The recollection below was written by Harry Park regarding his time as a Japanese prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma-Siam railway. It has been kindly provided to The Singapore War Crimes Trials Project by his son Ian Park.

We have also published a portrait of Harry Park.

Harry Park as a young man

This account of the building of the Burma - Siam Railway, the so-called “Railway of Death” is not to be regarded as historically accurate. The story has been written 45 years after the event and is no more than personal recollections of the time. I was not able to keep a diary while I was a prisoner-of-war. The Japanese, in their periodic searches of the camps, used to confiscate any written material we had. To conceal any quantity of paper in the conditions in which we lived was virtually impossible, as well as the difficulty in obtaining it in the middle of the jungle. It was in much greater demand for rolling cigarettes!

Timetable of Events

December 8th 1941

Japanese attack Pearl Harbour. Japanese landing at Khota Baru. Bombing of Singapore.

December 1941

Sinking of “Prince of Wales” and “Repulse”. Japanese advance down Malaya. Repeated landings on East Coast of peninsula.

January 1942

Japanese naval units threaten sea-routes to India and Ceylon. All tea production halted in Sumatra. Options open to British planters:

Escape to India or Britain – almost impossible.
Remain as civilian caretakers of estates with certain internment.
Recruitment into Netherlands East Indies Land Forces as volunteers.
Formation of Stadswacht in Indonesia. (Para-military Police).

February 15th

Fall of Singapore.

March 3rd

Transfer of our “British Brigade” of about 30 tea and rubber planters to guard duty on the Sioehan Peninsula on Lake Toba, halfway between the East and West Coasts of Sumatra.

March 9th to 10th

Japanese landings on the East Coast of Sumatra. Rapid advance due to lack of resistance along main road south, Belawan – Medan – Tebbing Tinggi – Pematang Siantar – west towards Prapat and only main road to West Coast.

March 12th

Mines on road east and west of our escape road detonated. Escape route useless.

March 13th

Japanese cycle troops overrun our positions. Surrender. Taken up to main road and lined up for possible execution. Reprieved and set to repair bomb-damage on the road.

March 14th

Loaded on to first convoy lorry and sent ahead to test road for possible mines! Arrived in Palige and locked up in native prison. Held there for 6 weeks.

May 2nd

Loaded on to first convoy lorry and sent ahead to test road for possible mines! Arrived in Palige and locked up in native prison. Held there for 6 weeks.

May 3rd

Arrival at Uni-Kampong camp. Belawan in peace-time was the main port for shipping the produce of the East Coast of Sumatra all over the world, - tea, rubber, tobacco, palm-oil, etc.

May-June

Work details on docks at Belawan, removing bomb-damaged buildings – with conspicuous lack of progress!

Middle of June

Embarked on unmarked Japanese troop-ships and sailed north through Straits of Malacca. Anchored in Mergui Archipelago for several days to load more POWs. On to mouth of River Tavoy on west coast of Lower Burma, where we were transferred to landing-craft to disembark at a rice-mill on the river bank, 17 miles from Tavoy. As we were landing, we were entertained by the sight of an Australian working-party trying to unload a huge steam road-roller from a barge. Needless to say, after a lot of puffing and blowing, they allowed the roller to run backwards into the river. Overnight we had our first suicide. We marched to Tavoy the next day.

Even in our wretched conditions we had a great deal of fun that day! The short-legged Japanese guards could not keep up with us, and by means of a steady marching pace, with a 10-minute break every hour, some of us soon outdistanced our escorts. All along the way there were native villages where the Burmese, poor though they obviously were, showered us with gifts of rice, meat and fruit! About 12 miles from the rice-mill we became cheeky and thumbed a lift from a Japanese supply lorry. We raided his load and stole anything which might be of use to us. He dropped us at our camp, hours ahead of the rest of our party, and we thanked him most effusively!

We spent only a short time in Tavoy, performing unimportant work details. At the end of June, a mixed party of Australians and Dutch, including the “British Brigade”, were sent by lorry southwards to the village of Ye. The village was the former terminus of a railway from Rangoon, sabotaged by the British in their retreat from Burma.

I celebrated my 25th birthday (note: perhaps 26th? Harry Gordon Park was born on 11 July 1916) there with my friends, sitting behind a native house which was our billet, well away from the Japanese.

At Ye, we started to build a road through the bush, apparently to nowhere! We had the first death in our party, a fellow planter from Edinburgh, the first of many we were to experience over the next 3 years. There also we witnessed the first operation (appendicitis), performed by an Australian Lt Colonel with a safety-razor blade, and, as far as I know, without proper anaesthetics!

In September we were marched to the banks of the River Ye, to a point near a bridge which had been blown up. Crossing by bridge was impossible, even on foot, as the centre span had fallen into the river. The river was in flood, and we had to cross it in pairs in canoes. These canoes were little better than hollowed-out logs, paddled by Burmese boatmen. The river was more than 200 metres wide, and I had never been so terrified in all my life! Fortunately, the crossing was made safely by all. We were then loaded onto a train of open goods wagons and taken back northwards to the village of Thanbyuzayat. The Burmese railway line ran from Rangoon via Moulmein, and Thanbyuzayat was to become the jumping-off point for the new railway to run into Thailand.

Here we learned the magnitude of the task which lay before us.

Before the war, there had been an agreement between the Burmese and Thai governments to build a railway across the narrow neck of land between Lower Burma and Southern Thailand. However, the project had been abandoned, possibly due to the threat of the coming war. Thanbyuzayat was to be the Burmese terminus, and Ban Pong (about 74 miles from Bangkok) the Thai equivalent. The distance between these two points was about 250 miles, through the mountains by way of the Three Pagoda Pass, which lay on the boundary between the two countries. These mountains formed the backbone of the peninsula of Tenasserim and the Kra Isthmus, which then extended through Malaya to Singapore.

