Life and death on the Thai-Burma railway

Updated

Seventy years after he was freed, an Australian prisoner of war looks back on his harrowing experience in the jungle in World War II.

In 1942, Milton "Snow" Fairclough was taken prisoner by the Japanese army in Java and forced to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway.

He was one of Dunlop's 1,000 — the men under commanding officer and surgeon Edward "Weary" Dunlop, who worked tirelessly to protect them.

Mr Fairclough told his story to John McGlue on 720 ABC Perth.

Taken prisoner

Snow Fairclough was born in Moora, in Western Australia's Wheatbelt, in 1920 and left school at 14.

At the outbreak of war in 1939 he joined the Army's 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion and was posted to Palestine and Syria.

After Japan entered the war his battalion was recalled to Australia, but a stopover in Java proved fateful.

"We thought we would only be there a day or two but unfortunately they decided, as a gesture to the Dutch, that the whole of our Dunlop group would be left on Java to give the Dutch a hand," Mr Fairclough recalled.

Shortly afterwards, the unit was taken prisoner and transported first to Changi prison in Singapore then to Thailand to work on the railway.

"I remember our last train trip across, it took about five days. There were 30 of us to a van and they had the van closed all the time," he said.

"A big majority of us had malaria and dysentery even then, so it was a pretty miserable five days."

The unit ended up at Hintok camp in Thailand, building the section of the railway that the soldiers came to call Hellfire Pass through the mountains.

"The hardest part was to cut the jungle down and get a cut into the mountain to make a base to lay your track on," he said.

"That was hellish and difficult. The tools we had were not good.

"The position you are in leaves you sort of hanging on by your toenails and hands while you are sawing.

"You would just look at the mountain and you would be looking 50 yards up. That was where we lost a hell of a lot of lives."

The Lizard and the lowest point

Malaria, cholera and amoebic dysentery became rife in the camp.

Forced to work day and night to finish the railway, and given tiny amounts of food, the men became severely ill.

One-fifth of all the prisoners of war on the railway died.

"Breakfast would be half a cup of liquidy rice and there was a lot of mice poo and maggots in that," Mr Fairlcough recalled.

"A friend of mine used to say, 'eat it up, it's good protein'."

One of the most brutal Japanese officers was a man dubbed "The Lizard".

"His job was to supply the number of troops that the engineers wanted for each party every morning," Mr Fairclough said.

"It was his job to convince Weary that everyone that was picked was fit to work and that's where the trouble started."

Once all the "fit" men had been chosen, The Lizard would look to the sick to fill the shortfall.

"His life was on the line if he didn't get that amount and he would just come into what we called our hospital huts," Mr Fairclough said.

"I remember being on a single bed there right at the front and The Lizard would come in.

"You would get quite a few jabs in the back with a rifle and then he would pull you off the bed and through the mud.

"One particular day when he did that to me, and Weary went over to him and bent down — because Weary was about 6'4" — and put his hand on his head and said: 'I am a doctor, this man is not fit to go to work today. Sit down there Snow and don't move'.

"That's the day I thought, ta-ta, they'll just lop my head off over this."

Instead, Dunlop continued arguing until the work parties were formed and Mr Fairclough was sent on so-called light duties — working at the Japanese quarters.

While pouring water for a bath for two of the cooks, and still suffering from severe amoebic dysentery, he asked to go to the bathroom but was ignored.

"Suddenly I peed and I peed straight in the bath," he said.

"I remember the first few hits and then I was unconscious."

It was night when he woke up in the mud by the railway track.

"I lay there for quite some time and suddenly I see one of our blokes coming up with a light," he recalled.

"It was one of our blokes called Sunny Smith from Narrogin.

"When he saw my bed was empty he said: 'Did Snow die today?' He came up looking for me and that's how found me.

"I had this big bamboo leaf sticking out of my penis one end and there was a stick of bamboo plugged in my rear end. That was how they found me.

"That was about the lowest point I think."

Survival

A total of 12,000 Allied troops died as prisoners of war on the railway.

Mr Fairclough said he often wondered how he survived.

"I had particularly good mates and we stuck together through thick and thin," he said.

"I think if you didn't have a mate you wouldn't have got through.

"[I survived with] just a bit of help and encouragement from them and a grim determination not to bloody well die in a place like that; to die like a slave in the jungle."

On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki.

On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan to the allies.

The news did not reach the Dunlop men labouring in the jungle until August 28.

"The early morning of the 28th we heard somebody walking up the line and we thought, 'Christ, early start', but it turned out to be one of our own officers and he had a machine gun slung across his chest and a big revolver," Mr Fairclough said.

"He said, 'the war's over for you blokes. The war is finished'.

"That was my 25th birthday and I always celebrate my birthday as being the day that I knew for good and certain that the bloody war had eventually finished.

"I think how lucky we were that the atom bomb was dropped, because that stopped the invasion of Japan.

"Had there been an invasion of Japan there wouldn't have been any POWs, the whole lot of us would have been annihilated."

Nightmares and reconciliation

Mr Fairclough returned home to Western Australia and in 1948 he was married.

However the memories of his time as a POW plagued him and on his wedding night, at a hotel in the Perth hills, he dreamt about The Lizard.

"I had quite a few nightmares and nine out of 10 of them were all about The Lizard and the stuff he used to do to me," he said.

"This night I was on my single slat of the bed and he came in with his rifle. I kicked the gun out of his hand and grabbed him by the throat. I was determined and I hung on like hell.

"Apparently the screams from my wife woke the manager of the place and he came up just in time to get me off what I was doing to my new bride."

Mr Fairclough and his wife went on to have four sons.

Last year he travelled to Japan with his son Denis and other POWs to tell people in Japan their story.

There he also discovered the fate of The Lizard.

"The Lizard is still alive," he said.

"We found out that he was sentenced to death by the War Crimes Tribunal for what he did on the railway but he ended up being given a 20-year jail term instead.

"But he only did five years of that and he finished up as the second biggest taxi owner in Tokyo and made a hell of a lot of money.

"Apparently he is a real philanthropist to school kids and the ones he is targeting most are older kids, about how war is a useless thing and to try to teach them to talk peace all the time.

"At the end of the trip four of us POWs all got a gift pack from The Lizard, little bits of tea and food."

Mr Fairclough did not speak to The Lizard but did tell his story in schools and a meeting at the Diet — the Japanese parliament.

"In every case we were told not to leave anything out," he said.

"Tell it exactly as it was and we could rest assured that from now on all the stuff that they gather from us will be recorded in history books and school books.

"I had a big turnaround in my opinion of what's going to happen over there. I think they were all dinkum."

Hear the full interview with Milton "Snow" Fairclough on Soundcloud:

Interview: John McGlue

Research and audio production: Patti Brook and Anne Clugston

Sound recording: Martin Roth

Web production: Emma Wynne

Topics: world-war-2, history, veterans, human-interest, perth-6000

First posted