After closing down the stills, the officers only permitted yeast to be made for medicinal purposes. Many prisoners quickly turned their hands to yeast production. They’d discovered that if enough of it was consumed, the effect was equal to that of the liquor they’d produced in the stills.
CHAPTER NINE
VOLUNTEERS – OFF TO JAPAN
IN June 1944, the Japanese command at Tamarkan issued an order. Six hundred Australian prisoners and three hundred British were to go to Japan. They would come from the main POW camps-Tamarkan, Kanchanaburi, Non Pladuk and Ban Pong.
Strangely, the Japanese called for volunteers. Jim Bodero and his mates put their hands up in the belief that nothing could be worse than what they’d been through. They were told they’d be sent to Singapore to wait for a convoy of ships to be assembled to transport them to the Land of the Rising Sun.
First stop was Kanchanaburi, where the nine hundred men were to assemble for transport by rail to Singapore. Only the fit would go to Japan, the prisoners were told. The men, all of them just skeletons, laughed at that.
The Japanese ordered a sports day to show how fit they were. There was no shortage of men who found the strength to compete when they learnt that the prize for winning was toilet paper. They hadn’t seen toilet paper since 1942. Bodero, who in better days had been the hundred-yards champion of the 2/26 Battalion and Brigade, won couple of footraces. If they’d given him a gold medal as a prize he couldn’t have been more pleased.
Any sort of paper had been scarce during their time on the railway, and to enable them to roll cigarettes, the prisoners would double the quantity of any scraps of paper they came across by carefully splitting them.
In the days of the Twenty-six-Kilo camp, Padre Thorpe from HMAS Perth had given the prisoners pages torn from his Bible, but the men had found them unsatisfactory because they were too thin to split.
A few non-smokers who objected to the Bible being used in this way were told by the worldly padre that ‘If the book is good enough to read, it’s good enough to smoke.’
One race during the Kanchanaburi sports day was designed to frustrate and humiliate the prisoners. They had to run fifty yards and pick up biscuits from the ground using chopsticks. Any they picked up they could keep. However, none of the prisoners knew how to use chopsticks. When the race finished, the biscuits remained lying on the mats, tantalising the hungry men.
The Japanese thought it was funny. The prisoners didn’t.
When the train left Kanchanaburi for Singapore, the men were locked in steel railway vans, fifty to a van. Packed in with no room to move, it was unbearably hot. The only air came through cracks at the top and bottom of the doors. Some men fainted, while the others fought to get their nose near one of the cracks. Those who collapsed were taken from the train and left behind when it resumed the journey. They were never seen again.
Bodero and his mates cursed themselves for being so stupid as to volunteer to leave Tamarkan.
For several hellish days, the train moved down through Malaya. When it finally reached Singapore, the weakened men expected to be returned to Changi Prison, but they were banned from there, not by the Japanese, but by other prisoners of war. The administrative staff of the Allied prisoners at Changi objected to having them there for fear they’d pass on the infectious diseases they’d brought from Burma and Siam. The Japanese apparently agreed, and they were sent to a camp on a small island about half an hour’s run by landing craft from Singapore.
The prisoners didn’t know the island’s name, so they dubbed it Jeep Island.
Jim Bodero was in for a surprise on Jeep Island. There among the prisoners was a face he had never expected to see again. It was Tellemalie, who’d been given up for dead when he disappeared from Tavoy after encouraging Japanese planes to crash.
Years of imprisonment hadn’t changed him. The cheeky grin was still there, which must have brought a few beatings from Japanese guards who couldn’t be laughed at, and the wild crop of wiry black hair was as untidy as ever. Mysteriously, he hadn’t lost much weight, even though all the other men had been reduced to skin and bones.
At first, Tellemalie didn’t recognise the skeleton that Jim had become. When he did, he grabbed his hand. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m on my way to pick some cherry blossoms. Nine hundred of us are going to Japan.’
‘Me too’, Tellemalie said. ‘Should be a nice holiday.’ He held out a pack of cigarettes, a brand issued only to Japanese officers. ‘Have a smoke.’
Jim hadn’t had a decent smoke in years. He took one, and Tellemalie lit it with a Japanese officer’s lighter.
Jim took a deep draw on the cigarette.
‘Good, huh?’ Tellemalie grinned.
‘Good all right. But Jap cigarettes, Jap lighter, fat as a pig. How the hell did you manage it, Tellemalie? We thought you’d be cactus when the Japs caught you at Tavoy waving a Dutch army hat at a Jap plane and yelling for it to crash.’
‘Yeah, that was almost a mistake. I was hauled up before a young Jap lieutenant who pulls out his sword and says he’s going to use it on me. I ask him why, and he tells me, “You say ‘crash, you bastard, crash’ to Nippon planes.” Oh, that, I say. It doesn’t mean what you think it does.’
Jim couldn’t believe the man’s cheek. ‘You told him that, Tellemalie? “Crash, you bastard, crash” couldn’t mean much else, could it?’
‘I had to talk pretty hard to explain.’ Tellemalie gave one of his lopsided grins and took a puff at his cigarette. ‘I tell this Nip lieut that Australians have a strange way of speaking. When they say something, they mean the opposite. Like when a bloke’s got red hair we call him Blue, and if he’s fat we call him Slim.’
Jim was intrigued at the way this was going.
‘I explained to him that when Australians say “bastard” it doesn’t mean their mum and dad weren’t hitched, it means dear honourable friend. So when I was yelling “crash, you bastard, crash”, what I was really saying was “Land safely, dear honourable friend, land safely.” And I was waving a Dutch army hat to show I was expressing the best wishes of all Allied prisoners of war.’
‘And this Jap lieutenant believed you?’
‘ Not only believed me, he gave me a cup of Jap sake and asked if I’d be available to help him in his relations with the prisoners. I agreed to be a sort of public relations officer and he got me transferred to Kanchanaburi to be with him.’
‘You were at Kanchanaburi? I didn’t see you there.’
‘You wouldn’t have. I was hobnobbing in the Jap officers’ mess, eating top tucker.’
‘And here we were thinking you’d had your head lopped off.’ Bodero was full of admiration. ‘Why would you give up such a great lurk to go to Japan?’
‘I started to look attractive to the Jap lieutenant, that’s why. I had to get clear of him. Japan seemed far enough away to preserve my virginity.’
Bodero marvelled at the survival instinct of the man. ‘You’re incredible. What next?’
‘Wonder if the Japs need a public relations man.’
Jim got to thinking. With survival a priority, a master at it like Tellemalie would be a good man to be around. He suggested they become a team.
‘A team? You mean stick together? You and me?’
‘Why not?’
Tellemalie thought for a moment. ‘All right. I’ll give it a go.’
Jim stayed close to his new partner when the prisoners were ordered to work on a dry dock being built on Singapore Island. It seemed a fair enough assignment, until they saw the enormous hole they were to work down. It was like an untended graveyard. There were dead and decaying bodies everywhere, with others near death lying in mud and filth, flies crawling into their mouths, eyes and ears. They were Singapore natives who for months had been working, and dying, down in that foul hole.