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MY TIME AS A PRISONER OF WAR

by BILL ANDERSON
9th Bn The Northumberland Fusiliers

Bill Anderson ( front left ) and friends

I was born in Gateshead in 1919 and attended a Grammar School later in life but there was no work available at all so it was a matter of getting a job anywhere you could. I worked in a shop and so the time went by.

I went to work about 1934 and I was called up in January 1940. A great friend of mine was in the Artillery. After the medical examination which was in Newcastle, I went in front of an officer who asked which branch of the services I would like to be in. I said I'd like to be in the Army and I said I'd like to be in the Artillery if necessary and he said I was just the chap they needed. I was quite fit and well and had some wild ideas and thought that was just the job for me to do.

I joined the 9th Btn the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and served for a couple of years in this country before going abroad.

We had no equipment whatsoever. No trucks, no machine guns, no weapons and bits of wood represented the machine guns. Camouflage nets, that's about all we had and you can't play with camouflage nets at the end of the day, it's impossible. But we were down on the Norfolk coast, Yarmouth, Gorleston and various places waiting for the Germans to come over. Thank God they didn't at the time. To be honest, I remember after the War when I read War and Peace and Tolstoy said in the epilogue that the aggressor has always got the terrific advantage of 'speed in' because the brains of the country have got to come into the forces before you are any use at all. I mean all these officers and that, Sergeants etc they were all taken over by the civilian population later on.

I left the country in October 1941. We had an idea we were going to the desert because all the trucks were camouflaged and coloured suitably for the terrain, but we made our way straight away to Nova Scotia in Canada and took ten days to get there. We were half way across the Atlantic when the American Navy met us and they weren't in the War then. They met us and there was an aircraft carrier, and a couple of cruisers and one or two destroyers and they saw us across to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From there we travelled south and through the Caribbean. We landed at Trinidad and then on to Venezuela to refuel and then off to the Cape and we were 500 miles south of Capetown, which would be about December now, when Pearl Harbour was bombed. So I was on an American ship, who weren't in the War when Pearl Harbour happened.

We arrived at Capetown in December 1941 and from there we went up to Mombassa in East Africa. We spent about a week there and then we crossed the Indian Ocean and went to Bombay. We went inland from Bombay to a camp in Du Lalli and stayed there. This is not very interesting but it is interesting to me and from there we went to Singapore. Now, a day out of Singapore we were caught in what are called the Roads, The Japanese spotted us that day. Some planes came over and our Colonel, a First World War man, said they'll be back the next day and sure enough they were and we were bombed. We were on board the Felix Roussel and the ship behind us, the Empress of Asia, was sunk and we received casualties aboard the ship - we had 20 killed aboard the ship. We eventually got into Singapore itself.

We landed in Singapore and saw action with the Japanese straight away. We gpt positions on the coast and, of course, it must be mentioned that the island is very, very small and you've got anything from 1/4 to 1/2 million people running all over the place. We had no aircraft whatsoever and the Japanese always bombed with 27 planes and we always said they must have only one bomb aimer so they blanket bombed us. We had three planes, Brewster Buffaloes, and as soon as the Japanese came over they took off and disappeared. They got out of the way.

We were actually on a tennis court with a machine gun at the time of being attacked and were told about the 'pack-in'. We were told to keep the machine guns loaded in case the Japanese were aggressive. We didn't know what they were going to do but, of course, you never think you are going to die. You never really think this and the next morning they turned up and, of course, they yelled and shouted at us, you know and searched us and took everything off us, anything of use at all. They left us with watches. Actually the Japanese fighting man wasn't too bad at all, it was the administration staff that came on later. The Japanese fighting man would offer you a cigarette. They weren't perhaps as brutal as civilians. They weren't too bad with us. The Rape of Nanking didn't occur in Singapore, that was the infamous thing the Japanese did in China. The Rape of Nanking is a well known fact.

We were eventually taken prisoner and for a week or two we stayed in old Army barracks, British Army barracks at Changi. Then were taken down to Singapore, actually on the docks. We were stevedores at first. The whole of Prisoner of War life wasn't taken up with this romantically called Death Railway. It wasn't all that. That only lasted a year but I was a stevedore for a good year on the docks and, of course, the advantage of that is you could pinch stuff off the ships, You could get some food but they knocked us about a bit then but the administration staff from Japan came down and they were villains, real villains.

