Close-up of a man the Jap's couldn't break
Close-up of a man the Jap's couldn't break
Like many of the POW cobbers he has met again since he arrived in Maryborough the other day, after three and a half years in Singapore, former Sergeant “Baldy” McDonald is gradually finding himself in the strange, new friendly world of which he and so many others have so often dreamed – the world of soft clean sheets, good food and friendly people who want to help repay him for the lost years of captivity.
“Baldy” wants a job. Driving a truck or something similar. His healthy tan and well set up figure gives him an appearance which belies his long ordeal in Japanese hands. He and so many other freed prisoners look like that, not only because they have worked so long in the steaming hot tropical sun of Malaya and the fetid air of the Thailand jungles, but because they are among the fittest who survived the hardships and dreary diet or rice and dried salt fish.
Sergeant “Baldy” McDonald’s triumph is that of a tough constitution over all the barbaric Japanese could do to make his life a torment. With other members of his unit (2/26th Battalion) “Baldy” moved to the Selerang Barracks at Changi following the fall of Singapore. There they stayed till a working party was called to go to Bukit Timah to build the vast national shrine erected by the Japanese to honour their dead who fell in the fight for Singapore. Here he saw fellow prisoners repeatedly struck with rifle butts and pick handles and trussed up against fences and posts with ropes round their necks to pull their heads back while water was poured into their noses and mouths – a sadistic method of punishment for the most trivial offences that quickly rendered the victims unconscious. Others were beaten and knocked down where they were then kicked into unconsciousness.
On one occasion a Chinese woman with a baby tied to her back and another one expectant in the near future gave the working party to which “Baldy” was attached a handful of biscuits. Seeing this, the Japanese guard knocked the woman down and amid the most unearthly screams tied her up by the feet to the rafter of a shed, head downwards. As each guard passed he kicked the unfortunate woman in the face.
Here they worked till towards the end of 1942 when all working parties were recalled to Changi. In April the following year, when the ill-fated “F” Force left for Thailand travelling 30 in a truck for five nights and days with practically no food, “Baldy” went along. The story of that journey is now history – the long trek by night over jungle-covered hills and along elephant pads to Shima Sonkurai, 250 miles east of Bangkok.
Here the 2/26th Battalion, with members of the 2/29th and 2/30th Battalions, began work on the Thai-Burma Railway. Here men fell ill. Night after night men succumbed to dysentery and malnutrition. Close on the heels of these diseases came the chilly death – cholera – which threatened to wipe out every Australian in the camp.
The glow of the fires at the Cremation Point some few hundreds of yards from the camp itself showed clear and distinct in the dark of the early mornings when working parties moved off towards the jungle and the working point on the railway. Following the disinclination of the majority of officers to take out working parties owing to the moodiness and quick tempers of the engineers, NCO’s were detailed.
“Baldy” was one of them. I know – I was there. With a break of 20 minutes for lunch of a cup of rice and at times a square of dried fish and occasional rests they were kept digging the heavy sodden earth till 10 and 11 each night, returning to camp most nights soaked to the skin with rain and bootless and tired out.
One NCO had charge of a light duty party – men with fevers, malaria, and dysentery, who were not supposed to do anything too heavy, but were made to carry heavy logs all day in the teeming rain. By mid-day seven or eight had collapsed. Two, weaker than the rest, were detailed by one of the Japanese guards to carry a log which earlier in the day six men just managed to shift a few hundred yards. They fell down. The Jap “koora’d” to no avail. The men were too weak. They staggered to their feet with the guard kicking them intermittently.
As they were unable to even shift the log, the guard strung them up by their wrists to a pylon of the bridge where they were beaten at intervals. Because he interceded on their behalf, the NCO was slapped about the face and later beaten with a pick handle. Later the Japanese came back and the NCO was forced to hold a heavy piece of wood above his head. Each time he dropped it, owing to the strain imposed on his arms and muscles, he was kicked in the shins and beaten while the guards sneered at him because he could not hold it for long.
With the end of the day, the other two, still tied by their wrists to the bridge with a piece of rope stretched to a stay high above their heads, were again beaten, both their arms being broken. They gritted their teeth as they were cut down and from then until late that night when the party returned to camp at 11 o’clock, the half-repentant guard sat them on a log while they meditated on the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity scheme.
This was the background against which men like “Baldy” struggled during those unforgettable years. These same men, once pathetic caricatures of men, now are looking for jobs. They want to forget. They want to start all over again and make for themselves a life in which they can become an integral part of the community for whom they offered so much, braved so much and suffered so much.
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