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Ray Wheeler Transcript of interview by Ina Bertrand 11 December 2000, Tape 2 (90 mins)
Ray Wheeler interviewed 11 December 2000, Tape 2. Can you explain to us what the routine was on a day in any of these camps? You suggested they were all much the same, so, what was it like for a day? Well, you got up very early and you had a your papala breakfast, and then off out to work. Now, you would be working, in most places, you would be shifting earth. Now you would either be building an embankment or digging and cutting, or preparing to build a bridge and eh … the amount of earth you had to shift per man would vary and the closer the time came for completion of the railway, the greater the amount of earth you had to shift. And other odd times you would get out to cut wood for the projected railway when it was finished for piles to drive into the … to make bridges, everything except the sleepers was obtained locally and we’ve always wondered why the sleepers weren't just got out of the thing … and we were put to cutting them, but on reflection the sleepers we used to get sent up were beautifully sawn timber. Very sharp edges, if you were handling sleepers you used to like to wrap rags, otherwise you could cut your fingers on them. Well I only found out in the last few years that Mitsubishi had the contract to supply all those sleepers and eh … So they came from Japan? I don’t know where they came … they could have come from any of their possessions. They could have come from even the Philippines or Thailand or, you know, over in Vietnam or anywhere. But they were a pretty uniform sleeper. I can quote that they are very good because I have been back up the line about 5 times and some of the original sleepers are still there, 50 years later. What sort of tools were you using? Very poor, your main tools that you had were a shovel, a.. like our mattock, only with only … not the axe head on it. It was called a chungkal - more like a big garden hoe and the saws they used were pretty inferior to what we would use ourselves, mainly a crosscut saw that you could use underneath a log or over a log, depending on which … A two person? A two person one and eh to shift the earth you used what we called tungas, which were two bamboo poles, either with a rice bag slung in between them and eh or a finely woven type bamboo slat net … eh which you used to use to carry rock or earth out of the cuttings and things like that, and transporting. Did you make those things? Some of them you had to make, but eh … in the main they were made by natives … it was something that was used a lot up there and eh. There were a lot of civilian labourers as well, weren't there? Did they work with you or … ? No, they always kept them working well away from us, but I would say on the whole, from what I remember, there was as many, if not more, civilian impressed labour working on that line and in a lot of places like at the border camps they had whole families would come up in their yak carts, and the wife wouldn’t work, but they would have younger kids there as well and they could buy food and that. They were impressed labour, they worked in a lot different conditions to us, they had better food and that but the big problem with them was that they weren't able to stave off disease as well as us because they hadn’t been inoculated and at the 105 kilometre camp or Aunkanaunk, when cholera struck, it was about our third cholera epidemic, it raged for about 3 weeks and that time the Australians lost about 150 men, the Dutch a few less because there weren't as many as them, but on a proportion, about the same percentage and we would have had perhaps 3,000 people in that camp. But in that same time that we lost perhaps 250 to cholera in the whole camp, they lost … 28 - that was all that was still alive and when it finished its run, that was all that survived, because we know that some of them attempted to walk their way back out and how many of them made it we wouldn’t know, but I know I got put on a burial detail and on reflection it just shows how callous you were getting because we were burying a lot every day there. The first graves we dug, we dug them deep to cover a body so no animal or anything could … and we always tried to find a bit of something on them that could identify them, and we would build a cross out of bamboo. It didn’t matter what religion, you couldn’t tell, and we would put that, tie that thing there, so at some future date they may be identified and we started off, we would be burying 9, 10 a day and you wouldn’t touch them - you dare not touch them for fear of contracting cholera yourself - so you got a bit of bamboo, lifted whatever part of the body, the legs or the head that you … could, wherever they had died and lantana vine out of the jungle around them, without touching them and then drag them to where you had dug the grave, on a flat bit of territory and then pull them so they would drop into the grave and then bury them. After about a week of that, you were getting very callous because you got tired of it, we said a prayer for everyone we first buried and then you were forgetting to say the prayer, it was just the … morbidity of the whole situation, you forgot to say the prayer, but then you turned a bit the other way because occasionally you’d bet which way they would fall, face down or on their back - bet a cigarette or something on it. And a cigarette was the cheapest thing you could get. Not a cigarette as we know it in a packet. Where you did get paid your ten cents a day, it would keep you going in cigarettes and cigars even - the Burmese type cigars - quite easily. But you would have to work for 10 - 30 days to buy one duck egg and the duck egg could be rotten when you got it anyhow, so give you an idea of the parlous state you were getting into. That evaporated pretty quick after, it gave you a lot to think about, how morbid you had become and how callous you had become after that. Talk about money a bit. I find it very puzzling that people still had money at this stage. Were you paid? Well we sold … no some camps .. we were supposed to be paid 10 cents a day and in some camps that was honoured, in some it wasn’t, depending … we have only found out lately that we were leased out to a lot of the Japanese companies and they were supposed to pay us, to feed us, to clothe us and look after us medically. They did none of it. And the Japanese companies that have been named to us, and have surfaced in the Japanese archives which they have got into lately - Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Nippon Steel, several of the big coal mines in Nagasaki, in that area - and eh hardly anywhere were you working just for the Japanese government, you were working for people who had the contracts to build that certain thing, the bridges or whatever you were doing. Right, when you said 10 cents, what did you mean by that? Local currency? 10 cents, that was Japanese occupation currency and there would be 100 cents to a rupee in Burma. 