Singapore: A fairly dirty city
Well, it was a fairly dirty city. The river was actually black and you could smell it for miles away and after I went back after, on some subsequent visits, they'd cleaned it up and it's as clean as any river in Australia now. The population in Singapore was a polyglot group, you know, you had Chinese and Indians, you had Malays, and there were lots of opium addicts there and to try and control it, Government officials used to have special places where these people who go and they'd give them a small amount of opium and let them go. And the storm water drains there, because the rain in the monsoon seasons, were quite wide and deep and one of my lasting memories is that every morning, this big truck would go around and collect up the bodies of those that had died in the night.
Hit by shrapnel
Well, I was wounded, we hadn’t had a shower or a shave for several days and we got back and we were placed in a place called Tanglin Barracks, which is in the centre of Singapore and the sergeant come around and said, you know, we had to dig a trench to put our set in.
He said, “You better go and have a shower and a shave”, which I did and then they started selling the place and I walked out to see what was going on and the shell burst over there, and this piece of shrapnel hit the wall behind me and ricocheted down into my neck.
So, all I can remember, like getting hit on the back of the neck with a baseball bat and something hot and the next thing I remember was waking up at a British military hospital with a, coming out of the anaesthetic and I'm wiping my head and this annoying thing kept hitting me.
When I came to, the doctor had taken a piece of shrapnel out of my neck and wrapped it up and tied it on my finger. Actually, he told me that if the shrapnel had hit me a little bit to the right, it would have severed my spinal column and I'd have been probably a quadriplegic. He said a little bit deeper, it would have severed the carotid artery and that would have been it as well. So, lucky in both ways.
Changi work parties
in Changi, the first work parties were spread all over, they worked in the wharves and the rail sidings examining and cleaning up the detritus from the war and, unfortunately, came across some Australian soldiers who had been tied with barbed wire to trees and bayonetted and the first time we went into Singapore is prisoners of war, there's six severed Chinese heads stuck up on a great stake in the middle of Singapore to warn the population to behave themselves. So, we did that for about 12 months or so and then as food got very short, they wanted labour for the Burma Thailand railway and other places. They sent a lot of people to Japan to work in the steel mills, in the coal mines and to Borneo to do the aerodrome.
A secret wireless
Anybody caught with a radio was likely to get severely beaten or executed but we had some brilliant people. One of them was a member of my unit in our maintenance section and he made a wireless set which was hidden in a broom made of coconut fibre and every night somebody would listen in with a couple of screwdrivers to turn it and listen to the BBC, so we heard all about the war in the Middle East.
Nothing was ever written down and he would tell one officer and that officer would walk around and repeat what had been told verbally and they used to say “Hello, the canary’s spoken again.” So, we knew the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we didn't know they were atomic bombs or nuclear bombs, we just know there was some super bomb and, actually, that saved our lives because the Japanese High Command that had issued orders to all the prison camp commanders that in the event of invasion by Allied troops, they were to destroy all the prisoners and remove any trace of them and our last job was digging in these tunnels into the hills in Singapore and the Japs told us that they were storage area which fitted in very well, but actually they would have been our graves.
B-29 bombings
They were terribly terrified of the American B 29 bombers because no Japanese fighter could get up that high and you just saw their vapour trails up in the sky and the Japs’d all scream out … and they'd be diving recover and they bombed lots of places in Singapore and up on the railway and the Japanese kept parties back there to keep repairing the railway but, this particular day, they had these sort of rail skips which you'd have to fill up and then push it across and dump it into the ocean and one of these young Japanese pilots was taking off and he didn't get up high enough and the wheels hit the skips and he crashed and everybody's cheering.
F Force
Well, they sent the British troops they sent away to start work on the Thailand and they had group numbers. Group I, 2, 3 and 4 but all the Australian troops who were sent away were listed alphabetically. A force went to Burma and started work on the railway from that end. B force went to Borneo to build an aerodrome. C force was sent to Japan. D force went to lower Thailand. E force was a small group tha6t supplemented B force in Borneo and I was a member of F force.