On the Railway

Our Sumatran contingent arrived in Thanbyuzayat around the middle of September 1942, the first of the thousands who were destined to build the railway. Our first task was to finish the half-completed camp and to assemble the necessary tools – shovels, pick-axes, axes, and wicker baskets (to carry the soil).

We were then moved to our first jungle camp, to allow the base camp at Thanbyuzayat to be turned into a reception and hospital area for the many groups of Dutch, British and Australian prisoners who followed us.

There were no British troops from Malaya and Singapore on the Burmese side, as they were set to work from the Thai end. These groups passed along a primitive track which followed the line of the railway, through the jungle. Each group leap-frogged the others, until we had camps at Wegale (8 km), Retpu (14 km) and Non Pladuk (30 km), among others. Another hospital camp was established at the 55 km camp, which served the whole of the Burmese side until the railway was finished. Our party occupied camps at Wegale, the 45 km, 70 km, 90 km, 103 km (Three Pagoda Pass), 108 km as well as 120 km (Cholera camp) camps, and lastly at Nieke, where the two railways met.

We started on the railway work at Wegale, and worked in both directions from there. It was here that we encountered our first example of Japanese savagery.

Two half-caste soldiers, who were virtually indistinguishable from the Burmese when they discarded their uniforms and donned sarongs, decided to make a break for the coast. We will never know what or where their goal was, as we were many hundreds of miles from any friendly territory, surrounded by jungle as well as among natives whose help was uncertain and who certainly could not be trusted.

The Japanese immediately started a “blitz” in our camp and tried to make us give our parole that we would not try to escape. This, naturally, we refused to do, but after several Dutch officers of field rank had been beaten up and tortured on the orders of the Japanese commandant of the base camp, Lt. Colonel Nagatomo, we signed “under duress”. It was really amazing how many “Donald Ducks” and “Charlie Chaplins” had enlisted in the N.E.I. (note: Netherlands East Indies) army! Hardly any of us signed our real names.

Weeks went past, and we began to hope that our two escapees had won clear, but one day, word came to the camp that our friends were back in the camp at Thanbyuzyat. Next day they were led into our camp with their hands tied behind their backs. Every prisoner had to pass by in an identity parade, but naturally no one had ever seen them before. We were then formed into a hollow square with the captured men in the middle on their knees. A brawny Japanese “gunzo” or sergeant, stripped to the waist, stepped forward, and with two savage slashes of his sword, decapitated the two men. Immediately the name of the Japanese commandant was entered in our camp records for trial after the war as a war criminal.

The work at Wegale was comparatively easy, as our route lay over abandoned rice-fields. It was only later when we reached the mountains that the task became cruel. We had to build low embankments or dig out cuttings. All levels had been set by Japanese engineers working miles ahead of us, so the rail-bed had to be raised or lowered to match these levels.

We were guarded by Korean conscripts (who hated the Japanese), while the work was supervised by Japanese engineers, most of whom were of a low level of intelligence. It was an easy task to cheat on the amount of work we did, until one day a senior Japanese Engineer officer came along to inspect progress. Then all hell let loose! Guards, engineers, POWs felt the weight of his wrath and the flat of his sword, so after he had gone the guards took it out on us in dozens of different ways.

We were put on task work. Each man had to move 0.5 cubic metres of earth. Each group consisted 50 O.R.s under an officer, with 2 men detached to boil water for tea. This we drank scalding hot during “yasme” periods, which was the only way to slake our thirst. Immediately after the blitz we convinced the engineers that half-a-cubic metre was ½ x ½ x ½ metres. Work that one out for yourselves! If any of the guards cottoned on to this, they wisely kept their mouths shut!

If we were lucky enough to get a decent engineer, it was a good idea to try to make friends with him. At one stage, one engineer used to come and sit on a tree-stump near me, and gradually I was able to build up a fair bit of Japanese vocabulary. They were always keen to show us photos of their wives and families. This situation only lasted about 3 weeks, when another officer cottoned on to our ruse, beat up a few engineers and our work-load was increased to 1 cubic metre per man.

To make a cutting, we dug the earth from the rail-bed to the required level and dumped it near the edge of the jungle. To make an embankment, we dug earth from elsewhere and carried it in baskets to the railway until it reached the required height. I don’t think it ever occurred to the Japanese to use the earth from a cutting to help make an embankment.

As the line of the railway followed roughly a south-easterly direction, across the lie of the land, it often had to cross ravines and dry river-beds. There we found bridge abutments already constructed by Japanese and native workers, made out of 16” x 16” baulks driven into the banks and backed by 4” planks. How these huge amounts of timber got there I never found out, as we never saw any of these workers. When we came to these bridges, we had to pile earth behind the wood up to the correct level.

For our purpose, the higher the abutment the better, as we were then able to pile up bamboo, bamboo roots and any other form of rubbish we could find to speed up the work – provided the engineers were not watching. If our guards saw anything, they chose to ignore it! There was no communication between the Koreans and the Japanese. This was delayed bridge sabotage, as nothing happened until the Japanese started bringing huge steam locomotives, war booty from all over the East, along the line. Then often the rubbish we had hidden under the earth gave way under their weight, and many locomotives and wagons finished up at the bottom of the ravines. We guessed (correctly) that this would not constitute any grave risk to fellow-prisoners, as they would not be the first to travel on the completed line.

There were always a number of camps working simultaneously along the line. As each camp finished their stretch, they leap-frogged ahead to start another length.

The monsoon broke just as we arrived in the hills, with day after day, week after week of torrential rain, but the work had to go on. This was a period of incredible misery. We were racked with malaria, dysentery and beri-beri. The holes we dug filled with water, and the embankments we raised became quagmires of mud. We slipped and slithered, cut our feet and legs with our spades which had become as sharp as knifes through working in the sandy soil, walked knee-deep in mud, and cursed the Japanese, the weather and one another (in that order), but had to keep on working.