100 cents to a Malay dollar in Malaya and so on. Occupation currency and eh … Were you actually given it in your hand or was it just a book entry? Sometimes, sometimes you were given it to you in your hand, sometimes you never saw it. In actual fact, I will give you an idea of how you survived. In Saigon, was about the only place I remember where they allowed us to have a canteen, because we were quartered in the old foreign legion barracks down in Chowlong, the sister city. French people were driving past that, day and night, and they could see you and it was sort of dressed up a bit to look a lot better - they even gave us mosquito nets which we had never had before and the mosquitos weren't that bad there and em … this canteen, you could buy fruit and stuff like that and we did get paid in Saigon. But they stopped it at one stage, they were worried we were spending twice as much as we were being paid. Now that was because some of still had stuff to sell, and myself, I went into the tailoring business, we cut the bottom blue part that tucked under the bamboo mat on the floor where you slept - about that, oh, I suppose about 2 foot wide or more, you could get off it, material - we made them into shorts and we made our own pattern of shorts to fit the people of the area and we sewed them up with whatever we had left in our housewives, I know I made most of mine with darning wool, that’s all that was left and you take em out and they’d buy them. Eager to get hold of them. Of course we couldn’t bargain too much with them or they would just dob you in. And quite a lot of times they would just exchange it for their own local home brews or whisky or something. And eh I know we had one bad … I only had one bad experience, I had sold something to them and they had given me this bottle of stuff and I managed to get it back into camp, had a drink out of it that night ... and mates … at that stage an American aluminium type eh mess can, me old one had been flattened by a tree falling up near Burma somewhere and when I got up the next morning it was pitted and green with verdigris and I went to the doctor worried. And he picked it straight away -it was wood alcohol they were selling us. And fortunately I hadn’t drunk enough to hurt meself but some blokes did drink enough to hurt their stomachs. But the other thing that we did, that place there had great big huge locks in it and the brass ferrules that the handles went through, we cut them off, stolen hacksaw blades, used carborundum paste, anything we could steal in workshops where we were working and we made them into rings and we cut the little top out of them and inserted bits of toothbrush, highly polished, greens and different things, old toothbrushes that were useless and the whole thing, looked a rather attractive ring and there were 3 chaps there out of one of the anti aircraft gun crews that had come out from England to Saigon, prisoners of war, and one of them was a jeweller and he had the hallmark stamps. For 3 cigarettes you could get a 9 carat gold stamp on it. For 10 cigarettes I think it was an 18 carat and for a packet you got a 22 carat gold stamp on it. The first thing they looked at when you went to sell them, they’d seen that gold mark stamp on it, they would buy them, and you’d pray you never went back there in 3 days time because they would turn green with verdigris too in the humid weather. But that’s where this extra money was coming from. I think everyone was doing it. Um. Talk about cholera itself, where does cholera come from? Well cholera, the worst places we struck cholera, I think we had 3 bad epidemics in the camps we were in. Because if you had natives around with poor hygiene and you had running water that had been used for drinking or anything like that, you had to be very careful. But I suppose that in every place we were in Burma was right from the start on the railway, we only drank boiled water. In a lot of cases you didn’t get boiled water even because some of the water that you got was a bit muddy and that, it was boiled and was masked with the Chinese tea which the Japs gave you. It was like a dried cabbage or something. But it had that green Chinese tea taste and that used to mask the earthy taste and that in them, and used to always draw that water in your water bottle when you went out to work. You daren't even when the streams were running in the wet season, to even take a drink out of the stream because we never knew what was up above it, whether there was a village up there with poor sanitation and it was washing it down to you. That was one of the things you had to watch out for. So you got cholera 3 times. 3 camps we were in, we had a cholera epidemic. And an epidemic would just run its course and then these people would be all right again? Run its course, yeah, about 3 weeks courses generally ran. Did getting it or being in those circumstances give you any kind of immunity for the next time that happened? No, we already … everyone of us in the Australian army in particular, I think the English as well, and possibly the Americans, they would all have been inoculated against cholera and there was a certain protection, because our death rate from cholera wasn’t as high as like the Indonesian national ones that were there, that wouldn’t have had the injections that we had had. Right. And you got a certain amount of protection. So what was the progress of the disease? How did, what were the first symptoms? A symptom would be … oh I have got another bout of dysentery and it just … you lose all body fluids in it and eh the only way to fight it - and our doctors were very skilled at it - was saline drip into the veins and they were using old stethoscope rubbers and things like that with needles that were made virtually from bamboo into the vein. The Japs wouldn’t give them anything and eh if they could get you onto the drip quick enough and it wasn’t that bad, your protection, a bit of your protection was still there, you could survive it. So they would have to make their own Saline? Oh yes, they would have to make their own Saline. And you said there was a salt shortage at one? Yes, there was a salt shortage every camp we were in, but I think that the doctors managed to keep enough aside to do that. At one stage I can remember marching from the 105 Camp back down to the 80 or 85 camp to pick up supplies in the middle of the wet season. About a third of the camp used to have to do that every 3 or 4 days and you took your haversack, your old army haversack on your back, to bring stuff back on and that was filled up with rock salt. That is, you know, the coarse grain stuff and half way back to the camp I thought, oh God, I’ll get, I could do something and I got a handful of that and I swallowed a whole handful and if I did that today or any other time you would be violently ill. It never affected me, that is how starved for salt you were. Right, so you started out feeling as though you had dysentery, but what … when you said you lost fluid, how did you lose fluid? Through the pores, through? Oh it went through excreted and eh … people you know would get very thirsty. Sweating too? Eh, yes, a certain amount of sweating, because it was a very humid climate you are in up there and generally if you lasted the first 24/48 hours you would get over it. Most of the deaths occurred in that period of 24 to 48 hours and they would go down from