Marie, had met in the hospital at RAF Cosford in June 1946. Marie was a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and had suffered a dislocated knee, for which she was receiving treatment when she met Freeman. Their relationship, from the start, had been forged through the care that the POW’s body required. Similarly to his daughter, the memory of captivity was impressed upon the body of the former POW – here, the rope burn from the Junyo Maru returns: Dad had a rope burn round his upper arm where he struggled to climb up the ship. I remember hearing about the vicious Koreans and the Japanese who would peg out prisoners over quick growing bamboo so that it would grow through the man’s body. Another torture was to force-feed the POW with water and jump on his full belly.64

The ‘rope burn round his upper arm’ created a tangible mark of Freeman’s captivity and the stories that he told. The burn became a testament to his experience, a mark that a father carried, and was a visible reminder of his history.

104

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

Freeman’s body, like those of many thousands of former POWs, became an object to be scrutinized by medical professionals (not least through routine tropical disease assessments). Simultaneously his skin became, to echo Russell Braddon, a ‘parchment’ for his family to read. It was a parchment that bore the burn marks of his experiences and the scars of ulcers. In her second-generation narrative of the European concentration camps, Eva Hoffman has written of a private, bodily language that emanated throughout the familial home – ‘the past broke through in the sounds of nightmares, the idioms of sighs and illness, of tears and the acute aches that were the legacy . . . of the conditions my parents endured’.65 Likewise, Lisa Appignanesi writes that her mother’s body ‘remembers more than her mind’.66 These second-generation narratives find that memory has a ‘texture’ as it is embodied through the survivor’s skin. Thus the marks of captivity connected the basic imperative to physically care for a former POW, with the need for younger generations to know and understand the reasons why the marks were even there.

5

Aftermath

In early September 1945, Major Gideon Jacobs and a small team of troops parachuted onto Sumatra. They found that intelligence ‘had indeed been poor. The size of the problem was formidable’.1 This was the first time that the two camps at Pakanbaroe, and the fifteen others along the railway line, were discovered by Allied forces. Having toured Padang and Fort de Kock on Sumatra, Jacobs was flown to Pakanbaroe. From the air he had seen rows of atap huts situated in forbidding jungle terrain. Having met Wing Commander Davis at the base camp, he queried the positioning of the huts that he had seen from the plane. Davis told him that ‘it was the railway’. A trip to Logas, the site of Camp Nine on the railway, led to the discovery of several hundred POWs. These men were so cut off by thick jungle that they had not been aware that the war was over. For several weeks they had been ‘surviving on tree bark and plant roots for food’. At that point, hundreds of men had been identified as requiring urgent hospital care, some unable to move at all because they were so poorly. A serious problem also existed in the ‘listless’ sprit’ of the liberated men – ‘they could not take it in’ that they were free men. Jacobs inspected the huts at Camps One and Two. By this point, Camp Two was being used solely as a hospital camp. Jacobs described men who were ‘apathetic, broken in spirit’, who ‘bowed, as the Japanese had forced them to do’ when they greeted him. They were men who ‘shuffled’, many suffering from ‘large suppurating ulcers’. Those still able to move were ‘acting as nurses and trying to relieve the suffering of their companions’. The smell, for Jacobs, was ‘nauseating’ with flies hovering around the ‘listless’ bodies (Figure 9). Nearly all the men were suffering from beri-beri . . . In many cases, the men’s bodies had become swollen to grotesque proportions, their limbs looking like water-filled balloons. In others the swelling had subsided and with the water drained away only the skeletons remained. Their skins withered and shrunken, hair matted and eyes sunk into deep hollows, they were spectres from a haunted world.2

Figure  8 Aerial shot of Pakan Baroe. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 9 Inside living quarters at Pakan Baroe, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

Aftermath

107

Writing home Excerpts from a letter written by Albert Simmonds to home, as he was treated in Singapore Convalescent Hospital immediately upon his release from Pakanbaroe, September 1945. Excerpts from the diary of Albert Simmonds, recorded in his early captivity in Gloegoer, appear in Chapter 2. So now it’s all over!! Very hard for we ex-POWs to realise . . . At the time of release I was building a rail-road for the Japs (with thousands of other ex-P.O.Ws) and I was in a pretty bad way physically – malaria, beri-beri and dysentery had all taken their toll and as far as I was concerned the end came just in time… I am extremely lucky to be alive and I thank God that I shall soon be home (in plenty of time for Christmas) whilst I leave so many of my close friends buried in the jungle of Central Sumatra. I am eating well now and putting on weight rapidly. In a very few weeks I hope to be my old self once again. I was very fortunate in being flown from Sumatra to Singapore in a Douglas Dakota aircraft piloted by the R.A.A.F. personnel . . . We received a great welcome here [in Singapore] . . . the Red Cross and other organisations have showered us with kindnesses. We have been given tea, coffee, sweets, chocolates, bread and butter, biscuits, milk, eggs, razor, tooth-brush, and all toilet requisities and best of all a good supply of cigarettes. These may seem trivial things to a normal human being, but I suggest going without all these things, and a thousand and one normal requirements of ordinary civilian life for three and a half years, and I assure you that you will appreciate bread and butter as one of the finest luxuries that life can hold. Our main diet has been for the last 3 ½ years, rice and vegetables three times a day, with the mearest [sic] taste of meat once a week. It is only to be expected that thousands died from malnutrition . . . We are now very vitamin-minded. At the rest hospital that I am at (awaiting embarkation to England) I get plenty of eggs, milk, fish, meat, butter, cheese, fruit, vegs. and also vitamin tablets. I am getting on like a ‘house on fire’. To be clean (really clean), to sleep between sheets, to get enough to eat, to get medical attention, to be free from louse, to be shaved, and to have a haircut, and best of all to be free. These things make life at the moment an earthly paradise.

Jacobs was appalled by such ‘withered and shrunken’ bodies and he later wrote how he felt as if he has found himself ‘in the company of the living dead’.3 However, he also recounted that despite their poor physical state, the

108

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

psychological recovery of former POWs was of paramount concern to the liberating forces: ‘It was apparent that none of them could recover in such an unhealthy area, where they had suffered such mental and physical torture.’ In his visceral focus on sick bodies and broken spirits, Jacobs’s response helps to move us beyond the camps to the post-war narrative of the Far Eastern POW. As this chapter shows, the post-war narrative is ‘haunted’, too: ghosts and ‘spectres’ pervaded the stories of Far Eastern captivity from the moment of liberation. This haunting culminated in what became referred to among survivors and their relatives as the ‘spirit’ of the former ‘FEPOW’. By necessity, this final chapter broadens its focus from the Sumatra Railway. As Chapter 1 highlighted, early post-war responses to Far Eastern captivity were dominated by stories from the Burma–Siam line. These were significant responses, however, in understanding how the ‘FEPOW’ experience was interpreted among families in the aftermath of war, when they did not know whereabouts across Southeast Asia their loved ones had been incarcerated.

5.1 Repatriation and Resettlement Serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Stanley Cooper treated British troops following their liberation from Rangoon at the end of the Second World War. ‘The things I have seen and heard’, he wrote ‘have not been propaganda – they have been the men themselves. And I say this without exaggeration – these things are almost beyond human comprehension.’ In a letter to his wife in September 1945, Cooper wrote that ‘Belsen and its infamous companions will pale almost into insignificance’ to stories from the Far East.4 Liberators on the island of Sumatra made the same analogies: ‘They look as if they will never be normal again, through the beatings and slow starvation. Some were even worse than those photos in Germany and when they were given food they could hardly eat.’5 The clear hyperbole that Belsen will ‘pale into insignificance’, or the idea of measuring whether some camps were ‘even worse’ than conditions experienced elsewhere, makes for uncomfortable reading. Yet it reflects the immediate shock that was felt among the individuals who were tasked with organizing the liberation of captives in the Far East and their repatriation. It also shows that as early as September 1945, what Michael Rothberg has termed ‘Holocaust consciousness’ was already influencing the representation of other atrocities from the same conflict.6 The repatriation of troops and civilians from the Far East was managed by the office for the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI),

Aftermath

109

Figure  10 Aerial shot of Pakan Baroe as liberated POWs are airlifted from Sumatra, 1945. Courtesy of Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

established at the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. As part of their remit, RAPWI personnel provided information on board repatriation ships about the various aspects of support that would be available to them when they returned to Britain. One of these was the Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs), which former POWs from all geographies were invited to attend in order to help them ‘get in shape for civvy street’.7 As early as 1944, based upon lessons that had been learned during the First World War, medical professionals were making remonstrations to the government that provision needed to be put into place to cope with the large numbers of former POWs who would be returning from captivity. In response to this, a series of twenty CRUs were established across the country as a form of ‘decompression chamber’ in which to welcome and support former prisoners in their return to civilian life.8 A stay at a CRU involved a four-to-six-week period, but could be as long as three months, attending lectures about employment opportunities and the way in which different aspects of public life had changed in the intervening war years. There were also workshops put on for former POWs to develop new skills, trips organized to local workplaces or employment centres, as well as social

110

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

events and group discussions. For the latter, men were permitted to wear civilian clothes but for the remainder of the time were expected to wear uniform.9 Men could receive medical treatment, and psychiatrists were involved, but any suggestions of seeking help for mental health issues were ‘deliberately played down’.10 The CRU system was a success among POWs returning from captivity across Europe: around 60 per cent of these men took up a place at a CRU. Follow-up studies suggested that those who had done so had readjusted to civilian life more quickly than those who had not. This success was attributed to the resocialization activities undertaken at the CRUs. However, the system was not so appealing to repatriates who were liberated from the Far East. Only 12 per cent of troops returning from captivity across Southeast Asia attended CRUs.11 There were several reasons for this lack of appeal. In his history of veterans’ mental health care between 1914 and 1994, Ben Shephard points to a lack of ‘public discussion’ regarding the ‘mentality’ of the Far Eastern POW. Shephard reports that medical professionals had wrongly assumed that this ‘mentality’ was likely to be more positive among former captives from the Far East, than that of their European counterparts. This was due to three key considerations. First, it was believed that there would be a unanimous animosity among the former Far Eastern POWs towards their captors, based mainly on racial epithets. Second, it was thought that men had not been entirely separated from their officers in the Far East. Therefore it was judged that men liberated from the Far East had experienced the benefit of being able to draw on an authoritative Allied support system throughout their incarceration. Third, and rather remarkably, it was determined that the weakest men had died as POWs and therefore the fittest and most resilient men, physically and emotionally, would be returning home.12 Indeed, the leaflet distributed to men on board their repatriation ships stated that as a result of their experiences overseas they would now see the world ‘through the eyes of a soldier instead of a civilian’. They would have ‘a new outlook on civil life, a more developed outlook and, quite possibly, a better one than before’.13 There appeared to be little open consideration for how men returning home were not looking ‘through the eyes of a soldier’, but the eyes of a man who had, to use Harold Goulding’s words, become accustomed to viewing himself through the eyes of a ‘savage’.14 No centrally organized attempt was made, at least initially, to identify and manage the particular problems facing the former Far Eastern POW. Later, one man would write that ‘ignorance of our positives’ and ‘the knowledge derived’ from the experience of captivity was also ‘the reason why the sinecure C.R.U.s failed with our real problems’.15 The CRUs were also likely to be unattractive to the

Aftermath

111

former Far Eastern POW because he had already experienced a form of ‘decompression chamber’ – the repatriation ship.16 Men received often lengthy periods of medical treatment prior to repatriation (e.g. in Singapore and Bangalore) and then voyaged home over the course of several weeks. Medical treatment continued on board, along with the provision of dietary advice and the practical matters involved with returning home. Army, Navy, Royal Air Force (RAF) and Red Cross personnel were present on these voyages to help ‘in every possible way towards complete recovery’.17 The CRU was not, then, going to be an appealing proposition to men who were already desperate to return to their homes and families. In the collection of one former POW from Sumatra, John Sharples, there is some official acknowledgement – late in the repatriation process – that the leaflet distributed about CRUs did not address adequately the specific issues faced by former Far Eastern POWs. A letter dated 1 November 1945, from the War Office, introduces the leaflet, stating that it is ‘written in rather a colourful style’. Regardless of this, the men were told ‘it is well worth attention’.18 This ‘colourful’ leaflet told of the many ‘changes’ that had taken place while former POWs had been incarcerated: Your friends have been engaged in war-wok. Many are on jobs that didn’t exist before. There are ration cards and wartime regulations. Your wives, mothers and sisters have carried the burden of war-work as well as the extra difficulties of wartime housekeeping . . . It is a different world in many ways from the one you left.19

As much as the leaflet acknowledged that men faced many challenges in readjusting to ‘civvy street’, it was also particularly blunt in warning men not to ‘spoil your future because you are impatient to get into a job right away’. As if to dismiss any subsequent rebuttal that troops were ‘impatient’ to return home rather than to ‘a job’, the leaflet closes with the cheery advice that ‘a few weeks won’t make much difference after all these years [but] good luck to you anyway’.20 It is of no surprise that relatively few liberated men from the Far East took up the offer of a place, and that by June 1946 the CRUs had closed.

