Bart Richardson - Burma-Thailand Railway

Transcript

Well, hours of working 24 hours a day. We split into two groups, the 28th, and one would do day shift, one would do night shift for a while then we'd swap over. But we'd be going all day. We'd be up in the dark. We'd have the best part of a mile to walk up to the cutting. When we got there, we'd be moving rocks, mostly, that was what we did.

There were other parties, of course, the whole cutting was full of people working. And one group was drilling holes, another group was putting dynamite in and blowing the rocks and our group, or one of our groups, was moving the rocks, pulling them out of the cutting and dropping them over the side. They'd go back with a little thing on wheels, rail wheels and ...

Oh, they were too heavy to carry, they were great big goonies. That was our whole day. Night-time, the Japs would light oil fires and then that lit up the sides of the cutting and down in the cutting itself in certain places. You have to be able to see something. And daylight would come, and the other half would come up and we'd go back to camp and you'd just get nicely asleep and the Japs would wake us up to go unload the barge.