Life and Death on the Death Railway Through the Jungle of Sumatra

by George Duffy

Whenever an American Fire Department or Police Department is struck by tragedy, as happened in the Massachusetts cities of Worcester and Holyoke this past December 1999 when six firefighters and one police officer were killed while performing their duties, the outpouring of public grief and sympathy is overwhelming. Thousands of their fellow officers, from all over the United States, including bagpipe bands and color guards, travel to pay their last respects and take part in the funerals and memorial services.

On such occasions my thoughts always revert to the last twelve months before the Japanese surrender in World War II. In those days I, and about 5,000 Allied military personnel -- mainly Dutch and English, but including a little over 200 Australians and 15 Americans, were held as prisoners of war by the Japanese. We were engaged in the building of a narrow-gauge railway across the central portion of the island of Sumatra, in what is now known as Indonesia.

The northern terminal of the railway was the city of Pekanbaru (new spelling), therefore the project became known as the Pekanbaru Rail Line. In more recent years, a Dutch author dubbed it "The Death Railway Through the Jungle."

 

The route of the Pekanbaru Rail Line in red	Inside the barracks at Base Camp - photo source unknown

Indeed death was no stranger there. We were overworked, underfed, provided with little medicine, and subjected to constant physical and mental abuse by our Japanese overseers.

A hospital for malaria, dysentery, pellagra, and beri-beri patients existed in name only. It was simply a dilapidated bamboo-framed, thatched roof barracks where the sick were placed to await their eventual death. Once in a while, a man recovered his health and returned to the daily camp routine, but it was not the rule.

 

The Base Camp "hospital" - sketch by F.A.R. de Jong, Amsterdam	"Where the doctors carried out their mostly hopeless struggle against death" - sketch by F.A.R. de Jong, Amsterdam

In April 1945, I was living and working in the Base Camp which contained this "hospital." Deaths that month (according to my journal) totaled 106; an additional 14 died out in the construction camps along the line. My job, with 29 other officers, was to cut down rubber trees and carry the logs into camp. There, another group sawed and split them for the cookhouse and the locomotives. (That's right: wood-burning boilers!) Rarely did the full complement of 30 report for work. Everyone was afflicted with malaria which reduced our number to about 20 on a given day.

We worked in teams of three - an axe man, and two carriers. Rubber trees grow tall and straight. The wood is fairly soft - and wet. Each of us became quite adept at felling a tree and we even had contests to see who could most accurately predict the line of fall. One man chopped while the other two went in and out of the camp. Burlap bags were used to protect the log carriers' shoulders and also to hide the occasional dried fish, fruit, or vegetables purchased from a passing native vendor. (Such food was available, but the Japanese would not buy it or requisition it, and actually attempted to prevent us from "smuggling" it into camp.)

 

"Food distribution is the high point of the day" the wooden containers held rice, the tin held stew - photo from Australian War Memorial, Canberra	"Prisoners cook their own pots of purchased or smuggled ingredients because the official rations were insufficient" - photo from Australian War Memorial, Canberra

 

Therefore, the "wood party" offered an invaluable, though risky, opportunity for its members to create a "black market" inside the camp. We always had a single guard with us. Due to the nature of the work, we were spread through the plantation, so most of the Japs simply spent the day sitting by our camp fire reading the pornographic books they all carried, or snoozing.

The railway workers carried their mid-day meal with them when they left in the morning. We on the "wood party" came into camp at noon for our meager cup of steamed rice and a watery soup made of tree leaves. Before we went to work in the afternoon someone from the "hospital" would tell us how many deaths had occurred in the previous 24 hours. For each deceased, four of us would be detailed to carry the straw-matting wrapped body to the cemetery which was adjacent to the plantation where we chopped down the trees. Out of respect for the dead, we covered our nakedness with a shirt or jacket. (The sole, daily item of wearing apparel was a Japanese-style loin cloth.)

 

Every evening after the dead were collected in the roofless barrack extension, their remains were wrapped in a straw mat preparatory to burial"- sketch by F.A.R. de Jong, Amsterdam

Several prisoners labored at the unending task of digging the graves and burying the remains. Most of the time we never knew the identities of the lost souls who we carried over the creek and up the hill. Only if a prisoner had five friends was he accorded a proper burial, generally at the end of the work day.

Such was the case on May 29, 1945, less than three months before V-J Day. Sidney M. Albert, one of the cooks on our ship, the American Leader, had died. In the evening, Stan Gorski, our ship's bosun, a U. S. Marine, an English soldier, and I, were the pall bearers. Another shipmate, Carl Kalloch, carried the shovels and the cross.

