In his elegant flat overlooking Hyde Park, over coffee and dainty biscuits, 95 year-old Harold Atcherley is explaining why it's taken him so long to break his silence about the horrors he endured as a prisoner of the Japanese.
"I didn't think anybody would be interested. One has to remember that the war for the British was mainly in Europe. Nobody knew anything about it."
Harold was one of 80,000 allied soldiers who became prisoners of war when Singapore surrendered in 1942. In April 1943, after a hellish train journey and 200-mile forced march through jungle, he was put to work building the infamous Death Railway – later immortalised in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
On scraps of paper bound by needle and thread, Harold chronicled his struggle to survive in a diary that has finally been published. It's illustrated by the harrowing line drawings of cartoonist Ronald Searle, a fellow POW and lifelong friend. Searle passed away in 2011 but Harold – as one of the last survivors – has now spoken about his experience in a new BBC4 documentary.
"But there's one thing you cannot do in a book or a film and that is give an idea of the stench of war. The stench of death in such numbers."
Even by Japanese standards of wartime cruelty Sonkurai camp on the Thai-Burma border was one of the most brutal. The POWs' first task was to burn the rotting bodies of Sonkurai's previous occupants: native labourers who had succumbed to cholera.
The bamboo shelters had no roofs, so the POWs worked, ate and slept in the monsoon. A daily ration of two and a half ounces of rice ("rotten most of the time and full of weevils") was halved for the sick, which in reality meant everybody received less. In desperation they supplemented it – "with anything we could get. Snakes. Lizards. Anything that moved."
Every day they would hack through jungle and haul wood for up to 18 hours, then carry back the dead – sometimes as many as a dozen – to prove there had been no escapees. "You'd have five or six bodies burning and a pile over here lined up ready to go. One was hardly able to recognise people who got cholera only 12 hours before."
Harold escaped cholera but like everyone else suffered – often at the same time – from dysentery, malaria and beriberi, which left him temporarily paralysed from the waist down. He would tie his toes to his knees so he could stand and avoid the wrath of the guards.
But it's the memory of the jungle ulcers that still makes him shudder. "Some people had them from their knee down to their ankle. You could see the bone. No flesh left. We had nothing to treat them with except maggots or leeches." Amputations were carried out with a borrowed handsaw and – if you were lucky – a splash of sake as anesthetic.
By the time the line was completed in December 1943, only 400 of the original 1700 POWs at Sonkurai were still alive; only 182 survived a further 18 months imprisonment back in Singapore. Overall the Death Railway cost the lives of about 13,000 POWs and 100,000 native labourers – one man for every sleeper laid.
Three of Harold's friends later committed suicide, unable to live with their memories. "I was very lucky in that I'd got myself a job as a trainee with Royal Dutch Shell [before the war]. It was something to return to. If I hadn't had that, I don't know what I'd have done." He spent the next 25 years travelling the world and was knighted in 1997.
At a preview screening of the documentary, Harold found himself in tears while listening to the former Japanese guards, who are just as haunted by their memories. Like many POWs, he forgave his captors long ago.
"One of the things I have learnt and I have no doubt about this: soldiers fighting on different sides do not hate each other. Most of them wonder why the hell they're there."
Building Burma's Death Railway: Moving Half the Mountain airs on Tuesday 1 April, 9.00pm, BBC4
Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2014/04/02/building-burmas-death-railway-a-former-pow-breaks-his-silence/
No comments:
Post a Comment