The Japanese and Korean guards were also fooled. Having a wireless was one of the more serious crimes the prisoners could commit, and the guards turned this one inside out before they finally accepted that it wasn’t the real thing, only a shell.
Skelton’s performance was countered by the Japanese producing a singer of their own, a senior officer who tried to outdo the Australian. In a squeaky sing-song voice, he presented a dramatic, drawn-out vocal version of ancient Japanese battles between warlords.
It was terrible, but when he wound up on a note that sounded like the factory knock-off whistle, the prisoners clapped, stamped, cheered and demanded an encore.
The Japanese officer bowed, took it as a signal of appreciation of his talent and was happy to give the audience more. Each time he finished, the prisoners called for still more. It was top entertainment seeing him making a fool of himself, bounding about the stage cutting and thrusting with his sword at make-believe foes, bellowing and grunting like a stuck pig.
‘Get onto this bastard’, Snowy Baker guffawed. ‘The only thing not in motion is his bowels.’
When exhaustion finally brought the officer’s performance to an end, he’d formed a new admiration for prisoners with such an appreciation of the arts, and treated them well for days after the concert.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TAMARKAN – AN OASIS IN A DESERT OF MISERY
SOONER or later, whatever the circumstances, the Australians would start gambling. When the inevitable game of two-up got under way at the Hundred and Five-Kilo camp, a Korean guard saw money being exchanged and pushed into the ring.
After watching the coins go up in the air and money being grabbed, he pulled a small bill out of a pocket and placed it on the ground. It was covered, the kip was tossed and the Korean lost. The winner just beat him to the money.
Scowling, the guard put a larger note on the ground. It was covered and before the coins came to rest, he’d grabbed the money and taken off. Nobody complained. He had the law on his side.
If the prisoners weren’t gambling, they were scrounging something to sell. Three of them pinched a Japanese army tent and cut it into pieces to sell to the natives for sarongs. They made arrangements for the business transaction to be conducted in the jungle under cover of darkness.
One customer was a Burmese woman who wanted a sarong but had no money, so she made a physical arrangement that was readily agreed to by the sellers. Later, two of the men discovered they had syphilis. The only one to escape the disease had differing sexual preferences, and the woman had held no attraction for him.
The introduction of syphilis into the camp created a problem. There were no medical supplies to treat the many other prevalent diseases, let alone a new and exotic one.
Late 1943 was a bad period for the POWs. They were low in physical condition and morale. All contact had been lost with the outside world. The constant movement further into the jungle and uninhabited areas meant there was no news about what was happening in the war. Wirelesses that had once kept the men informed were a thing of the past, because no parts were available. Despair was everywhere. Sick men had lost the will to live.
Jim Bodero had his first attack of ulcers. Cuts and scratches that had previously healed without infection now flared into vicious skin eruptions. In desperation, he treated them with a snakebite kit he’d been able to hold on to during his imprisonment. The kit consisted of a wooden pencil-shaped phial with a lance at one end and the purplish antiseptic Condy’s Crystals at the other end.
Bodero had no idea how much use a snakebite kit would be in treating ulcers. He used the lance end to cut the ulcer open, and then he’d go down to the river and let tiny fish nibble at the wound. Afterwards, he’d apply the Condy’s crystals. Miraculously, it worked, and the ulcers eventually healed.
However, other men suffered badly from them, and if it wasn’t ulcers, it was some other disease. Still the Japanese pushed them beyond the limit of human endurance. The Burma Railway had to be finished before the end of 1943.
And it was.
A-Force worked on the line until Christmas Day 1943. On that day at Niki, near the Three Pagoda Pass and the Burma–Siam border, they linked with F-Force, who’d been working from outside Bangkok westwards.
When the two forces met, the Burma Railway was completed.
With the line finished, the Japanese took the bulk of A-Force who were still standing-about five hundred of the original thousand men-from the Hundred and Five-Kilo camp to Tamarkan, close to the Bridge on the River Kwai of movie fame, about thirty miles from Bangkok.
For the train journey to Tamarkan, the prisoners were locked in railway wagons. On the way, they were let out to cut bamboo fuel for the railway engine when it ran out of steam. This was done many times because bamboo burns well, but not for long. Steam was both produced and lost quickly, and the train journey to Tamarkan took five days.
There, the force was split into three groups. One went to Camp Kanchanaburi and another to Non Pladuk, while the force Bodero was with stayed in Tamarkan. He didn’t mind. Tamarkan was paradise compared with some of the other places where the prisoners had been kept. They were housed in sound bamboo-attap huts, and the rations improved considerably.
Food was available because Siam, although occupied by the Japanese, had not been damaged by the war. The Siamese had capitulated at the start of hostilities, and as no fighting had occurred on their soil, life for them continued much as it had before the occupation.
Farms had continued to produce crops and prisoners started to receive a small ration of greens, bean shoots and lentils. Occasionally there was even a small portion of fish and some fatty pork.
Work in Tamarkan was mainly road-building, but Bodero was put in a woodcutting party. The wood was brought into the camp by natives, and the prisoners cut it into lengths for the kitchen fires.
The men lived ten to a bay in the huts and slept on bamboo slats three feet off the ground. If they had tobacco, they could smoke until nine o’clock at night when lights-out was ordered. The blackout was imposed to foil the Allied bombers from India that passed over the camp each night on their way to bomb Saigon, the main port for the landing of Japanese supplies going by way of the Burma Railway to the Burma–India front.
This supply link was the reason for the Burma Railway. The Japanese couldn’t risk transporting supplies by the Indian Ocean because by this time the Allied navies were in control there.
On moonlit nights, the bombers passing over the camp in the searchlights looked like huge white moths, and anti-aircraft guns at either end of the bridge over the river would open up. The guns didn’t cause much damage to the planes, but the prisoners had to dodge flak fragments that rained down on the camp.
By this time, the bridge over the River Kwai was not the wooden structure seen in the film, but a steel bridge that had been dismantled in Java, taken to Tamarkan and re-erected.
Five of the old A-Force mates stayed together in Tamarkan-Jim Bodero, Jimmy Harris, Johnny Gorman, Sol Heffernan and Snowy Baker.
Three of the original group were missing. Peter Murphy was buried in Burma, Dickie Barnes had been left in a hospital camp and Tellemalie hadn’t been seen since his open defiance of the Japanese at Tavoy, when he surely had been executed for inviting their planes to crash.
About two thousand prisoners of all nationalities were engaged at Tamarkan in road-building, ferrying supplies by river from Bangkok and various other jobs.
One huge kitchen catered for all meals. Each national group had its own cooks and cooking facilities.