5.1.1 The Claim for Compensation All of the examples of life-writing referenced in this book in relation to the Sumatra Railway begin at the moment of enlistment or capture, and finish either during the voyage home (‘Passed Aden in the morning’),21 when a man is reunited

112

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

with his loved ones, ‘I was home at last’,22 or at his demobbing, which ‘more or less completes the story’.23 As a free man, a man returning ‘home at last’ and discharged from service, the experience of war captivity is presented as being over: the story is ‘complete’. Yet, the story was far from over. Although no precise data are available, Shephard documents suicides, accidental deaths, cirrhosis of the liver, and a ‘good deal of depression’ among returning Far Eastern POWs, with persistent problems related to loneliness, isolation and guilt.24 Research conducted by Dr Kamaluddin Khan at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine during the 1970s, and published for the first time in 2015, established a ‘clear excess’ of anxiety and depression among former Far Eastern POWs more than three decades post-repatriation (compared to Burma Star Veterans more broadly): ‘notable was the periodicity of symptoms, with severe bouts lasting hours or days, followed by a period of relative remission’.25 No comprehensive studies were carried out on early deaths among former POWs of the Japanese, though tentative research findings on mortality and autopsy results in the 1980s suggested an ‘overall excess mortality’. In particular, there was a ‘marked increase’ in cancers of the stomach, pancreas and liver, and death due to rheumatic heart disease.26 These post-war challenges were acknowledged to some extent in mid-1946 by the Chairman of the Returned British Prisoners of War Association (RBPOWA), who wrote about the problems of resettlement in the Association’s newsletter, The Clarion. It was a subject that would become a recurring theme throughout the following editions. In this article, repatriates were described as being often ‘physically weak, mentally sick, and socially maladjusted’ and, crucially, unable in the turmoil of repatriation to consider (as was the ambition of the CRUs) reskilling, securing new employment and, in many cases, dealing with housing difficulties.27 To assist with these troubles during resettlement, the RBPOWA attempted to make itself a unified organization that included all former POWs regardless of the theatre of captivity from which they had returned. The Clarion contained reports, book reviews and also requested contributions of reminiscences and anecdotes from former POWs themselves. Between the summer of 1946 and its final issue in Christmas 1952, thirty-four editions of the twelvepage newsletter were printed, and submissions from former POWs were quickly dominated by the stories of men who had been incarcerated in the Far East. This caused a dissatisfaction among the RBPOWA’s wider membership, namely those men who had been POWs in Europe, and that dissatisfaction spilled out onto the pages of The Clarion.28 As the factions between the groups developed, former Far Eastern POWs started to create separate local clubs. The earliest references to the Sumatra

Aftermath

113

Railway appear in the sixteenth issue of The Clarion, dated February 1949, coinciding with the development of the separate reunions of former Far Eastern POWs. One article writes somewhat contradictorily of ‘the lesser-known but notorious Sumatra railway [sic]’;29 another article in the same issue describes ‘work on the notorious Sumatra Railway’.30 Such articles voiced the difficulties in communicating their experiences from Sumatra to those back home. [Former POWs] are just ordinary people, but every one has a story to tell if you know them. For they don’t talk much to strangers about what went on along that railroad track and in the camps . . . where they buried 20 men a day, where he was burnt with a cigarette end, where his finger nails were pulled out, where he had four teeth knocked out with a rifle butt, all for such things as not saluting.31

It was, however, 1951 before the ‘other railroad’ received a dedicated article in The Clarion: Men who returned . . . will remember the days of toil under the tropical sun, days when working parties crossed the Equator going to and from their labours. They will recall the nights of terror, striving to prevent embankments being carried away by raging torrents from overflowed rivers; the nights of anxious waiting when bridges threatened to collapse, and sometimes did, under the weight of debris . . . Anxious because their destruction meant many more hours of souldestroying toil.32

By the time this article was printed, over sixty local Far Eastern POW reunion clubs and associations had formed.33 Having listened to discussions among these groups, on 19 September 1950, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival held the first meeting of what became the RBPOWA’s Sub-Committee for the Claim for Compensation. This Sub-Committee was formed to ‘bring together representatives from all over the country to follow a common line of action’ in terms of claiming compensation from the Japanese government for violations against the Geneva Convention.34 With parliamentary opinion split regarding the issue of compensation, it became necessary for the Sub-Committee to establish that POWs in the Far East had undergone experiences that were ‘a separate class from those elsewhere’.35 This group of former POWs, already congregating separately in private, were now required to create a public representation of their experiences as being in ‘a separate class’:  their experiences were under public scrutiny. Thus began a lengthy dialogue in the House of Commons36 and across the national press.37 In an act that negated the earlier warning not to divulge their experiences to the press, members of the local social clubs and associations were urged to ‘re-double your effort’ in broadcasting the story, since ‘we need a large

114

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

body of public opinion behind us’.38 It is clear, however, that the Sub-Committee members aimed to maintain control over the public representation of ‘FEPOWs’, as the Committee started to refer to them. Within the two pamphlets produced by the claim committee a clear image of ‘the FEPOW’ or ‘the ex-FEPOW’ was first introduced. The ‘FEPOW’ was an individual ‘reluctant to remind others of the sensational and horrific aspects’ of captivity but often still bearing ‘physical signs of their maltreatment and sufferings’.39 The mental scars are less apparent to the casual onlooker… they are ordinary members of the community occupied with the usual daily routine of family matters, personal interests, and earning a living . . . One thing they have in common: a spirit of comradeship and solidarity that is still very much alive.40

This ‘spirit of comradeship’ became integral to the campaign, much as it had in captivity through the kongsi. The pamphlets both had a print-run of 4,000 copies, and the efforts of the Committee culminated in an all-party meeting at the House of Commons on 7 March 1951.41 In May 1951, a motion was carried in the House of Commons to request the government to consider the claim for compensation,42 and former Far Eastern POWs eventually received £75 each under Articles 14 and 16 of the Treaty of Peace signed between Japan and the Allied Powers 1951. This amount came in several instalments, the initial payment of £15 being made in November 1952. A  further ex gratia payment of £10,000 was made by the British government to former Far Eastern POWs or their widows from 2000.43

5.1.2 Creating ‘the FEPOW’, Continuing the Kongsi In late 1951, the co-ordinating secretary of the Claim Committee used the pages of The Clarion to once more invoke the ‘spirit’ of former ‘FEPOWs’. In this he suggested that ‘you should not allow that spirit of cooperation to lapse’, but ‘that a strong and widespread FEPOW organisation can be a great power for good’.44 Thus that ‘spirit’ of ‘comradeship’ and ‘cooperation’ that began among the kongsi in the camps led to the establishment of the National Federation of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War Clubs and Associations (NFFCA) in July 1952. The NFFCA oversaw the sixty-eight local clubs and associations that had been set up – sixty-seven across the United Kingdom and one in Hong Kong.45 The NFFCA bore the motto ‘to keep going the spirit that kept us going’; it worked to support the welfare of former POWs and their dependents (including of those who died in captivity), to preserve the memory of those who did not survive,

Aftermath

115

and to co-ordinate information and communications between the local groups and their supporters. An annual reunion for the NFFCA, held at St-Martinin-the-Fields in London, typically included an address and reminiscences, the Last Post, the National Anthem, the Lord’s Prayer, Reveille and a recital of ‘The FEPOW Prayer’.46 ‘FEPOW’, the term that originated during the compensation claim, remained a distinctive part of their collective remembrance. Indeed, it is a term that has become commonplace now in critical and cultural examinations of captivity in the Far East. However, it is rare that the ‘FEPOW’ acronym will appear in a memoir written by a former POW himself. Where it does appear, the acronym is used in reference to a collective group of men rather than any specific individual.47 Neither will ‘FEPOW’ appear in unedited versions of contemporary camp diaries, since its usage was coined only several years after liberated troops had returned from the Far East. The FEPOW acronym appears in The Clarion for the first time in October 1949, and it was used as a collective term, adopted by the newsletter to differentiate between ‘the Kriegie’ (the former European POW) and ‘the F.E.P.o.W’.48 Notably ‘the Kriegie’49 is not a term that is then perpetuated throughout future issues, but news items for ‘F.E.Ps.O.W’ or ‘F.E.P.O.Ws’ are headed as such. The FEPOW Forum, the newsletter for the London Association, and newsletters for other local clubs then adopted ‘FEPOW’ as a standard collective term.50 Thus by adopting the public figure of ‘the FEPOW’, the clubs and associations (and the NFFCA) communicated outwardly as a body of men who supported one another, just as they had through the comradeship and mutual aid of the kongsi. The reunion groups also offered safe spaces in which to remember the past. By the time of liberation, privations on the home front meant that former POWs entered a domestic life that had also been changed dramatically by the experience of war. In the grips of a post-war depression, families did not have the time, energy or inclination to reminisce about the recent conflict.51 The publication of first-hand accounts, memoirs and diaries immediately after the Second World War was therefore rare, particularly in comparison to the corresponding period following the First World War. For example, the IWM library holds just over 170 memoirs and first-hand accounts that were published 1945–1950 (averaging 28 per year), compared to the 302 published 1918–1922 (averaging just over 60 per year). The story changes four decades later with a striking average of nearly eighty Second World War memoirs published per year during the 1980s and 1990s.52 The publication of Far Eastern POW and civilian internee memoirs specifically followed the same pattern. For his six-volume work on the postal history of

116

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

POWs and civilian internees incarcerated in the Far East, historian David Tett amassed an extensive research library including popular as well as rare accounts of captivity under the Japanese. This library was catalogued when Tett came to sell much of his collection, and an interrogation of that library reveals the predominance of published works relating to captivity in the Far East from the 1980s and 1990s, compared with those from the 1950s and 1960s (397 vs 101 respectively).53 These figures do not take into account the unpublished private papers of former Far Eastern captives that are held at IWM, of which it is estimated that there are nearly 2,000.54 The common perception of men who did not talk about their experiences is somewhat difficult to reconcile, then, with a group of men who formed social clubs and annual reunions, contributed to a national compensation claim, wrote memoirs in later life, contributed oral histories and donated materials from the camps to public archives. It is, I think, more accurate to state that they did speak or write about their experiences, but they chose to do so more commonly in public rather than domestic spaces. As relatives were told not to ask questions, the men themselves appear to have relied upon the wider body of the kongsi, or the institutional archive, in order to tell their stories. Such support – and the authority of a public archive – granted permission to men to no longer ‘guard’ their tongues, even if at home they remained quiet.

5.2 The Postmemory of ‘the FEPOW’ If silence at home was the case: where, and when, did families in the immediate aftermath of the war learn about captivity in the Far East? And how did it affect them? Any early attempts by relatives to respond to the histories of the camps will have necessitated their engagement with contemporary public representations of events in the Far East. But these were not the cartoons produced by POWs in camp as a means to boost morale and survive psychologically. They were not narratives from the disparate camps across Southeast Asia; they were certainly not recollections from the Sumatra Railway. As Chapter 1 detailed, the first and most prominent stories to emerge were those of extreme deprivation and suffering along the Burma–Siam Railway. It is therefore the familial reactions to these that are studied here. The relationship between history, memory and familial bonds has become the focus of much interdisciplinary debate throughout the past three decades. This has been driven by the rapid proliferation in Holocaust studies, and marked

Aftermath

117

by a shift in critical attention from the memories of survivors to the impact of those memories on second- and third-generation family members. For example, there have been various attempts in Holocaust studies and elsewhere, to articulate and encapsulate the complex – and often unspoken – exchanges that occur between the survivors of a traumatic history and their kin.55 Marianne Hirsch’s study of the life narratives produced by second-generation writers and artists, through the 1980s until the early 21st century, led her to develop the concept of postmemory. This ‘describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before’. Hirsch, herself a child of Holocaust survivors, explains that postmemory both signals the ‘inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience’, and documents the ‘consequence of [that] traumatic recall . . . at a generational remove’.56 At the core of postmemory dwells the compelling need of younger generations to explore the ways in which they have inherited the memory of their parents’ history, and how their own lives have then been shaped by its legacy. Despite the centrality of the European concentration camps to its development, postmemory is equally applicable to the history of the camps in the Far East. For the children of former Far Eastern POWs, postmemory has been, and remains, a significant force in their lives.57 In tracing the postmemory of the Far Eastern camps, I  have examined an exhibition that was created by a former POW, Charles Thrale. A  commercial draughtsman and portrait artist, Thrale joined the British Army in 1940 leaving a pregnant wife at home, and voyaged to the Far East. His post-war exhibition, ‘The Valleys of the Shadow of Death’, included pictures that he painted while he was a POW, a largely selfappointed eye witness to the devastation around him. Some pictures, such as medical studies, were requested by his campmates. Upon his repatriation, the paintings were arranged into a narrative sequence, providing a pictorial journal of his time on the Burma–Siam Railway in Changi Gaol and Adam Park camp in Singapore. Accompanied by black-and-white photographs of Thrale and his family, as well as sick men in the prison camps, over 100 paintings travelled Britain for an extraordinary eighteen years between 1946 and 1964. The Thrale archive is therefore an exciting and unusual example of one man very publicly telling his personal story of captivity, for a sustained period of time almost from the moment he returned. The exhibition was managed and presented by the Royal Artillery Association with all proceeds being split between the Association’s Benevolent Fund and the Scottish Returned Far East POW Association. Advertised in the local

118

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

newspapers of the towns and cities that it visited, Thrale’s work was displayed in venues including auction houses and drapers’ premises – large spaces that, given the charitable nature of the exhibition, likely kept overheads to a minimum while simultaneously opening the exhibition up to a wider public.58 Accompanying the picture archive is a series of thirteen books within which visitors recorded their responses to the exhibition.59 Each of the hard-backed ruled ledgers holds approximately 150 pages with around 5 entries per page. Using this rough estimation, we can conclude that each contains around 700 comments, offering a unique record of the reactions of former POWs and exservicemen, their families and members of the public to stories of Far Eastern captivity. Those choosing to leave comments represented many nationalities across Europe, Australia, the United States as well as Japan. They included men, women and children – the parents of those who did not return, and the wives and siblings of those who did. The survivors and the second generation were together in the same venues, digesting the story of the Far Eastern camps at the same time. This meant that the function of the comments books, like those of the paintings, became multi-faceted. They were a place for commemoration and debate, and a revelation of the connective memories brought together through the shared spaces of exhibition and book. For tracing the legacy of captivity in the aftermath of war, the Thrale archive is unparalleled. In his extensive review of the history of ‘trench art’, for example, Nicholas Saunders examines works produced by POWs from the Napoleonic era onwards and does not uncover a ‘detailed account of how [veterans] reacted to or thought about’ the art produced or viewed as a souvenir of conflict and captivity.60 The comments books, then, form an extraordinary narrative for exploring the early formation of postmemory and remembrance of Far Eastern captivity. Read chronologically, the books make it clear that individual affective responses to the Thrale exhibition changed over time. They were shaped by, and in turn came to shape, visitors’ memories of other aspects of the Second World War: namely Allied captivity in Europe, the Nazi concentration camps and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Furthermore, world events following on from the Second World War – particularly new conflicts in Korea – informed visitors’ readings of Thrale’s work. The visitor books indicate that the postmemory of the Far Eastern camps emerged through an increasing public consciousness of, and comparative reaction to, other events that occurred during or immediately following the Second World War. Indeed, Hirsch has outlined ways in which postmemory can facilitate the connection of apparently ‘contiguous or intersecting histories without allowing them to occlude or

Aftermath

119

erase each other’. But the Thrale visitor books suggest that a nascent form of this ‘connective’ approach to postmemory was already burgeoning in the immediate post-war period.61 In the layering of events, pictures and memories, a pattern emerges of visitors to the Thrale exhibition attempting to understand their familial stories from the Second World War, while also trying to locate them within a wider narrative of trauma, conflict and remembrance.

