With the daily war accounts of home-made bombs, burned-out buildings, and the dying beyond counting in Iraq, one wonders if the national psyche can endure a look back at the Japanese atrocities visited upon Fepows (Far Eastern Prisoners of War) – 1942-1945.

However, the book, Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur, is more than a record of Japanese savagery throughout the camps, it is a tribute to the courage, the ingenuity, the compassion and endurance of the tens of thousands of Allied prisoners.

MacArthur points out that sixty years on from 1945, we are all too aware of the horror of the Holocaust: the survivors have refused to allow the world to forget about the atrocities committed in Hitler’s concentration camps.

Other enduring images are found in Hollywood films – The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, The Guns of Navarone, The Dam Busters, Colditz, The Great Escape, and The Wooden Horse.

Yet, there is only one memorable film on the war in the Far East, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and in its central theme, a British officer cooperates with the Japanese to prevent the blowing up of the bridge, which is pure fiction.

When, after the fall of Singapore, Lt. Col. Philip Toosey, with 690 men from the 135th Field Regiment, was sent to Thailand to build the bridge on the River Kwai. The nine-hundred mile journey in railway trucks took four days.

At 4:A.M., the men arrived at Ban Pong and then walked two and one-half hours to their staging camp in a paddy field, which was completely waterlogged. Toosey was shocked by the filth and the low morale of the British staff. When an officer tried to offer an excuse for the conditions, Toosey yelled at him, “Don’t you ‘my dear man’ me!” No matter the hopelessness of a situation, Toosey continued to deny defeat.

The next day, they left for Tamarkan, eighty miles west of Bankok. There were one thousand British prisoners, and one thousand Dutch from Java. Three hundred men were squeezed into bamboo huts, eighteen inches to a cot, made up of bamboo slats.

Toosey, elected by the British commanding officer as the Senior British Officer, was told by Lt. Kosakata, the Japanese camp commander, that the men’s job was to build two bridges across the River Kwai. One would be made of wood, the other of concrete and steel, along with a mile and a quarter of railway embankment on either side of the main steel bridge. The steel bridge would be three hundred yards long and set on eleven concrete piles across the river. One hundred yards south, the wooden bridge, one hundred yards long, was designed for light traffic and use in emergencies while the steel bridge was being built.

MacArthur wrote that the schedule was nine months to a year, and the higher priority was given to the building of the temporary wooden bridge (featured in David Lean’s film on the project).

At the end of the day’s work, an individual prisoner might well have been on his feet under the tropical sun from 7 in the morning until 7,8 or 9 at night...
He would come back late for the evening meal;
there would be no lights in the huts;
and as most of the guards went off duty at 6:00 o’clock, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to go down to the river to bathe or wash his clothes.

Sgt. Maj. Socho Saito, the Japanese second in command, known as “the ball-breaking bastard,” built a wooden cross beside the bridge. If someone angered him, the man would be tied to it by his wrists. His free hands had to hold a bucket of water or sand in each up to twelve hours a day.

Cpl. Lawson (who had been stealing tools on Toosey’s instructions and selling them to the Chinese outside the camp to raise money for the hospital, was caught and questioned. Tooley heard Lawson’s groans, and was allowed to intervene. When he asked Lawson his trouble, he said, “Well, Sir, I have told these little brutes the truth and they won’t believe me and I am not going to lie to please them.” Toosey replied, “Now, Lawson, don’t be a fool, do you know what they want you to say?” and he said, “Yes, Sir.” Toosey said, “Well, say it, and if your conscience is in any way hurt, I will take full responsibility when we get home.” The beating-up stopped immediately. Lawson had also been tortured with cigarette burns and matches under his fingernails. Toosey said he was one brave man.

According to the Australian historian Hank Nelson the greatest Japanese atrocity was in not providing sufficient food for the men. Richard Sharp wrote:

When the rations arrived they were rice.
Bags and bags of it, and we looked dumbly at each other and said, “Now what?”

The men were not to reject the rice because it contained mealworms or weevils. One day’s rice ration was to be placed in a thin layer on newspaper and . exposed to the direct rays of the sun. Both mealworms and weevils would walk out of the rice and make their way to the end of the paper and then take cover under the paper. The men were not to stop the progress of the mealworms, for they would then return to the rice and die. Separating the dead worms from the rice was no simple task.

This book is not a comfortable read, nor should it be.  War is hell, and never more so than for the men caught up in the mad world of their sadistic Japanese captors.

We pray for those who died, and for those who are living with memories that for many are still too painful to be shared with anyone, even their families.

(To be continued)

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