Inevitably, the work fell behind schedule. Our task was increased to 2 cubic metres per man. A group’s task was 100 cubic metres per day, irrespective of sickness, and often sick men were carried out of camp and left to lie under whatever shelter we could construct. The sole criterion for the Japanese was the percentage of workers who turned out each day. Consequently, this meant that workers were having to get through 2½ cubic metres each under appalling conditions. This was particularly so at the 70 km camp, and the weekly death-rate among the POWs reflected this.

At this camp, I was rather fortunate, as I had badly injured a hand while on a cook-house firewood detail, and could claim pay as an “injured at work”. Curiously enough, the Japanese were relatively sympathetic to such cases. During my time-off I busied myself each day killing lice on my blanket and bed bugs on our sleeping platforms, only to have more come back each night from my neighbours! Outside the huts, where I could be seen by the camp guards, I made the most of my sling!

While working, we were paid at the princely rate of 10 annas per day in banana-money issued by the Japanese. This allowed us to buy cheap Burmese cheroots, or a smoke made from coarse tobacco mixed with charcoal and rolled in a green leaf. To smoke one of these, although the flavour was not too bad, was an adventure as the effect was much the same as the trick exploding cigars we can sometimes buy in the UK. Sometimes we were able to buy loose tobacco, which we rolled into cigarettes with any piece of paper we could find. I confess that the best cigarette papers were the sheets from a pocket bible – at 1 anna per sheet.

After being on the railway for nearly a year, our clothes were in tatters, and our boots were kept to protect our feet on marches from camp to camp. Bare feet were the norm, and most prisoners wore only a G-string. On our way to work from the camps, the only way to cross ravines and swollen rivers was by way of the 16” x 16” timbers on which the sleepers and rails would eventually lie. Try that with bare feet, often more than 20 feet above the water!

Rations were brought by ox-cart in wet weather, and by lorries driven by prisoners without escort along a track which followed the railway line. During rain it was a quagmire, and in dry weather it was inches deep in dust. The news service along the line was provided by a secret radio in the 55 km base hospital and spread through the camps by these lorry drivers. Unfortunately, by the time it reached us by word of mouth, the news was not always accurate and, at that period of the war, seldom good.

For some weeks, in an area where many large trees still lay in the path of the railway (and with many stumps still in the ground), I worked with 3 elephants. I developed quite an affection for these gentle giants. It was truly fascinating to watch them push, pull and roll these trunks out of the way. That is, if you were not standing behind them when they took the strain! Then the air became so thick that you could cut it with a knife! At one camp we had to share our bathing pool with the elephants. The number of hours an elephant can work in a day are very limited. The rest of the time they must feed and rest. The Japanese grossly overworked these elephants despite the protests of their Burmese mahouts, to the point that one of them died (but more on that later).

When not working, the elephants were shackled by a leg to a handy tree near the huts occupied by the mahouts and their families. One day, the bull elephant had an itchy back-side and proceeded to relieve the itch by rubbing himself against the gable of the hut, where the Burmese were at supper. The picture of the resultant exodus of men, women and children from inside will remain with me all my life, as the hut moved and swayed backwards and forwards before crashing to the ground!

At the Three Pagoda Pass on the Burmese/Thai border, we seemed to be sitting on top of the world. All round us towered high mountains up to 6000 feet, and as far as every horizon there was nothing but a sea of treetops – the jungle. There were indeed three Pagodas close to the railway, with hundreds of little bells tinkling in the almost constant wind.

Here we struggled to bring the railway through the pass, through solid rock which had to be blasted away, sometimes to a depth of 20 feet. Even the Japanese engineers seemed to have little stomach for blasting. As I had some previous experience, I joined a party who drilled and laid charges. Thankfully, no prisoners were injured, though sometimes we “forgot” to warn any guards which were in the vicinity. This work took several weeks, but once through the pass the route led downhill into Thailand.

At our next camp inside the Thai border, we found that there had been a severe cholera outbreak among both natives and prisoners. These natives were Burmese, Thai, Malays and Indonesians who had been forcibly recruited into what was virtually slavery and sent to work on the railway. All round the camp there were the remains of fires where the victims had been burned, and here and there were mass graves where they had been buried, sometimes with hands or feet protruding above the surface. The Japanese were petrified by such illnesses, and went about with surgical masks over their mouths and noses. We had to bathe in a river at the bottom of a deep ravine, and our bathing areas were very strictly defined. Upstream were the Japanese, below them the POWs and below that the natives. One day a poor native mistook his area and was found by a Korean guard, who promptly shot him.

We, the POWs, had a nightmare existence on the railway, but it was a Paradise compared to what the native workers experienced. The Japanese kept no records of deaths on the line, but it is estimated that 16,000 POWs died, and likely well over 100,000 natives perished.

By this time, the track itself was catching up on us. Sleepers and rails were being brought forward, on flat-cars pushed by powerful Japanese tractor units which had both road and rail wheels. The road-wheels with their tyres were whipped off and inner flanged wheels engaged the rails. We worked 12-hour shifts for track-laying, day and night. At night we worked by the light of crude torches, which were rags pushed into short lengths of bamboo filled with kerosene. One gang of prisoners, working in pairs, lifted the sleepers off the flat-cars and laid them on the track at regular intervals. Then a squad of Japanese, about 12 men on each side of wagons lifted off the rails and then laid them on the sleepers. Prisoners then connected the rails with fish-plates, the track was roughly straightened and the train moved forward. Spikes were driven into the sleepers to hold the rails, but often the line looked like an inebriated snake after the empty train had moved away! The Japanese train-drivers didn’t seem to worry, after all they were at the back of the laden train! When the train had gone, the line was properly aligned and set to the proper gauge. I spent most of this period on night-shift, and we returned to camp in the morning to sleep through the day. Our rations were brought up on the trains and we ate at the side of the track.