5.2.1 The Charles Thrale Exhibition Charles Thrale enlisted in the British Army in 1940 a Corporal with the First Battalion of the Cambridgeshire Regiment who was ‘attached to Intelligence’.62 He voyaged to the Far East in October 1941 aboard USS West Point. Within two weeks of disembarking, following the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, Thrale was a POW of the Japanese Imperial Army. Like many other POWs it was his ‘abiding creative instinct’ that Thrale turned to for strength and solace, as well as a sense of purpose, for the next three and a half years.63 This was despite the fact that maintaining records of any kind as a POW in the Far East was fraught with danger. In practical terms, paper was a precious and rare commodity. Regular movements between camps along the Burma–Siam Railway meant carrying belongings on exhausting marches and, further, there was the threat of severe and even fatal punishment if papers were discovered by guards. Reflecting the scarcity of materials, and the urgent need to make the paintings concealable and portable, many of Thrale’s surviving pictures are small, not much larger than a postcard in size. Limited in resources, Thrale’s pictures were painted on scraps of notepaper, rice paper, music manuscript paper, the backs of Japanese field cards and thin, fragile tissue paper. Press attention during the course of the exhibition in later decades gave much focus to Thrale’s use of blood as a pigment and his hair for brush bristles. Newspaper readers were pulled in with shocking headlines such as ‘Artist Used His Own Blood’ and ‘Prisoner . . . Used His Own Hair for Paint-Brushes’.64 Indeed, newspaper reviews tended to fixate on the horror of the camps, and the ‘human suffering’, ‘horrors and degradations’ and ‘bitter, agonising memories’ of former POWs.65 Yet this sensationalism in the press often hid the ingenuity, graft and risk that Thrale took in finding materials for his work. Blood is noted as a pigment for only three of the surviving pictures:  first, for a self-portrait; a second portrait, of a campmate; and, third, a painting of a bridge-building job, during which men were ‘drowned – exhausted – beaten to death’, and so the blood of the painting bleakly recalls the blood spilled during

120

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

the work.66 More generally, Thrale used pigments that were created by boiling rags and book covers, crushing leaves, bartering crayons, pencils or paints from members of the local population, and even from some guards in exchange for portraits. Aside from the narrative of his day-to-day captivity, Thrale created self-portraits, portraits of campmates, their sweethearts, civilian internees that he saw ‘through the wire’ and the landscape around him. Emphasizing the important role of his art in survival, Thrale took the time to draw at the end of brutal marches, squeezed into a railway truck and while sick with diphtheria and dysentery. He may have relinquished meals for materials, but in the absence of regular letters from home, ‘the scraps [of paper] afforded spiritual food’. Indeed there was a literal exchange between food and resources: Thrale drew one picture of a sunset on the piece of paper that cost ‘two dinners’. Writing in the exhibition catalogue in later years he recalled that the ‘satisfaction I got [from painting the sunset] did offset the gnawing in my stomach’.67 Paintings were also a means of recording testimonies of captivity while it happened. These testimonies were valuable for several reasons. First, in the advance of wider understanding of tropical diseases and their treatment, medical officers asked Thrale to ‘execute a number of sickness studies for record purposes’.68 Similarly, fellow artist Jack Chalker drew images of men with dysentery, cholera and tropical ulcers that would appear in the British Medical Journal soon after repatriation.69 Second, the story of the Thrale exhibition claimed to represent ‘the story of us all’. This was despite the divergent experiences, circumstances and conditions found within each Japanese POW camp. Explaining the inclusivity of his approach, the souvenir catalogue for the exhibition emphasized that Thrale viewed his work as ‘an exhibition of the heart’ – a means by which he could pay ‘tribute’ to the ‘courage of every prisoner in Jap hands’. It was his stated intention to ‘make people think’ and encourage viewers to ‘safeguard’ freedom rather than dwell upon their fear of suffering.70 Thrale’s aim to acknowledge the experience of ‘every prisoner in Jap hands’ was, overall, received positively by former Far Eastern POWs who attended his exhibition. Indeed, his pictures brought back the memories of those who had been incarcerated throughout the wartime Japanese Empire, including Borneo, Java and Sumatra. ‘I was there’, they wrote – even if the ‘there’ that a former POW remembered was hundreds of miles away from the ‘there’ that Thrale had painted. The books offered the opportunity for former POWs to create a form of witness statement, often signing their comments as ‘one who knows’ and ‘one who was there’. Indeed, the first volume is reserved specifically for ‘Ex-POWs Candid Comments’. And as if to counteract any doubt among the public that ‘it could possibly have happened’,71 men chose

Aftermath

121

to use this book as a means by which to validate the story Thrale’s paintings were telling: ‘As an ex P.O.W. I would like to state that Mr. Thrale has made an absolutely true set of pictures of the horrors that went on in the P.O.W. camps.’72 In this respect, the paintings served as ‘testimonial objects’  – objects that offer ‘testimonies and the testaments that they may have wished to transmit’.73 The comments books recorded, uniquely, the reactions to those testimonies and their formative influence on the remembrance and postmemory of Far Eastern captivity in the Second World War. In January 1951, visitors could start leaving their reactions and comments in these books. The introduction of the comments therefore occurred at the same time that the claim for compensation was brought by former POWs. Although no reference is made to the claim in the souvenir catalogues, the visitor books were used by former POWs as a forum through which they made calls for ‘something definite’ to be done ‘regarding our compensation claim’.74 Yet the watershed date of 1951 was also crucial in the development of the exhibition itself. In a move opposite to the activity of the claim committee, Thrale removed from public display ‘all the horror’ from the exhibition. This ‘horror’ comprised ‘fifteen paintings’ that Thrale explained ‘would frighten the next of kin of soldiers in the Far East’. The exhibition catalogue included a note on the withdrawal of the pictures stating that ‘it is far more important to make people think rather than horrify or frighten them’. There is no indication as to which fifteen were considered the ‘horror’ pictures, but the decision to withdraw them covered the duration of the exhibition wherever it travelled, and there were apparently no age restrictions placed on audiences.75 With the ‘horrors’ of captivity removed, it is unsurprising that ex-POWs began to comment that the exhibition was ‘very true, but insufficient shown [sic]’, that they had seen ‘worse’ – that ‘people who see this exhibition can guess by the portraits how bad things were but cannot realise it in true reality or feel the way we felt’.76 As ‘true’ as the exhibition was, and as visceral its materials, for survivors it was not the ‘reality’. For these men, removing the horror removed the truth. Such allusion to horror was even deployed by Thrale throughout his work, screening scenes as he drew them. For example, while painting a picture of the ‘Java lines’ (a resting point for POWs in transit from Java to Thailand), ‘I was interrupted and distracted by the sight of a British Officer receiving a bashing’.77 The horror, the act of ‘bashing’, is not included in the picture. In a painting where tropical ulcers on a POW’s leg are being scraped out with a spoon, medical personnel surround the body and the procedure itself is obscured. It is the caption that tells the viewer the details of the treatment. When men are depicted carrying out a body from a hospital camp, an eerie lamplight and the

122

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

hues of blue Indian ink shadow the corpse, with the POWs in the foreground sitting with their backs to the viewer, heads bowed or looking away. Even if fifteen pictures were missing from the walls, it was the images beyond Thrale’s captions that contained the full story.78 The symbol of the missing picture epitomizes the difficulty of telling the trauma of captivity:  for every event recorded, there is another missing.79 In representing atrocity, there is always horror ‘on the fringes’, and for children of former POWs the horror could also be found ‘on the fringes’ of their upbringing. For some members of the second generation, childhood could be a ‘tense’ time and fathers who had been POWs in the Far East could be ‘very frightening’ even if the reasons for their fits of rage or waking nightmares were not spoken of at home.80 The testaments of history had been transmitted prior to the sharing of their stories.

5.2.2 Post-War Responses The responses in the exhibition comment books were, at times, as striking as Thrale’s pictures. There is evidence of an increasing uneasiness among viewers (including former Far Eastern POWs) that the exhibition encouraged animosity and was ‘designed to stir up more hatred’.81 While the exhibition was ‘valuable’, such commentary suggested, ‘a little less exhortation to continued hatred might nowadays be more helpful & appropriate’.82 Such unease reflects that the period of the exhibition, 1946–1964, was not just a crucial moment for the post-war narrative of the Far Eastern POW. It was also a key time in considering what concepts of ‘memory’ and ‘survival’ meant across Western cultures. Most notably in 1961, the testimonies of over 100 individuals were given as evidence during the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The wider cultural impact of that testimony led to an increasing ‘Holocaust consciousness’ among the general public, and a deepening awareness of what it meant to be the survivor of a traumatic history.83 Indeed, in a fascinating connection between the trial of Eichmann and the history of the Far Eastern POW, the cartoonist Ronald Searle, who had been a POW on the Burma–Siam railway, was commissioned by Life magazine as a courtroom artist at the Eichmann trial.84 In order to make sense of history – and the stories perhaps concealed from them at home – viewers were assessing Thrale’s pictures against their own perceptions of the conflicts and captivities that had occurred before, after and simultaneously to that in the Far East. The connective nature of these memories was reflected in requests from visitors during the final years of the exhibition to

Aftermath

123

‘remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima’ and for the organizers to display the narratives of survivors from those atrocities alongside the pictures from the POW camps.85 Indeed, an early form of Michael Rothberg’s theoretical framework of ‘multidirectional memory’ is revealed here too – that is, the cross-referencing of apparently divergent histories to inform our understanding and reading of each.86 Rothberg’s presentation of multidirectional memory tends to create a dialogue between and across events that took place decades apart (most prominently between the Holocaust and 18th- and 19th-century histories of slavery in the United States). However, during the Thrale exhibition a multidirectional form of remembrance was applied to events that occurred simultaneously during the same conflict. This is found through meditations written by visitors on ‘the atrocities for the British Government in India in 1942’, and the Nazi concentration camps (‘why was Belsen talked about so much’) as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These reflections were joined by those of individuals who had been prompted to evaluate their own captivity in prison camps across Europe: ‘Thank God I was only the guest of Hitler for 5 years.’87 And as peace movements developed throughout Western societies during the 1950s and 1960s, other conflicts were beginning across the East.88 Pertinent to Thrale’s audiences specifically, the commencement of the Korean War in 1950 had introduced a new tranche of Far Eastern POWs into public consciousness remarkably soon: ‘Let us hope the same is not happening in Korea.’89 A comparative focus for the remembrance of captivity, then, was already at work.

5.2.3 Transgenerational Perceptions of ‘the FEPOW’ Explorations of postmemory have tended to involve painstaking research undertaken by members of the second generation after many years of grappling with familial ghosts. In the pursuit of postmemory, pilgrimages to the sites of historical trauma are undertaken, old photographs are scrutinized to peel away the layers from history. Crucially for this analysis of the Thrale books, material objects hold particular significance in enabling individuals to ‘read’ a story that they may have not heard from their predecessors. So the Thrale exhibition offered the opportunity for relatives to discover a material connection with the POW experience, precisely through its presence preserved in Thrale’s artworks. The books, too, offer a rare perspective in understanding the development and trajectory of postmemory. Rather than taking place decades later, as has been portrayed by second-generation writers of the Holocaust,90 the Thrale books

124

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

indicate that in the immediate post-war period members of the second generation were already attempting to understand the history and impact of their fathers’ captivity. Common discourses of remembrance are echoed throughout the visitor books, as we read of ‘man’s humanity to man’ and ‘lest we forget’. The seminal lines of Laurence Binyan’s ‘For the Fallen’ are transcribed repeatedly. Yet resting among these popular modes of collective remembrance are the individual names of men who died in camp, and the deeply personal pleas from relatives of the missing – ‘Can anyone give me any information please?’ The distress is palpable, and the workings of postmemory are clear. For here are the attempts by relatives to fill in the gaps of their knowledge, and to understand the impact of their fathers’ captivity on their own lives:  ‘Now I  know’, writes one visitor, ‘why Dad never came back.’91 By enabling relatives to forge connections between Thrale’s paintings and their own family histories, the exhibition was deemed an ‘astounding revelation’.92 The visitor books are revelatory in the evidence they contain about early forms of postmemory. The books were a vital medium through which ex-POWs could state that their story was ‘true’. Relatives also used them to say that they could accept what they saw  – even when such open and frank admissions remained unspoken at home.93 These attempts to uncover intimate family histories necessitated engagement with contemporary public representations of events in the Far East. Visits to the Thrale exhibition were often informed by readings of Russell Braddon’s Naked Island. Several of Thrale’s visitors write that ‘I have read the “Naked Island” ’, but then admit to their disbelief in his story: ‘It never seemed to me that it could possibly have happened.’ The Far East was too exotic, the tales too ‘horrifying’ to believe. ‘I have listened, I have heard’, wrote one visitor in Leeds, ‘now I believe.’ In the same way that former POWs affirmed that Thrale’s exhibition was ‘all true’, the images in the exhibition helped their relatives or friends to ‘now believe after seeing’.94 The books highlight the need for the second generation to confirm the validity and authenticity of the narrative, before they could start the lengthy process of discovering the detail and understanding its formative influence on their family’s past. Thus if images of atrocity demand ‘a response’, those responses also demand recognition.95 The comments in the Thrale visitor books are, in the main, written in pencil and some are now too faint to read. Sporadically interspersed throughout the pencil entries are those written in blue ballpoint pen or occasionally pinks and reds. The coloured script is rendered all the more vibrant by the otherwise monochrome and fading pages. Anecdotes, letters and commemorations appear, with entries ranging in size and length. The script of one might be tiny

Aftermath

125

cursive letters, while the next is large, jagged and raw – frustratingly at times, both styles are illegible. One entry will comprise only a few words: ‘Truly a revelation’,96 while others run to an entire page. Some comments would perhaps get lost if it were not for the bold arrows added in reply. One comment, ‘things like this should never be shown and let us forget it ever happened’, generated three terse responses: ‘What a rat’, ‘what manner of man is this that can say such a thing’, ‘Let him Suffer he will remember [sic]’. It is difficult to ignore the incongruity of such impassioned arguments being carried out silently, presumably, among strangers and across different venues – with the original commentators unlikely to know about the reactions that they provoked. And so where the visceral nature of captivity emanates from Thrale’s pictures, the postmemorial embodiment of it exudes from the comments of viewers: ‘it made me sick’ wrote one child of a former POW, ‘I dread to think what it would do to him’.97 This urgent bodily response to grief, anger and shock is evident in the imprint left on the following pages, by the pressure with which the pen or pencil of the writer made contact with the book. With such a mismatch of sizes and styles, colours and tones, affective response and political opinion, these documents offer an impression not of collective but ‘collected memory’ (my emphasis). Like that found by James Young in his examination of Holocaust memorials, the Thrale visitor books are a forceful example of ‘the many discrete memories that are gathered into common memorial spaces’.98 As they responded to Thrale’s paintings, exhibition visitors created multidirectional remembrances, engaging with other events of the Second World War, the post-war political narrative of the Far Eastern POW and the start of new conflicts around the world. Testament to the effects of captivity on family relationships can be found in the comments made by the children of former Far Eastern POWs in the immediate aftermath of the war. This was the very time when histories of captivity were still in the process of being transmitted from survivors to the second generation. In the comment books we see that the silent dynamics of the domestic sphere were being negotiated in the public spaces of Thrale’s exhibition and his audience’s collected remembrance.