very … completely drawn and nothing left. How did the medical staff manage because presumably they would be just as vulnerable? Yeah, well they took the precaution … see when you are working you couldn’t take the precautions, you were handling stuff that you didn’t have a chance to, but in the hospitals they had the capacity to wash their hands after each operation and we never had that. And you also could get it from eating green vegetables. Like a great friend of mine, he was an amateur champion boxer and he was also a sports master at one of Melbourne’s Public schools - well know public school. I saw him at the 85 - I am talking about that period, I am talking about where I came back to the 105 and we had that bad … that was the worst cholera epidemic we ever had and they got one down there. I was talking to him that day and the next party that went down about 4 days later, come back and told me he had died. What did he die of? Cholera. He had a green cucumber. Yeah. And that picked up, or whatever it was, it must have come from that. And he lasted 24 hours from when he got it and he was a tough man, you know. Right. Well, in March 1944 you left the railway. How come? How did, how did? The railway wasn’t finished, so how did you come to be leaving the project? The railway finished in 1943, September 1943 I think it was and we stayed there for a while cutting firewood for the engines and quarrying rock for the ballast and then without any warning we were told that we were going down to be checked for Japan, No 1 Party to go to Japan and we were all entrained, down to Tamarkan and I know part of it was over night because we got to … I had malaria on the train and eh … the only time I met Weary Dunlop was at a place called Tarso, which has now got a different name, but he … this tall skinny doctor come through asking if we were all right and they said "Oh this bloke is rattling the boards. He has got malaria". He gave me choice, he said "Well, do you want to stay on the train with your mates or do you want me to put you in hospital for 3 days". I said, "I’ll stay with me mates," because if you got separated the chances were you wouldn’t join up again. And went down to Tamarkan which was a reasonable camp where they screened us all, they gave us tests to see if we were cholera carriers, with the most primitive of equipment and eh … The Japanese did this or the … ? Japanese doctors were supervising it. They had a lot of cases, some Indian doctors who were doing the actual one, and Indian medical orderlies. But the ones that were screened, were cleared of those sort of things. I think they screened you for dysentery as well and eh you were put in one lot and the others in another lot. The ones that were for the Number One Japan party were only there about 4 or 5 more days and we got shifted over the railway station and caught a train down to Phnom Penh, then another one up through Bangkok and all the way across to Bampong, to Bangkok then up to Phnom Penh in Cambodia by train. We had to wait a few days till the river boat took us down river to Saigon and there we worked in a lot of strange places there - biscuit factories, on the airfield building blast walls for their bombers, digging slit trenches at the Japanese headquarters for that area of the war, which was a Saigon university and there were big 12ft deep holes in the ground and about 14ft wide covered with rubber tree logs and that with a mound of about a metre or more of earth. I think that was a long project that we did. Strange things happened there, the Japanese higher command blokes, they fancied themselves, and they used to try and get some of our blokes to take part in kendo - that is the wooden rifles and they had one English drill instructor there, he swept all the Japanese experts away and it stopped very quickly. They lost a lot of face with that one, but I can remember we were working on this big hole this day and this little Jap guard had been sitting there for days, 2 or 3 days with us. Hadn’t said a word, you know, he hadn’t tried to force the pace or anything and eh, this day we got our bit of watery soup and a bit of rice at lunch time and one of our blokes said, "Oh God I could do with a wonderful feed of ham and eggs," and this little Jap, without thinking, he just said in the largest Cockney voice you could get, "So would I," he said, "I haven't had one of them since I left Soho to come and see my grandparents in Japan and got put in their bloody army". And this was a Cockney born Japanese. His parents had a Japanese restaurant in Soho. He had set out to see his grandparents and they put him in the army and here he was guarding us. But he was … we thought there was something wrong because he was known to give blokes a cigarette every now and again. That is all they would trust him with. But it was full of strange things, that headquarters there, the Japanese … some Japs would come and talk to you … what do you know about the war … things like that. And they were all officers. We called it "can opener college". Every one carried a sword. But eh. So then you moved on back to Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur Kuala Lumpur yes And ended up in Singapore again. Singapore, in River Valley Road camp. The strange thing about that, when we got to Singapore we thought we would be going out to Changi, but they would not let us have any contact with Changi. The original 3,000 that went up to Burma, had been … all our papers had been just you know, got rid of, and the 1,000 that we were on … no record of us ever got back to Australia as being prisoners of war because we were … when we were sent, all our papers went up there with them, that’s how we were missing for so long. It wasn’t till 1943, late in1943, that they found out that … from a card that was written pretty early in the days at Moulmein, got back through the Red Cross to Australia, that actually I was a prisoner of war. Um, you were working around the docks in Singapore? Singapore ..and you built a dry dock nearby, can you talk about that? Yeah, was the main job when we first got back to Singapore and River Valley Road - that’s near the docks - and we used to march down there of a morning, loading and unloading Japanese merchant ships. The work was pretty strenuous. Occasionally you might be able to pinch a tin of food - it was foodstuffs coming off and made it worthwhile. And we went down there one morning and there is a German submarine tied up just back from where the ship we were unloading and eh, it wasn’t a very big submarine - we later found out it was only an ocean going one. But they talked to us freely the German crew, and eh they had come out early in the war to Japan and brought out experts to teach them to make proper lenses for cameras and field glasses and that, and eh the … in the period the war had changed and it wasn’t safe for them to go home, so they were lent to the Japanese and they were originally doing patrol work from Java through to Japan and as parts for their submarine wore out and they couldn’t get any more, they got smaller and smaller and eh … when we found them in Singapore they couldn’t go back to Java because there was no backup or something and they could only go