Returning to the scenes of their agony, survivors of the
notorious Death Railway blasted Japan for not facing up to its
World War II atrocities.
George Lee, an 88-year-old Australian, lived through eight
months of grueling, pre-dawn to after-dark labor before being taken
to Singapore to finish an airfield by August 28, 1945, or face
execution. The war ended 13 days before the deadline.
Now, 60 years after the war's end, Lee and four other former
prisoner of wars (POWs), all from Ipswich, Queensland, returned to
the railway yesterday to take part in commemorative ceremonies and
recount some of their brutal -- and inspiring -- experiences, as
their own generation wanes and passes.
Survivors from other countries joined them at one of two war
ceremonies in Kanchanaburi, 110 kilometers west of Bangkok, where
many of the 12,000 Australian, British, Dutch and Americans who
died working on the railway were laid to rest.
In a World War II episode popularized by numerous books and the
1957 Hollywood movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Japan's
Imperial Army forced some 60,000 Allied soldiers captured on
Southeast Asian battlefields to build a 415-kilometer railway
between its garrisons in Thailand and Myanmar -- then called Burma
-- through some of the world's most inhospitable, disease-ridden
terrain.
Given virtually no medicine, fed rotting rice with occasional
bits of maggot-ridden meat and beaten by sadistic guards with
nicknames like Doctor Death and The Maggot, the Allied prisoners,
along with about 200,000 Asian forced laborers, were driven
mercilessly to complete the rail link.
Dysentery, beriberi, cholera, malaria, malnutrition, executions
and Allied bombing took a terrible toll.
"You have to move on. I've been to Japan, had a Japanese student
stay at my house. I drive a Japanese car," said 85-year-old Harry
Barker on Sunday. "But what gets my goat is that they don't
recognize what they did. They just butchered people without any
apparent reason."
Another comrade, Bobby Landers, one of the last Aboriginal POWs
still alive, was less forgiving: "Oh, no. I'll never forget or
forgive those bastards. They killed too many of my mates."
"I can accept the fact that the young generation of Japanese is
not to blame. It was their fathers and grandfathers. But until they
own up, they'll always be a pariah nation," said 84-year-old Baden
Jones, who traveled in a wheelchair. "They could have got the work
done without any brutality at all. They didn't even need barbed
wire to keep us in the camps. Where were we going to go?"
Perhaps the greatest display of Japanese brutality during the 14
months of the railway's construction came at Hellfire Pass, where
about 1,000 Australian and British POWs had to cut through 533
meters of sheer rock to a depth of up to 20 meters with only
primitive tools during torrential monsoon rains.
When the Japanese started a "speedo" campaign, already
intolerable working hours were pushed to 18 a day. Some estimates
place the number of dead at 400, with 69 beaten to death by
guards.
(China Daily August 16, 2005)