In captivity, you're in peril all the time and even the mildest swear word you had to watch yourself in case they thought you were criticising them. They were terrible people, terrible people. They had no time for their own men either. They were exactly the same with their own. They were like the Gestapo and, of course, there was the Kempetai, that was the Police who were in the Army and they were all trained by the Germans. They were trained by the German Army whereas their Navy was trained by our Navy but the Kempetai, they all let their hair grow long. All the Japanese soldiers for cleanliness and hygiene had all their hair shaved off but the Kempetai had all their hair long and they were very intelligent. One or two of them spoke a few languages. You had to watch yourself.

At the end of my period as a stevedore, the decision was made to take us up to Thailand, or Siam as it was known then and we were told, as everyone else was told the same story, that we were going to proper camps and the food would be good and everything and we'd get paid. Of course, in all our innocence we half believed this. We should have known better by this time. Any rate, we got on the train and they were cattle trucks. There were 40 in a truck plus a British sergeant who was in charge of us. There were machine guns back and front of the train and off we went. It took us about 6 days to get to, let's say, Bangkok, which is a well known place. It took us 6 days. Some fellows had dysentery etc on the train. It was terrible hanging out of the train and we stopped every now and again for food. There was a very funny story that actually happened. There was a chap sitting in the doorway and he fell out. He fell out and his own story is he wandered around a bit and the Japanese picked him up and took him to a hut where they bashed him about.. He was in our regiment. I asked him about this and I think they would have murdered him but the officer came and said that he hadn't tried to escape because he had no boots on!. This man was saying he had no boots on and sat asleep in the door so they brought him back to the camp. So that was a little bit of civilisation on the Japanese part. But the food was atrocious. An officer told me to take care of a tin of gravy salt and we got rice at the stopping points, About once a day we stopped and we got a tin of corned beef between 200 men. Of course, we were all reasonably fit still. It wasn't like the time we worked on the railway. We weren't right down on the bottom so it was a bit of a joke. We'd got a tin of corned beef. Now, when you repeat these stories, who's going to believe them? Who's going to believe you - no one.

After 6 days on the train, we got off and they took us to this camp at base, it doesn't really matter about the name but it was called Banpon and it will stick in all our memories and it was the rainy season and the beds were just strips of bamboo. The water was lapping on the bamboo, it was lapping and, of course, excreta was coming out of the toilet, everything was on the surface. It stank to high heavens and the Japanese didn't do a thing about it, they weren't bothered about us at all. Somebody caught a vulture and cooked it. I've even eaten snake, something you would not normally think about eating. I'm actually a natural vegeterian and an old aunt of mine actually said when I came home "Yes, but I bet you ate all the meat the Japanese gave you!!".

Working on the railway, the food and the work go together. If a man was sick and couldn't go to work, they'd just half his ration and they treated the Japanese soldiers exactly the same. If he was wounded he went on half rations, so the more sick you became the worse it was and rice was the staple diet. I mean you can't live on rice alone. The oedema you get from rice exacerbates the problem of beriberi which happened to everyone at some time but, of course, there were other ailments such as malaria. I never got malaria. I was lucky. I think the mosquitoes must have objected to me in some way! I did, however, get cholera which can see you off in four or five days. I was lucky to get over that and dehydrated completely. It got rid of my dysentery immediately.

I received no medical treatment but I was rather fortunate. There were a couple of officers who had been in a brewery in Jahore and they knew about distilled water and stuff like that and they used bamboo for putting the water through and you get an infusion of water and alcohol mixed and they knew just what to do about this, but I was in a camp where they had been working on this for a while and the men that first caught cholera simply died like flies. I ended up in what they called a cholera ward and there were 7 chaps between me and an Australian and the 7 just disappeared and I was left. I tell you it was very strange. The ordinary sparrows are the same out there as they are here. They would come on the end of the bed - they weren't frightened of you at all. I don't know, it seemed like an omen. It was very, very strange, very strange indeed. Everybody who came in the hut had to stand. The only thing they had as disinfectant were crystals that miners used. You put them in a tin and they had to put their feet in and had a wash down when they went outside. The Japanese never came near the cholera ward, they avoided it like the plague. Everybody had to stay in that camp, everybody in that ward, nobody was to go out among their fellows.

