Full documentary transcript

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Fergus Anckorn: You can’t believe what I’ve survived, you really can’t. And how things became quite normal. I mean death was nothing, death was absolutely nothing at all.

Arthur Turbutt: All we could give them was physical, mental and perhaps, I don’t know, spiritual comfort. You couldn’t do any more for them. They knew they were dying and they were dying in agony a lot of them.

Harry Hesp: I’d never seen a dead person before going there. The first day we were there we tagged 700 people, then we ran out of tags.

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Meg Parkes: My name is Meg Parkes and I am an honorary research fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Narrator: For the last eight years, Meg Parkes has interviewed British men who were formerly prisoners of war and suffered in their thousands at the hands of the Japanese army across South-east Asia during World War II.

Parkes: The majority of the men I interviewed would say that their overriding feeling was that they would never ever forget the waste, the destruction, the neglect that they were subjected to and witnessed.

Narrator: Their war was one of demoralisation and disease, of hardship and humiliation. Held captive by a cruel enemy, they experienced almost four years of brutality, starvation and misery. Yet from this struggle came a collective effort of medical ingenuity, compassion and care that would prove crucial to their wellbeing and ultimately their survival.

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Narrator: February 1942. The Imperial Japanese Army, having torn through Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia, was now bombarding the British colonial island of Singapore with fierce air attacks and artillery fire. Fergus Anckorn was attached to the British 18th Infantry Division and defending the city from the encircling enemy.

Anckorn: Our gun had been hit and I was sent down to get another one, into the town of Singapore – I was a gun driver – and on the way back I was spotted by 27 Japanese bombers, who bombed me out of existence. I just about lost my right hand in that, I was hit everywhere. And I jumped out of the lorry and in mid-air I was shot.

Narrator: Also under artillery bombardment at the Singapore General Hospital, Harry Hesp, an 18-year-old butcher’s assistant in the Merchant Navy, was adapting to the carnage of his role as an untrained medical orderly.

Hesp: The mortuaries were absolutely at overflow and the dead bodies were lying three or four deep in the corridors. The fighting was only a quarter of a mile away, so the dead and dying were everywhere – dead, dying, wounded – they were being brought in on rickshaws, on motorbikes and anything else.

Narrator: Having been found unconscious and bleeding in a ditch, Anckorn came to. He was undergoing emergency surgery in a post office, now requisitioned as a makeshift medical post.

Anckorn: The surgeon said, “I’m sorry son, I can’t save your hand, it’s got to come off.” And I said, “Well, get on with it and save me,” ’cause I was pouring with blood. And he got his orderly to put me out of it, which he did by sticking a piece of gauze on my face and pouring ether on it, which was the most terrible thing I can ever remember – couldn’t breathe in or out. And as he did that he looked at me and said, “Aren’t you the magician we saw in Liverpool?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And he said to the surgeon, “You can’t cut his hand off, he’s a conjuror.”

Narrator: After capturing the large MacRitchie reservoir, the island’s primary source of water, the Allied forces were close to capitulation. The Japanese made their final advances into the city, the Alexandra one of the first hospitals they encountered. Anckorn had been transferred there.

Anckorn: I don’t know what happened but I woke up again in the Alexandra Hospital. I didn’t know whether I had a hand or not, and there was a fellow on the stretcher next to me, and I said to him, “Have I still got a right hand?” And he put his hand up and he said, “This little piggy went to market,” and he counted each finger for me. And I remember saying to myself, “I suppose I’m dying.” And I kept going off and then waking up, and it was then that the Japanese came in and killed everybody.

Narrator: In a horrific act of barbarity, the Japanese had lined up the medical staff on the front lawn and killed them, one by one. They then marched through the wards and bayoneted the patients in their beds.

Anckorn: When they got to me I had passed out again, and my hand was on my chest and the blood was pouring out onto the bed and onto the floor, and they thought they’d already bayoneted me and walked past.

Narrator: Two days later, on February 15th, the guns fell silent. The brutal violence that the Japanese inflicted at the hospital was to foreshadow the treatment the British, Dutch, Indian and Australian Allied prisoners would soon be facing at the hands of their captors.