5.3 The Postmemorial Archive Throughout this project, I  have been in correspondence with the relatives of former Far Eastern POWs. These have been children and grandchildren, the members of second and third generations. Nearly every story that I  have

126

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

heard has started with the (re)discovery of an object or document that holds an intrinsic connection to the camps: papers, notebooks and letters found in attics and closed-away spaces. Each relative, in some way, was creating their own archive: compiling references that they could find about their relatives, writing up their father’s handwritten memoirs, creating organized folders of documentation. Others had digitized materials or donated originals to archives and museums for preservation and safe-keeping. Each was creating a new personal archive from the original ones that they had found. They were bringing together, for themselves, a body of materials through which the ghosts of postmemory could ‘speak’.99 The origin of the word archive, traced by Jacques Derrida to the Greek arkhē, means ‘commencement’ or ‘commandment’.100 It offers both the means through which a search for information can begin (commencement) and declares as well the authoritativeness of the information preserved (commandment). With a nod to the future as well as the past, the folders and boxes of personal documents become postmemorial objects. For Derrida it was the very ‘force and authority’ of transgenerational memory that made it ‘irrepressible’. The creation of an archive was not, therefore, about ‘dealing with the past’. It was concerned with confronting ‘the question of a response’ and a ‘responsibility for tomorrow’.101 This need to provoke and preserve ‘a response’ to history, while concurrently creating a record of the story ‘for tomorrow’, has been reflected in the work of second-generation writers and researchers of Far Eastern captivity. The silent ‘spirits’ between the generations were officially acknowledged fifty-three years after the NFFCA was established, with a developing movement of relatives who met each other as they researched the histories of the camps. A charity, Children of Far Eastern Prisoners of War (COFEPOW), was established in 1997, after its founder Carol Cooper recovered the diary that her father had maintained as a POW on the Burma–Siam Railway.102 Cooper’s father died while in captivity, when Cooper was a young child. It was only in 1994  – at least fifty years following her father’s death – that Cooper read in a local newspaper that a POW diary had been sold at auction and she realized that it must have been her father’s. Later, Cooper would go on to film a documentary following her own journey along the route of the Burma–Siam Railway. Following its broadcast, Cooper received many letters and books written by former Far Eastern POWs telling of their experiences. They were books that Cooper felt ‘endorsed’ the history that she had learned on her trip. In 1997, Cooper convened the inaugural meeting of COFEPOW.103 COFEPOW was founded upon the principles of what was later established by Hirsch as postmemory. It developed explicitly out of the relationships between

Aftermath

127

history, and the ‘causes and consequences’ of that history that were circulating among ‘future generations’. At the core of COFEPOW – and as its very name professes – is the telling and remembering of the stories of the Far Eastern camps by members of the next generation.104 Originally, the charity aimed to deliver a ‘functional project’ – a project that would ‘enlighten and teach children and people of today and the generation of tomorrow’.105 That first project was to raise funds to establish a permanent ‘cultural and memorial’ building. The building holds an exhibition of ‘The FEPOW Story’ and preserves materials donated by former POWs and their families. The timber-framed structure stands at the National Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, and is designed to evoke the atap huts inhabited by Far Eastern POWs. Furthermore, through the construction of the building, the links between the work of COFEPOW and that of the wartime experiences of their forbears were made explicit. Fundraising activities for the memorial building began on 15 February 2002: the sixtieth anniversary of the fall of Singapore. The deadline for the opening of the building was set for 17 August 2005: the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war in the Far East, and the liberation of the camps. The FEPOWs spent three and a half years being beaten, worked, starved and humiliated in barbaric and pitiless conditions. We spent three and a half years raising money to build a place in their honour and everlasting memory to ensure that future generations understand the horrors so many endured and reflect upon its causes and consequences.106

For the founding members of COFEPOW, then, postmemory offered an immediate and ‘functional’ purpose to the memorialization of the Far Eastern camps. This was to ‘educate’ visitors to the building, ‘to ensure’ the story was told to younger generations and that this part of history was preserved so that people were able to ‘understand the horrors’ and ‘reflect upon its causes and consequences’. But the establishment of COFEPOW itself, and the decision to place the ‘future generations’ at the heart of its remit, also indicates a need for those members to create a space for their own place in that history. In doing so, a direct connection was made between the formation of the ‘FEPOW’ identity and the development of ‘COFEPOW’:  the tenth anniversary of the building’s opening was the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the men. The memorial work of the future generation is connected, quite explicitly, to the captivity of those that came before. Opposite the building, nestled in the grounds of the Arboretum, is a memorial to the Sumatra Railway: original pieces of its track re-laid in the Staffordshire countryside.

128

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

The postmemorial connections between the ‘FEPOW’ and the ‘COFEPOW’ were reinforced during the opening ceremony for the COFEPOW building, when on 15 August 2005, the Far East Prisoner of War Memorial Building was officially opened. On the same day, the NFFCA closed and an official handingover ceremony took place. This transferred the functions of the NFFCA to COFEPOW and the National FEPOW Fellowship Welfare and Remembrance Association (NFFWRA). That handing-over was both a literal and symbolic act, which acknowledged the passing of history from one generation to the next. It also acknowledged that the support provided by the kongsi in the camps, and perpetuated by the social clubs upon repatriation, was to be continued by the children and other relatives of former Far Eastern POWs. Essentially our aim is to be a point of contact for those Clubs and Associations which continue to exist, but more importantly to remain in contact with individual FEPOWs as their Clubs now close. By issuing newsletters and arranging social events we wish to try to continue with some of the work of the now former National Federation, in keeping FEPOWs in touch with each other and ‘To keep going the Spirit that kept them going’.107

Thus the kongsi of the ‘FEPOW’ had transferred, metaphorically, into the community of the ‘COFEPOW’. The ‘spirit’ that had ‘kept us going’ and that had haunted families would now ‘keep going’ in the guise of COFEPOW.108 As such, the members of COFEPOW, along with bodies such as the Researching FEPOW History Group and the online FEPOW Community, support one another in terms of the dissemination of information, fundraising for memorials, organizing pilgrimages to the Far East and sharing stories of their fathers. In helping each other to discover these histories, the smallest details are essential. Relatives will look endlessly to discover the camps that fathers and grandfathers inhabited, the routes that they took to the Far East or the ships on which they were eventually repatriated. These searches can take years, with the slightest reference bringing great hope of a better understanding. The postmemorial search is somewhat akin to Derrida’s ‘archive fever’: it becomes a ‘passion’ for which the searchers ‘burn’: It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away…It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.109

The blanks that the second generation need to fill in, and their desire to know as much as they can, drives the creation of a postmemorial archive: a ‘compulsive,

Aftermath

129

repetitive’ pursuit that is dominated by a continual search for references and the need to identify the most intricate of details. The archive, made up of folders and neatly arranged boxes, offers the second generation the chance to make a documentary ‘return’ to the story of their loved ones. A physical pilgrimage offers a return, too, ‘to the most archaic place’ of captivity itself. Medical officer Patrick Kirkwood was a key British figure on the Sumatra Railway (Chapter  4). In 2012, his daughter, Imogen Holmes, travelled for the first time with members of the Malayan Volunteers Group (MVG) to attend five days of services and commemorative events marking the anniversary of the fall of Singapore.110 Following these ceremonies, Holmes journeyed by boat through the South China Sea to Sumatra. In taking this trip, ‘following in my father’s wake’,111 Holmes was able to travel close to where the railway line ran on Sumatra. Although she did not get as close as she wished (she would do so on return journeys), ‘the whole point of my being there was to follow in my father’s footsteps and get a feel for the place’.112 Undertaking such a pilgrimage enacted a physical return to the history of the camps. It embodied a need to move to where the story begins: the moment of a father’s capture. But the journey was not just prompted by a reaction to narratives of imprisonment. It also involved a search for something new: a need to ‘get a feel’ for the place in which a father was a prisoner. It enabled Holmes to experience her own affective response to sailing the routes that Kirkwood would have taken, and to place her feet on the ground where his own bare feet would have once trodden. Holmes described Kirkwood as ‘following in his father’s footsteps’ by entering the military; she too wished to travel in her ‘father’s wake’. The act of recording her journey, and of sharing it in an article for the MVG, echoed the life-writing that many men adopted on their repatriation. In returning to where the story began, a new one could be written.

Afterword

As I finished preparing the manuscript of this book, I received news of the death of Terry Hadoke. Terry’s uncle Patrick was originally destined to work on the Sumatra Railway, but he did not survive the journey to Sumatra. Patrick Hadoke was thirty-one years old when he died in the sinking of the Van Waerwijk. Having gained a degree in Forestry, he had travelled to Malaya and, like John Parsons, Hadoke was working as a planter in Malaya at the outbreak of war in the Far East. His nephew Terry was born three weeks before he died, but the family were not able to tell Terry about Patrick’s history: ‘Whenever I asked the family what happened, I got nothing.’ A chance enquiry from a researcher about his surname initiated Terry Hadoke’s search for ‘what happened’ to Patrick  – known affectionately as ‘Uncle Oz’. My conversations with Terry centred on the contents of a blue ring binder that he had brought with him on the day that we met. In this file, Terry had collated an amazing range of information. He had not just learned about the life of a POW, he had researched the experiences of planters in Malaya, the fall of Singapore, the camps in which Oz was a POW and the sinking of the Van Waerwijk: ‘It’s too late to find out anything about Uncle Oz first hand’, he told me, ‘but if I can find out what sort of life he lived, what went on . . . that helps to bring it alive.’1 Terry had read reports from former POWs who had inhabited the same areas as Oz, and from these he ‘started picking out every name, every reference to something tangible’. From these references, Terry then started a tenacious and painstaking search to follow up each and every one: ‘gradually . . . I began to learn more’. He accessed relevant accounts from former prisoners, obtainable via The National Archives in Kew, and he had printed copies of POW art from online Dutch archives. Creating a wonderful connection with my own work, these pictures were what turned out to be my grandfather’s sketches produced in Gloegoer (one of which is reproduced in Chapter  4). Until that moment, we did not know that they existed.

132

Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway

From a search of the lists of POWs that I  had shown John Hedley at the conference all those years ago, I  was able to confirm Uncle Oz’s whereabouts to Terry. The scribble of handwriting that verified Oz’s presence among other POWs seemed to be the smallest snippet of information to offer him. Yet in the reply that he sent to me, Terry called it a ‘validation’ for his search. That Terry’s own search had unearthed my grandfather’s Dutch archives brought more than validation in return. I asked Terry why he had printed so many of my grandfather’s drawings. They became an important link to him, he said, because they ‘bring to life day-to-day life in the camps  – situations, routines and events that Uncle Oz would have seen, and which would have been part of his life’. Not only did the pictures give him an impression of ‘stuff that was going on, but equally importantly they give you an idea . . . of how they dealt with it . . . with a lot of humour. There aren’t sketches of guards beating POWs, there aren’t sketches of overcrowding or people being desperately ill, but they’re amusing pictures, which tells me . . . about the people there’. Terry’s search was focused on finding out what his uncle went through, where and how. ‘I want to know as much as I can about him’, he said, ‘because otherwise he’s lost . . . you can’t just forget him.’2 Seventy years ago Stanley Russell sat in a POW camp, drawing. He did so for a variety of reasons. Primarily, he could earn some money to buy precious extra rations. He could also record the historical events that he witnessed, and perhaps make sense of them for himself or the men in the camps with him. The sketches that he made of the birds and the landscape on Sumatra suggest that his drawings offered some solace, too. They became a way to escape from the brutality of POW life and focus instead on the beautiful parts of the island around him. It is with a considerable amount of hope that I also think that these pictures will have brought him comfort and allowed him to dream of home. Just as the diarist imagines a future reader, by making such drawings Russell was telling himself that one day the pictures would have viewers who did not know anything about Sumatra. He was hoping that one day they would help those who heard his story to acknowledge the experience that he lived as a prisoner on a railway in a jungle. For if his pictures really did have those viewers, then it would mean that he had survived and that he was free once more. This book began with a search to ‘bring to life’ my grandfather’s wartime experiences. Eventually that search brought me to Terry, and he taught me about the peace that Stanley Russell’s pictures brought to the families of men who did not come home. In the beginning, I wanted to know how the men had told their story; I learned, in the process, why it has mattered that they were heard.

Appendix: Research Resources The websites, organizations and research groups that follow are a great place to start when researching the history of captivity in the Far East, either from a personal or a professional perspective.

Sumatra Railway These websites provide additional information about the Sumatra Railway, its history, the men who were held captive and the site of the railway today. • British POWs on the Sumatra Railway, nominal roll, stories, research resources: www.sumatrarailway.com • Online app developed by Dutch historian Henk Hovinga, with historical information, maps and resources relating to the Sumatra Railway: https:// sumatra-railroad.shortstack.com/0RXcMp • Farrell family website, including many images of what the site of the Sumatra Railway looks like today: www.pekanbarudeathrailway.com

UK Reunion and Welfare Groups These membership groups bring together former veterans and their relatives at regular reunions, organize fundraising campaigns (e.g. to establish memorial sites) and provide welfare support to former POWs. • Children of Far Eastern Prisoners of War (COFEPOW): www.cofepow.org.uk/ • Java Club: http://www.thejavafepowclub42.org/index.html • Malayan Volunteers Group: http://www.malayanvolunteersgroup.org.uk/ • National FEPOW Fellowship Welfare Remembrance Association (NFFWRA): https://nationalfepowfellowship.org.uk/

134

Appendix

Research Groups There is a well-established and active community of family researchers, scholars and writers who focus on sharing histories of captivity, many of whom contribute to the following groups, projects and networks. • FEPOW Community: www.fepow-community.org.uk • Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine – Captive Memories (oral history, educational outreach, medical legacies of captivity, POW art): www. captivememories.org.uk • Prisoner of War Network: https://powstudiesnetwork.wordpress.com/ • Researching FEPOW History Group: https://fepowhistory.wordpress.com/

Archives Many institutions hold significant Far Eastern POW-related collections. Those listed here offer a good starting point. • Army Medical Services Museum: http://www.ams-museum.org.uk/ museum/ • Army Museum of Western Australia: http://www.armymuseumwa.com.au/ • Australian War Memorial: http://www.awm.gov.au/ • British Library: www.bl.uk • Changi Museum: www.changimuseum.sg/ • COFEPOW Database (names of British POWs including, where available, information such as service number, date of capture and places of captivity): http://www.cofepowdb.org.uk/cdb/Index.jsp • Dutch National Archives: http://en.nationaalarchief.nl/ • Imperial War Museum: http://www.iwm.org.uk/. To search the collections, including many oral histories recorded by former POWs and civilian internees that are available to listen to online, see http://www.iwm.org.uk/ collections. • Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/ • Museon (significant collections of material culture from Dutch East Indies during the Japanese occupation): www.museon.nl • National Army Museum: http://www.nam.ac.uk/

Appendix

135

• NIOD Institute for War, Genocide and Holocaust Studies: www.niod.nl/en • Second World War Experience Centre: http://war-experience.org/ • The National Archives: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-yourresearch/research-guides/british-prisoners-second-world-war-korean-war • The Thailand–Burma Railway Centre: http://www.tbrconline.com/ • Wellcome Library (particularly the work of Medical Officers in the Far East): https://wellcomelibrary.org/

Research Websites The sites that follow contain a wealth of information about the experience of captivity across Southeast Asia during the Second World War, including the civilian internment camps. • Borneo POW Site: http://www.borneopow.info • Center for Research, Allied POWs under the Japanese: http://www.mansell. com/ • Changi POW Art (original artwork of Des Bettany): http://changipowart. com/ • Far Eastern Heroes: www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/ • Hong Kong War Diary: http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/ • Indo Project: https://theindoproject.org/ • Memory of the Netherlands: www.geheugenvannederland.nl/en • Never Forgotten – The Story of the Taiwan POW Camps: www.powtaiwan. org/ • Philippine Internment: http://philippineinternment.com/ • Postal Histories of Far Eastern Captivity: http://www.fepowmail.com/ • Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942–1945: http://www.pows-of-japan.net/ • Rutgers Oral History Archives (Americans Held by the Japanese): http:// oralhistory.rutgers.edu/military-history/36-special-topics/ 226-prisoners-of-war-a-internees • Roll of Honour: http://www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/ • Singing to Survive (Civilian Internment and Women’s Vocal Orchestra on Sumatra): https://singingtosurvive.com/ • University of Virginia Law Library. Tokyo War Crimes Trial Digital Collection: http://imtfe.law.virginia.edu/

136

Appendix

Related Organizations The organizations that are listed here work to promote awareness of the history of the Japanese occupation, reconciliation between captors and former POWs, and maintain war graves across Southeast Asia. • • • •

Agape Reconciliation: http://www.agapeworld.com/ ALPHA Education: http://www.alphaeducation.org/ Commonwealth War Graves Commission: http://www.cwgc.org/ Netherlands War Graves Foundation: http://www.ogs.nl/

Notes Preface: The Man in the Photograph 1 Australian War Memorial, ‘Pakanbaru POW camp, Sumatra’. 15 September 1945. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/F02170/ (accessed 3 October 2016). 2 Art Spiegelman, Maus, A Survivor’s Tale Part I: My Father Bleeds History (London: Penguin, 1987), 159. 3 FEPOW Community, ‘Sumatra Railway’: www.fepow-community.org.uk/monthly_ Revue/html/sumatra_railway.htm (accessed 3 October 2016). 4 See the Researching FEPOW History Group website: https://fepowhistory. wordpress.com/ (accessed 3 October 2016). 5 John can be heard speaking of his time as a Malayan planter, and as a POW, via the IWM’s online catalogue. See John Hedley, Oral History, http://m.iwm.org.uk/ collections/item/object/80023021 (accessed 7 June 2014).