All clergy had been left behind on Java when we came to Sumatra, thus the committal service for anyone off my ship became my responsibility. It was brief. The Lord's Prayer. The 23rd Psalm, read from a borrowed Bible. Lower the body. Fill the hole. Erect the wooden cross, and, under the watchful eyes of the Jap sentry, trudge back to the gate and get inside the barbed wire before dark.

 

Funeral procession crossing the creek - photo from Australian War Memorial, Canberra	Australians and Dutch participate in a funeral - photo from Australian War Memorial, Canberra

The cause of Albert's death was malnutrition, or as it was called out there, "beri-beri." Lack of protein and vitamins caused kidney malfunction which resulted in fluid retention. A victim would first notice a soft swelling of his hands and feet which eventually progressed to his torso. He ballooned in size to as much as 250 to 300 pounds, losing mobility, and putting a severe strain on his heart. Albert was a load.

My exertion in carrying him to his burial site so sapped me that the next day, according to my journal, I suffered "the worst attack of malaria that I've had yet. I worked for 31 days without a break, most of the time axe work, and when the 'old bug' hit, I went down for the count. The whole packet -- fever, chills, and sweats. I never imagined it could be so bad".

Albert was 49. The average age at death of the 700 who perished on that railway was 37 years and 3 months. Five were 57, one was 58, another 66. They probably had wives and children -- somewhere. Yet most of them when they died had not five friends to mourn for them.

 

Awaiting evacuation- photo from Australian War Memorial, Canberra	POW's arrive in Singapore - unknown Singapore newspaper

On Sumatra there were no columns of fellow soldiers, sailors, or airmen. There were no color guards. On Sumatra there were no pipers nor drummers. No flowers. No eulogies. Death on Sumatra rarely arrived as a thunderclap. It moved slowly and inexorably through the "hospital." The men who died knew it was coming, and there was nothing to prevent it.

It is a great mystery, isn't it? The 700 unfortunates of Sumatra are just as dead as the 6 Worcester firefighters and the Holyoke police officer. By comparison, though, how fortunate were these latter 7 men to have had their lives celebrated with such pomp and ceremony. How fortunate were their families to witness the out-pouring of pride and devotion and brotherhood exhibited by their men's peers. How fortunate are we all to be living in a civilization that prides itself on such responses.

How fortunate that we won the war!

 

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Postscript: Comparison between death rates of British and Dutch POWs

When I was doing the research for the above article I picked up the thread of a thought that has been in my mind for many years. I have long felt that there were links between death rates, ages and nationalities on that railway job. Not until recently, however, did I bother to do a detailed study. First of all, a look at central Sumatra, the prison camps and their society.

The plan was to create a 138-mile connection between the town of Pekanbaru and an existing rail line which ran to the city of Padang on the Indian Ocean. Pekanbaru is located in the center of the island at latitude 0 degrees, 39 minutes north, thus 39 nautical miles above the equator. It was a small seaport, connected via the Siak River to the Strait of Malacca. Much of the surrounding terrain was swamp, with numerous interlaced waterways, creeks and bayous. It was a terrible area on which to build railbeds, bridges and to lay tracks.

Fifteen miles or so south of the town the ground was more stable, but the mangroves were replaced by a huge, dense, towering jungle, complete with wild tigers and elephants. Compounding the prisoners' problems was the extreme equatorial heat and the rains of the spring monsoon.

From May to September 1944 the Japanese threw into this inhospitable corner of the earth somewhat over 5,000 Allied prisoners who they had captured on Java two and a half years earlier. Of that number almost 4,000 had been in the Royal Dutch Indies' Army and close to 1,000 were British Army, Navy and Air Force personnel. Additionally, 200 Australians and 15 Americans, mostly merchant seamen whose ships had been sunk by a German raider, rounded out the total.

Unfortunately, considerable rancor existed between the various nationalities. The British and the Australians were never friendly, even before the war. That tenor actually went back to the 1700s when Australia was colonized by British emigrant prisoners. The numerically superior Dutch were disliked by both the Brits and the Aussies on the grounds that the Dutch in the East Indies, without a fight, had capitulated to the Japanese. In return, the Dutch pointed to the British surrender of Singapore.

Numerous of the European Dutch spoke English, but there was no more than a handful of English or Australian officers -- never mind the soldiers -- who knew any Dutch. This spilled over into frequent confrontations and even brawls. Meanwhile, everyone contracted malaria; many suffered with dysentery; and tropical ulcers -- a gangrenous condition -- disabled others. The fact that the food ration was barely life-sustaining overshadowed everything. As early as Dec. 31, 1944, 125 prisoners had expired.

After the last prisoner was repatriated, one historian shows the following death rates:

 

As the Americans and Australians composed just 4 percent of the work force, they are not included in this study.