At long last, after about 1½ years, the railway was finished and we met the prisoners from Singapore who had worked from the Bangkok side. Two ceremonial trains with high-ranking Japanese officers travelled from each side and met at the Nieke camp. Nieke was a supply camp with sidings and a marshalling yard carved out of the bush. To contribute the Allied share of the junketing, British bombers arrived shortly afterwards and blasted the area! The Japanese were not pleased. Several maintenance gangs were left at different points to repair damage caused by weather and derailments. Our little tricks behind bridge abutments had been very successful!

The work-force from the Thai side had suffered much more illness and disease than our troops, as many of them were straight from Britain, and had been decanted into the shambles of Singapore, with no experience of tropical service nor of tropical heat. We, on the other hand, had many soldiers with experience learned in the jungle garrisons of Java and Sumatra. They knew the jungle plants, roots and small animals we could use to supplement our dreadful and inadequate rations.

By this time, it was February 1944 and the railway was to all intents finished. Trains were passing through from the east with reinforcements for the Japanese army in Burma, as the Allied counter-attack had started. Eastwards these trains brought Japanese wounded from the fighting.

For all the work, misery and death which the railway had created, the Burma-Siam Railway proved to be of little help to the Japanese in their efforts to dominate Southeast Asia, and indeed after the end of the war, it was torn up.

We were drawn back to a rest-camp (Japanese definition) at the 122 km mark where we were supposed to cut wood for the locomotives. We were there for several weeks, but the stuff we cut and stacked at the line-side was absolute rubbish. How the engineers were able to get up enough steam to get over the Three Pagoda Pass, I’ll never know, but our guards didn’t seem to care. Possibly because they were Koreans, they thought they were getting a little of their own back on the hated Japanese.

Then suddenly, at a day’s notice, fit and sick alike, we were bundled onto a train of open wagons and carried eastwards into Thailand, leaving behind scores of dead friends buried in lonely jungle cemeteries.

The Physical Problems

Living as we did in dreadfully insanitary conditions, it is little wonder that many prisoners became sick and often died. Most illnesses stemmed from malnutrition. Our rations were set at 600 grams of rice. We were also supposed to get vegetables, but the supply of these was often non-existent and usually inadequate.

Breakfast was rice-porridge, often without salt, and usually of a consistency which made it easier to drink than to eat. On Sundays, which were usually rest-days, we got a little native sugar to sweeten it. This sugar was in the form of rectangular cakes, not unlike tablets, and liberally reinforced with ants, bees, flies and twigs.

The lunch and evening meals were rice and whatever vegetables had arrived the day before. When working on the line, no matter how far away, two men were detached from each working party and sent back in a group under guard to collect the midday meal, which they carried back to us in wooden buckets slung on a bamboo pole. We carried our dixies and spoons and ate wherever we could find shade. The usual vegetables were marrows or squash, which were made into a watery soup tipped over our rice. Occasionally, through the ingenuity of our camp cooks, we were treated to soup which looked and tasted almost exactly like lentil soup. I remember one day getting a most unexpected bonus in the form of a well-cooked fat frog. I simply salvaged the frog, gave it a decent burial and then ate the soup.

Another brilliant idea from the Japanese which back-fired was the production of sun-dried meat. This arrived in the camps in neat wooden boxes about 18 inches square, and the same depth. On opening the lids we were greeted by a seething mass of blow-fly maggots, crawling over the contents. Appeals to the Japanese were futile, and our camp doctors were forced to pass the meat as fit for consumption after the maggots had been knocked off and the meat well boiled. It was not wise to inspect your ration too closely, but it certainly added a piquancy to our diet, and, our need for protein being so great, very few prisoners refused it.

Although the official rice ration was 600 grams per day, there were many days when we received less, due to flooded roads or the breakdown of a ration truck, or simply the intransigence of the Japanese.

Towards the end of the monsoon, at the 108 km camp high in the hills, we had to organise carrying parties to back-pack our supplies from the 103 km camp. This was regarded as light duties, and could be done by the walking sick. We were also allowed to do this unescorted. The biggest drawback to this work was having to pass a very dead elephant outside the Australian camp at 105 km. This was one of the elephants which had died through over-work and inadequate feeding. The Australians were given the job of disposing of the carcass, which, in the heat and from internal gasses, soon became bloated. They could not dig a hole deep enough because of the under-lying rock, so they built an enormous bonfire round it and set it alight. What happened when it exploded defies description!

The main illnesses encountered in the camps were dysentery (caused by the plague of blow-flies etc. which thrived beside and in the open latrines), beri-beri, malaria and jungle sores. These sores were mostly on our legs, usually caused by cuts from bamboo. The ulcers rapidly grew wider, until areas of the shin-bones were exposed. The only treatment available was irrigation with salt and water, and scooping out the dead flesh with an ordinary spoon. Sometimes the treatment was worse than the disease. Malaria was treated with quinine tablets or raw quinine. These were also in very short supply, despite the fact that the Japanese now controlled the main centres of production in Java. Seriously ill patients were taken into a hospital hut, where they lay, as we did, on long platforms of split bamboo or branches, raised about 2 feet off the ground with a central passageway. Here miracles were sometimes performed by the dedicated camp doctors and male nurses, but alas, too many had to be carried to a lonely last resting place in a jungle cemetery. The most serious cases, if there was transport available, could be sent to the base hospital at the 55 km camp. Needless to say, the best rations were given to this camp.

If anyone died, and unfortunately this happened all too often, the body was encased in a rough wooden coffin made from any planks we could beg, borrow or steal from the Japanese, and were interred in camp cemeteries close-by with only a rough wooden cross at the heads.

The death-rate varied from week to week, sometimes as low as 1 per week, but usually higher. We became quite hardened to waking up in the morning with a neighbour lying dead beside us. Once, while on a grave-digging detail, I helped to dig six graves which were filled that same day.

In accordance with the Bushido spirit of the Japanese, which taught that it was better to die in battle than to surrender, all prisoners were regarded as cowards and quite beneath contempt. This was amply illustrated in the later battles to recover the Japanese-held islands in the Pacific, when the Americans had to winkle the Japanese from their bunkers almost one by one, long after resistance was useless.

