I stood rooted to the spot, trying hard not to breathe for the stench was sickening, the ghastly stench from hundred of dead bodies, black wasted bodies, with their skeleton like limbs spread grotesquely at every angle. We had no masks and we knew that we must not on any account put our hands to our faces. The Tamils had succumbed to Cholera, it was the most horrible, nauseating task I had encounter. We were ordered to did pits and bury the dead, while the Japs stayed at some distance outside the camp. When we reached a Tamil coolie camp we could see that it was strewn with dead bodies. One morning our group of twenty four was taken out of camp carrying picks and shovels.
And always, lying round them in stick like bundles were the bodies that awaited cremation - bodies at which we peered closely as we came in to see if any friends lay among them. They lighted the way out to work in the dark before dawn they guided us back through the dark wetness of the jungle long after dusk. While the outbreak was at its height, fires flared at every camp. The shrinking of soft tissue can be seen within a few minutes and the sufferer, shrivelled and monkey - like can succumb within hours, but sometimes will take a few days to die. Cholera is essentially a wasting disease in which the body loses its liquid and becomes dehydrated.
Being principally water borne it spread during the Monsoon period was inevitably faster. This acutely infectious decease had always been regarded with a particular horror, largely on account of the speed with which it can spread and kill. The medical situation was already desperate when in may Cholera struck. I recall a two week period when I never saw the camp during daylight hours. The working day was extended so that we never saw the camp until nightfall. We took breakfast in the dark and were at work before it became light. Men were frequently knocked out and some had bones broken. They beat us with pick handles, Bamboo and the flat of a sword. We were continually thrashed for slowness or failing to comprehend instructions screamed at us in Japanese. The medical officer was often beaten for trying to prevent sick me being ordered to work on the railway. Our commanding officer was regularly beaten for persistently trying to protects us. The beating of prisoners had been a feature of the Jap system ever since the first working parties had arrived in the southern region, but from May onwards there developed on the railway a crescendo of violence designed to spur us on to greater efforts, but which in fact only weakened us further, making it more difficult for us to meet the targets laid down by the engineers. All in all so far as our conditions on the railway were concerned, they could hardly have chosen a worse time for speeding up of the project. When the Monsoon was at its height food supplies dwindled and fell perilously low. Dawn would bring another round of grinding work and saturation.
We were never dry: after a rain soaked days work on the line we would return to a meal of watery rice which the rain further diluted as we ate it, and then we would retire saturated, muddy and exhausted to a wet bamboo bed in a hut that leaked. Drainage in the camp was none existent and water lay in great stagnant pools. The rain found holes in the best constructed attack huts and it poured through the inadequate tents which housed some of the prisoners.
The river rose in flood and swamped the lower camp at Kanu, every unmade road and track that we daily used became a water course and a layer of thick glutinous mud lay on the surface of the higher camp. Permission must be obtained before any part of this story is copied or used.Ĭoinciding with the “Speedo”, the Monsoon proper broke, (May 1943) and for the next sixteen days the driving rain lasted the railway track without pause.
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