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Narrator: Following the surrender, over 15,000 Allied troops were forcibly interned on the eastern peninsula of Singapore at Changi, an area that had formed the British military base. David Arkush was a Captain in the Army Dental Corps.

David Arkush: Changi consisted of a lot of barrack blocks, they’d been heavily bombed. It certainly couldn’t take – I don’t know how many thousands of men were there, but certainly in the damaged condition there certainly wasn’t room for all those men.

Narrator: Reluctant to provide any measures for prisoner welfare, the Japanese were content to leave the POWs to fend for themselves. Maurice Naylor was a Gunner in the Royal Artillery.

Maurice Naylor: There was no sign of the Japanese, they just left us alone. But we were asked to provide some working parties and I went on about three I think. Going down to the docks at Singapore, loading up ships and moving stuff around, basically. We had quite a lot of hardship in Changi at first because there was no water and there was virtually no food.

Narrator: Barracks designed for 800 men were now accommodating upwards of 15,000. The lack of nutrition, cramped living conditions and poor sanitation meant that dysentery quickly spread. Hugh de Wardener was a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and spent six months at the Changi camp.

Hugh de Wardener: In Singapore, we looked after a dysentery ward – a block. The block had 800 beds, our turnover was about 80 a day, so as you can see the average stay was ten days.

Narrator: Dysentery was a condition that proved to be highly debilitating for all the prisoners, and one that few, if any, avoided. Geoff Gill is a consultant at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and has worked closely on the prisoner-of-war study for many years. He describes the types of dysentery the men would’ve faced.

Geoff Gill: The commonest is bacillary dysentery, or bacterial dysentery, and as the name suggests that is due to a bacteria, and this basically gives an acute diarrhoeal disease, gastroenteritis. It’s a severe and unpleasant diarrhoeal disease characterised by the passage of loose motions with mucus and blood, with often significant cramp like abdominal pains and prostration and malaise, so it’s certainly a lot worse than the average dicky tummy that one experiences in temperate climates.

Narrator: At its peak in 1942, upwards of 5,000 men had contracted dysentery at Changi.

Gill: It’s spread faeco-orally, so infected water, infected foods, touch, infected touch and so on, and when you’ve got latrines, no proper sewage disposal system, poor hygiene, then it tends to be rampant.

Narrator: Hugh de Wardener.

De Wardener: Eventually, I got dysentery. And so I lay down and got over it. That’s when I discovered what tenesmus means. Tenesmus is the feeling there’s a pineapple stuck in your bottom.

Narrator: As if you constantly want to go to the toilet.

De Wardener: Most unpleasant.

Narrator: With the Japanese withholding medical supplies, the men had either to rely on what provisions medics within the camp already had, or on local knowledge. Harry Hesp recalls one method of treating dysentery while in a Changi jail block.

Hesp: One of the Asia lads had been the dispenser on the ship so he worked in a little cell called the dispensary. It was nothing but, the example is for dysentery, they mixed china clay in bottles and you had that.

Narrator: China clay or kaolin is a type of absorbent mineral, sometimes used in cosmetics.

Hesp: Now if you take enough of that it’ll bung you up – you’d cured the dysentery but you’d then got a bigger problem with the bunged-up intestines.

Narrator: Without access to medical supplies, Hugh de Wardener found an alternative remedy for the painful symptoms of dysentery.

De Wardener:I discovered a cure for it: you tip the end of the bed up, your feet up, because it’s oedema of the anus, and if you tip the end of the bed up, the oedema goes down and you get relief.

Narrator: De Wardener recovered. But dysentery was a condition that many men faced throughout their time in captivity – a persistent and acute threat to their health. Geoff Gill.

Gill: You tended to find that the men lost a lot of weight, they became malnourished, their food intake reduced, the absorption of what food they were taking into the blood and the body reduced. Their immunity, which was already low, went down, so they would be more frequently likely to get infections and so on. So they would just gradually deteriorate and perhaps die of pneumonia or something like that. It was a slow indolent death of deterioration, weight loss and reduced immunity, I think.