Now F force consisted of 7000 men and before we left Changi, the Japanese told our officers we were being sent to a convalescent camp because food was too short in Singapore. They said, because it’s a convalescent camp, half the men can be sick ‘cause they were running out of labour. 3500 sick men were taken out of hospital and the total force of 7000 was roughly half Australian and half English.
Well we got to lower Thailand at a place called Ban Pong and I said to one of the Englishmen, we were told we’d be taken in trucks. I said, “Where are the trucks?” He said, “No trucks Tommy you’re going to have to walk”. Well we walked 270 odd kilometres of a night, about 15 kilometres each night. We walked for two nights, rest up in the day, and the third day we spent a day and a night there.
They had established working camps every 15 kilometres along the proposed track. Actually the British had surveyed a route to connect the railway in Burma with Thailand or rather with Rangoon and Burma but decided not to go ahead with it because of the monsoon season, the cholera, the malaria, dysentery and all that and the Japanese actually followed that route. In building that railway we built over 700 bridges. I mean some of them are small, some of them were three tiers. One bridge collapsed twice and it was called House of Cards bridge and that’s, you know, it was a terrific effort when you consider that it was all done by hand.
Negotiating ten minutes rest
So, the total length of the rail was 415 kilometres and because they were running behind we got stuck in the middle between the two other groups and when the monsoon started, the river that used to supply us by barge was flooded with a torrent, the roads were quagmires, you couldn't get through and in one camp we'd almost run out of rice and they had people walking to the nearest depot and bringing rice back into the camp with backpacks and we existed on two mugs of rice pap, that's a sort of rice gruel, one in the morning and one on the afternoon, and on that we had to put in a full 12, 15-hour day working on the railway.
They call that the speedo period. The Japanese were very restricted to English and they had some terms they used to address us by in Japanese, which I couldn't repeat over the air, and their main thing was speedo and ni, jota ni. One instance, when we first started, we had to go into the jungle and cut down these trees and trim the branches off on it and carry it down to the road where it was put on the barge and floated out and they had a piledriver up on big scaffolding and then they had this great rope running across with about 20 men on the end of it and you had to pull the weight up and let it go.
This went on for hour after hour and the officer that was with us, like our officer, he asked the Japanese in charge … which means rest. So the Japanese officer said. “… ni” which means no and, actually, the Japanese officer was a Japanese airline pilot. He used to fly between Tokyo and America and when he was home on leave in Tokyo, he got swept up and put in the army.
So, a little bit longer and our officer’s said, “They've had enough, that's it” so he told us to stop and this Japanese pulled his revolver out and stuck it in our officer’s stomach and said, “You tell them to get back to work or I'll shoot you.” So our officer said, “No, they’re gonna have a rest.” So, the Japanese officer said, “Well, you're a very brave man. Okay, they can have 10 minutes rest every hour.”
Outstanding doctors
I know in Borneo, B Force officers had to work, but on A Force and the other forces on the Burma-Thai railway, the officers didn't actually work but they went out with the parties and acted as intermediaries between the Japanese and us and some of them got, you know, frightful beatings because they tried to intervene on our behalf, but they didn't actually have to work.
The most prized group of all were the 63 doctors and six dentists who work on the railway and they did a tremendous job with very little equipment. In the camp where I finished up when the two ends of the line were totally connected was the so called hospital camp called, Tanbaya and all the very sick people with ulcers and dysentery and malaria went there and in that camp, one officer amputated 40 limbs and because of the bad state of health, only four people survived those and the doctor I mentioned the other night, Dr. Rowley Richards, he was with A Force.
He performed over 120 operations during the course of his work with A Force. Well, Dr. Roy Mills was actually the doctor that was in the party that I went up. Our party was called Pond party and it consisted mostly of members of my own unit, excuse me, and Roy Mills was the doctor and he got very badly beaten several times but he was so good for us that we made him an honorary member of our unit when we came home.