Those are the numbers that reinforce my long-held opinion: To supplement what little the Japanese gave us, the young Dutch successfully used their knowledge of the indigenous grasses, roots, mushrooms, nuts, etc. to win the battle of survival. Chauvinistically, they kept what they knew to themselves. Being at that time quite fluent in the Dutch language, I had become a member of their society and learned from them.

Another example of chance favoring the prepared mind.

Sources for illustrations:
All photos and sketches are from the book by Henk Hovinga: "Eindstation Pakan Baroe 1943-1945 - Dodenspoorweg door het oerwoud" (ISBN 90 6064 922 2. Fourth edition 1996, Amsterdam. 344 pages.) An extended English translation of this book called: "Final Destination Pakan Baroe 1943-1945 - Death Railway Through Jungle" on CD with 162 illustrations, may be ordered by e-mail from the author: >henk.hovinga @ tiscali.nl<. Price is US $ 40.00 including shipping and handling.

Sumatra map adapted from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/cia99/Indonesia_sm99.jpg

A similar version of this story appeared in The Daily News of Newburyport, Massachusetts

Write to Captain George Duffy

7 Apr 2000

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Pakanbaru to Moera They ate starch and rats, they died of exhaustion dysentery and tropical sores, but on 15 August 1945, the last year of the war, and the day that the red Japanese sun finally went down, the death railway from Pakan Baru to Muara was ready. The last nail that the scarred survivors drove into the last sleeper in the Sumatran jungle was one of copper. As tradition has it, for lack of a gold one. The railway line built by Dutch, English and Australian prisoners of war and by press-ganged Javanese slave labour (Romushas) through marshy forest of central Sumatra under orders from Japanese occupiers had taken a toll in human lives of nearly seven hundred whites and of probably more than 10,000 people altogether. And this does not include the 1,626 victims who perished on the way to Sumatra, torpedoed by the Allies on board the "Van Waerwijck" and "Junyo Mary" No one will ever know the exact number of dead press-ganged Romushas. it is certain that the remains of thousands of these browned skinned slaves lie under the sleepers of a railway line which was never to see a train after 1945. All the suffering in this case was for nothing. The railway line no longer exists. Kilometres of rail have been looted or sold as scrap iron. And what remains is slowly rusting away in the stagnant black marsh water of the impenetrable Sumatran Jungle. When the Japanese capitulated on 15 August 1945, officially confirmed on the 2nd September, the curtain fell on the tragedy of Pakan Baru., Even in Asia the end had come at last to the most horrific war of all time. Historians were able to weigh events up, survivors to tell or record their bitter war experiences, and film makers got in on the act with their romanticised account of the "Bridge Over the River Kwai" on the famous and much-described Burma railway. All the events of those terrible war years in the Far East were researched and written up in documents and books. Almost all, for due to some mysterious reason not solved even today, there has never been an account of the gigantic drama of the 215 km death railway from Pakan Baru to Muara in the heart of tropical Sumatra, with its snakes, panthers, tigers and billions of malaria carrying mosquitoes. The suffering, the power of the Japanese and Korean guards and the fruitless death of so many simply remains engraved on the hearts of the survivors. A few still keep the notices and announcements published just after their liberation. But they are never publicised. The drama of Pakan Baru is forgotten. Even in Indonesia. Even in to-day's Pakan Baru, where children happily play on the remains of locomotives and trucks, without themselves realising at all that the rusty playthings between their campong huts are the last silent witnesses to a nightmare of suffering which was also real. Maggots on the menu For most of the POW's, who were brought via Singapore or Padang, "Mud Fun" (lit.) or Camp 1 at the edge of the Bakan Baru campong, was often the introduction to the railway. From there they were steered to other camps along the line to cut sleepers from wood, build bridges over the rivers, and to fix rails on the track. But or anyone becoming seriously ill and unable to work, the final destination was camp 2, the death camp on the Pakan Baru line, where few doctors fought using primitive equipment a generally hopeless campaign against death. One of these was military surgeon W.J. van Ramshorst from The Hague, who operated and amputated with a few simple knives and bent forks as "sharp hooks", when the tropical sores of his patients had eaten through to the bones. Dr. van Ramshorst remembers: - "We had no medicines and no antibiotics if someone had to lose a leg, the amputation made you feel a bit faint. I did have a bottle of ether, but when I had to operate on an acute ulcer one evening, in the crazy hut of bamboo poles and palm leaves, I could not use my petroleum burner for fear of explosions. Camp mates from the "work shift" stole a battery from a Japanese truck, and by the one slim ray of light from this battery I was able to help my patient. Those who did not work , ie the sick, were on half rations: 800 calories a day. The dying got nothing at all, as no-one passed them anything. But this hardly noticed amid all the other suffering. As a result we very soon had a hundred dead per month. The inmates of