Yet they sometimes displayed another facet of their nature when a Japanese N.C.O. was detailed to attend a prisoner’s funeral. Then the prisoner was regarded as having died in the service of the Emperor and was therefore worthy of respect. When the committal service by the camp padre was over, the N.C.O. would step forward and salute the grave. This did not go down well with us all, as we regarded it as an act of pure hypocrisy.

If any reading this is inclined to be squeamish, the rest of this paragraph might be better left unread. The first funeral I had to attend was that of a friend from Edinburgh, and took place in the village of Ye, before we went on the railway. He was to be interred in a Burmese cemetery. An old Burmese came with us in the morning to show us where to dig. About 3 km down (note: probably 3 m) we struck the end of a rough coffin. A careless blow with a spade knocked off the rotten end, and out rolled the skull of a very dead Burman. Hastily pushing it back and jamming the end shut, we continued to dig. In the afternoon we carried our friend to his last rest, accompanied by a Japanese officer. On the way we were caught in a torrent of rain. All round the new grave the ground sloped downwards, and within moments the grave was full of water. When we tried to lower the coffin into the grave, it floated, and we were rejoined by our Burmese friend when the two coffins collided. Two of us had to stand on the coffin while others shovelled mud into the grave. At the end of the service the Japanese officer stepped forward and saluted, much to our disgust.

The Japanese kept no records of prisoners’ deaths, but camp administration made careful notes. Due to periodical blitz searches of prisoners’ belongings and office records, it was very difficult to preserve such notes until the end of the war. I believe that when the War Graves Commission sent parties along the line after the war, they had great difficulty finding the cemeteries, and often the crosses had fallen or been eaten by ants. Even the camps had disappeared - the jungle had retaken possession.

Our camps usually consisted of 4 or 5 large thatched huts containing 200-300 men each, with (but not always) separate quarters for the guards. There would also be a hospital hut, as well as an office shared by the camp administration and the Japanese office staff. The huts very seldom had any walls, which allowed for the free circulation of air. There was a long central passage, where we used to keep low fires burning to cook such things as bamboo shoots, “kangkong” (jungle spinach) and any rations we could steal from the Japanese stores or passing transport. The smoke from these fires also kept the mosquitoes at bay. By order of the guards, we also had to have two men patrolling each hut in one-hour shifts. The thatch was a playground for lizards and occasionally snakes. One Saturday, as I was preparing for bed, I put my hand up to my mosquito-net which hung over my bed area during the day. I touched something and hurriedly withdrew my hand. Then, a snake about 3 feet long slithered out of the net, down a string and out through the branches which made up our beds. The next day - a rest day - 4 of my neighbours were playing bridge further up the platform when my snake reappeared and tried to climb up one of the players’ arms.

If we were lucky, we had one blanket each, which was very necessary when we were in the mountains during the monsoon. One camp had a plague of rats, and there were nightly yells as the brutes started to gnaw the hard skin on some unfortunate prisoner’s foot.

The huts were divided into bays between the bamboo support and each man, if he was lucky, had a bed-space 6 feet long by 18 inches wide. To ease the bed-space problem, we used to go into the jungle on our free days to cut bamboo with which to make 3-tier bunks. For a long time, I slept in a top bunk, just under the thatched roof. There were distinct advantages to this as the smoke from the passageway fires gathered below the thatch and kept the mosquitoes at bay. Not far enough unfortunately, as about this time I contracted malaria. Every 20-21 days I became a shivering, shaking wreck for 2-3 days. I always knew when a fresh attack was due, as, the day before, I felt really fit and well.

We worked almost naked on the railway, with at best a tattered shirt and shorts and, at worst, a G-string made from any old piece of cloth we had. At night we wrapped ourselves in an old, thin blanket to avoid stomach chills. These blankets became infested with lice, and bed-bugs made their homes amongst the branches or bamboo on which we slept. Our pillows were often bags filled with leaves or kapok, which we could gather off trees. If we did not thoroughly remove the oily seeds from the kapok, the rats used to come at night to reach them, close by our faces! We were nearly all barefoot. The boots were kept for marches between camps and, in the muddy conditions in which we worked, a pair of boots lasted only a few weeks with no hope of replacement.

Bathing and keeping clean was the biggest problem. There was no soap, but we discovered a jungle cactus-type plant whose sap provided an indifferent substitute. Scabies and ring-worm were rife, as well as other sores and wounds which quickly became suppurative. Ringworm was treated with a sulphur solution which stank like rotten eggs. Dysentery patients became so dehydrated that they became like walking skeletons, if indeed they were able to walk at all. Beri-beri, through lack of green vegetables, left one with puffy legs and painful feet, where, if one pressed the affected part, a depression was formed which took several minutes to fill again.

As I was serving with the Netherlands-Indies forces, which contained soldiers accustomed to jungle patrolling, I quickly learned to recognise roots and plants which went some way to counteracting these deficiencies. For example, “kangkong” or jungle spinach, and bamboo shoots etc. To supplement our almost non-existent meat ration, we cheerfully devoured pythons, whose flesh was not unlike a cross between chicken and rabbit. As some of these pythons were usually 12 feet long or more, this meant a big supplement to the diet of several men.

Bangkok-Saigon
1944-1945

About the end of February 1944, we were told we were leaving the railway - certainly with no regrets - but saddened by the thoughts of friends we had left behind in their lonely graves.

We were loaded on to a train which carried us into Thailand, past the spot at Nieke where the two arms of the railway had met. For a long way we followed the valley of the River Kwai-Noh, and passed over the infamous “Bridge on the River Kwai”. The reality of the bridge was far far worse than was ever depicted in the film. Countless prisoners’ and natives’ lives had been lost during its construction, but as I was not there, I do not care to comment further.