Half a Red Cross parcel
People always talk about the horrors of Changi, well as far as we were concerned, Changi was a holiday camp. Brilliant. I mean, we had electric lights and running toilets, accommodation and everything, great big kitchens and while we were away up on the railway, those that remained behind were pretty sick but they managed to develop some gardens, so they were growing vegetables, and they had duck farms and pig farms.
So that was, it was quite good to get back there was really good and there'd been a constant stream of Red Cross parcels sent to us, but the Japanese never issued them and when we got back from the railway, they allowed one Red Cross parcel between two men and that's the only, a half a Red Cross parcel was all I had in three and a half years. Oh, chocolate and coffee, and I know that we hadn't had any real coffee for three and a half years and it had such an effect on us that we sat up all night talking.
Getting home
Well, they flew the worst cases home and those that could last a little bit longer were taken home on aircraft carriers and the bulk of us had to wait until shipping become available and we didn't get home until two months after and there were two ships, the Largs Bay and the Esperance Bay and we were taken from Singapore harbour to Darwin and we overnighted in Darwin.
Then they split the parties up. One ship went to Brisbane and the other one went to Melbourne and, you know, you see all these photos of emaciated people getting off these ships. When we got off, we were almost fully fit, I mean, first of all, when the Japanese surrendered this plane flew over and dropped pamphlets and said, you know, “We're going to drop you some food. Don't overdo it, don’t gorge it in one. Eat little bits but have it often.” That started us but on the ship home we were getting about five meals a day. So, we put a lot of weight on the way home.
Mates
The first person I paled up with in the army was when I went into the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds in Sydney and he worked for STC, the company that produced the wireless sets we made, and he invited me to a company dance and introduced me to the lady that would eventually be my wife when we came back home.
So, he was the first one, and then I paled up with another chap named George Loveridge who worked for the, what they call the GPO in those days, and another chap from Western Australia, named … so the four of us were very close together and it was when things got tight in Singapore, Stan Ray said, “I've had enough of this. I'm going to volunteer for the next party that goes” and we said, you know, “Don’t volunteer for anything in the army.” So, he volunteered for E Force, went to Borneo and he was on the death march, Sandakan, so he died but the remaining three of us, we all survived and got back home.
Praise for Gordon Bennett
Bennett, Gordon Bennett, and of course, you know, the story was he managed to escape and came back home to Australia and he wrote a special book about Japanese tactics, but they never gave him a full command after that. They put him in charge of an armoured brigade in Western Australia but as far as we were concerned, we thought he was the bee’s knees.
He was the youngest Brigadier ever appointed in Australia in the First World War. He was a very brave man and he was my Brigadier in the brigade in which my father served and because he was redheaded, his nom de plume was Ginger Mick. So, he told us when he visited some of our reunions, he was apprehensive about the sort of greetings that he would get, but he didn't have any trouble, people flung their arms around him and called him Ginger Mick.
So, he did very well with his own troops, I mean, the people that were behind taking him to trial because he escaped with others, they said he should have stayed. Well, he wouldn't have done any good to us if he stayed because the Japanese sent all officers, British and Australian and Indian, above the rank of full colonel up to Formosa and the only officers left in charge of us were lieutenant-colonels, captains, and lieutenants, so he wouldn't have had any good at all if he had stayed and we didn't bother that he got home.
25 years before I could speak about it
My father, like most people was reticent about the bad side of it. He used to tell some funny stories but he didn't speak about it and, I mean, he went through four terrific battles, Passchendaele and the Somme. He got wounded four times.
So, when we came home from Singapore and Thailand, whether it was right or wrong, our wives or girlfriends and families were asked not to ask us to talk about it and a lot of people bottled it up inside and never released it. So it took me about 25 years before I could speak about it, but since then, I've spoken to numerous schools, high schools, different people about the experiences.
