Corporal Tommy Thwaites memoirs. Ex 2/10 Ordinance Workshop, AIF.

Author Ken Wright

I’m not sure of the date but we were sent to a place called Bang Pong in Thailand. This is where the Burma railway joined the Singapore— Bangkok line. The journey took about 4 days and in that time, we only had three meals. The hardest part of the trip was sitting around inside closed steel railway carriages going through the tropics. It was bloody hot! The only air that came in was through one door which was open about 4 to five inches so everyone could have a pee, but before using the gap you had to check the direction of the wind for obvious reasons.

After arriving at Bang Pong, there’s one incident I won’t forget. Not far from the station we had latrines and I was sitting on the latrine when this Thai woman came up and tried to pull my shirt off and shove a ten-dollar note in my hand. I looked up at her and said, ‘Darling, you can’t have that bastard as it’s the only one I have,’ I had a signet ring that my grandmother gave me so I sold her that for ten dollars. In the shops nearby, I got 10 hard-boiled eggs. They were the only eggs I had the whole time I was a POW. I’ve heard stories of people having food etc, but where they got it from, Christ knows, cause I could never knock it off.

We were put into groups of about 35 or 40 and we had to march up to different camps so we could start on the railway. The party I was allocated to was called F Force and we had to go to number three camp at a place called Kami Sonkurei, which unfortunately was about 200 miles away. We had to march 20 miles a night, as it was too hot during the day. Each section had a stretcher so that anyone not fit enough to finish the march could be carried until we stopped. It was either carry them or leave them there to die. On quite a few occasions there would be two on a stretcher and that meant four men had to keep changing about every twenty minutes to get one corner of the stretcher each. You did this for your mates. We did this for about four nights. Twenty miles is a decent sort of walk.

The Japs gave us one night off then we had to do it all again. One particular night I had a touch of dysentery and there was already one bloke on the stretcher so I had to do the 20 miles with dysentery. I reckon I could have the record for ups and downs in a night, no worries. After ten nights, that’s 200 miles, which is about the same from Melbourne to Bendigo and back, we got to the camp. When we got there, some bright bastard said, ‘How are we going to get home, I hope we don’t have to walk’! Another feller said. ‘Ah no, ‘Were all going home on the railway.’ The first guy said, ‘When?’ and the reply was, As soon as you bastards build it.’

We started off working, and the way they allocated the work force was the Jap Commander who was in charge of the camp would say at night how many men he wanted on a working party. In the morning if they had the allocated men, you would go off and do between 12-14 hours work a day. The food was about 500 grams of dried stuff a day so you did a bloody lot of work on very little food. One of the jobs we had was to build up the foundations for the railway tracks with dirt. They had gangs of 3 men to dig 9 cubic metres of soil, one man using the chunkle and the other two had wicker baskets to carry the soil. The Jap in charge had a three-metre stick to drop into the pit to make sure the sides were straight and if they weren’t, he made you stay there until it was right. It wasn’t too bad for a few days but the further away you got, you still had to shift the same amount so it got harder and so the longer you stopped there each day.

As time went on, the fellers started to get crook with malaria, beriberi and many other tropical diseases. The Jap Commander would say he wanted 300 men for a working party and if we could only manage say 250, they would have to go to the hospital and pick out another 50 of the fitter ones to make up the number required. We had to bloody near carry the sick ones to work but the Japs were pretty good as they didn’t want them to work but the numbers had to be there until the day’s work was over. At night we had to carry them bloody back again.

When we finished laying the foundations, we were allocated to various jobs. Such as chopping trees, or helping blast stones and then break them up with a sledgehammer. A mate of mine and I were chopping down trees one day and of course the tools were pretty bad. The axe head my mate was using wasn’t on very tight and while he was chopping, the axe head flew off and hit him in the shin, opening it right up. I started running around trying to find out where I could get someone to stitch him up as it was too far back to camp. I eventually found out the Jap RAP man was also the powder monkey in the quarry. I sort of helped my mate down to the quarry where the Jap put six stiches in his leg. When he finished, I made signs to the Jap for a cigarette so he gave me one and for alight which he did. I just had a few puffs out of it when my mate said, ‘What about me, why don’t you give it to me’. I said, ‘What are you talking about, I bloody near had to carry you here.’ That feller who is no longer with us always said from that day on till the day he died, that I would never die of a heart attack because, ‘you haven’t got a heart ya bastard.’ He didn’t die a POW. He eventually died of a heart attack.

I had been on the railway for about six months when I heard one day a call for volunteers to become medical orderlies as all the other poor bastards had died. So I volunteered and went up to the doctor and he asked me what experience I had. When I told him I had done a first aid course in the Boy Scouts he said, ‘Well, you’ll do.’

One of my jobs in the hospital, if you could call it that, was to hold blokes every morning, while the doctor was scraping away gangrene out of their ulcers with a sharpened teaspoon. There were always two of us holding them and just as well. Believe me, they would spit and bite and do anything to you. We felt sorry for the poor bastards ‘cause there were no bloody aspirin or needles of course. No nothing. Another job I had was picking maggots out of bloke’s ulcers. On legs, knees, in the groin, anywhere there was an ulcer that had maggots there; I had to pick them out every morning with a pair of tweezers.