Eventually we arrived at a camp at Tamarkan, built in the usual bamboo and thatch fashion, but in considerably better condition than the ruins we had occupied on the railway. It lay only a few hundred metres from a steel bridge over the Kwai-Noh. The bridge attracted the attention of a British bombing attack only a few days after our arrival, though little or no damage was done.

We were able to use the river for bathing, and little or no work was done, except by ration parties who travelled on trucks between the base camps of Chungkai, Kanchanaburi and Tamarkan.

The Japanese government had apparently never signed the Geneva Convention for the treatment of Prisoners of War or, if they did, chose to ignore it. However, they were astonished at world opinion when the real news of our treatment became known, and for a few weeks our treatment and rations did become better. We were issued with new clothing.

Authentic news was very scarce, but rumours flew through the camps. One of these became true when most of us were moved to the base camp at Kanchanaburi, where we had to undergo an amazing medical examination. If you had two arms and two legs and looked less than half-dead, you were earmarked for the “Japan Party”.

I was put on the party, which numbered several thousand. We were issued with clothing and boots, most of which didn’t fit, so there was a flurry of kit-swapping until we had something which approximated a fit, but what a bunch of scarecrows we looked.

This was now June or July 1944, and it was here that our group of British planters, who up to then had been regarded as Dutch, were transferred to a British group in camp. Our new companions were mostly Army, Navy and Air Force men who had evaded capture in Malaya or Singapore, managed to cross the Straits of Malacca to Sumatra, and then been captured there while waiting in vain for a ship to take them to India or Ceylon. They were indeed a mixed bunch!

We were marched to the railway station at Kanchanaburi and packed into covered goods wagons, where we had to take turns at sitting or standing. Thus began a nightmare journey of 3 days via Bangkok, across the seemingly interminable rice plains of Siam and Cambodia, roasted by day and frozen by night. We stopped twice a day to be given a miserable meal at some little station, and eventually arrived at Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on the bank of the Mekong River and terminus of the railway.

Our particular “kumi” or party numbered about 50 men, and we were put into some abandoned shops near the railway station. Work details consisted of carrying supplies from the station to a wharf on the river-bank, passing through some of the main streets of the town. It was here that we saw our first white woman in 18 months, a French girl on a bicycle.

On one trip back from the river, under command of a CPO, we decided to put on a show for the benefit of the Cambodians. We formed up and marched off at a spanking pace, having persuaded our Japanese guard to let us follow another and longer route. With heads up and arms swinging, and singing some army ballads, we soon outpaced our guard and arrived back at the station well ahead of him. We got some enthusiastic muted applause from the bystanders and shoppers. Our guard was so out of breath when we got back, he could not even give us a bawling out! Two days later, we were crammed onto a river steamer and sailed down the Mekong. In other circumstances it would have been most interesting and enjoyable, when one considers that today such a trip is a tourist attraction.

When we reached the delta of the Mekong, we turned eastward into a canal which carried us across-country into the River Saigon and eventually to the city of Saigon. There we were put into a POW camp close to the docks, where we found a group of British officers and ORs who had been there for some considerable time, having come direct from Singapore (mostly Royal Artillery). Over the next few days, our vastly enlarged camp was added to with the arrival of further Dutch and Australian POWs. Here we learned that Saigon was to be a staging post for our onward trip to Japanese mines.

This idea was abandoned. The first group to sail for Japan via Singapore were Australians. Somewhere in the China Sea these unmarked ships, which should have been carrying the Red Cross symbol, were ambushed by a pack of American submarines and very few POWs survived. To our great relief, any further shipments were abandoned.

Up to that time there had been no air activity over Saigon, but two nights after we arrived, American bombers dropped a few bombs in the area (though very little damage was done). The original British party were most annoyed with us, insisting that we had brought trouble with us!

By the terms of the Geneva Convention, all POW camps were supposed to be sited at a safe distance from any military target. In our case, every camp we were ever in was close to a railway, or in the case of Saigon, separated from the docks and naval base by only the width of a road.

The American bombing raid after our arrival galvanised the Japanese into a flurry of defence projects. Blast walls of earth were flung up on the aerodrome to protect their aircraft, a 4.7 anti-aircraft (AA) battery brought from Singapore was sited about 200 yards behind our camp, and further blast-walls were built down-river from Saigon to protect an oil-tank farm. The blast-walls on the aerodrome were promptly christened “Bludgers’ Battlements” by the Aussies, as we employed every tactic possible to delay their completion. At that time, we were not working on task-work as we had done on the railway. These walls proved to be completely ineffective, as you will find later in this story.

Saigon was never as hard as the railway. Our main tasks on the docks were loading barges and unloading ships with rice, military supplies, ammunition and aviation fuel. A great deal of supplies were stored in huge godowns on the docks, and we soon became expert thieves in our hunt for the necessities of life such as soap, sugar, or anything else which could be concealed about our persons and safe from spot searches by the Japanese.

On 4 January 1945, my party was unloading hundreds of 50-gallon drums of aviation fuel from a ship and stacking it a short distance away on the dockside. We were employing every trick of sabotage we knew, as it was hard and dangerous work, and at the end of the day, the Japanese N.C.O. told us in terms which even we could understand what he thought of us as workers for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Scheme. “Tomorrow American party come and finish the job, speedo-speedo”. His words were prophetic.

The following morning, as we were parading for work inside the camp, a force of about 43 carrier-borne Grumann fighter-bombers from an American carrier force off the coast appeared over Saigon. At that time, we believe the air-alert system was under control of the French, who did not appear to be in any hurry to sound the alarm.

Just previous to this, we had built a number of air-raid shelters in the middle of a rice-field behind our camp with an emergency exit at the nearest point, separated from the AA battery by only the width of a canal. These were walls of mud dredged from the paddy-field, about 4 feet high in the shape of an oblong box, each holding about 50 men, and lightly thatched with palm fronds as a protection against shrapnel!