You don't need a lot of food. You want stuff with vitamins and that. Actually if we had a thing like Marmite nobody would have died at all. It's got about all you need in it. People just went blind and deaf. You know, all these things were denied us. The Japanese had some, I don't know what it was, it was something like marshmallow stuff, it was a dark colour. It must have had vitamins in because nobody died of starvation.

Work on the railway progressed very rapidly but the Japanese were very, very clever, extremely clever and, of course, they'd been used to nothing in their own country and they were able to do things without the machinery. There was one particular camp, called Hell Fire Pass, that was just cracking away into the rocks. And the Korean soldiers were the worst. The Koreans could get no rank in the Japanese Army and consequently they had to take it out on somebody, so they took it out on the prisoners of war. They were much worse than the Japs and they were big, so big.

I did witness brutal behaviour by the Japanese to the Japanese. In the British Army, and perhaps the German Army as well, you are put on a charge but the Japanese deal with it on the spot. There was one particular instance when a Japanese Captain was in charge of this particular job we were on and he said, right-oh, just rest. Just then a Japanese Colonel came round the corner. He happened to be on a bike and he just drove the bike at the Japanese Captain for letting us rest. He kept hitting him and the Japanese Captain kept standing up and he knocked his spectacles off and smashed them up, then they started talking. He had dealt with him and he had lost face and you can't imagine what losing face is to the Japanese. That is one of the reasons they refused to have anything to do with giving us pensions in later years - I know I am going off the subject but if they give us a pension now they will have admitted their guilt and that's why we'll never get anything from them.

At the end of a period of about 9 months, I was almost invalided off the railway because I caught various illnesses, the common one being beriberi which most people had. Dysentery was another common one. I never had Malaria but I got cholera and it weakens you somewhat. I was thus sent by rail to a little place called Ubon which is near the border into China and we were making an aerodrome and all various plant and stuff, planting rice and all kinds of work.

Working on the aerodrome there were Japanese operating machinery. There was a lathe and all kinds of weird bits of machinery. We were treated very badly by the Japanese but they began to get a bit worried because Allied planes were starting to reach over. They hit one of our camps. I was about 4 miles away at the time in another little camp and they killed 99 people overnight but some actually got away. Some undercover men actually got some of the fellows away. How they did it, I don't know but they just disappeared. Brutal though most of the Japanese and Koreans were, there was the odd exception. There were one or two cheerful people who were sorry when some of our lads died, very few mind, but there was one particular chap, a fellow called by a name which is almost like Smith in this country, a very common Japanese name. He was a sergeant, a big powerful man. Now he was very decent to us and there was a very good reason for it. His wife was interned in Asperia. He told us he had letters from her and she had been well treated so we were treated accordingly. So, you know, you can't condemn a whole nation, but most of them. I wouldn't trust them. You can't blame present-day Japanese if they weren't even born then.

The Allied planes did start coming over and there were generally two at a time. They dropped leaflets one day and somebody said they didn't even drop them over the camp but as a rather romantic touch, on the leaflet in English was Be Bombed, Be Brave, Be Free. I didn't believe it but it sounded good at the time and, of course, rumours kept us going. We realised they must be getting close as before, you see, when we were on this line I think the nearest Allied troops were about 1800 miles away, way beyond Rangoon. So things were seemingly getting brighter but the food and conditions didn't help. The Japanese just didn't care what happened to us.

The warning I got that the war was nearing its end was when we were taken as a party out of the main camp and the Japanese said right, get these lathes off the backs of the lorries. As we were trying to lift them off they said no, no. They just tied a rope around the lathes and another end to a tree and smashed them on to the ground and started burning papers, masses of papers, documents etc. We thought something strange was happening. We didn't know what it was and then on the aerodrome we had been building, we were told to dig big trenches across which filled with water immediately. We thought they would not be able to use that aerodrome and wondered what the devil was happening. Of course there were about 40,000 Japanese fighting troops in the area and things got a bit scary. We all hoped we were fit to run at the end of the war.

Finally, on learning it was the end of the war, there was so much singing etc and everybody was in such high spirits. However, in all the time we were in captivity I might have got just the one letter from home.

I returned to England weighing about 6 stone. We were given the choice of going off to recuperate or going straight home to our families - there was no choice as far as I was concerned, I couldn't wait to get home!

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