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Narrator: Japan had not committed to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, which stated that POWs had a right to honour and respect. Believing that surrendered soldiers were men without honour and should be treated harshly, prisoners throughout 1942 were conscripted as forced labour, assisting the Japanese industrial effort across South-east Asia. Alistair Urquhart was a Corporal with the Gordon Highlanders. He recalls the announcement of their transfer north.

Alistair Urquhart: “You’re going up to a holiday camp, you will have three days’ work and four days’ rest, and good food.” That was a complete and utter lie, right from the very beginning.

Narrator: Urquhart, along with thousands of others, was sent to work in the dense jungles of Burma and Thailand building a railway – a strategic supply line to support the Japanese campaign in Burma and the anticipated advance into India. As a dentist, David Arkush was given notice to accompany a medical team on a transport heading north.

Arkush: We got on trucks and we were driven to Singapore station. I didn’t expect to go first class, but I thought the lowest class would be third class with wooden seats. When I saw how actually we were travelling, I realised how naive I’d been. It wasn’t first, second, third or even 50th. We were in goods wagons and with a sliding door in the middle, into which about 30 of us piled with our kit.

Narrator: After weeks spent at Changi on meagre rations, Maurice Naylor was another who vividly recalls the arduous four-day train journey.

Naylor: Throughout the time I was a prisoner I was prone to dysentery – not dysentery, diarrhoea, acute diarrhoea, chronic diarrhoea. I had to go to the toilet 11, 12 times a day. And I’d just had a bout of diarrhoea when we got into these trucks. And of course there was nothing, no facilities. And the only way to go, to do anything, was to get near the entrance to the truck if the door was open and do it outside if you could – get somebody to hold on to you. That wasn’t a pleasant journey for me, wasn’t a pleasant journey for anybody.

Narrator: They arrived at Ban Pong. Here the prisoners were searched, organised into battalions of around 600, and marched to camps deeper into the often virgin jungle to begin work on the 415-kilometre-long railway.

Urquhart: At Ban Pong we were then told we had to march 50 kilometres a day to this camp, which they referred to as a holiday camp. Don’t forget we were then on a basic ration of boiled rice, which would only fill half a cup, three times a day if you were lucky, and nothing else. And if you fell by the wayside, unless somebody was prepared to help you, you were left to die.

Narrator: The prickly bamboo, often rising 15 metres or more, hindered their advance and progress was slow. Staging camps were constructed by hand using bamboo and palm leaves. At each encampment, the first buildings erected were for Japanese guards. This would be followed by the cookhouse, then huts for the workers. Housing for the sick was typically the last to be built. Hugh de Wardener recalls his first night in one of the huts.

De Wardener: The bedding accommodation was a slat, bamboo slat on either side of a passage. But the trouble was that the huts were on a slope, and the bottom ends of the huts were in filthy water, with faeces and muck and so on in them. And I thought, my God, is this what the camps were going to be like, this was terrible.

Narrator: With each hut housings scores of men, the restricted space and poor sanitation exacerbated the spread of disease.

Parkes: The long huts, the long bamboo huts would hold anything up to 300 men, 150 each side, and they had a shoulder’s-width space, so you were literally touching the man next to you if you were all lying flat, and many men had no option but to lie flat, they weren’t able to lie on their side. They were in very close quarters.

Narrator: At daybreak the men would attend tenko – or roll call – and be sent out to work on clearing the route for the railway. Alistair Urquhart.

Urquhart: They had picks and shovels all laid out, and we were sent down to this part of the river which was virtually solid rock, and you had to physically break rocks with a pick. The work was sunrise to sunset and it was eventually named Hellfire Pass, and the loss of life was tremendous.

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Parkes: From the very beginning in all areas, rice was the staple diet for POWs. It was usually polished rice, which meant that the vitamin-rich husks had been removed, so it was pretty valueless in terms of nutrition. And it was also dirty and weevil-infested, and they had to get on with that. They could in some places trade with locals; in other areas various vegetable matter was used. Little meat, little fish, and so it was really a very low-nutritional diet that they had from the very word go, and signs of malnutrition were evident within weeks of captivity.