Introduction 1 Henk Hovinga, The Sumatra Railroad: Final Destination Pakan Baroe, 1943–1945. Translated by Bernard J. Wolters (5th edn.) (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010), 75. 2 Ibid. 3 Allied Land Forces South East Asia, Weekly Intelligence Review 9 and 10 December 1944. TNA WO208/1623, n.p. 4 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 304. 5 Allied Land Forces South East Asia, Weekly Intelligence, n.p. 6 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 342. 7 Henk Neumann and E. van Witsen, The Sumatra Railway, Constructed during the 2nd World War on the Island of Sumatra: A Documentary of Facts Compiled during and Immediately after the War (Studio Pieter Mulier, 1989), 39. 8 War Office, ‘List of Available Death Certificates for Deceased British, British Indian, American and Australian personnel. August 1946’, TNA WO361/1513. 9 See, for example, Sibylla Jane Flower, ‘Captors and Captives on the Burma–Thailand Railway’, in Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II. Edited by Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 227–52; Robert P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5 (London: RoutledgeCurzon 2003).

138

Notes

10 Sears A. Eldredge, Captive Audiences/Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival on the Thailand –Burma Railway, 1942–1945 (Macalester College, 2014), http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thdabooks/1/ (accessed 19 October 2016). 11 See, for example, Geoff Gill and Dion Bell, ‘The health of former Prisoners of War of the Japanese’. Practitioner 225 (1981), 531–38; Meg Parkes, ‘Tins, tubes and tenacity: inventive medicine in camps in the Far East’, in Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity behind Barbed Wire. Edited by Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 51–65. 12 See Helen Langridge, dir. Building Burma’s Death Railway: Moving Half the Mountain (London: HLA, 2014); James Dawes, Evil Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 13 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 14 There were also civilian internees held captive by the Japanese on the island of Sumatra. For a comparative study of the experiences of civilian internees across the Far East, see Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–1945: A Patchwork of Internment (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). For stories of the Women’s Vocal Orchestra created in Palembang on Sumatra, see ‘Singing to Survive’, https://singingtosurvive.com/ (accessed 19 October 2016). 15 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 30. 16 Ibid., 147. 17 Ben Shephard, ‘A Clouded Homecoming’, History Today 46: (1996), n.p. 18 Peter Post et al., ed. The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War: In Cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 177. 19 Ibid., 179–84. 20 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 12. 21 Ibid., 327. 22 See ‘Pekanbaru Death Railway’, http://www.pekanbarudeathrailway.com/gallery (accessed 22 October 2016). 23 Edwin Varley, The Judy Story: The Dog with Six Lives (London: Souvenir Press, 1973); Damien Lewis, Judy: A Dog in a Million (London: Quercus, 2014); Robert Weintraub, No Better Friend (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). 24 Arthur Trebble, ‘That Other Railroad’. The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 26 (1951), 7.

Chapter 1 1 Post et al., Encyclopedia, 12.

Notes

139

2 Arthur Hesford, ‘Personal account of official escape party of two Officers and twentyfour Warrant Officers and NCOs of First Battalion, the Manchester Regiment from Singapore, February 14, 1942 to Padang, Sumatra, March 17, 1942’ (private collection), 1. 3 Geoffrey Brooke, Singapore’s Dunkirk (London: Leo Cooper, 1989), 1. 4 Joseph Kennedy, When Singapore Fell: Evacuations and Escape, 1941–42 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 50. 5 John Hedley, ‘My war story’ (private collection), n.p. 6 Kennedy, Singapore, 88. 7 Hedley, Oral history. 8 For an excellent account of captivity in Padang and Medan, see Peter Hartley, Escape to Captivity (London: J. M. Dent, 1952). 9 For a detailed history of the British Sumatra Battalion, see A. A. Apthorp, The British Sumatra Battalion (Lewes: Book Guild, 1988). 10 Kenneth Robson, Ten Cents a Day and All Found: A Story of Trial and Tribulation, Private papers of K. Robson, IWM Documents.11338, 49. 11 Robson, Ten Cents, 42. 12 Ibid., 43. 13 Patrick Kavanagh, MI9 Statement: Account of events leading up to capture, TNA WO361/1672, 2. 14 Hedley, Oral history. 15 Hedley, Oral history. 16 John Parsons, Diary, Private papers of JER Parsons, IWM Documents.18760, December 1942. 17 Hedley, Oral history. 18 Parsons, Diary. 19 Hedley, Oral history. 20 John Hedley, Diary (private collection), n.p. 21 Ibid. 22 Hedley, Oral history. 23 Parsons, Diary, 10 October 1944. 24 Hedley, War Story, n.p. 25 Ibid. 26 During their tracking of the railway, the Farrells have discovered power sources at the site of Camp Fourteen, confirming POW testimony that nightshifts were commonplace here. 27 Parsons, Diary, December 1944. 28 Joseph Fitzgerald, A Day on Sumatra’s Forgotten Railway, Private papers of J. G. Fitzgerald, IWM Documents.8209, 4. 29 ‘Far East: Singapore and Sumatra; statement by Captain J. G. Gordon, Royal Artillery; includes account of the sinking of SS Van Warweak, June 1941’, TNA WO361/1592, 3–4.

140

Notes

30 Lizzie Oliver, ‘The sinking of Prisoner of War transport ships in the Far East’, Imperial War Museum, http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-sinking-of-prisoner-ofwar-transport-ships-in-the-far-east (accessed 19 October 2016). 31 Post et al., Encyclopedia, 24. 32 For the testimonies of some survivors, see Jan Banning, Traces of War: Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways (London: Trolley, 2005). 33 Frederick Freeman, Memoir, Private papers of FG Freeman, IWM Documents.14046, 3. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 4. 37 Trebble, Other Railroad, 7. 38 The main information in this table of camps has been compiled from a variety of sources, including Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad; Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway and NIOD, ‘East Indies Camp Archives’, https://www.indischekamparchieven. nl/ (accessed 14 April 2017); quotes from former POW accounts are referenced throughout the table. For an interactive map of the route of the Sumatra Railway, including all camps, see ‘The Railway Now’, PekanBaru Death Railway, http://www. pekanbarudeathrailway.com/camps-today (accessed 3 April 2017). This resource also provides images and descriptive text of what the railway site looks like today. 39 Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 166. 40 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 76. 41 Saunders, Journey, 154. 42 Ibid., 138. 43 Robson, Ten Cents, 69–70. 44 Ibid., 139. 45 Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 170. 46 Patrick Slaney Davis, Report to Office of the Judge Advocate General: ‘In the Matter of the Ill-Treatment of British Prisoners of War in Java and Sumatra between 1942 and 1945’ (NIOD 400/4538), 7. 47 Boulter, Memoir, 158. 48 Saunders, Journey, 139. 49 Davis, Report. 50 East Indies Camp Archives, https://www.indischekamparchieven.nl/en (accessed 27 October 2016). 51 Robert Braithwaite, Medical report on conditions at No. 3 POW Camp, Pekanbaroe, Sumatra, from 14 July 1944 to 24 August 1945. TNA WO361/1618. 52 Saunders, Journey, 144. 53 Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 171. 54 Braithwaite, Report, 3. 55 Saunders, Journey, 152.

Notes 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

141

Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 127. Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 177. Ibid., 178. Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 27. See http://www.pekanbarudeathrailway.com/ Thomas Chatfield, Sackcloths and Orchids, Private papers of TH Chatfield, IWM Documents.9783, 10. There were some early attempts to evade Japanese rule in the two weeks following 9 March 1942. Most either gave themselves up due to hostile environment (and an unsympathetic local population), or were re-caught by guards and brought back to camp within a matter of days. For an example, see Alastair Munro, ‘An account of how some evaded capture and information re: casualties’, TNA WO361/1546. Parsons, Diary, 17 November 1944. The ‘dassy’ or ‘dassi’ was a wood-boring augur that was used to create the holes necessary for jointing and fixing the rails to the sleepers. Jack Saunders, It Seems Like Yesterday (London: Avon Books, 1995), 135–36. ‘Noko’ is short for nokogiri, a Japanese woodwork saw that cuts on the ‘pull’ stroke, rather than on the ‘push’ as is typical with European tools. Walter Smith, ‘One Man and His War’: An Account of the Writer’s Experiences 1939– 1946, Private papers of W R Smith, IWM Documents.8443, 74. Ibid., 76. Fitzgerald, A Day, 6–8. Smith, One Man, 76. Fitzgerald, A Day, 7. Smith, One Man, 77. Fitzgerald, A Day, 8. Robson, Ten Cents, 50. Claude Thompson, Into the Sun, Private papers of C. G. Thompson, IWM Documents.4491, 171–72. Robson, Ten Cents, 49. Paul Kratoska, ed. Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2005). R. Raben, ‘Indonesian Romusha and Coolies under Naval Administration: The Eastern Archipelago, 1942–45’, in Kratoska, Asian Labor, 197. Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 216. Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 26. Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 304. Fitzgerald, A Day, 10. See Kratoska, Asian Labor. Banning, Traces, 131. Ibid., 117.

142

Notes

86 Ibid., 118. 87 Jack Saunders, Journey to Hell, Private papers of J. Saunders, IWM Documents.11371, 180. 88 Ibid., 204. 89 Fitzgerald, A Day, 2. 90 Robson, Ten Cents, 69. 91 Hedley, Oral history. 92 Greenwood, Oral history. 93 Leonard Williams, Oral history. IWM Sound 11542. 94 Thompson, Into the Sun, 199. 95 Malaka, qtd. in Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 232–33. 96 Jan Krancher, ed. The Defining Years of the Dutch East Indies, 1942– 1949: Survivors’ Accounts of Japanese Invasion and Enslavement of Europeans and the Revolution That Created Free Indonesia (Jefferson: MacFarland, 1996), 6–7. 97 Post et al., Encyclopedia, 174. 98 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 342. 99 Neumann and Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 39. 100 War Office, List of Deaths, n.p. 101 Clifford Kinvig, ‘Allied POWs and the Burma–Thailand Railway’, in Japanese Prisoners of War. Edited by P. Towle, M. Kosuge and Yoichi Kibata (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), 47. 102 Ibid., 44. 103 Neumann and van Witsen, Sumatra Railway, 118. 104 Naval Intelligence Division, Geographical Handbook Series: Netherlands East Indies, vol. 1. (London: Naval Intelligence Division, 1944), 48. 105 Braithwaite, Report, 1–6. 106 Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, Oral History. IWM Sound 8458. For an example of the order that was given for the ‘final disposition’ of all Allied POWs in Japanese hands, in which camp commandants were ordered to ‘annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces’, see ‘Order to kill all POWS’, www.mansell.com/pow_resources/ Formosa/doc2701-trans.html (accessed 19 October 2016). 107 BBC, ‘People’s War’, www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories/c1204/index.shtml (accessed 8 February 2014). 108 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 12. 109 ‘Allied POW Captured in the Far East and Hong Kong: camps, treatment etc.’, TNA CAB 100/199, n.p. 110 ‘The editor writes’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 1 (1944), 1. 111 ‘How to write to civilians’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 3 (1944), 8.

Notes

143

112 ‘The editor writes’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 4 (1944), 1. 113 The writing of letters, rather than postcards, was permitted by the Japanese in some areas of the Far East, notably from the camps in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. 114 ‘Official reports from the camps’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 4 (1944), 4. 115 ‘Civilian news on Sumatra’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 7. (1945), 10. 116 David Tett, A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in South East Asia During World War Two. Volume 2: Dutch East Indies 1942–1946. Paradise Lost (Wheathampstead: BFA, 2004), 197. 117 ‘Free at last! And on their way’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 10 (1945), 8. 118 Oliver, Sinkings. 119 Edward Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 50. 120 Flower, Captors and Captives, 240. 121 Wilfred Owen Greenwood, Oral history, IWM Sound 4990. 122 ‘Editor writes: September 1945’, Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 10 (1945), 1. 123 H. Wilson, ‘A prisoner in Siam’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 6 (1945), 4.

Chapter 2 1 Thomas Chatfield, Sackcloths and Orchids, Private papers of TH Chatfield, IWM Documents.9783, i. 2 Ibid., 10. 3 This is most likely to be a reference to peripheral neuropathy, a condition that indicates damage to the peripheral nervous system (those nerves outside of the cranium and spinal cord), with symptoms commonly including aching, tingling and itching skin and especially hypersensitivity of the feet. Vitamin deficiency and physical injury are common causes of the condition, which ties in with hard labour often carried out in bare feet on a starvation diet. 4 Chatfield, Sackcloths, 7. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., i. 7 Helen Buss, ‘Memoirs’, in Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Edited by Margaretta Jolly (London: Routledge, 2001), 595.

144

Notes

8 Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 156. 9 Chatfield, Sackloths, 13. 10 Ben Wicks, Welcome Home: True Stories of Soldiers Returning from World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 1991) and Julie Summers, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War (London: Simon & Schuster, 2008). 11 Chatfield, Sackloths, 13–14. 12 Tim O Brien, The Things They Carried (London: Flamingo, 1991). 13 Ibid., 179. 14 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011), 220–21. 15 Parsons, Letter from Mamie, 8 June 1943. 16 Clare Makepeace, ‘Living beyond the Barbed Wire: The familial ties of British prisoners of war held in Europe during the Second World War’, Historical Research 86: 231 (2003), 164. 17 It was a format used by other POWs too, who wrote their diaries directly to wives and sweethearts back home. 18 Makepeace, Living beyond, 161. 19 James Pentney, Memoir, Private papers of JD Pentney, IWM Documents.20664, 18. 20 Tett, Postal History. 21 Allan Munro, ‘So What Did You Do in the War Dad? Asked My Daughter Judy’, Private papers of AA Munro, IWM Documents.21577, 10. 22 Parsons, Diary, n.d. 23 John Sharples, Private papers, IWM Documents.20664, n.p. 24 Andrea Peterson, ‘War diaries and journals’, in Jolly, Encyclopedia, 926. 25 Margaret Homberger, ‘Prison writings’, in Jolly, Encyclopedia, 730. 26 Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 315–16. 27 Ibid., 353. 28 Ibid., 370. 29 Joseph Fitzgerald, If You See Any Japs Don’t Shoot, the Dutch Have Capitulated, Private papers of J G Fitzgerald, IWM Documents.8209, 1. 30 Gerald Tait, Private papers of GT Tait. IWM Documents 65/166/1. 31 Jones, Violence against, 370. 32 Ian Mackintosh, Diary, Private papers of Captain I Mackintosh RAMC, IWM Documents.21580, n.p. 33 Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 170.