As we had been on parade preparatory to leaving the camp on work details, we were equipped with dixies and water bottles. We needed no urging from the Japanese to leave the camp and take shelter. For the next six hours we were treated to a grandstand view of the whole attack. Here we were in a paddy-field, less than 200 yards from the AA battery, about 300 yards from the docks (where two Japanese corvettes were putting up a very spirited defence with their anti-aircraft guns), and only about 20 miles from the aerodrome! Even nearer was the tanker still half-full of aviation fuel, with all those drums sitting on the dockside.

The attackers concentrated naturally on the aerodrome first. Any Japanese fighter who tried to take off was immediately pounced on by the Grumanns, to be shot down when only a few hundred feet up. Others attacked the Japanese bombers standing inside the blast-walls and completely destroyed them. Meanwhile, other planes were bombing the runways to prevent the arrival of reinforcements.

Each wave of planes was about 40 strong, and there were 3 separate attacks throughout the day. As the first wave left, a second wave arrived and went for the docks. After a brave defence, which we had to admire, the fire from the corvettes was silenced, and the full fury of the attack was directed onto the several supply ships and tankers lying at the quayside or out on the river. All were set on fire or sunk, and several sheds were damaged. Luckily Godown 9, where we did most of our pilfering (notably soap) was not hit!

A third wave of bombers now appeared and did some more bombing to try and knock out the AA battery, albeit without success. We sincerely hoped that the American pilots knew of our presence. From all these attacks, as far as I know, only 2 American planes were shot down, one into the river and one damaged by flak. The second managed to escape towards open country, and we saw him eject and land by parachute miles away. At the end of the war, I heard he had been picked up by friendly natives and smuggled north, where he was recovered by a rescue plane.

That evening, a number of Japanese officers came into our camp, and all British anti-aircraft men were paraded. We had seen during the day that shells fired by the AA battery had been bursting at all levels, and rarely near the American planes. These officers asked all fuse-setters to step forward and teach them how to set fuses correctly. Quite surprisingly, there didn't seem to be a single fuse-setter in camp.

These planes were obviously from an American carrier force somewhere off the coast, and, after this raid, a period of comparative peace descended on Saigon. The attitude of the Japanese towards us began to change for the better, although beatings still went on.

With working parties having access to various Japanese stores and dumps, it was not too difficult to steal parts for a radio, and soon we were following the progress of the war, both in Europe and the Far East.

When the American forces retook airfields in the Philippines, our next visitors were B29s escorted by P38s, and they were much more terrifying!

In March 1945, a detail of several hundred men were sent to flat scrubland about 25 miles from Saigon and set to build an emergency landing strip. We burned off the lalang grass and scrub, levelled the ground below, and surfaced it with stone. Our camp was under the trees of a young rubber plantation, and consequently well-screened from the air. One day, as the work was nearing completion, we heard the drone of many planes. Coming towards us from the south-east was a formation of B29s escorted by P38s. One or two Japanese fighters made half-hearted attacks on the formation, but were quickly driven off by the concentrated fire from the bombers. At one stage, the B38s dived in line astern towards the air-strip, and we thought it prudent to disappear into the surrounding bush, to find the Korean guards there ahead of us! This time the bombers were after the French naval base, which had been taken over by the Japanese. Destruction was total.

About the same time, the tank-farm down-river had been attacked, and every tank except one had been blown up or breached. After our return from the landing-strip we were sent to build an earth containment wall around the survivor. The day I was there, a further flight of B29s appeared over Saigon. After dropping their bombs, they turned down-river towards us. We really broke all records for the 800 metres dash to seek refuge in the storm drains along the road, but they passed over us.

In early Spring the Japanese had disarmed all French servicemen and confined them to barracks in the centre of the city, and all civilians were interned in an area of the residential quarter.

Up till August we had been transported to work by lorry, but now we had to march to the aerodrome daily, with our Korean guards alongside. The way passed through the edge of the residential quarter, and we were accustomed to see Frenchmen and women in their gardens trying to pass covert signals to us. Then one day they were all standing waiting for us, with broad smiles on their faces and whispering as loudly as they dared “La guerre est finie” (note: the war is over). The guards were mad and threatened to beat them up, but we closed ranks and would not let them through. It was significant that they did not seem overanxious to pursue the matter. We were able to tell the French that we already knew the good news through our radio. We entered our camp to the strains of “Roll out the Barrel” sung at the top of our voices. That was the last work-detail we did as prisoners.

There is an amusing personal story relating to the cessation of hostilities. Back in February, when we were housed in long wooden huts close to the docks, sleeping on 2-tier wooden platforms infested with bed-bugs, I was preparing to get into bed on the lower level when an Irishman (who slept above) asked me when I thought the b... war would be over - a not-uncommon question in those days! I pretended to give the matter some thought and replied – August 13th! Having once said that, if anyone asked me the same question later, I gave the same answer. At the end of July, Paddy asked me the same question under the same circumstances, and suggested that if I was right, something adjectivally drastic would have to happen. I assured him that I was right and that something would happen. Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if a storm had not delayed the Japanese envoys' plane, the provisional armistice would indeed have been signed on the 13th of August and not on the following day. Some of my prisoner friends gave me some very old-fashioned looks, but I had not, and do not claim to have second-sight!

One aspect of our time in Saigon, remarked on by many prisoners, was the different treatment accorded to us by Japanese naval personnel, compared to that meted out to us by the Army. In the far past, Japanese naval officers had been trained by British instructors, and had absorbed much of British naval tradition, and in consequence, treated us much more humanely. In comparison, Army officers had been trained by Germans in the Prussian tradition, and this, allied to the Japanese Bushido ethos, resulted in very harsh treatment of us. To be fair, Japanese officers and NCOs treated their own soldiers in the same way.