Narrator: On such a starvation diet, in order for the men’s bodies to generate the energy they needed, the protein in their muscles soon began to break down. Called autophagy, it is the body literally consuming itself in order to stay alive. Most of the protein loss would occur during the first three to four days of malnutrition. And due to the poor diet, vitamins such as thiamin – usually absorbed from ingested food – were largely absent. Increasing their nutrition often meant scavenging for food. Some were able to acquire discarded produce from nearby villages: bananas, papaya or watermelon, or the odd rotten vegetable. However, fraternising with locals ran the risk of reprisals from prison guards. If snared, snakes and scorpions were sufficiently edible. Rats even became currency. Arthur Turbutt recalls the paltry rations.

Turbutt: Your breakfast was a little portion of boiled white rice, boiled of course in salt water. Midday, if you were lucky, some camps you had pap. Now pap was nothing more than what I think was tapioca from its consistency, it was like paper-hanger’s paste. And then in the evening you had steamed rice, on which you had your jungle juice.

Narrator: That’s simply tree leaves stewed in boiled water. Only on rare occasions would the Japanese offer something more.

Turbutt: On the Emperor’s birthday one time, the guards said they wanted us to be happy, so they increased our ration of rice and they presented us with a little goat. And I think there were about a thousand of us had to share that. And I was terribly, terribly fortunate: in the piece that I had I got a bit of bone. I thought I was so fortunate and I’ve sucked that bone thousands of times in the camp, just put it in and just sucked it, sucked it, sucked it, as a comfort.

Narrator: Now without the use of his injured hand, Fergus Anckorn used his skills as a stage magician to help obtain rare morsels of protein.

Anckorn: The Japanese camp commandant was a real devotee of magic and he got me into his hut to do magic for him, and I hadn’t got anything in those days to do it with. But what I’d do is I’d borrow a coin off him and then vanish it. And he would have a tin of fish on his table; I’d open the tin and get the coin out of it. But he then pushed the tin of fish over to me. They would not touch anything that we’d touched because we were verminous, you know, so I got a tin of fish. Then I remember doing a trick with a banana. I got him to take a card and he took the four of hearts, I think it was, and I asked him to peel the banana and it fell off in four pieces, and I got the banana.

Narrator: For the sick, tiny scraps of extra food were often life-saving. These were brought by friends who gave up part of their rations to help those gravely in need. Whether trading personal belongings for food or tending to the ill, having close-knit bonds was essential. David Arkush.

Arkush: People who were sick in the hospital, all skin and bone. They were lying on split bamboo – maybe they had a blanket, maybe they didn’t. They had dysentery, everybody had dysentery, they lay in their own excreta. Unless they had a pal to look after them, they stood little chance of survival. But if they had a pal he would see that you were cleaned up, he would feed you. Without that you would have died.

Narrator: Similarly, medical orderlies played a vital role in caring for the sick. Often volunteers, they selflessly tended to the infirm day after day, even though the risk of infection was high. Arthur Turbutt was a medical orderly with the RAF who recalls helping in one of the dysentery huts.

Turbutt: Our main job seemed to be trying to lift these poor fellows off the bamboo and, as weak as we were, trying to carry them along to an old metal cabin trunk, the lid had been taken off and the cabin trunk was lying in the centre of the floor and those who needed had to get to the trunk and try and put their bottoms over the side and do what they had to do into the trunk. Now that was swimming with filth and slime and blood and these poor fellows, well I remember on one occasion, I think he was a Canadian, I’m not sure, he went to that over a hundred times in the day, as fast as we got him back to the bamboo we had to bring him out again, it just poured from him. Of course, he died. But some of them were so thin that when they laid on their back you could see their spine, they’d gone, everything had gone.

Narrator: For some, help and recovery came from an unlikely source. Fergus Anckorn.