Notes

145

34 Note that the correct spelling is ‘kerbau’, not ‘kerban’ as Parsons had written in his diary. 35 Parsons, Diary, 8 January 1945. 36 Albert Simmonds, Diary, Private papers of AB Simmonds, IWM Documents.21578, 18 September 1942. Underline found in the original. 37 Makepeace, Living beyond, 166. 38 Parsons, Diary, 25 December 1944. 39 Munro, So What, 10. 40 Boulter, Memoirs, 150. 41 Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 45. 42 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1996), 5. 43 G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9. 44 Michael Nellis, Freeing the Demons: Memories of Pop, IWM (not yet catalogued), 101. 45 Fitzgerald, A Day, 3–4. 46 Fitzgerald, If You See, 59–61. 47 Fitzgerald, A Day, 12. 48 Rowland Pressdee, Memoir, Private papers of R. Pressdee, IWM Documents (not yet catalogued), 2. 49 Ibid., 4. 50 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 150. 51 James Cuthbertson, Private papers of J. Cuthbertson, IWM Documents.21579, n.p. 52 Boulter, Memoirs, n.p. 53 Chatfield, Sackcloths, 1. 54 Official reports and MI9 interrogation forms also cross-reference liberated POW statements. For example, John Hedley, James Matheson and Dudley Matthews testified to planning an escape attempt, each signing individual copies of the same report and referencing one another in separate evidence; and David Fiennes’s MI9 statement includes an explicit note to the reader, instructing them to refer to a report provided by another POW. 55 Surr, Trust in God, 41, 46. 56 Ibid., 46. 57 Boulter, Memoirs, n.p. 58 Smith, One Man, 73–74. 59 Freeman, Memoir, 3. 60 Saunders, It Seems, 151. 61 Ibid.

146

Notes

62 Pentney, Memoir, 14. 63 Ibid., 19. 64 Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art (Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 2002), 55. 65 Frederick Douglas, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, A Slave. Kindle file, 29. 66 Saunders, It Seems, 147, 140. 67 McLoughlin, Authoring, 156. 68 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Kindle file, 28. 69 Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 191. 70 Wilfred Owen, ‘Insensibility’, in War Poems and Others. Edited by Dominic Hibberd (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), 89–90. 71 Fitzgerald, If You See, 64. 72 Hartley, Escape, 173. 73 Penry M. Rees, ‘Hell’s Railway’, More Poems of the Second World War: The Oasis Selection. Edited by Victor Selwyn (London: J. M. Dent, 1989). 74 Rees, Hell, 11,1,93, 13–16. 75 Smith, One Man, 123. 76 Harold Goulding, Yasmé: Some Random Recollections of a Former FEPOW, Private papers of H B Goulding, IWM Documents.3807, 2. 77 Rees, Hell, 49, 75, 76. 78 Ikuhiko Hata, ‘From consideration to contempt: the changing nature of Japanese military and popular perceptions of Prisoners of War through the ages’, in Prisoners of War, 253–76. 79 For a detailed discussion of the implications of using the trochaic form, see Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 50–60. 80 Rees, Hell, 65–68. 81 Ibid., 97, 69. 82 Brewer, Memoir, Private papers of F Brewer, IWM Documents.21574, 91. 83 Fiennes, private papers, n.p. 84 Ibid.; Brewer, private papers, n.p. 85 Midge Gillies, The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War (London: Aurum Press, 2012), 212. 86 Richard Kandler, The Prisoner List: A True Story of Defeat, Captivity and Salvation in the Far East: 1941–45 (Milton Keynes: Marsworth, 2010), 128. 87 Jacobs, Incidents, 106. 88 Douglass, Narrative, 44. 89 See Eldredge, Captive Audiences/Captive Performers. 90 Parsons, Diary, 9 December 1944.

Notes 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105

Hartley, Escape, 189. Ibid., 84. Simmonds, 26 December 1942. Hartley, Escape, 70. Goulding, Oral history, IWM Sound 4808. See Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992). For a summary of the literature that proved popular both in Britain and among Allied troops abroad during the Second World War, see Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 228–52. For a response to Fussell’s work that offers a comparative analysis on the poetry produced from the First and Second World Wars, see Janis P. Stout, Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars (Tucaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). For a summary of correspondence received from literary figures by one POW in Europe, and the books that were read by POWs (and censored by their guards) in European camps, see Gillies, Barbed-Wire, 247–63. Hartley, Escape, 70. Simmonds, 21 April 1942, 23 November 1942, 17 October 1942, 26 November 1942. Ibid., 20 December 1942. Goulding, Yasmé, 35–36. Ibid., 44–45. For a list of eighty Penguin POW titles, see Joe Pearson, Penguins March On: Books for the Forces during World War II (Chippenham: Penguin Collectors’ Society, 1996), 47–49. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2011), 19. Fiennes, Notebook, Private papers of DEM Fiennes, IWM Documents.13219, n.p. Boulter, Memoirs, 160.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6

147

Fiennes, Private papers, n.p. Ibid. Ibid. Nellis, Freeing, 38. I. H. Mitchell, Private papers of I. H. Mitchell, IWM Documents.3223. Grace Huxford, ‘ “Write your life!”: British Prisoners of War in the Korean War (1950–1953) and enforced life narratives’, Life Writing 12:1 (2015): 3–23.

148

Notes

7 For an example, see ‘Documents relating to Prisoners of War in the Far East, 1942– 1945’, IWM Documents.8370. 8 Hartley, Escape, 88. It is likely that Hartley’s tutor was my grandfather, Stanley Russell. 9 Hedley, Oral history. 10 Thompson, Into the Sun, 176 11 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (London: Maclehose Press, 2009), 371. 12 Ibid., 353. 13 Frank Bell, Undercover University: Artes in Arduis. (Cambridge: Elisabeth Bell, 2001), 70, 20. 14 See Brewer, Private papers and Sharples. 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293. 16 Ibid. 17 Eco, Infinity, 67. 18 Parsons, Diary, 6 February 1945, 28 June 1945. 19 Thompson, Into the Sun, 145. 20 Robson, Ten Cents, 46. 21 Smith, One Man, 72. 22 Parsons, Diary, 25 April 1945, 2 May 1945, 3 August 1945. 23 Ibid., 5–6 May 1945. 24 Thompson, Into the Sun, 175. 25 Parsons, Diary, 3 September 1945. 26 Ibid., 3 December 1944. 27 Fitzgerald, If You See, 39. 28 Surr, Trust in God, 38. 29 Parsons, Diary, 31 December 1944, 9 April 1945, 22 May 1945, 24 July 1945. 30 Robson, Ten Cents, 49. 31 Thompson, Into the Sun, 159. 32 Robson, Ten Cents, 56. 33 Smith, One Man, 75. 34 Fitzgerald, If You See, 61. 35 Parsons, Diary. 36 Ibid., 16 February 1945. 37 Ibid., 1 April 1945. 38 Saunders, Journey, 181. 39 Surr, Trust in God, 38. 40 Fitzgerald, If You See, 56. 41 Smith, One Man, 89.

Notes

149

42 Boulter, Memoir, 139. 43 Joshua A. Fishman, ‘Who speaks what language to whom and when?’ in Wei, Bilingualism, 61. 44 Boulter, Memoirs, n.p. 45 Thompson, Into the Sun, 187–88. 46 Jan-Petter Blom and John J. Gumpertz, ‘Social meaning in linguistic structure: code-switching in Norway’, in The Bilingualism Reader (2nd edn). Edited by Li Wei (London: Routledge, 2007), 75. 47 Thompson, Into the Sun, 187. 48 Boulter, Memoirs, n.p. 49 Shana Poplack, ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en espaňol: toward a typology of code-switching’, in Wei, Bilingualism, 217. 50 Blom and Gumpertz, Social Meaning, 88. 51 Goulding, Oral history. 52 Brewer, Memoir, 103. 53 Fitzgerald, A Day, 4. 54 Krancher, Defining Years, 6. 55 Goulding, Oral history. 56 Arthur Baxter, Oral history, IWM Sound 13278. 57 Ibid. 58 David R. Cole and Linda J. Graham, ed. The Power In/Of Language (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012), n.p. 59 Andrea Mayr, Prison Discourse: Language as a Means of Control and Resistance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 22. 60 Gillies, Barbed-Wire, 219. 61 Linda J. Graham, ‘The product of text and “other” statements: discourse analysis and the critical use of Foucault’, in Cole and Graham, Power In/Of, 120. 62 Smith, One Man, 90. 63 Parsons, Diary, 10 November 1944. 64 Boulter, Memoirs, 142–43. 65 Saunders, Journey, 181–82. 66 Fitzgerald, If You See, 181, 67. 67 Tan Twen Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Newcastle: Myrmidon Books, 2011), 254. 68 Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Edited by Robert Young (London: Routledge, 1981), 52–53. 69 Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Vintage, 1995), 33. 70 Mary Somers Heidhues, ‘Kongsi’ in Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor, vol. 1. Edited by Ooi Keat Gin (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 742–43.

150 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95

96 97 98 99

100

Notes John G. Lee, Private papers of JG Lee, IWM Documents.1925, 11. Thompson, Into the Sun, 162. Goulding, Yasmé, 2. Thompson, Into the Sun, 162. Robson, Ten Cents, 62. Tindle died on 8 April 1945 and is buried at the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Jakarta, at Plot 1.E.21. See Jakarta War Cemetery, www.cwgc.org/ find-a-cemetery/cemetery/2014900/Jakarta%20War%20Cemetery (accessed 19 October 2016). Surr, Trust in God, 41. Smith, One Man, 1. Ibid., 80. Ibid. Ibid. Saunders, Journey, 188. Smith, One Man, 81. Saunders, Journey, 188. Ibid. Smith, One Man, 81. Saunders, Journey, 189–190. Smith, One Man, 81. Ibid., 191. Saunders, Journey, 191, 194. Ibid., 192. Smith, One Man, 81. For discussion on the differences between the three concepts, see A. P. Martinich, ed. The Philosophy of Language (5th edn.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 541–45. Smith, One Man, 81. Michael Billig, ‘Preface: language as forms of death’, in At War with Words. Edited by Mirjana N. Dedaić and Daniel N. Nelson (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), xiii. Smith, One Man, 86. Ibid., 81–86 Ibid., 86. Cuthbertson, Private papers, 55. The Japanese forced Allied POWs to sign a pledge not to attempt to escape from captivity, contravening the Geneva Convention; when POWs refused to sign these forms they received severe punishments. This occurred on Sumatra in Gloegoer in September 1942 (see diary of Simmonds). Smith, One Man, 86.

Notes

151

101 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 209. 102 Smith, One Man, 86. 103 Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad, 346.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

Robson, Ten Cents, 50. Ibid., 59. Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 225–26. Robson, Ten Cents, 60. Braddon, Naked Island, 225–26. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. Ibid. Braddon, Naked Island, 225. Scarry, Body, 10. Smith, One Man, 92. For detail of the work of Dutch medics, see Hovinga, Sumatra Railroad. John Wyatt, Private papers of J. C. Wyatt, IWM Documents 60/19/1, 27. Ibid., 27–28. Braithwaite, Report, 3. Wyatt, Private papers, 29. See, for example, Meg Parkes, ‘Tins, tubes and tenacity: inventive medicine in camps in the Far East’, in Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity behind Barbed Wire. Edited by Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 51–65. Wyatt, Private papers, 29, 33. Braithwaite, Report, 1. Wyatt, Private papers, 29. Freeman, Memoir, 4. Boulter, Memoirs, 154. Fitzgerald, If You See, 77–80. Wyatt, Private papers, 30. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34–38. For Camp Two as drawn in 1944, see http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=urn:gvn:M USE01:4397; for Camp Two as drawn in 1945, see http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn =urn:gvn:MUSE01:4399 (accessed 20 October 2016). Wyatt, Private papers, 40.

152

Notes

28 Imogen Holmes, ‘Retracing my father’s footsteps in Sumatra’, www. malayanvolunteersgroup.org.uk/node/457 (accessed 19 October 2016), 1. 29 A former POW with the Australian Imperial Forces, Bill Davies, remembered that Kirkwood had found himself in ‘trouble with the guards whilst trying to stop them from entering the Hospital hut with their rifles’, maintaining a stance that to do so would be against the rules of the Geneva Convention: William Davies, ‘The Sumatra Railway’ (2006), www.pows-of-japan.net/articles/66.htm (accessed 26 January 2014). 30 Author’s correspondence with Imogen Holmes, Patrick Kirkwood’s daughter. 31 Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum, ‘The importance of creativity behind barbed wire: setting a research agenda’, in Carr and Maytum, Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War, 5–6. 32 Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill, Captive Memories: Starvation, Disease, Survival – Far East POWs & Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015). 33 Author’s correspondence with Rod Suddaby and Jenny Wood, 2011–2015. 34 See Private papers of WEH Lang, IWM Documents.11114. 35 Henk Hovinga’s research on the Sumatra Railway includes sketches created by other Dutch former POWs including representations of the hong at Camp One (104) and working parties on the railway itself (106–109, 130–139). 36 For examples of Russell’s artwork, see ‘Medan Oil Dump’, http://resolver.kb.nl/res olve?urn=urn:gvn:MUSE01:11467; ‘On the Road from Padang to Medan’, http:// resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=urn:gvn:MUSE01:11472; ‘Judy’, http://resolver.kb.nl/res olve?urn=urn:gvn:MUSE01:11470 (accessed 20 October 2016). 37 See ‘Dysentery in Medan’, http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=urn:gvn:M USE01:11486 (accessed 20 October 2016). 38 Most likely to be Warrant Officer Edward W. Porter; became POW at Padang on Sumatra, 17 March 1942. 39 Simmonds, Diary, December 15 1942. 40 Edwin Varley, The Judy Story: The Dog with Six Lives (London: Souvenir Press, 1973); Damien Lewis, Judy: A Dog in a Million (London: Quercus, 2014); Robert Weintraub, No Better Friend (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). 41 Boulter, Memoirs, 140. 42 Smith, One Man, 93. 43 Parsons, Diary, 28 September 1944. 44 Fitzgerald, A Day, 3, 9. 45 Fitzgerald, If You See, 62. 46 Robson, Ten Cents, 55. 47 Braddon, Naked Island, 223 48 Braddon, Naked Island, 223–24. 49 Ibid., 223. 50 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 65, 72.

Notes

153

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Boulter, Memoirs, 164. Goulding, Yasmé, 61 Ibid. Robson, Ten Cents, 55. Freeman, Memoir, 4. Frederick Freeman, ‘Pensions appeal tribunal assessment’, Private papers. Ibid., 13–16. Ibid., 22–79. Freeman, Memoir, n.p. Freeman, Private papers. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 7. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 10. 66 Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir (London: Vintage, 2000), 7–8.

