Chilla Goodchap, who’d had some medical training on HMAS Perth, was selected as a medical orderly, a job that separated him from his best mate Ronnie Crick for the first time. Crick joined Jim Bodero and the others as miners.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SENDRYU CAMP
IN the last week of January 1945, the prisoners had their first taste of the real mine. They were marched to the pithead about a mile from the Sendryu camp, where they were issued with a pick, a shovel and a cloth helmet with a battery-powered lamp attached. The equipment had to be signed for, and the Japanese made it clear what would happen if any of it disappeared.
The unlucky ones drew blunt picks. A coalminer’s pick looks like a kid’s toy, small enough to allow it to be swung in confined spaces. The head is pointed at both ends, and if the ends are blunt, flying coal fragments can blind the miner.
When the men had received their mining gear, they were marched to the cage, the open lift that dropped them with gut-wrenching speed down the deep shaft to where a steel cable car waited. This transported them at an angle of about forty-five degrees down the main tunnel to another level. There, they left the cable car and were marched a long distance to branch tunnels where the coal was being extracted.
Coal-carrying skips ran on two rail tracks in the main tunnel. One track was used for full skips carrying the mined coal to the surface, while the other was for returning empties.
The main tunnel was roomy, and in some places, living and messing quarters were set up for Japanese miners who worked for days without seeing the surface. Many were women who carried timber used to prop up the roofs in areas where coal was being taken.
The Japanese who lived down the mine were almost white from their lack of exposure to the sun. Often exhausted, they slept, men and women together, on heaps of coal and shale piled against the tunnel wall.
Numerous branch tunnels, all about three feet high, ran from the main tunnel. Some were still being worked, while others had been mined out.
From the pithead, it took about two hours to reach the place of work. The men had to crawl the last hundred yards from the main tunnel into the coal tunnel, dragging their picks and shovels behind them.
Only the main tunnel was lit by electricity. Where the prisoners worked, the blackest of black was pierced only by the dim light of the lamps on their cloth caps. Occasionally, the lamps’ batteries failed. Confined in coffin-like conditions, the feeling of being buried alive in darkness was frightening.
With little room to move, the miners swung their picks while lying or squatting between a row of posts. Between that and a second row of posts was a steel trough with an endless chain driven by an electric motor. The chain carried the coal in the trough out to the main tunnel, where it was emptied into skips.
Unlike Australian coalmines where pillars of coal are retained to support the roof, everything was taken out in this one. Two rows of ashi, thin pine posts, kept upright by pieces of pine wedged between them and the rock ceiling, were all that held the roof up. Falls were inevitable. When they came, it was a matter of luck or divine providence whether it would stop at the two lines of posts or go right to the coalface.
On two occasions, the fall didn’t stop at the posts. The first time, the men managed to scamper out with their gear. The second time, they only managed to get themselves out.
Loud cracking noises like pistol shots were the only warning they had of an impending fall. Cracks speared in all directions in the rock ceiling, and the soft pine of the roof props was gradually crushed, unlike the clean snap of hardwood. When the props went, there was nothing left to hold up the roof, and down it would come.
The Japanese tried to overcome this by banning whistling in the mine. They believed that the vibrations would crack the rock ceiling and cause a fall. The prisoners didn’t feel like whistling, anyhow.
As they extracted the coal, they put up a new line of posts. The trough was moved forward and the last line of posts was knocked out.
The coal seam was packed hard and tight. Using a pick while crouched almost double was as arduous as it was painful. The men found that if they dug into the base of the coalface it was easier to bring down the top coal. It was important to keep the coalface level. If a man got ahead of his neighbour, the job became more difficult. Some of the prisoners, though, couldn’t adapt to the technique.
The Japanese mine supervisors continually goaded the prisoners to work harder. The only rest period was a brief meal break. They weren’t allowed to leave their cramped work space, and had to eat there. They carried their food ration in their bento (lunch box), a little rice, some saccaline seed and a few pieces of pickled horse radish. Saccaline seed was indigestible, no matter how much it was boiled. The hungry prisoners ate it knowing they’d need to have the insides of a pelican to process it. The huge black pit rats had a picnic on the undigested grains.
A set quota of skips of coal had to be extracted each day. If the quota was not reached, the shift continued until it was.
The most dangerous work was at the end of the tunnel where the electric motor operating the endless conveyor chain was located. Here, the coal seam was extremely hard, and explosives often had to be used. The prisoners were required to take turns working with the sticks of gelignite and detonators that were passed man-to-man from the main tunnel. When the explosive charges were ready for firing, those nearest would be moved back a few yards.
The Japanese counted the blasts to make sure that all the gelignite had been used and none had been pilfered. Many charges failed, and a tense situation always developed when there were not enough blasts for the amount of explosives used. The guards would search the prisoners and when they came up with nothing, the men returned to the coalface. There, they worried that their next swing of the pick could hit an unexploded detonator.
Naked to the waist and streaked with sweat, Jim Bodero was painfully cramped as he squatted trying to swing his pick. Above and below him, he could hear explosions being used to bring down coal. As always, they made the foul air thick with dust and smoke. It was bad enough at any time, but now breathing was even more difficult.
Suddenly, there was a creaking in the craggy roof just above his head. He knew what it meant, but there was no escape. He held his hands over his head as the roof came down and buried him.
Fred Barnstable was the first to reach him. He dug frantically with his hands until he freed his mate. Bodero was alive, but he couldn’t move. He seemed to have only cuts and scratches, but Fred knew the main injuries were internal. The Japanese couldn’t see any evidence of injury, and ordered him back to work.
Bodero suffered until the end of the shift when, unable to walk, his mates dragged him along the confined space to the main tunnel. From there, he had to endure the long and painful process of getting to the surface.
Back in the camp, he was in agony, but little could be done to ease the pain.
The Australian medical officers who examined him declared him unfit for work, but were overruled by a Japanese doctor who, seeing only cuts and scratches, placed the injured man on the work list for the next day.
‘I can’t work, Fred’, Jim told Barnstable.
‘You won’t be working’, Fred said. ‘We’ll get you down the mine and then do your share.’
The next morning, Jim’s mates half-carried him onto the job, and then each already overworked man did a bit extra to cover for him. They saved their badly injured mate from the Japanese brutality that was meted out to those suspected of shirking.
Going down the mine while injured had one advantage. As a worker, Jim was entitled to full rations, limited as they were. Had he been put on the sick list, the rations would have been reduced.