Anckorn: One day, a priest came in and there was a fellow in there dying who was from this priest’s regiment, and the padre said to me, “How long has he got, do you think?” I said, “I think he’ll die this afternoon.” And someone said, “Well, I want his water bottle.” And someone else says, “I’ll have his razor.” And someone said, “Well, I want his haversack.” He had been lying there for two days with his eyes wide open, with flies crawling on him. Dying. He shot up, “No one is having my bloody gear, I ain’t bloody well dying.” And he didn’t.

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Narrator: With each camp required to produce a specific number of men to work on the railway construction, deciding whether men were fit enough to work became a difficult daily task for the medical officers. Each morning they had to tally all those who were sick and judge who, if any, were able to attend that day’s work detail. Hugh de Wardener was now at a makeshift hospital base in Chungkai.

De Wardener: They sometimes went out before daylight, and came back in the dark. Our job was to try and keep the most ill from going out on the railway, that was really our main therapeutic tool.

Narrator: If the number of sick increased, guards would often raid the tents and forcibly drag them to the work line. Hostility towards the sick was rampant. The Japanese regarded the infirm as shameful – they required nothing more than a labour force of utmost productivity. If your effort reduced, it was met with punishment. Harry Hesp.

Hesp: Their favourite occupation was ear bashing. They couldn’t hit you when they were stood up, they’d wait till you were sat down and then come behind you and hit your ears.

Narrator: Sometimes a convenient weapon, be it bamboo stick, shovel or crowbar, might be used. Beatings were followed by extended periods of standing to attention, for hours or days. One punishment was the holding aloft, or at arm’s length, a heavy object such as a pail of water, the prisoner being beaten if their arms dropped.

Hesp: One of the worst things about being a prisoner like that is humiliation. I got many beatings, because of my stupid attitude of not bowing and that sort of thing. I could stand beatings, but humiliation... I remember one saying to me, “British tall, Japan small. Japan: boss!” and then giving me a clout. And it takes a lot not to hit him back.

Narrator: Prisoner Jeffrey English wrote in his diary that the Japanese attitude of punishing the sick had a strange, perverse logic to it. He wrote: “If you were going to have a man die in a month’s time, you had at least to have two or three extra days’ work out of him now. If every sleeper laid on the railway cost another man his life, so what?”

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Narrator: Although prisoners moved location frequently, medical officers knew it was crucial to establish strict camp discipline in order to retain good sanitation and restrict the spread of disease. Meg Parkes.

Parkes: Disciplined hygiene routines were essential. All sorts of different methods were put in place, for instance latrines – the design and the creation of latrines almost became a science in itself. Strict rotation of latrine sites, covering them over so they had designs for different types of bamboo covers, so like toilet seats they put down. These were just holes in the ground, all of which had to be dug in the tropical heat. And then they would obviously fill up very quickly, they would be covered with soil after so many days’ usage, moved to another site, that would all settle, they’d go back to – so a routine was established in some of the more organised camps – certainly up in Thailand, in Singapore and in other areas of the Far East in captivity.

Turbutt: The place was full of flies. Millions upon millions.

Narrator: Flies were a major cause of the transmission of diseases such as bacterial dysentery, so medical officers would encourage them to be killed en masse to reduce the threat of infection.

Parkes: There are examples of fly-swatting campaigns – men being rewarded by presenting the senior officer with 100 flies a day or thousands of flies a day. There were men who were too sick to work who made fly swats. They made them out of woven bamboo, that was their job and it was essential.

Narrator: To ease the escalation in dysentery cases, one Japanese camp commander even tried to incentivise the practice. Arthur Turbutt.

Turbutt: Everybody had to kill 100 flies before they could get their rice ration. So that’s what happened, people were going round killing flies, and you had to put them in a pile or line them up so that the Jap could come along and have a look, so you could eat. And that’s the way they tried to control it.

Narrator: Seeing friends ravaged by disease and illness was also motivation to protect oneself as best as possible. Fergus Anckorn recalls devising a novel precaution to fend off night-time mosquito bites.

Anckorn: I found a blanket and I stitched it up into a sleeping bag, and I put buttonholes and buttons round the top, and at night I would get in there and close it all up, and in the morning there was a gallon of water in there of course from perspiration, but no malaria. Kept the mozzies away.