Chapter 5 1 Gideon Jacobs, Prelude to the Monsoon: Assignment in Sumatra (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 7. 2 Ibid., 71–100. 3 Ibid., 102. 4 Cooper, n.p. 5 R. W. Cobb, Letter, 21 September 1945 in Freeman, Private papers. 6 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 7 For an example of a poster, see http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/ 10364 (accessed 19 October 2016). 8 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994 (London: Pimlico, 2002), 317. 9 War Office, Settling Down in Civvy Street. For an example, see Private papers of J. A. Pearce, IWM Documents.9387. 10 Shephard, War, 317. 11 Ibid., 317–320. 12 Ibid., 319. 13 War Office, Settling Down.

154

Notes

14 Goulding, Yasmé, 62. 15 C. Barclay Miller, ‘In the balance’, The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 4 (1947), n.p. 16 ‘Bringing Them Home’, in Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 10 (1945), 3. 17 Ibid., 3. 18 War Office, Letter on ‘Posting’, 1. Sharples, Private papers. 19 War Office, Settling Down. 20 Ibid. 21 Parsons, Diary, 13 November 1945. 22 Boulter, Memoirs, 165. 23 Cuthbertson, Private papers, 73. 24 Shephard, War, 322. 25 Parkes and Gill, Captive Memories, 219–226. 26 Gill, ‘Mortality’, 13. 27 Viscount Tarbat, ‘The problem of resettlement’, The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 2 (1946), n.p. 28 ‘Future “Clarions” ’, The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 20 (1949), n.p.For an analysis of the immediate post-war bonds forged between former European POWs, compared to those forged between former Far Eastern POWs, see Clare Makepeace, ‘ “For ALL who were captured”? The evolution of the national ex-prisoner of war associations in Britain after the Second World War’. Journal of War and Culture Studies 7: 3 (2014), 253–68. 29 ‘Railroad of dead men: survivors recall the jungle camps’. The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 16 (1949), n.p. 30 ‘Boar or Python’. The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 16 (1949), n.p. 31 ‘Railroad of Dead Men’, n.p. 32 Trebble, ‘Other’, n.p. 33 John Sharp, Collection of Cuttings Relating to the Claim for Compensation from the Japanese from Ex-prisoners of War, 1949–51, IWM LBY 84/1123, n.p. 34 ‘Minutes of the meeting of the sub-committee of the F.E.P.O.W Association’, 19 September, 1, in Sharp, Collection. 35 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 13 June 1950, vol. 476, col. 179 36 See, for example, Hansard: 14 June 1950; 10 and 30 May 1951; 12 July 1951; 26 and 28 November 51; 30 July 1954; 23 July 1956. 37 See, for example, Hansard: 14 June 1950; 10 and 30 May 1951; 12 July 1951; 26 and 28 November 51; 30 July 1954; 23 July 1956; plus Sharp, Collection. 38 J. P. Howard, Letter to members of the Select Committee set up to manage the claim for compensation. October 1950. Private papers of Harold Payne, IWM Documents 66/330/4.

Notes

155

39 Select Committee for Claim against Japanese Frozen Assets, on behalf of The Far East P.O.W. Social Club. Ex-Prisoners of War Far East (1941–1945). The Claim for Compensation: Pamphlet 2. 1950. Private papers of Harold Payne. IWM 66/330/ 4, 1–6. 40 Ibid., 6 41 ‘Minutes’, 3. 42 Hansard, 10 May 1951, vol. 487, col. 2219–77. 43 Hansard, 7 December 2000, vol. 356, col. 159–70. 44 John Faithfull, ‘Captain John Faithfull thanks Fepows’. The Clarion. The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association 29 (1951), n.p. 45 Sharp, Collection, n.p. 46 For the full version of the prayer, see Arthur Ogden and Victor Merrett, ‘The FEPOW Prayer’, www.fepow-day.org/html/fepow_prayer.htm (accessed 20 October 2016). 47 Fitzgerald, If You See, 1. 48 ‘Future “Clarions” ’, n.p. 49 Derived from Kriegsgefangenen, the German term for ‘Prisoners of War’. 50 Each local social club or association developed a newsletter, such as ‘The FEPOW Forum’, which was the newsletter for the London FEPOW Association; ‘FEPOW Fanfare’, the newsletter for the Duchy of Cornwall FEPOW Association; and ‘FEPOW Focus’, the newsletter for the Manchester and District FEPOW Association. 51 Toby Haggith, ‘Great Britain: Remembering a just war (1945–1950)’, in The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Lothar Kettenacker and Torsten Riotte (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 237–38. 52 Haggith, ‘Great Britain’, 241. 53 Tett, Research Catalogue, PDF file. 54 Author’s correspondence with Stephen Walton, Senior Curator, IWM, 31 January 2014. This estimated figure also includes collections related to the experiences of civilian internees in the Far East. There is no way of identifying the exact number of Far Eastern POW collections held at IWM, many of which are yet to be entered onto the publicly searchable catalogue. 55 For examples, see Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave, 1996); Hoffman, Generation; Hirsch, Generation, 2012. 56 Hirsch, Generation, 5–6. 57 See Julie Summers Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War (London: Simon & Schuster, 2008); Meg Parkes, Notify Alec Rattray . . . (Wirral: Kranji, 2002). 58 Anon 1952b; Thrale Press Cuttings, 1

156

Notes

59 I have examined twelve of the thirteen Thrale visitor books; the thirteenth requires conservation and therefore has not been handled. Three additional volumes contain cuttings of newspaper reviews of the exhibition up until the mid-1950s. 60 Nicholas Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 154. 61 Hirsch, Generation, 20–21. 62 Charles Thrale, The Valleys of the Shadow of Death (13th edn) (Bridlington: Woodhouse, 1961), 2. 63 Charles Thrale, The Valleys of the Shadow of Death (1st edn) (Bridlington: Woodhouse, 1947), 2. 64 Anon 1950a; Anon 1952a. 65 Anon 1951c; Anon 1952c; Bruce 1952, all quoted in Thrale 1946–1961. 66 Thrale, Valleys, 1961, 8. 67 Ibid., 1–26. 68 Ibid., 23. 69 Edward Dunlop, ‘Medical Experiences in Japanese Captivity’, British Medical Journal 2: 4474 (1946): 481–86. 70 Thrale, Valleys, 1961, 2–8. 71 Thrale, Visitor Book 1952–1953, in Charles Thrale, Collection: Material Relating to Charles Thrale Exhibition, Art.IWM ARCH 41. n.p. 72 Thrale, Visitor Book: Public 1951, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 73 Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts, 220. 74 Thrale, Visitor Book: Prisoners of War 1951, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 75 Thrale, Valleys, 1961, 2. 76 Thrale, Visitor Book: Prisoners of War 1951, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 77 Thrale, Valleys, 1961, 5. 78 Thrale, Valleys. 79 See: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004). 80 Parkes, Notify, viii. 81 Thrale, Visitor Book: Public 1953–1955, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 82 Thrale, Visitor Book 1958–1960, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 83 Rothberg, Multidirectional, 3. 84 One of Searle’s images from this series is held by the Imperial War Museum: ‘The Trial of Adolf Eichmann’, IWM ART 17450. 85 Thrale, Visitor Book 1961–1963, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 86 Rothberg, Multidirectional. 87 Thrale, Visitor Book 1952–1953, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 88 April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992). 89 Thrale, Visitor Book: Prisoners of War 1953–1957, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. 90 For examples, see Spiegelman, Maus; Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts; Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011).

Notes 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112

157

Thrale, Visitor Book 1952–1953, in Thrale, Collection. n. p. Thrale, Visitor Book: Public 1951, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. Thrale, Visitor Book 1955–1961, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. Thrale, Visitor Book 1961–1963, in Thrale, Collection. n.p. Jay Prosser, ‘Introduction’, in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. Edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser. (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 10. Thrale, Visitor Book: Public 1951, in Thrale, Collection. n.pag. Thrale, Visitor Book 1955–1961, in Thrale, Collection. n. pag. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), xi. Derrida, Archive, 62. Ibid., i. Ibid., 35–36. Carol Cooper, ‘The lost diary’, www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/stories_lostdiary.html (accessed 20 October 2016). Ibid. COFEPOW, ‘The appeal’, www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/appeal.html (accessed 20 October 2016). COFEPOW, ‘The charity’, www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/charity.html (accessed 20 October 2016). COFEPOW, ‘Appeal’. FEPOW Fellowship, ‘What is the FEPOW Fellowship?’, PDF file. n.p. Such transferences occurred in private spaces too. As her father, a former POW on Java, was dying, Parkes felt that ‘it seemed as though he wanted to “hand over” ’, and she has since transcribed and published two edited volumes of his POW diaries (Notify, 68). Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 91. Malayan Volunteers Group, www.malayanvolunteersgroup.org.uk/ (accessed 26 January 2014). Holmes, Following, 1. Ibid., 3

Afterword 1 Terry Hadoke, Correspondence with author. 2 Ibid.

Selected Bibliography Archival Materials Australian War Memorial ‘Pakanbaru. POW camp, Sumatra’. 15 September 1945. F02170. https://www.awm.gov. au/collection/F02170/.

Imperial War Museum (London), Department of Documents and Sound (IWM) Baxter, Arthur L. Oral history, recorded 1993. IWM Sound 13278. Boulter, John. Private papers. IWM Documents.11265. Brewer, Frank. Private papers. IWM Documents.21574. Chatfield, Thomas. Private papers. IWM Documents.9783. The Clarion: The Official Organ of the Returned British Prisoner of War Association. IWM LBY E.J.983. Cooper, Stanley. Private papers. IWM 13/23/1. Cunyngham-Brown, Sjovald. Oral history, recorded 1983. IWM Sound 8458. Cuthbertson, James. Private papers. IWM Documents.21579. Fiennes, David. Private papers. IWM Documents.13219. Fitzgerald, Joseph. Private papers. IWM Documents.8209. Freeman, Frederick. Private papers. IWM Documents.14046. Gotto, Basil. Private papers. IWM Documents.21576. Goulding, Harold. Oral history, recorded 1981. IWM Sound 4808. Goulding, Harold. Private papers. IWM Documents.3807. Greenwood, Wilfred. Oral history, recorded 1981. IWM Sound 4990. Hedley, John. Oral history, recoded 2002. IWM Sound 23219. Lang, Walter. Private papers. IWM Documents.11114. Lee, John. Private papers. IWM Documents.1925. Munro, Allan. Private papers. IWM Documents.21577. Nellis, Michael. Private papers. IWM (not yet catalogued). Parsons, John. Private papers. IWM Documents.18760. Payne, Harold. Private papers. IWM Documents.66/330. Pentney, James. Private papers. IWM Documents.20664.

160

Selected Bibliography

Pressdee, Rowland. Private papers. IWM (not yet catalogued). Red Cross and St. John War Organisation. Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’. IWM E.10426 – MS/E/S. Robson, Kenneth. Private papers. IWM Documents.11338. Saunders, Jack. Private papers. IWM Documents.11371. Sharp, John. Collection of Cuttings Relating to the Claim for Compensation from the Japanese from Ex-prisoners of War, 1949–51. IWM LBY 84/1123. Sharples, John. Private papers. IWM 65/165/1. Simmonds, Albert. Private papers. IWM Documents.21578. Smith, Walter. Private papers. IWM Documents.8443. Surr, James. Private papers. IWM Documents.13623. Thompson, Claude. Private papers. IWM Documents.4491. Thrale, Charles. Material Relating to Charles Thrale Exhibition. Art.IWM ARCH 41. Williams, Leonard. Oral history, recorded 1990. IWM Sound 11542. Wyatt, Cameron. Private papers. IWM Documents 60/19/1.

The National Archives, Kew (TNA) Allied Land Forces South East Asia. Weekly Intelligence Review 9 and 10. December 1944. TNA WO208/1623. Braithwaite, Robert. Medical Report on Conditions at No 3 POW Camp, Pekanbaroe, Sumatra, from 14 July 1944 to 24 August 1945. TNA WO361/1618. Kavanagh, Patrick. MI9 Statement: Account of Events Leading Up to Capture. TNA WO361/1672. War Office. Liberated Prisoner of War Interrogation Questionnaires (Japan Subseries). TNA WO344/361–410. War Office. List of Available Death Certificates for Deceased British, British Indian, American and Australian Personnel. August 1946. TNA WO361/1513.

NIOD Davis, Patrick S. Report to Office of the Judge Advocate General: ‘In the Matter of the IllTreatment of British Prisoners of War in Java and Sumatra between 1942 and 1945’. 1945. NIOD 400/4538.

Private Collections Hedley, John. ‘My War History’. 2007.

Selected Bibliography

161

Hesford, Arthur. ‘Personal Account of Official Escape Party of Two Officers and Twenty-Four Warrant Officers and NCOs of First Battalion, the Manchester Regiment from Singapore, February 14, 1942 to Padang, Sumatra, March 17, 1942’. 2001.

Secondary Materials Abraham, Nicholas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Nicholas Rand. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Ahmed, Sarah. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Ahmed, Sarah and Jackie Stacey, eds. Thinking through the Skin. London: Routledge, 2004.Appignanesi, Lisa. Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir. London: Vintage, 2000. Apthorp, A. A. The British Sumatra Battalion. Lewes: The Book Guild, 1988. Archer, Bernice. The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941– 1945: A Patchwork of Internment. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Discourse in the Novel’. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259–422. Banning, Jan. Traces of War: Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways. London: Trolley, 2005. Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 2002. BBC. ‘People’s War’. www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories/c1204/index.shtml. Bell, Frank. Undercover University: Artes in Arduis. Cambridge: Elisabeth Bell, 2001. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC. Duke University Press, 2008. Billig, Michael. ‘Preface: Language as Forms of Death’. In At War with Words. Edited by Mirjana N. Dedaić and Daniel N. Nelson. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. vii–xvii. Blom, Jan-Petter and John J. Gumpertz. ‘Social Meaning in Linguistic Structure: CodeSwitching in Norway’. In The Bilingualism Reader (2nd edn). Edited by Li Wei. London: Routledge, 2007. 75–96. Braddon, Russell. The Naked Island. New York: Atheneum, 1982. Brooke, Geoffrey. Singapore’s Dunkirk. London: Leo Cooper, 1989. Buss, Helen M. ‘Memoirs’. In Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Edited by Margaretta Jolly. London: Routledge, 2001. 595–97. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Carr, Edward H. What Is History? London: Penguin Books, 1987. Carr, Gilly and Harold Mytum, eds. Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity behind Barbed Wire. London: Routledge, 2012.

162

Selected Bibliography

Carter, April. Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945. London: Longman, 1992. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. COFEPOW. ‘COFEPOW Database’. www.cofepowdb.org.uk/cdb/Index.jsp. COFEPOW. ‘The Appeal’. www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/appeal.html. COFEPOW. ‘The Charity’. www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/charity.html. Cole, David R., and Linda J. Graham, eds. The Power In/Of Language. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Connerton, Paul. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Cooper, Carol. ‘The Lost Diary’. 1999. www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/stories_lostdiary. html. Cottam, Rachel. ‘Diaries and Journals: General Survey’. In Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Edited by Margaretta Jolly. London: Routledge, 2001. 267–69. Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Davies, William. ‘The Sumatra Railway’. Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942–1945. 2006. www.pows-of-japan.net/articles/66.htm. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2011. Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. London: Maclehose Press, 2009. Eldredge, Sears. Captive Audiences/Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival on the Thailand–Burma Railway, 1942–1945. Macalester College, 2014. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thdabooks/1/ (accessed 19 October 2016). FEPOW Community. ‘Sumatra Railway’. www.fepow-community.org.uk/monthly_ Revue/html/sumatra_railway.htm (accessed 28 February 2012). Fishman, Joshua. ‘Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When?’ In The Bilingualism Reader (2nd edn). Edited by Li Wei. London: Routledge, 2007. 55–70. Flower, Sibylla Jane. ‘Captors and Captives on the Burma-Thailand Railway’. In Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II. Edited by Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich. Oxford: Berg, 1996. 227–52. Foucault, Michel. ‘The Order of Discourse’. In Untying The Text: A Post-structuralist Reader. Edited by Robert Young. London: Routledge, 1981. 51–78. Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: McGraw Hill, 1979. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gill, Geoff. ‘Study of Mortality and Autopsy Findings amongst Former Prisoners of the Japanese’. Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps 129 (1983): 11–13.