Camp 2 consisted of approximately 800 men. so I told a Jap: "Another 8 months and everyone will be dead". he replied: "Splendid, that's precisely the idea". Nevertheless we got through it. It was worst at night, the rats ran all over you , but once caught in a home-made trap of spring and a small board, they made a tasty meal. They had marvellous white flesh, even whiter than rabbit pieces. I saw chickens grubbing round the latrines and quickly getting fat from the maggots. And I thought: what's good for chickens is good for people too. So we fetched maggots by the bucketful out of the latrines, washed them, cooked them and gave them with sambal (sauce) to the sick, who then visibly improved because of this extra portion of protein. And in fact I made another discovery in that terrible camp, where people only actually came from the railway to die. We had no disinfectant for treating dirty tropical sores, but once again the maggots provided a solution. I wound an old sheet with maggots in it round a wound and after a few days it was nicely healed. Sumatra railway Operations hut Only peeled rice was issued, without the vitamin rich silver skins, so many died of malnutrition, beri-berri, malaria and bacillary dysentery, for which there was hardly any cure. But we were able to save a number of people with the maggots. When the surrender came at last we got a double portion of rice. All of a sudden we were allowed out of camp. I walked to a post office Pakan Baru and asked the crazy question whether I could send a telegram to my wife in Java. And, strange as it may seem, I was able to for 10 cents per word. The Japanese were extremely jumpy and when they had burnt all papers relating to the camp they asked us if we thought that they should commit suicide. Our answer was: "Yes, as your tradition hara kiiri lays down, that's the best thing you could do". In the bridge building camp we had to pile-drive trees into the river. The Japs were very careful over the tools given out. From time to time a monkey wrench would crash down into the river, and if we found it we would be given tobacco and extra food. So more and more monkey wrenches started to fall into the water, but we had tied them to a stick beforehand with very thin thread. The first train was pushed over the bridge by a hundred and fifty POWs. We never thought it would take it, for the whole thing was mainly clamped together. The train got to the other side but the ridge was distorted by the very first river flood. And then there were the tigers. The place was stiff with them. Ever since a Japanese had gone to sit on the latrine one night and had been eaten by a tiger, they were scared to death of them. Now, there was a certain Jan de Kwant in our gang, who could do a marvellous imitation of a tiger. When Jan gave a growl in the evenings, the Japs fled inside and we were able to quietly steal a chicken from the guards camp, which Jan plucked under his mosquito net, trembling the from fever because he had again caught malaria. A bridge had to erected across a wide river and our gang had to chop trees from marsh forest. When we did not jump from the path into the water ourselves, we were beaten into it. We stood shoulder deep in the water and sometimes our heads went under. The amazing thing is that nobody was eaten by crocodiles. The worst part was when a tree finally fell. You had to try and get out of the way, while a torrent of red ants rained down on you. After one to three weeks the bridge was ready and then the rain came. The river swept trees and bushes out of the jungle and we POWs had to work at night, trying to steer driftwood between the bridge piles using long sticks. But the next day there was no denying that the bridge had a bend in it. No one believed that a train would ever get over it, but the Japanese knew better. Then, when we all had to get in the very first train, I thought my last hour had come. But with a lot of whistling and creaking we made it to the other side. Because the wretched railway was easily disrupted and the clamped bridges just held together, there were many derailments. Sometimes we had to use brute force to get trucks back on the track. but I still do not know how we managed to right a heavy locomotive and get it back in place. We had to raise it using loose bits of rail and push it centimetre by centimetre. It didn't work at first, obviously, but when the swine gave the signal "Lift" and at the same moment began to beat us at random, we finally succeeded. Everything succeeded in this way by the end. Between Logas and Muara we dug our way through a hill carrying away the earth in baskets. And we laid a railway line in a narrow ravine under an overhanging mountain from which bits kept falling off.. When the first trainload of Romushas went along this line, the cliff fell in and they were all buried alive. The exhausted POWs who were forced, during the Japanese occupation, to construct a railway line 215 km long right through mid-Sumatran tropical jungle, had no escape. For over a year, from late May 1944 until Japanese capitulation on 15 August l945, they were subject to the whims of their cruel Korean guards and to their Japanese masters, who had been ordered by Tokyo to construct a railway line between Pakan Baru and Muara at the cost of so many human lives. They acquitted themselves very well in this task. More than ten thousand native slave labourers and nearly seven hundred whites, mostly Dutch POWs died in the torrid Sumatran jungle of malnutrition, beri-beri, tropical sores, malaria and dysentery. For a map of the Sumatra railway, please click here.