In nineteen months on the Death Railway, their only real meat came after Allied planes bombed Moulmein and killed several cavalry horses brought from Japan as officers’ mounts. These were the same horses that had come to Burma on the Toyahashi Maru, the hellship that had transported the prisoners to work on the railway, and in whose dung they had stood for the whole of that terrible voyage.
The horses carcasses were cut up and the meat was packed into open railway wagons and sent up the line as food for the prisoners of war. It was a long journey in sweltering tropical heat to the Thirty-Kilo camp, and by the time the horse meat arrived, it was crawling with maggots.
Still, rotten meat was food. The prisoners boiled it in a forty-four-gallon drum of water, and the maggots that rose to the surface were skimmed off and thrown away, bringing partly genuine protests from some of the men that the freshest meat was being wasted.
After being cooked and eaten, the horse meat brought on more cases of dysentery.
An occasional Burmese wildfowl was the closest alternative to meat. About the size of a bantam, the birds had little flesh on them and were as tough as an old boot, but after being well-stewed in rice water, they provided some sustenance.
Bodero knew how to set spring traps. As a boy on the family property outside Rockhampton during the Depression years he’d trapped wallabies and dingoes. The wallaby skins were sold and a bounty was paid for dingo scalps. Only the skins and scalps were kept. In his current state of perpetual hunger, Jim often thought of all the meat that had been thrown away.
Now he made snares out of thread unravelled from webbing belts. The snares were set in the jungle around the Thirty-Kilo camp, close to a track used by animals at night. A sapling would be bent over and pegged into the ground, and would spring upright and catch any foraging animal that stepped into the noose.
There were no guards with the water-carrying and woodcutting details, so the snares could be set at will. Sometimes a small monkey would be caught, although many escaped because the cord made from the webbing belts wasn’t strong enough to hold them.
This kind of foraging ended when the prisoners were moved from the Thirty-Kilo camp. It was the last time they were ever able to trap food.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MORE NEW CAMPS
THE new camp at the seventy-five-kilometre mark bypassed three others. The Fifty-Kilo camp was classed as a hospital camp for F-Force, while the Forty-five-Kilo and Sixty-Kilo camps were occupied by Java Force workers.
Before the men started at five in the morning, Japanese engineers measured the area to be excavated and drove in pegs to indicate the distance allocated as the work quota for the day. This had to be finished, even if it took until midnight or beyond.
Bodero, who was still weak, was put back on line construction. Though the quotas that were allotted were mostly finished by seven o’clock at night, he often worked for up to thirty-six hours at a stretch. If the quota was finished quickly, the Japanese extended it after having told the prisoners they could go back to camp when they’d completed the original distance allotted. Quick work meant extra work.
Captain Dave Thompson, the officer in charge of Bodero’s excavation kumi (a section of thirty men), risked his life on a daily basis to help his men. A shire council engineer at Kyogle in northern New South Wales before the war, Thompson would follow the Japanese engineer as he pegged out the daily allocation. After the Japanese had driven in the pegs, Thompson would pull them out and replace them closer to the day’s starting point, thus easing the work burden. Time after time, he risked his neck.
When the excavation was completed, other prisoners followed laying ballast, sleepers and rails, but excavation was the hardest work. The line was going through an almost impenetrable jungle of bamboo, vines, thorny shrubs, stinging nettles and other wild vegetation. Some of this country had never been trodden by human feet. The only tools the prisoners had were blunt axes, blunt crosscut saws, chunkils (a type of Burmese hoe), picks and shovels.
Wheelbarrows were unknown. When earth was removed, it was shovelled into large bags slung between two poles and carried on the shoulders of two men, who would often have to scale tall cuttings, slipping and sliding in the mud created by the constant rain. Though each bag held between twenty and forty pounds of soil, the guards were always calling for more, more, more.
Elephants controlled by Burmese were used to carry the heavy bridge piles and girders. The elephants were almost as undernourished as the prisoners.
Constantly wet and starving, the men were developing tropical ulcers from cuts and scratches, and any wound quickly became infected. With no medical supplies, once the ulcers became established they were impossible to cure. As they spread, the only treatment the Australian medical officers could administer was to gouge at them with a sharpened spoon until the proud flesh appeared and the wound bled. There were no bandages available, so the wound would be wrapped in whatever was available, usually strips of canvas cut from tents or any scraps of cloth that could be found.
The ulcer was gouged in the hope that the germs would be expelled and new flesh would grow, but it never happened. In many cases the infection spread, and shin bones, ankles, wrists and other bones were gradually eaten away. When that happened, the infected limb had to be amputated.
Many of the amputations were performed by Australian surgeon Colonel Coates at the Fifty-Kilo camp, which had become a hospital for the F-Force men who worked on the Siam end of the line. It was a mystery why the F-Force sick were brought from Siam back to the Fifty-Kilo camp in Burma, while the A-Force sick in Burma were sent to the Thambuzyat hospital.
Before starting an amputation, Colonel Coates would ask the patient what he did in civilian life. If the man’s job was one that required the use of arms or legs, Coates would say, ‘We’ll put this off for a little longer. In your line of work you’ll need the limb.’ Anyone from a more sedentary occupation would be operated on without delay. Anaesthetics were as non-existent as other medical supplies.
The patient would be placed on a crude bamboo table and Coates, who’d have a Burmese cheroot in his mouth, would thrust one between the man’s teeth whether he smoked or not. The surgeon would light both cheroots and say, ‘Now, lad, you puff when I puff.’ Then he would start cutting and sawing. Mercifully, the patient usually passed out quickly.
Many prisoners never recovered from the amputations. Weakened by malaria, dysentery, beriberi, pelagra and scabies, they had little chance of survival.
The prisoners had no means of combating the swarms of flies that spread disease, in particular cholera, which dehydrated its victims in a few hours through vomiting and dysentery. There were no medical supplies, so those who contracted cholera knew it was a death sentence.
One night at the Seventy-five-Kilo camp, Bodero and a mate cooked rice cakes made from leftover rice they’d scrounged from the Japanese kitchen. At nine o’clock that night, they ate the rice cakes and sat talking. By midnight, Jim’s mate was dead from cholera. At least it had been less painful than an amputation by Colonel Coates.
At one stage Coates was called on to finish an operation on a Japanese officer who had a burst appendix. The operation had been started by a Japanese doctor who was really a dentist. When he didn’t know how to complete it, he ordered Coates to finish it for him.
‘Give me back the microscope you confiscated and I’ll do it’, Coates told him. ‘No microscope, no operation.’
‘You operate or you die’, the Japanese doctor said.
‘Then I die. And so will your man with the burst appendix.’