Ulcers could start from bloody nothing, just a slight scratch then infection set in and there was nothing that could be done to stop them. A bamboo scratch could cost you a leg. Malnutrition had a lot to do with it too. Outside the hospital, there was a cholera section. I went there for a while and the only medication they had was a water bottle of salt water. Unfortunately for those poor blokes who had it, as fast as they were drinking the salt water, it was coming out of both ends. It was rare for anyone to survive. Two of us were working twelve-hour shifts and on one shift, 12 blokes died and the same happened on the next shift, another 12 died. Anyone who died of cholera had to be burnt to stop the disease spreading through the camp. One day, I asked the feller that used to burn them what it was like. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t mind sitting with my billy on the fire but I get bloody pissed off when they sit up and look at me.’

The hospital wasn’t a very nice place to work in as you can imagine. In fact, in the mornings the doctors got so pissed off because they didn’t have the medical equipment or stuff to treat the patients. The medical huts were made of bamboo with a passageway down the middle where the patients lay on both sides. I remember one day, these two doctors walking down the centre of the huts in front of me and they would be pointing to various fellers saying which ones will die today. This went on for a few weeks and in the end, they would be saying the same thing every morning. They would say that this bloke would die at ten o’clock and that bloke at three o’clock. I don’t know why they did this but I suppose it was their way of breaking the monotony. On the side of one hut was an operating table. This particular day as the doctor was amputating a guy’s leg, I was the flyman. My job was to brush the flies away and I can tell you, this doctor, he didn’t worry about not having a proper medical saw, he just picked up an ordinary saw, thought this is good enough and took the blokes leg off. No worries.

You know, when the rail was finished, it cost one hundred thousand lives. There were two thousand seven hundred Australians among them. The cost in lives didn’t worry the Japanese one little bit. We were all expendable. The railway had to be finished as soon as possible and with the Japanese contempt for the prisoners lives, the line was finished in 14 months. F Force was the hardest hit, we had fifty percent casualties.

When we eventually returned to Changi Prison, it was like a home away from home compared to the railway. The living conditions were better and the working situation was better too. It was probably a month or two later when I got picked out to work on the Changi aerodrome. This meant we had to walk to work, do eight hours labour, then walk back again. When we got back we could have a shower and a meal. The jail, which was built under British rule, was designed to hold under one hundred thousand people, but the Japs crammed in many thousands more. In the section I was in, the cells were designed to hold one person, but we had eight plus the toilet in ours.

A mate of mine was allocated to work on the garden party. They did all right because after lunch, the Japs would let them cook a few greens or what ever they could scrounge. There were a couple of young Jewish blokes with us and we used to have a go at them about their religion. So one day, we had this watery soup or stew or what ever you wanted to call it with bits of fatty pork floating around in it. This mate of mine, Ernie, who was a bit of a character said, ‘I’m going over there to get their bloody food. They won’t eat it cos it’s got bloody pork in it!’ He went over and said Well, you’re not going to eat it are you; it’s got bloody pork in it! Give it to me.’

One of the Jewish guys said, what are you talking about Ernie? This chicken is bloody beautiful.’ It just goes to show that religion goes out the door when you’re bloody hungry.

We all knew in camp when the war had finished but that didn’t stop the bloody Japs from taking us to work the next morning. At lunchtime that same day, the 16 th August 1945, all the Japs had disappeared and we knew that was it. While I was waiting to be sent home to Australia, I was down by the wharves and there were Japs working there under our guys who had come up on the ship ‘Duntroon’ to relieve us. There were some wooden boxes there and one was broken. I couldn’t help my self. I grabbed a piece of timber and belted the shit out of the nearest Jap and busted my hand in the process. A Sergeant came up and wanted to court martial me. I said, ‘If you don’t want to end up in the drink, you better piss off!’

We came home on the Duntroon. On the way home, the CO of our group radioed ahead to Darwin to tell them not to upset us, as we were all bloody mad. In Darwin they put on a dance for us but after interval when the band struck up, there was hardly anyone on the dance floor because all the POW’s had the nurses down on the bloody beach.

We only stayed one night in Darwin and then we were sent to a camp in Sydney. A mate and I went into Sydney near Luna Park [fun park] and there was a sight I couldn’t believe. There was this sheila standing around in a pair of long pants with a bottle of beer in her bloody hand and she was smoking. Bloody unbelievable. You can imagine how we felt. We have never seen anything like that in our bloody lives. That was unheard of before the war.

From Sydney, we came by train to Melbourne where the authorities had Red Cross cars waiting. The thing that stood out in my mind was everyone saying, ‘Oh, I wish I was with you’ and us saying, ‘Why would you want to be with us you stupid bastards.’ We met our families and finally went home. My Grandmother, who was determined to hang on to life until her Tommy returned, welcomed me home with the best rice pudding in the world. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had just finished about three and a half thousand feeds of rice and very little else. Later on, she cooked my other favourite dish, bread and butter pudding.

It was so good to be home.

Compiled by Ken Wright, from Corporal Tommy Thwaites memoirs. Ex 2/10 Ordinance Workshop, AIF.