certain distances, they were sort of eh limited in what they could travel in their ancient submarine that was running out of spare parts. This morning we were down there working and there was one of their crew - only a young Japanese … German sailor rather, sitting on one of the mooring bollards that the submarine was tied to, coming down the pier towards him was a Japanese major - he was only about 4 foot nothing, so small that his sword is nearly scraping along the boards on the wharf - and he spots this bloke and goes over without any perfunction, he slaps them both, they are slaps one on that side and coming back on the other side of the face, and ordered him to get working. Signalled him to go and work with us, he didn’t realise he was a German soldier, he was a white man just in a pair of khaki shorts. And this other bloke just took one look at him and let go a holy right cross and dropped him cold. It created a real international incident. And they had been looking after us. They had come down one morning and they wouldn’t believe what we were eating and an officer came up and had a look and he threw it in the sea and they fed us for 2 or 3 days on brown bread and butter ... tinned butter and, stuff we had never had for ages and bully beef and we thought it was wonderful. And eh next day, of course the submarine has gone, it was round at the collier coaling docks, tied up there, which is still in existence this day. I found them about 2 years ago when I was over there. And you built a dry dock you said, too? Yes, when that , they were taking a long time to get a boat to take us to Japan from there. All of a sudden, one morning, we are marched down to the wharves and put on landing craft and taken to Pulim Bukhit Island, which is just down from the tip of Sentosa Island, or Blackamatti as it used to be known in those days is now Sentosa. Where that … our camp was on the Pulim Bukhit Island, the landing ships used to take us across to Singapore Island, which is a pretty sloppy bit of country, and we were set to work, they had already started digging this big hole in the ground and they had about 4 or 5 gangs of us - they were taking earth out on steam winches and tipping it into the, you know, the bit of a fen or the bit of the marsh land that was alongside it, building it up and we dug this men … oh big, terrifically big hole and it got, when the work got behind eh they put us on 2 shifts, you worked 8 hours on, 8 off, 8 on, 8 off, 8 on, 8 off, for 8, 10 days, then you had a yusme, and eh, that took its toll on a lot of us. The camp didn’t have much of a supply of fresh water and the only good thing about it was there was plenty of seafish and sea lice … eh sea life around on the rocks out from it. Uha. And for the first few months we were, weeks, whatever it was, we were well and truly rewarded by going out there. A few fellas … one bloke lost his life from standing on one of the coral fish. Died an agonising death, but all in all we didn’t lose that many men there. Would have been better, wouldn’t it, because you were closer to civilisation? Diet, you were able to buy more stuff off the natives, yeah, so they used to check on you pretty thoroughly. Eh … the hygiene conditions there perhaps were better because the toilets were built out over the sea and they were carried away by the tidal swell and the tidal influence there is 20 feet or something and eh … some days, to get on to the landing ship you would have to climb down a bamboo ladder to get on it and when you come back there would be about 8 inches of water over the pier and you would wade … , you know, paddle, paddle ashore. Plenty of crocodiles round there. And eh … And all of this time you were waiting for a ship to Japan? To Japan, yeah. We actually had the hole just about finished when we left they … they were just doing sort of cleaning up different parts of it. And you left on the "Rokuyo Maru?" "Rokuyo Maru" yes. About 717 Australians I think and 600 eh English, or 590 something English, left on that. And then there was 2 ships, another one "Kachidoki Maru" It had only English, about 900 on. That left on 6th September and it was sunk on 12th. Talk about the sinking. Well it was a horrible, horrible trip in the first place because we were all, the whole 1300 - they packed us down one hold. Just the first hold which had a sort of a shelf floor built and you couldn’t stand upright, you had to sit with virtually your head nearly in your knees, you couldn’t lay down and it was obvious before the ship set sail that it wasn’t going to work. And they set out, and they got about 200 on deck, the worst of the sick, and then set sail and we were out to sea for several hours, I think we all would have died down there it was so hot, there was no air getting down and they decided they’d take some of the hatch covers off. The ones on deck say when they took the hatch covers off it was like we had been down in a sauna, all the steam that come out and from then on they had, toilets, you used to have to go up and use toilets over the side of the ship. They sailed over to North Borneo, along the coast of North Borneo, some more ships come and joined the convoy, then they turned north and were going up the coast of the Philippines and a few more come out, we recognised it was Manila and a few more come and joined it, making a convoy of 15 ships. And eh that would be about the next night, after we left Manila, or gone past Manila, on the 12th that, just after midnight, there was one almighty bang, and up and the sky lit up and it was the biggest con … the biggest eh mil ..eh naval ship - a destroyer - was blown out of the water. They waited for that, they took that out and there was a lot of screaming and abuse going on and yelling down at us not to move and then everything settled down, it was quiet and we thought that was the end of it. And about 2.00 o’clock, 3 … 2, half past 2 some time there were screams on the bridge and you knew that something was happening and 2 oil tankers just out from the bows of where we were went up with terrific flame going from them and caught alight from stem to stern right from the start and eh then the loud screams on the bridge told us we were next to go and you could hear them screaming on the bridge, and one sickening thud in the engine room which was just next to the hold we were in, came through … I was sitting against the bulkhead of the big dividing engine room and that. I got propelled violently forward and then hardly time had elapsed and then another one hit the bows of the ships and blew a big hole in the bows and screaming, much screaming from the bridge and the blokes up on deck yelling down to us there was about 7 ships burning and all that. They made a heck of a mess and eh … we had had our escape plan and it worked, it was formulated by some of the survivors of the "Perth." Well we took the hatch covers off the hold beneath us and put them up criss cross, out of the hold, made it easy to walk out of. I didn’t wait for that, I … the steel cables on the davits above the hold, had come down into it and I went up one of them like a monkey and got on deck and didn’t realise that all of a sudden I had a wacky right foot that was flopping round a bit