Our guards on the railway and indeed right up to the end were Koreans, conscripted into the Japanese army, and who hated the Japanese as much as we did. They could not take out their spite on the Japanese, so they ill-treated us instead! Beatings and sometimes torture for the smallest infringement. Luckily, they didn't seem to know how to hit us with the closed fist, but their open-handed slaps were just as painful, and if they chose to use a rifle-butt, the poor victim usually ended up unconscious. I know! Naturally it was the unwritten law among the prisoners that we sabotaged everything possible.

The night of the 13th/14th August saw the hasty departure of our Korean camp guards, no doubt fearing some well-deserved retribution. Only one remained, a man who had enjoyed a certain measure of respect, if not affection, among us. The chief guard nicknamed “The Beard” and his henchman “The Boy Bastard” had disappeared, but were later tracked down in the Chinese city of Cholon and imprisoned awaiting trial as war criminals. To this day I regret I don't know what happened to them!

On the 15th of August, our camp commander (a Royal Artillery N.C.O.) went to the Japanese Captain in charge of the camp and demanded that we be moved to better quarters. We were quickly moved to an empty French cavalry barracks on the outskirts of the city, and our living conditions and food quickly improved.

Our first sight of an Allied officer was when a Major of the Black Watch, who had apparently been in the area for some time, walked on his own up the street and into the camp gate, carrying only a swagger-stick and a side-arm. Our guards, who had replaced the Koreans, were soldiers of the regular Japanese army. They did not know how to handle the situation, so to be on the safe side, they turned out the full guard and gave the “General Salute”.

Next day, from the roof of the barracks, we were able to watch the arrival on the airfield of a company of Gurkha parachutists. They jumped, quite prepared for anything. A day or two later, a platoon of these gallant little soldiers marched into camp. They asked how we had been treated, and on being told, drew their kukris and offered to decapitate the guards!

We were free to leave the camp to go into the city, but we were advised that, if we did so, it would be at our own risk, as the rebellion by the Viet-Minh Annamites, which was later to escalate into the Vietnam war, had started up in Saigon in the power vacuum created by the capitulation of the Japanese. However, many of us did go into town, and were made most welcome by many of the French families, who were also having problems of food supply as the Viet-Minh had banned country people from the city markets.

The Viet-Minh were unwilling to tangle with Allied servicemen and ex-POWs, so many of us spent nights in French houses as guards. A friend from Edinburgh (also a planter) who had been with me all through, and I, looked after 2 French families living in a huge colonial-type house. Guard duty consisted of making periodic circuits of the garden, freely demonstrating that we were armed, then returning to the house to enjoy French cuisine and a night on a sofa. Sleep was not too easy at first, after spending 3½ years on bamboo, branches or boards.

Every morning we reported back to camp to keep up-to-date with events, and one morning we met a Lt Colonel of Engineers standing at the side of the street cursing his Japanese driver who could not fix his broken-down car. This we were able to do, so I then offered to be his driver, as I knew Saigon and its surroundings, could speak French and a bit of Japanese, and was fairly conversant with the general situation.

Two days later I was summoned to Officers' Quarters in a former Girls' School, my POW rags were burned and I was kitted out in jungle green. “Cookie” Burns and I then went to a Japanese armoury and liberated Colt .45s with ammunition, the only weapons suitable for use from a car.

During the next few weeks, many officers arrived from the Allied Control Commission and I had to attend several meetings, sometimes as an interpreter between Allied French and Japanese officers. This was a sometimes hilarious, sometimes hazardous period, as we sometimes did not know who was fighting whom, and the Japanese were not above double-crossing us by disarming Viet-Minh rebels in one area of the city and handing the weapons to another group in another part of the city.

Twice we were ambushed by Viet-Minh, and twice we escaped unharmed. On another occasion, we found ourselves skirmishing alongside Japanese troops who had been sent to clear out a nest of Viet-Minh rebels on the city boundary (who were denying us access to the aerodrome). Another time, we picked off 3 rebels on the roof of a hospital who were firing down on a mixed Japanese/Gurkha force.

Having such close contact with the organisation engaged in repatriation of ex-POWs and internees, our little group was able to arrange fairly speedy repatriation to Sumatra via Singapore. The night before we left, we threw a party in the quarters occupied by the British planters, attended by a mixed bunch of Australian N.C.O.s and British officers. My recollections of that night are rather hazy, except for 4 of us picking a portly Major from a distinguished English Yeomanry regiment out of a puddle and carrying him to his cot.

Next morning, nursing sore heads, we boarded a Dakota of the RAF to be flown to Bangkok. From here we were to be flown to Singapore by the RAAF, but as the Australians were busy rounding up Australian ex-POWs who had gone AWOL in Bangkok, we had to wait our turn. Eventually, a large number of them were brought under escort to the transit camp on the airfield, and planes were whistled up to fly them out the next morning. Next morning came .... and there wasn't a single Aussie to be seen .... they were all back in Bangkok!

When I had left Saigon, I had been given a letter of introduction to the Commander of the Thai Air Force, who was also a cadet member of the Thai Royal Family. Cookie and I were received and entertained most hospitably, and I was invited to a night out in Bangkok with the Prince! Unfortunately, later that day we were advised that we would be flown out next morning at dawn, so our night-out had to be foregone.

On arrival at the Seaview Hotel outside Singapore, which was being used as a transit camp, I was delighted to meet my former estate manager, Tom Hay. We were told that repatriation to Sumatra was out of the question, owing to the unrest caused by the Indonesian War of Independence against the Dutch. Eventually about 100 of us - ex POWs and internees from Sumatra - were put on board the S.S. Ranchi and brought home to Southampton.

It was 21 months before I saw Sumatra again, this time as a married man.

After 43 years I still find it hard to forgive and forget. The Japanese I can forgive, but not forget. The Koreans neither.

S.S. Ranchi

Harry Gordon Park's POW card is shown in the images below,
provided by "Roll of Honour: Britain at War"

The card lists Harry Park's occupation as Tea Planter

Harry Park is stated here as having been repatriated by the Allied forces on 13 September 1945.