The Forgotten Highlander (25 page)

The position I had drifted to must have been in the opposite direction from the bulk of the flotilla. A strong current took me even further away.

The noise from everyone else in the sea started to fade anyway. Soon I was alone and bitterly cold in the night air. I tried to use the rope I had picked out of the water to lash the raft together more sturdily but it was very difficult in the dark and with my lack of energy. Yet I busied myself, knowing that I had to stay awake to stay alive.

When light came in the morning I was utterly alone. There was not a thing in sight. Just the vastness of the blue sea, the infinite blue sky and the scorching yellow sun. Whether it was because of the heat, thirst or oil, my tongue had begun to swell. My eyes stung from the oil. When the sun had been up a couple of hours I had still not seen or heard a thing. I started to think of home, of my family and friends, and of happy times in Scotland.

Castaway and dreaming of home I was shocked to suddenly hear a shout from behind me.

‘You will be picked up soon!’ a voice called out. My spirits soared at the thought of a companion to share the ordeal but my joy was short-lived. I turned around full of expectation only to be confronted by a Japanese officer in a one-man raft similar to mine. Immediately I thought, Right! Here we go. I couldn’t see if he still had his sword or not but prepared myself for a fight. There was no way to fight from the raft, I knew it had to be in the water. I knew that my swimming ability would give me the edge. I had my lifesaving badge and I could control a frantic person in the water. He was also fully dressed in a tunic, trousers and boots so I was confident of beating him. It was incredible that even in the extreme circumstances we were in, the need to defend yourself from another human being was uppermost in my mind.

He was using a proper paddle to come towards me. I steeled myself but he stopped five yards or so away and shouted, ‘Here’, as he threw me a tin. Despite my oily hands I managed to catch it. The Japanese officer then paddled off without saying anything more and it was the last I saw of him.

The top on the tin was sealed and waterproof. I clawed at it frantically, eager to know what was inside. It seemed to take for ever. When I finally managed to prise the top off my heart sank. The tin contained chocolates, something we could have only dreamed of in the last two years but a death sentence for me now, dehydrated and adrift in the tropical ocean. I would have loved to have devoured those chocolates but I knew that afterwards they would have sent me mad with thirst. Eating them may have even killed me because I had eaten nothing like that for such a long time. Immediately I threw the tin and its lid in the water. I watched it sink and realised I probably should have discarded the chocolates but kept the tin to catch any rain water. It was a cruel moment.

I was alone again, and so tired, completely unable to do anything. All I could do was lie there and use my brain and imagination to keep me awake. One of the things I did was to go back in my mind to the plumbers’ merchant in Aberdeen I worked at before the war. I did a mental stock-take through the bins and warehouse, memorising all of the stock. Going through the drawers of pipes, fittings, couplings, screws, nuts and washers took a long time and I enjoyed it. I even made up imaginary orders for customers in the ‘big houses’.

It was so hot out on the open sea with the unrelenting glare bouncing off the water. My burning skin was dissolving into salt-water immersion sores, made even more painful when crude oil got into the fissures. It felt like being cooked alive. When one part of my skin could take no more of the blow-torch heat I would move my little pieces of canvas around, feebly trying to gain some protection. I began to think of the cold and bitter winters back in Aberdeen, almost willing myself cool.

I recalled childhood days of making slides and organising snowball fights and smiled as I thought of our sledging expeditions to Auchinyell Brae, where we would toboggan from early morning until late at night, returning home with ears and fingers frozen numb.

Images began flooding back. I could see the fantastic sight of the mighty carts that belonged to Wordie and Co. picking up goods from the warehouse to take them down to the railway goods station. It was amazing to see the giant Clydesdales struggling in pairs up frosty braes, hauling huge loads with their masters whipping them on and shouting out obscenities. The carters were a ‘gallus’ lot, really rough and ready.

I laughed to myself as I thought of the rag and bone man too. At the sound of his bugle we kids would swarm behind his cart like a plague of locusts, hoping to be given a balloon or to pick up the steaming horse dung to take triumphantly back home for Mum to put on the garden. There were some real fights over that dung!