and a big hole in me elbow. And I went back down to get me belongings out of there, I just took what I wanted, me wallet with me paybooks and all that in it and eh we set about getting some food into us, drink. By the time we got on deck the Japs had abandoned it, they had taken the lifeboats and gone. We set about patching a few lifeboats up to put the worst of the sick and wounded in and the senior officers in and eh they shoved off from the ship, and it didn’t look like sinking and the officer in charge on the ship said, "We’ll tell you when to go, but you can go any time you like now. It will sink, there is no way we can stop it." It didn’t sink until well past daylight, perhaps10 o’clock in the morning or something like that. By the time it sunk there was only 2 Jap escort vessels over in the what we would classify as a frigate these days and eh one lone tramp steamer right out on the horizon. They … after we went into the water, I went in with my 2 mates. We got a hatch cover off one of the hatches and … it was about18 foot long, a couple of feet wide, and it was quite buoyant for the 3 of us, threw it overboard and we were only about oh 3 or 4 feet of … you know, between the deck and the ocean, we were sinking very fast then. And we jumped over and got on that. Then we had to go through all this oil … burning oil in the water, which we shoved the board as hard as we could and hope it got through where it was burning and then duck dived and come up underneath it, but we missed getting in any flame, we just got thoroughly coated in this black, rotten fuel oil or crude oil or whatever it was and managed to get through it and then join up with a group of about 160 odd men. Formed in one big group - mainly Australians - some English amongst us. And there we stood there, sat there watching, most of us were out of the water too, you know, with just our legs dangling in the water on bits of wood and anything that would float they tied together. A ship eh … the whale boat or the captain’s gig off one of the escort vessels come cruising through us looking for Japanese. There was none left where we were, they had already been pushed under and dispatched and eh … he just kept a pistol pointed at us saying, "Goodbye, you all die, goodbye, you all die." But he didn’t shoot anyone? No, he never shot anyone. Well I think he had … I think had he shot anybody he would have had to get through the rest of the blokes I think, they might have pulled it under, the odds were to nothing and that … he realised that. And he had just gone and got over to the ship, it was only about quarter of a mile away and they pulled it … we saw it go up. And the one furthest away started blinking with its Aldus lamp towards the one that they had gone back to, and this one blinking with its Aldus lamp, all of a sudden it went up, a sub had come back and got it and the whole superstructure went up in the air, you could see it, and you could see the blokes off the bridge like matchsticks … figures going out from it. By the time they started coming down, the two halves … come in half and the two halves had gone down and the debris fell into virtually empty sea again and I don’t think they would have saved too many off that one. The other one come racing through, went through where all the bulk of us were in the water and threw depth charges everywhere. We later learnt that their thinking on that was that the submarine was hiding under the prisoners of war. That killed a lot of people, horrible deaths, and fortunately I was with one of the "Perth" survivors who I made a good friend of during the time on the line and he said the best thing, get as much as you can up out of the water and that seemed to work, although the concussion through the water was pretty severe. And we eh … So, in the water now are a lot of POWs, but there are probably also Japanese seamen as well? Very few, they picked them all up. That’s what these other things were doing. Right. There was two or three of our blokes spent their time, they died doing it, pushing the Japanese under, they were that mad with them and eh the only ones that were close to us in the water were a couple off one of the burning oil tankers - one who was tied onto a piece of wood and obviously he was badly burned, he was too far away to swim to, to try and do anything for him and he was laying there … occasionally, you knew he was still alive, he was going like this with his hands and then all of a sudden there was a swirl in the water and blood everywhere, a shark got him, turned it over and we don’t know what happened to him from then on, so that was the last Jap that was anywhere near us and eh … So, how did you come to be picked up the? Well … That was 5 days later. 6 days. 6 days? 6 days later. Without food or water? Well we took our water bottles over with us, full of water, but they were that old that the corks had perished and within an hour in the water, unless you saw some way of not getting them near the salt, that water was just as salty and saline as the sea. And eh I never drank anything for the first couple of days at all. On the third night 2 of my mates - my good mates who had been with me all the way from Puckapunyal - they died from drinking salt water, they went mad and got delirious and that and they died overnight. On the fourth morning I thought gee, I am not going to stay here with this … cos a lot of them were doing the same thing and my mate off the "Perth" and 2 others had gone. They said they were going to try and make to where they could see some Carley floats which they did achieve. And I could still see them in the morning, they seemed to be within attainable distance, so I said goodbye to my 2 mates and shoved off and swam and they were half way there … what I estimated half way, there was a raft with 2 people on them. As I got near, they were 2 English, and they were yelling at me to give them their water bottle back, I had pinched their water bottle back - I hadn’t even reached there by the time I could hear them screaming. They were mad from thirst and drinking salt water. When I got over there one of them had a whack at me and I just, I just grabbed one’s ankle and sat him down and couldn’t get any sense out of him, so I kept going. I had on the inflat … not the inflator, the kapok, ordinary kapok life jacket that was standard on these Jap ships. It still had some buoyancy … and it took me about four and a half, five hours to get over to where the others were, it was getting late in the afternoon. They pulled me in and put me on … they had 6 Carley floats. That made … and there was 4 of them, someone else had joined them. I knew them, we all knew each other, we had been working together and not long after I got there with them, Phil come drifting down and we got him on too, we all knew each other and we talked it all over. We used our collective possessions and I had a … bottle of tablets with mainly quinine for malaria and that that I had hoarded for a couple of years in an Ingram shaving cream jar and we elected the bloke off the "Perth" as the leader of our group. We talked over, now what can we drink and I said, "Well I have read somewhere where a body can absorb a teaspoon of water every 2 hours