SINGAPORE AND THE THAI RAILWAY EXPERIENCES OF ...

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be beaten to death, and he would usually be beaten with sticks and his limbs broken. The
same Nip sergeant hit one man on the head with a pick handle and he went mad. He used to
fight any Nip he saw. He eventually died. On some occasions if a Nip was unpopular with
his own men a POW could lay him out and get away with it. This did not happen often. On
the whole the Nips treated our Battalion harshly but not brutally. They got all the work out of
us that they wanted. Their idea of getting a job done was to put masses of men on it. The
tools were shoddy and inadequate. The shovels were made out of petrol tins and bent in no
time. The rock drills were often as blunt as hammers. The hammers used to break. The pick
axes were made of cast iron and the axes were not forged. It is an amazing thing that the
railway ever got through. Sometimes there were so many useless tools that the POWs had to
dig with their hands. "Hellfire" Corner, the 100-foot deep cutting at Kanu 2, was done chiefly
by Australians, and the Nips certainly drove them. They did a lot of night work. We did no
night work. This 100-foot deep cutting was probably the biggest job on the whole railway.
Millions of tons of rock had to
be blasted away. Blasting went on night and day every 3 or 4 hours.
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When the steam train went through Kanu 2 we went back to Tonchan for a rest of a few days.
Then to the Bridge Camp for about a fortnight. Everything was better now. The work was
light. We only had to put the ballast on the track - working with Tamils. The camp was
cleaner and the food brought up by the railway more adequate. Now came a horrible rumour.
The railway was held up in Burma and we were to be marched up to more "Speedo". We
went to Tonchan Central where we linked up with Lilley again. For a few days our fate was
in the balance, then Lilley's protestations to Hattori had the desired effect and we were told
that we had earned our rest and another battalion was to be sent. These unfortunates were the
men from Saigon who had come up in April '43. A lot more men were evacuated and we then
went to Hintock River Camp. This was an interesting camp. There were 450 of us - the
balance of 1,700 at Wampo. The camp was full of sick Saigon men when we arrived. They
had come
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from Saigon where they had lived very well on stuff stolen from the docks and gone straight
into the jungle and the Speedo without acclimatisation. The result was disastrous. They were
in a bad way. There were also some sick Dutch. They had no news of the war and we were
able to give them this - all about the fall of Italy. F Battalion's secret wireless set was
operating spasmodically. It was ballasting and clearing up work with the worst bunch of Nip
Engineers I ever came across. The work was not difficult but they had got into the habit of
driving the men and could not get out of the habit when the need was not there. I well
remember carrying some particularly heavy logs one day. I blacked out after that and also on
parade that night. Dr Richardson was not very sympathetic and Rae and Clarke our officers
had to tell him off. I had a day's rest, although Richardson was not willing to give it to me.
He was scared of the Nips. Many of the Medical Officers were. It was in this camp that we
really fed well. The rations consisted chiefly of dried vegetables, "cheesy" fish and rice,