When the sun went down again it was bitingly cold. A full moon on that cloudless second night made it feel even colder for some reason. I had the bits and pieces of canvas draped over me but I was so cold. Terrified of rolling off the raft, I still had to stay awake. I was at my lowest ebb. The light from the moon struck the water and reflected bright in my eyes. I started to see things that weren’t there. Imaginary bits of wreckage or a boat would suddenly come into view. I began to lose my senses, saying to myself, ‘Come on, let yourself go. Go to sleep.’ It was always an inner battle. Half of me wanted to give up. The other half refused. And so it went on.

Alone with no sight of land, birds, dolphins or life of any kind, I sang songs to keep my mind occupied and awake. No words would come out of my parched throat but I sang them in my head. I went through all the pre-1940 dance songs I knew and always returned to my favourite: ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’.

It was a hit for Fats Waller and I sang it over and over and over in my head.

Be sure it’s true when you say I love you
It’s a sin to tell a lie
Millions of hearts have been broken
Just because these words were spoken

I love you, yes I do, I love you
If you break my heart I’ll die
So be sure it’s true
When you say I love you
It’s a sin to tell a lie

Unknown to me over 650 survivors of the
Kachidoki Maru
had already been picked up by the Japanese and the
Pampanito
, which had returned to the scene of the original attack to make a horrible discovery. As the submarine surfaced amid the debris and wreckage of the
Rakuyo Maru
, the crew saw survivors who had been in the water for three days and were horrified when weak voices started shouting. At first the young Americans could not understand the British and Australian accents, until one of the sailors made out the words ‘pick us up, please!’ Then the awful reality dawned. These oil-covered survivors were not Japanese but English, Scottish and Australian. The wolf pack had sunk two hellships packed with prisoners of war. One thousand four hundred and three allied servicemen had died as a result of the failure of the Japanese to observe the Geneva Convention and apply red crosses to our hellships.

Pampanito
promptly radioed for assistance, and the
Sealion II
and two other American submarines returned to the scene. With survivors too weak to clamber aboard the subs, American sailors dived into the sea to pull men out, rescuing a total of 159 men. A handful died on board and the Americans were horrified at the condition of the survivors and to hear about the Death Railway and the privations we had endured. Incredibly the evidence gleaned from these survivors allowed the allies to discover for the first time the true extent of the horrors on the Death Railway and simultaneous announcements were subsequently made to stunned Houses of Parliament in both London and Canberra.

The men picked up by the subs were the lucky ones. Joe Bates, communications officer on the
Sealion II
, later told how his captain angered the crew by ordering the submarine to dive after rescuing just fifty survivors, leaving behind dozens of others frantically calling out, ‘Over here! Over here!’ It was a heartbreaking decision but Lieutenant Commander Eli Reich feared for the safety of his vessel. The cries of the men left behind haunted Joe Bates and his shipmates for decades.

I was still drifting alone. By the time the sun came up on the fifth day I could no longer see; my eyes had been seared by the dazzling sun and sparkling sea. I had no eyebrows or hair on my head; I think the sheer shock of what was happening to me had caused my hair to fall out. I kept moving around in my tiny raft the best I could and prayed for rain. I sang to myself and vainly tried to croak out loud, urging myself: ‘Hang on in there until you can’t hang on any longer.’

Badly burned by the sun, my tongue swollen, gripped by a maddening thirst, effectively blind and completely hairless, I fell into a trance-like state. I was on the very edge of death. At some point on that fifth day there came a lot of shouting around me. I was lifted into a small boat and then on to a Japanese whaling ship. I must have been left on deck but from there on I have no real recollection. I don’t know what the Japanese on board that ship did for me. As far as I was concerned they just left me alone but they must have at least given me some water. I was as close to death as I had ever been.