or something, salt water". Someone else recorded that it was a dessertspoon, so we listened to all the discussion and we decided we would try it. We would drink just a … about a teaspoon of water every hour or 2 hours and just wash round the mouth, let a little bit trickle down, spit the rest out, which we did, and that seemed to work. The thirst wasn’t as predominant after we started that and the next morning we were all still together the 6 of us, the seas were getting rough and eh … that evening, on the fourth evening, we saw a submarine at dusk picking up survivors, but we were against the setting sun and they couldn’t see us, we could see them and we could hear the engines start and move on and see it move and that gave us hope. We thought, well, they are looking for us. And then it finally shifted and one of our numbers who had fished an oar out of the sea had his shirt tied to it and he was waving it like this, "Come round you silly buggers we are over here," and he … when it made it away he sort of went into the ocean, "If there is a God in heaven he didn’t hear me prayer." He only died about 18 months ago and he is a lot older than us. And the other one that came to us last. He is into his 90’s now, he lives in Perth. And of that 6, there is still 3 of us still alive. And all the 6 survived? All the 6 survived and we went through, on the fifth morning, the seas were starting to get up a bit rough and we honestly believed that they would still be searching for us. And when nothing that day … we didn’t see a thing or hear a thing, but by late afternoon the seas were very rough and eh these 6 rafts, and we had worked out a plan. We all had a life jacket, you know the 2 strings or 4 strings on an ordinary kapok life jacket stretched across each of the Carley floats with 2 strings, one from each side and the others, loose, so that you could wind them round your wrist and if you got washed off it was easy to grab you and pull you back. Of a night time we decided we’d have two on the thing to help each other and in the daytime, one each. Well by, oh it was after the sun was well down, the seas were getting, I have never seen seas like them, even to this day, and eh the navy bloke estimated they were at least 40 foot high and you would get up on the top and the actual spume across from the wave would feel like it was cutting your skin. And then we got heavy rain and during it all about … we estimate it was just after midnight, it went quiet, we didn’t know anything about typhoons or anything … we were in the eye of it and it went quiet and we got heavy rain and we managed to collect a bit of water in a soya bean barrel we had picked out of the ocean. It was oily and a bit salty to taste but we did get, I suppose, half a cup of oily, slightly salty water out of it each, which give us hope. The next morning we were surprised we were all still there, the 6 of us and the typhoon had passed, but we were still in 30 to 40 foot waves. You got an idea in daylight of the immensity of it. It took you ages to go down like, just being on a lift up and down, up and down, and fortunately the configuration that the Carley floats were tied, they seemed to be evenly balanced on the top of each wave or evened themselves out and they were going up and coming down together and they never broke apart. And eh … that is on the … that is the fifth night, there is this typhoon. On the sixth morning, when we, you know, we were amazed that we were all still there. We could hear engines and we were looking for aeroplanes, looking for ships, can't see a thing. I said "I’ll bet there are aeroplanes out looking for us". No, they ... one of them.. I think agreed that they were aeroplane engines, another one said that they were ships’ engines and the navy bloke said it was a ship’s engine. Anyway, we heard them on and off all day and we couldn’t see a thing and about … well 4.00, half past 4 in the afternoon oh, from here to the road away, this submarine surfaced, ballast blowing water out everywhere to get it up quick and eh … the bloke from Broken Hill, he said "Out of the frying pan into the bloody fire," he said, "They are damn Gerries" and next minute a voice said, "Hoy, can any of you boys catch?" in a yankee voice and fired a rocket line across. They reckon I caught it like a football or something. We tied that to the side, they pulled us into the submarine and we all got aboard and our navy bloke, who we had elected, you know, the leader of our group, he left it last, pulled rank, come up, he gets up onto the submarine and the captain’s standing up on the conning tower, Blood stands to his full erect, he is a 6 footer, throws a terrific naval salute and says, "Permission to come aboard sir?" Talk about breaking the tension. Ok. It is a marvellous … once getting on that submarine, how quick we picked up. We were given the run of the galley, go down and order anything we wanted and they apologised to us for not having any fresh milk, they had run out the day before, but that was the score and eh … I know I slept the first twenty four hours. They cleaned all the oil off us in their shower, they cut all my clothes off, even my identity disc and they were thrown overboard, I was left with just a ring on me finger. But they had a bit of a trial to finish and they went through one of the … or two of the islands of the Philippines and they could hear a convoy ahead … a Japanese convoy and em, next minute we heard these thuds and we thought that, you know, we had fired torpedoes, which they did and eh … but the thuds were depth charges going off, so we had an experience there which was unique I think, it eh … never were the crew frightened. And we got through there all right, surfaced out on the Pacific Ocean, they gave a display of jokes on us, looked through the periscope, you looked over there is another periscope travelling. Oh my God, you think you are going to get sunk, that was their sister submarine the "Barb" and its eh … What was the name of the one you were on? "Queenfish" - hence the "Barb" and they were travelling together out of the Philippines. We got … the "Barb" and us were bombed by one of the big Jap seaplanes on the way, a big old clipper flying boat type of thing. And it nearly got a bad hit, but when it surfaced, when it was safe to do so, it had the fin of one of the bombs in its conning tower, that had come down after it exploded - they were pretty deep they dived. Having got to Saipan Island, which was still under … fighting with the Japanese, Saipan and Tinian Island, we were there for 4 or 5 days. They patched us up, they gave us blood plasma and that to correct all problems and eh pronounced us fit enough to travel, except 3 they flew down later and we boarded a USS Alcoa Polaris a troop ship, big liberty ship, took us down to eh through Ena Wetok atoll down to Guadalcanal where we were hospitalised and quarantined - they thought we would have some strange ideas, the diseases, the Australian government and which we hadn’t evinced any, I don’t know why they thought that, but they kept us there a few days and eh pronounced us fit and we came back through a hurricane, if you don’t mind. We had to shelter for a while behind Vella la Vella Island and eh back to Brisbane and I never … And you arrived in Brisbane on the 23rd? 25th or the 23rd - I think it was the 25th. 2 days before my birthday is the 27th. 25th October? So that means … Come up the Brisbane River looking for gum trees and all we could see is mangrove trees and we were very disappointed. So you left on the Japanese troop ship on 6th September and you actually landed in Australia on 25th October? 