Selected Bibliography

163

Gill, Geoff and Dion Bell. ‘Persisting Tropical Diseases amongst Former Prisoners of War of the Japanese’. Practitioner 224 (1980): 801–3. Gill, Geoff and Dion Bell. ‘The Health of Former Prisoners of War of the Japanese’. Practitioner 225 (1981): 531–38. Gillies, Midge. The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War. London: Aurum Press, 2012. Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002. Haggith, Toby. ‘Great Britain: Remembering a Just War (1945–1950)’. In The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Lothar Kettenacker and Torsten Riotte. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. 225–56. Hansard. House of Commons Debates. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com (accessed 27 October 2016). Hartley, Peter. Escape to Captivity. London: J. M. Dent, 1952. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave, 1996. Hass, Aaron. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Hata, Ikuhiko. ‘From Consideration to Contempt: The Changing Nature of Japanese Military and Popular Perceptions of Prisoners of War through the Ages’. In Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II. Edited by Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich. Oxford: Berg, 1996. 253–76. Havers, Robert. Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011. Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Holmes, Imogen. ‘Retracing My Father’s Footsteps in Sumatra’. Malayan Volunteers Group. www.malayanvolunteersgroup.org.uk/node/457 (accessed 2 March 2014). Homberger, Margaret. ‘Prison Writings’. In Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Edited by Margaretta Jolly. London: Routledge, 2001. 728–30. Hovinga, Henk. The Sumatra Railroad: Final Destination Pakan Baroe, 1943–1945. Translated by Bernard J. Wolters (5th edn). Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010. Howarth, Peter. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Pimlico, 1992. Jacobs, Gideon. Prelude to the Monsoon: Assignment in Sumatra. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

164

Selected Bibliography

Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Routledge, 2001. Jones, Heather. Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kandler, Richard. The Prisoner List: A True Story of Defeat, Captivity and Salvation in the Far East: 1941–45. Marsworth Publishing, 2010. Kennedy, Joseph. When Singapore Fell: Evacuations and Escape, 1941–42. London: Macmillan, 1989. Kinvig, Clifford. ‘Allied POWs and the Burma–Thailand Railway’. In Japanese Prisoners of War. Edited by P. Towle, M. Kosuge and Yoichi Kibata. London: Hambledon and London, 2000. 37–57. Krancher, Jan, ed. The Defining Years of the Dutch East Indies, 1942–1949: Survivors’ Accounts of Japanese Invasion and Enslavement of Europeans and the Revolution That Created Free Indonesia. Jefferson: MacFarland, 1996. Kratoska, Paul. Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories. London: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Laub, Dori, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992. 57–74. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. MacArthur, Brian. Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese 1942–45. London: Time Warner, 2005. Makepeace, Clare. ‘Living beyond the Barbed Wire: The Familial Ties of British Prisoners of War Held in Europe during the Second World War’. Historical Research 86: 231 (2003): 158–77. Makepeace, Clare. ‘For ALL Who Were Captured’? The Evolution of the National Exprisoner of War Associations in Britain after the Second World War’. Journal of War and Culture Studies 7: 3 (2014): 253–68. Martinich, A. P., ed. The Philosophy of Language (5th edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Mayr, Andrea. Prison Discourse: Language as a Means of Control and Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six Million. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Moore, Bob and Kent Fedorowitch, eds. Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II. Oxford: Berg, 1996.

Selected Bibliography

165

Naval Intelligence Division. Geographical Handbook Series: Netherlands East Indies, vol. 1. London: Naval Intelligence Division, 1944. Neumann, Henk and E. van Witsen. The Sumatra Railway, Constructed during the 2nd World War on the Island of Sumatra: A Documentary of Facts Compiled during and Immediately after the War. Studio Pieter Mulier, 1989. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. London: Flamingo. 1991. Ogden, A. and Merrett, V. ‘The FEPOW Prayer’. FEPOW Day. www.fepow-day.org/ html/fepow_prayer.htm (accessed 27 October 2016). Owen, Wilfred. ‘Insensibility’. War Poems and Others. Edited by Dominic Hibberd. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. 89–90. Parkes, Meg. ‘Notify Alec Rattray. . .’ Wirral: Kranji, 2002. Parkes, Meg. ‘Tins, Tubes and Tenacity: Inventive Medicine in Camps in the Far East’. In Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity behind Barbed Wire. Edited by Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. 51–65. Parkes, Meg and Geoff Gill. Captive Memories: Starvation, Disease, Survival – Far East POWs & Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015. Pearson, Joe. Penguins March On: Books for the Forces during World War II. Chippenham: Penguin Collectors’ Society, 1996. Peterson, Andrea. ‘War Diaries and Journals’. In Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Edited by Margaretta Jolly. London: Routledge, 2001. 925–26. Poplack, Shana. ‘Sometimes I’ll Start a Sentence in Spanish y termino en espaňol: Toward a Typology of Code-Switching’. In The Bilingualism Reader (2nd edn). Edited by Li Wei. London: Routledge, 2007. 213–43. Post, Peter, William H. Frederick, Iris Heidebrink and Shigeru Sato, eds. The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War: In Cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Prosser, Jay. ‘Skin Memories’. In Thinking through the Skin. Edited by Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey. London: Routledge, 2004. Rees, Penry M. ‘Hell’s Railway’. In More Poems of the Second World War: The Oasis Selection. Edited by Victor Selwyn. London: J. M. Dent, 1989. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rushdie, Salman. Shame. London: Vintage. 1995. Saunders, Jack. It Seems Like Yesterday. London: Avon Books, 1995. Saunders, Nicholas. Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Perfomativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

166

Selected Bibliography

Shephard, Ben. ‘A Clouded Homecoming’. History Today 46: 8 (1996): 10–13. Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994. London: Pimlico, 2002. Somers Heidhues, Mary. ‘Kongsi’. In Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor, vol. 1. Edited by Ooi Keat Gin. Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2004. 742–43. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004. Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. London: Picador, 2008. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. London: Penguin, 1987. Stout, Janis P. Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars. Tucaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Stubbs, Pam. Unsung Heroes of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines: The Far East Prisoners of War 1941–1945. Lincoln: Tucann Books, 2011. Stubbs, Pam and Les Stubbs. Unsung Heroes of the Royal Air Force: The Far East Prisoners of War 1941–1945. Grantham: Barny Books, 2002. Summers, Julie. Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War. London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Tan Twen Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists. Newcastle: Myrmidon Books, 2011. Tett, David. A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in South East Asia during World War Two. Wheathampstead: BFA, 2002–2011. Thrale, Charles. The Valleys of the Shadow of Death (13th edn). Bridlington: Woodhouse, 1961. Toolan, Michael. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge, 2001. War Office. Settling Down in Civvy Street. Private papers of J. A. Pearce. IWM Documents.9387. Wei, Li, ed. The Bilingualism Reader (2nd edn). London: Routledge, 2007. Werth, Paul. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Harlow : Longman, 1999. Wicks, Ben. Welcome Home: True Stories of Soldiers Returning from World War II. London: Bloomsbury, 1991. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Young, James. ‘Towards a Received History of the Holocaust’. History and Theory 36: 4 (1997): 21–43.

Index Page numbers in bold refer figures. art in camps 92–6, 118–25, 131–2, 136 documentary art 94 IWM review of 94 Thrale exhibition, see Thrale, Charles Atjeh forced marches 13–14 Party xiv, 12–14, 20–2, 48, 89, 92–3 road building xiii–xiv, 13–14 Boulter, John xv, 18, 48, 52, 63, 73–4, 94, 97–8 Braithwaite, Robert Fenton xv, 19, 31, 89 Brewer, Frank xv, 57–8, 69–70 British Sumatra Battalion 11, 31 Burma Siam Railway, see railway Civil Resettlement Units, see repatriation Cunyngham-Brown, Sjovald xv Cuthbertson, James xv, 85 Dallas, Ronald James Grant xv, 83 Davis, Patrick Slaney 18, 81, 105 diary genre of life-writing 4, 36, 37–49, 52–3 kept by POWs 4, 13, 37–49, 45, 58–62, 96–7, 126 language in 71–3 pictorial 95 self-censorship in 40–5, 67 diet and food bartering and sharing 68–70, 79, 94 cooking in camp 17, 74, 77, 79, 90 dreams of food 58–9, 61–2, 72 imagination as sustenance 57–63, 120 malnutrition, effects of 2, 13–14, 30, 51, 70, 97, 100, 108 rice xi, 13, 55, 71–2, 79, 82, 90–1, 93 discourse Bakhtin, Mikhail 5, 70

Foucault, Michel 77–8 POW camp discourse 5, 68–86 disease beri-beri 2, 30, 90, 97, 105, 107 cholera 120 duodenal ulcer 90–91 dysentery 2, 13–14, 30, 46, 80, 87, 89–91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 107, 120 hospital camp x, 13, 18, 22, 80, 89–92, 105, 121 malaria 1–2, 14, 30, 46, 51, 80, 89–92, 97–8, 100–3, 107, tropical ulcers 46, 87–90, 97–8, 104–5, 120–1 Eco, Umberto 69, 78 Far East Prisoner of War (FEPOW) community xiii, 128, 134 National Federation of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War Clubs and Associations (NFFCA) 114–15, 126, 128 National FEPOW Fellowship Welfare Remembrance Association (NFFWRA) 128, 133 origins of 113–16 reunion groups 115–16, 133 spirit 107, 114, 126, 128 Federated Malay States Volunteer Forces (FMSVF) 10, 38 Fiennes, David Eustace Martindale xv, 57–8, 62–3, 65, 67, 75, 78 Fitzgerald, Joseph Graham xv, 24–5, 42, 49–51, 54–5, 63, 73, 77, 90 Fogarty, Derek Robert xvi, 52 Freeman, Frederick George xvi, 16, 52, 100–4 Gill, Geoff 94 Gillies, Midge 58, 77

168 Gloegoer xiv, 13, 44, 60–2, 92, 95–6, 107, 131 Gordon, James Gordon xvi, 15 Gotto, Basil Ashmead xvi Greenwood, Wilfred Owen xvi, 29, 33, 54 Hadoke, Patrick xvi, 131–2 Hartley, Peter Goodwin xvi, 55, 60, 62 Hedley, John xiii–xvi, 10, 13–14, 38, 68, 132 Hesford, Arthur xvi Hirsch, Marianne, see postmemory Hovinga, Henk 4, 7, 20, 52, 86, 133 Imperial War Museum 3, 38, 94, 134 Java Java time 23 POWs shipped from 2, 7, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18–19, 31 recruitment of forced labour 26–8 Judy the English Pointer 8, 96–7 Junyo Maru, see sinkings Kavanagh, Patrick Francis xvi, 12–13 Kirkwood, Patrick Murdock xvi, 13, 89, 92–3, 129 Kongsi 78–81, 128 Lang, Walter Ernest Hermann xvi, 94 language code-switching 73–5 discourse, see camp discourse interpreter in camp 5, 19, 24, 81–6 learning in camp 5, 68–73, 96 use in camp 68–78 Lee, John Geoffrey xvi, 51 Lejeune, Philippe 4, 41–2, 51–2 autobiographical pact 4 letters, see POW correspondence life-writing, see diary; memoir list-making 57–60, 69–70 literature libraries in camp 59–64 POW Book Service 62 Lovesey, William xvi, 43 Makepeace, Clare 39, 46 Matheson, James xvi

Index Matthews, Dudley Shields xvi Medan, see Gloegoer medical officer, see Braithwaite; Kirkwood; Wyatt medicine and illness, see disease memoir genre of life-writing 4–5, 36, 49–52 mini-memoir 45–9 non-narrative features 52–5 Palembang 65, 69–70, 74, 79, 85, 94, 99 Parkes, Meg 94 Parsons, John Edward Roden xvi, 13–14, 38–49, 51, 59, 68, 71–3, 97, 131 Pentney, James Douglas xvi, 40, 53–4 poetry 55–7 postmemory early development of 3, 116–19 Hirsch, Marianne 3, 6, 38, 117–18, 126 postmemorial archive 125–9 second generation responses 117–29 post-war impact of captivity Children of Far Eastern Prisoners of War (COFEPOW) 126–8 claim for compensation 6, 57, 102, 111–16, 121 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine 3, 112, 134 pension tribunals 51, 100–4 psychological recovery 37, 107 Researching FEPOW History Group xiii, 128, 134 POW correspondence letters 38–40 postcards 32, 39–40 Tett, David 40 psychological impact, see post-war impact Railway Burma-Siam 49, 55, 58, 87, 94, 116–25 camps 17–22 comparison between Sumatra and Burma-Siam 4, 30–4 completion 2, 21–2 construction methods 22–6 death rates 30 early responses 32–4, 107, 116–25 engineers 48 entertainments 59–60

Index local slave labourers, see romusha rationale 1, 11 Red Cross camp inspections 32 Far East journal 6, 31–4 parcels 18 repatriation ships 111 Rees, Penry Markham xvi, 55–7 repatriation Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs) 109–11 liberating troops x, 28, 66, 105–7 order not to talk 65–8 silences (domestic) 104, 107, 116, 122, 124 Robson, Kenneth xvi, 11, 17, 26, 28, 80, 99 Romusha 1–2, 11, 13, 15–16, 18, 21–2, 26–8, 30 Russell, Stanley Kay x–xiii, xvii, 93, 95–6, 132 Saunders, Nicholas 118 second generation responses, see postmemory Sharples, John xvii, 41, 70, 111 Simmonds, Albert Bernard 44–5, 60–2, 96, 107–8 Singapore escape from 9–11, 60, 94

169

fall of 9, 92, 119, 127, 129 liberation 107–8, 111 recuperation in 15, 48 sinkings Junyo Maru 15–16, 16, 20, 29 33, 103 Rakuyo Maru 32–4 Van Waerwijk 15–16, 20, 29, 33, 48, 96, 131 Smith, Walter Raymond xvii, 19, 24–5, 52, 56, 73 role as interpreter 81–6 Sumatra historical silence 30–4 strategic significance to Japanese 1, 11 surrender to Japanese 9–10 Surr, James 51, 80 Thompson, Claude Goodwin xvii, 26, 28, 68, 74, 79–80 Thrale, Charles exhibition 116–25 Tindle, Roland Henry Curtis xvii, 80 Voisey, Rouse Osbert xvii Williams, Frank 96–7 Williams, Leonard Walter xvii, 29 Wyatt, John Cameron xvii, 89–92