SINGAPORE AND THE THAI RAILWAY EXPERIENCES OF ...

an anxious time. The Koreans in charge were a bad crowd. Incidentally the Koreans and
Nips hated each other and we had a mass fight at Wampo on one occasion.
22.
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17/5/43 We marched from Tarso to S. Tonchan. Here it was that our troubles really started.
The wet weather came and we were quartered 20 to a small tent 14 feet by 8 feet and the mud
was ankle deep everywhere. The flies and refuse were terrible and the other POWs who were
there before us were a hopeless crowd with no decent organisation. The latrines were open
and dysentery was rife. I believe I first got it here.
28/5/43 200 of us were marched 3 km to the Bridge Camp. I split from Tony on this
occasion so the Kongsi was broken up.
10/6/43 Cholera broke out and Tamils and POWs were dying every day. We lost 105/110 in
June and about 500/600 Tamils. They were all buried in big pits anyhow. I was lucky to
escape free but the awful horror of catching it was nerve racking.
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June and July '43 were my worst months as a POW. It was these 2 months that caused most
of the deaths on the railway. Work was terribly hard, the weather was continuously wet and
we never had a dry stitch of clothing. The 200 of us built 10 bridges in one month. Most of
them were the usual crazy temporary bridges. We did all the heavy work - the Nips used to
knock in the dog spikes. We used to carry colossal weights and we were all very weak.
Cheeba, the Korean in charge, was very bad. He forced the sick to work, stole our rations and
generally behaved very badly. I have listed him as a war criminal. I had one go of malaria
and was lucky to get 3 days off work. This was due to the efforts of an Indian doctor from a
neighbouring F Force camp. For several days this doctor came early in the morning to our
camp and inspected the sick. He diagnosed malaria in my case and ordered "bed down no
work". Cheeba did his utmost to shake the MO but he insisted in face of threats and got his
way. On a
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subsequent occasion Cheeba knocked this Indian MO down and kicked him and forced the
sick out to work. Cheeba used to parade the sick at the same time as the workers and make
them do physical jerks, press ups, running around, etc., until sometimes they collapsed. The
idea was to intimidate the men into working. Capt. Rae of the SRA(V), my unit, who was in
charge of our camp, was not a very suitable person to handle Cheeba. He is a very
melancholy-looking, serious individual and Cheeba used to love to irritate him. The best type
we could have would have been a bluff, devil-may-care type like Capt. Watts. On several
occasions Rae reported Cheeba's behaviour to the "Tiger", the Nip Sergeant Major at South
Tonchan. Cheeba did not like this, naturally. He made Rae and Capt Sanderson stand outside
his hut at attention for several hours whilst he blathered at them and struck them. Rae and
Sanderson came out of it very well. I was the target for several ill-tempered assaults on the
bridge work because I never worked as hard as the Nip engineers would like, and deliberately
did the wrong things. They realised this ultimately and one