25th October yeah. We were met at the Brisbane Docks, right up in the city, by General McArthur on one side of the gang plank and General Gordon eh General Blamey on the other side. We had just been told about Blamey and Bennett and the fighting that went on between them and we discovered.. we decided we didn’t like Blamey, he only heard one side of the story, so no one would shake his hand Oh dear! And he came up to the hospital where a few shook his hand and they talked to him … I think they put him straight. And eh … after about 4 or 5 days there they had run all the tests on us, they gave us the hookworm cure which we were full of and things like that. They decided that the best thing they could do is give us some leave, put us on an express train thing, or the best train down to Sydney, a night in Sydney at Marrickville Barracks and then on the Spirit of Progress down to Melbourne the next day where we were met on Spencer Street Station by our families and then spirited out to Royal Park, given some Australian clothes - at that stage we only had all American clothing - Australian clothing and a 90 day leave pass and the Red Cross drove us home to our own home. I went out to Balaclava where Mum was living and caught up with everything over the years. Well you would think that that would have been enough, but actually you continued in the army and you went on serving didn’t you? Whilst I was out on that 90 days leave a Major Seeger came out from the special forces and the coast watch … he was tied up in all those things and he had proposed me and 8 others to go into the Z specials. And we would have to pass the test first. I … only 2 of us did and ended up in the "nut factory" where they took you back, you know, to your childhood, and seeing what you had wrong with you and the consensus from that one was that I had an above healthy hatred of the enemy, but it was … above normal hatred of the enemy, but it was a healthy hatred so I was fit to serve. So I went into this show and did my training eh, you know, to parachute into Borneo on Operation Kingfisher which fell flat. I got malaria, I was sent up interpreting with those that had, the Japanese that had survived the breakout at Cowra, I was a bit of a naughty boy there I think and the next thing I was on a ship going to Italy with a special group. Served the war out there. And you said that Italy helped you come to terms with the experience? Italy was far, far different to what I had been through. People welcomed you there. You were a foreigner, but they welcomed you because you … they had been repressed all the time with Mussolini and it was a breath of fresh air and I think I regained my sanity there and part of the healing process was picking up all these poor buggers that had been locked up in the Holocaust and eh, with the tattooed arms and that and we used to actively help them, although we weren't supposed to, to get down to the south of Italy to get over to Cyprus and the thing that struck me was that there were old women, young children and old men, there was none of the in betweens amongst them. And later on I went up to Auschwitz on leave after the war finished and actually saw what had been through and I couldn’t face it. I went about 200 or 300 yards inside … the smell was the same as a cholera camp. All the bones and skeletal things being bulldozed into pits and I just walked out and left it. The other 3 went in and had a good look at the ovens and that, but don’t let anyone tell you it never happened the Holocaust. There was another one about a mile away from it and that has all gone to this day. Em … what was left for you? What were the bad things that continued, even after the experience itself ended? There are some funny ones. You would be walking around Melbourne on leave and a tram would go across one of the cross, you know, the intersections and the pole would leave that blue flash. The first few times you threw yourself flat on the ground. Right. You were indoctrinated from the bombing and that that you had suffered to get cover, and the people would laugh at you. I think they knew what it was all about, poor bugger, he has got shell shock or something like that. With us it wasn’t shell shock, it was survival. What about physical problems? Did you still have dysentery, malaria? I got several bouts of malaria, but one while I was on leave and I never told them about it because it would have meant going out to Heidelberg and eh I knew enough to treat it … I had managed to get some quinine tablets from a doctor, local doctor. And eh … visited relatives, caught up with those that were still in the army, learnt that my cousin had been shot down over Alamein and eh … oh that was when we first come home and when I went back to Italy I actually come back to Egypt waiting a boat home. I went up to Alamein and found his grave and 2 of his squadron looking for graves out of it. And they said "Who are you looking for?" I told him and they said, "We found … ", he said "There wouldn’t have been much of Bill left", they knew him. And eh … went up to … we go on leave to Damascus, to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, travelled around wherever you wanted to virtually. And eh … There was the story you told about having an attack of malaria while you were on a tram? Oh, that was, that was … . we used to go in … 3 or 4 of us locals in Melbourne that lived within easy commuting distance of the city, used to meet up of a morning there and go to Hosies hotel, have a couple of beers, and this morning I’d got in there about 10 o’clock and I sat down. I said, "Don’t buy me a beer, I am getting malaria", I could feel it coming on. So I headed straight back over to Flinders Street Station, sat down on the train and I got the shivers and the shakes and the next thing I remember, that would be about half past ten, next thing I remember, it was about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I am still on the train, I must have been to Sandringham and Broadmeadows 3 or 4 times and 2 old ladies sitting opposite me going crook about the drunken soldier. I never made them any wiser, but got off at Balaclava. That was the one I never reported. I never told them that I had that bout of Malaria there. Look, this has been an appalling, awful experience and you were very young. It is hard to remember that you were still only just 21 when you got home? Now, did anything good for you come out of it? Oh yes, a lot of good come out of it. It made you more resolved, it made you deeper interested in international affairs, it gave you a much broader outlook on life, it taught you to survive and I think that the mere fact that there is about 18 of these chaps still alive today, like me, some of them are young, some are old - the oldest one would be in his 80’s, approaching 