Faith, Hope and Rice: Private Cox's Account of Captivity and the Death Railway by Ellie Taylor

Author:Ellie Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military
ISBN: 9781473857902
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Maintenance Specialists

[Dad’s next move was to a camp known to the PoWs as Wampo. The vast majority of the men sent here were housed in the main camp, but he was one of a comparatively small group who were based some distance away from this in a much smaller camp near the railway line at Wampo station.] He continues:

In August 1943 my time at Kanburi came to an end, when I was detailed to a party going further north. There were only a few of us in this party – two chaps from the Leicesters, one from the Gordons, one from the Norfolks, two from the RAOC, and me. The seven of us were taken to Wampo, at the 114-kilometre mark, a journey of about forty-five miles. We travelled there by way of a convertible army truck, one of several which had been adapted to enable them to run on the railway line; with their wheels removed, the hubs fitted the gauge of the line. Many small stations had been built along the line as work on the railway progressed. Each of them consisted of little more than a cluster of bamboo huts built alongside the line, equipped with a field telephone. Men were needed to keep these places clean, to chop and stack wood, draw water and clean the fires when an engine was taken off the run, and to do whatever else was deemed necessary. Every so often a party was detailed to move up country to do this work, and this time it seemed that it was our turn. We didn’t know what to expect as a result of this latest move, although from the outset it had appeared to us to be a move for the better, but you just never knew. Our lives had become so unpredictable. We were, all of us, the property of the Japanese, to be moved around as their whim dictated.

Talking amongst ourselves, we soon discovered that each of us had a background in vehicle maintenance. The Japanese had taken note of any particular expertise men had a few months earlier at the last camp and, though it had subsequently seemed a waste of time when everyone was then detailed to the same sort of work, it now appeared things might be different. We soon found out this was indeed the case, when one of the guards informed us that we had been brought here to work as specialists in maintenance. Hearing this, we hoped that it meant we were considered to be useful and might be treated less harshly, although we were in no doubt as to our place in the whole scheme of things and weren’t foolish enough to imagine that being useful made us indispensable; we knew there would be countless others who could take our places. For my part, although I’m not sure I would have described myself as a ‘specialist’, I felt very grateful that the Army made sure that, as a driver, you learned about the vehicles you drove.

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