The next thing I knew I was being dropped off at a port, which I later learned was on Hainan Island. Congregated there were other shipwrecked POW survivors. As a punishment we were paraded through the village stark naked. One man shouted out, ‘If we work like horses, we may as well look like them.’

I was so burned and emaciated and ill that I staggered through the streets like a drunk. Some of the locals turned their backs on this terrible procession but others jeered and spat at us. I was past caring. There must have been at least a hundred of us, and then came an incredible and inspiring episode. As we stumbled along in the pouring rain someone started singing. It was ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, and slowly we all took up the song and joined in, singing a very rude version of the hit – complete with altered lyrics crudely deriding our Japanese captors. Even in this terrible condition and after all we had been through, my comrades, ravaged by exposure, naked and in slavery, were defiant, their spirits unbroken.

Eight

Sentimental Journey

The effects of the exposure I suffered during my ordeal in the South China Sea had led to a complete collapse in my health. At the camp on Hainan I hovered at death’s door, drifting in and out of awareness, but out of it for most of the time. Eventually on 18 September I was stretchered on to another hellship and lowered into the hold. As our ship made a dash for the Japanese mainland, dodging prowling American submarines, I lay blissfully unaware of the grim conditions in the bowels of the vessel.

It was another terrible journey and must have been full of angst for the conscious survivors. We were on board for eleven days with no drugs or medical assistance whatsoever for 120 ill men in our contingent. Terrified of further attacks the Japanese had commandeered all of the life-belts and despite the protests of Captain Wilkie had two or three each, while there were none available for prisoners. In fact our convoy was attacked again and a destroyer sunk. We were lucky to escape being sunk for a second time and it was nothing short of miraculous that only five men died in the holds during the voyage. Unknown to me I was lucky and had a guardian angel – Dr Mathieson was tending to me.

I came to my senses as we arrived in Japan and found myself being driven into the middle of a barren, almost desert-like landscape to a bleak prison camp surrounded by a ten-foot-high wooden fence, with barbed wire on top. Along with others I was slung into a timber hut, where we slept on the floor Japanese style. Exhausted I did not wake the entire night. Next morning I struggled to make it out of the hut for roll-call. We were issued with Japanese-green, all-in-one boiler suits with zip-up fronts, and rubber boots like the Nippon soldiers wore. I had to roll the sleeves up on my overalls, which struck me as being strange since the Japanese didn’t have long arms.

A Japanese officer told us that we were in a place called Omuta and that our camp was designated Fukuoka Camp 25. It was a few miles from a seaport that owed much of its modern prosperity to the efforts of an Aberdeen merchant called Thomas Glover. He had opened Japan’s first coal mines and developed the country’s first dry-dock in the city. Its only other claim to fame was as the setting of Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly.
That seaport was called Nagasaki.

We were being put to work immediately. This time labouring in a nearby open-cast coalmine. I was still in a terrible state; I barely knew my own name and could hardly stand. I dreaded hard labour. We marched for half an hour along a dirt track to the coalmine, which was quite small, much smaller than the ones I knew of on the east coast of Scotland. We saw very few locals and when we did they never gave us a second look. Vegetable plants grew on the roadside verge. The Japanese mainland was literally starving and food was being grown on every available scrap of land. There was of course no improvement to our rations.

We filled coal carts with our bare hands and sometimes shovels, and then in groups of four had to push the laden carts along a small railway, fifty yards or so up a slight incline to a point where we would tip them over and the coal would fall on to a large mound that trucks would take away. It was quite an effort to get the carts moving, even with four of us hard at it. But I doubt I was much use to anyone – I was completely worn out. It was nothing short of miraculous that I was still alive and I was a husk of a man, certainly unfit to work. I could do no more.

There were several of these mines scattered around Omuta, one of which was owned by a family called Aso. For decades after the war the Japanese government denied that allied prisoners had been used as slaves in any of these mines and factories, and it was only recently when researchers proved that the family of Taro Aso, the former Prime Minister of Japan, had personally profited from the labour of 197 Australian, 101 British and two Dutch prisoners that we received any kind of grudging recognition.