90 - that all felt the same. We were a little group, we all felt the same when we talked about it and I think that that is the biggest I learned is survival and how to face problems. Problems are there to be solved, and they were there to be solved when you were a young chap, you solved the problem successfully, why can't you do it here where everything is for you, not against you. So there is still a very strong bond between you? Yes, there is a very strong bond between prisoners of war. You will hear it often quoted amongst our ranks that if you didn’t have a mate, you died, and that is still true to this day. Like there is … those 3 that are still alive out of the 6 of us that spent the last 2 days in the war together, first thing … "G’day mate," and you mean it … mate as mate. Uha. And eh … that is still very large in the POW experience in the cult. Did you join organisations, did you join the RSL or POW organisations? I joined the RSL and the POW organisation. I became active in the RSL and I realise in the early days they had the numbers to do more good for prisoners of war than the Association itself, because we had very limited numbers, and I rose up through the State Branch to Senior Vice President. I headed the Defence Committee in Victoria, the publications we ran, I had several portfolios, I used to go to Canberra, I became … got on the national Defence Committee at one stage. Used to go to Canberra 20 times a year where I could do a lot of lobbying. I did a lot of courses at ANU. What did you see as the main function of the RSL? Well to fight for better conditions of soldiers and keep a watching eye, a watching brief on that Australia never got into the same conditions that they had to send young blokes to war like us and go into action … the first day they went into action with only 30 rounds in their ammunition pouch. You learned … we learned by hard experience. Did you march on ANZAC Day? Used to rigorously always attend ANZAC Day and … until I got older and then up in different ranks in the RSL and then I used to be asked to speak at all the regional capitals and all those places. I actually did ANZAC Day in Melbourne at one stage. Have you watched changes in ANZAC Day? Do you … . what do you think about those? Yes, I have seen a lot of changes in ANZAC Day. You know, they have had to come apart, the hierarchy of the RSL realise that if they want to still keep functioning, they have got to have larger numbers and I think now you have noticed that the national service blokes can now march on ANZAC Day and they should have been doing that a lot longer, you know, that … but ..eh How do you feel about young people wearing their father’s or grandfather’s medals? I feel proud of them. I feel proud of them and they are … and most of them, they wear them on the left breast where they are supposed … the right breast, where they are supposed to be worn, and there is nothing against them doing it. Right. I don’t like Australia’s system of war medals. I have got 4, I am entitled to another one which I am not really interested in getting, but I value the Order of Australia medal more than them. And when did that come? 12 months ago, last Australia Day. Right, and that was for services to the RSL? Services to the RSL and the prisoners of war and community. I have done a lot … I am very interested in a lot of community places. I got interested in the aged care thing and went on the board of the Mt Eliza Centre down here and I was on that for 11 years, the last 18 months I did as Chairman of the board. How do you feel about the Japanese now? I have got no quarrel with the younger Japanese. I will talk to them and they talk to us, they are a different breed altogether, but I feel sorry and once they know what happened they ask questions that have been written out of their history books. I still reserve my thoughts on the military Japanese. I believe that we were sold short, I believe that the 1951 Peace Treaty in San Francisco did us a disservice, in that it wouldn’t let us ever sue the Japanese government for compensation. I have got a lot of thoughts on the Japanese that way because that’s if you read that peace treaty, they rebuilt Japan for them, give them the money to build new factories and then the latest technology in Japan and Germany in the same boat, they took over and they were the 2 rich nations very quick after the Second World War. And they have never come to tors with what they did to us. They were the signatures to the Hague Convention which promised treatment of the Japanese … eh by … treatment of prisoners of war the same as the Geneva Convention. They just threw it out the door when it come to their soldiers treating us as human beings. We were worse than cattle to them, especially on the building of that railway. Do you read books and watch films about prisoners of war? Yep, I have got nearly every film that has ever been made about it, except the one I didn’t keep was Return from the River Kwai, that was the story of the Rykuyo Maru, which started off being transported down the rails, Thailand down to Singapore to catch a boat. No it took us to Saigon that one and eh … then the sinking of the Rykuyo Maru and the … some of the footage was all right, but it went wrong right in the very first instant where it showed Australians being beheaded, coming down on a train from Thailand. They never beheaded one of our men. Right, so you measure these things by how accurate they are? Oh by accuracy and then the other thing we had on that ship, an American Colonel who had been shot down over Rangoon, about 3 months prior. The poor cow, he had been belted unmercifully trying to get the secrets of codes and that out of him and he was being sent to Japan for the kempi ti to further work on. In that story they made up, in the film Return from Kwai, it didn’t follow the text at all and it has got this American Colonel escaping in Saigon, which he didn’t - he never went to Saigon, he came down to Singapore and got on the ship - and he died when the Japanese machine gunned the life boat he was in with Brigadier Varley, Captain Crans and several of the top officers and chaps … they machine gunned 3 lifeboats with about 80 people in and not a one survived. And we only found that out from Japanese archives after the war. The other 2 with our doctor and the worst of the wounded, they survived and eh … I have got a lot of reservations about the military cast of Japan still to this day because a lot of them that we got to meet in certain circumstances, like the Colonel in charge of building that dry dock, another chap who was a Colonel who came out here and built the Yepoon Village, you know, the thing, his name was Iwasaka, he was the head of the big steel company that had the contracts to supply the steel for the railway. To see what they got without being charged, because in 1950 they never charged anyone they caught as a war criminal after 1950 and in 1952 they let all they had caught walk free without trial and this, I believe, was McArthur’s doing and I still can't see the right from the wrong of it and don’t believe it should ever have happened.
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Victorians at War - Oral History Project