Anzac ghosts haunt Railway of Death

By CATHERINE MASTERS

As the lone bugle sounds at Gallipoli, a hush will fall in the jungles of another Anzac graveyard.

Thousands of men from the Allied forces died in Thailand in an area perhaps better remembered for the film Bridge on the River Kwai than for the massive human suffering that unfolded there.

Second World War prisoners of the Japanese were forced to build a 413km railway from Bangkok to Rangoon in occupied Burma. The death toll grew daily as the men toiled in monsoon rains with little food, their emaciated bodies shaken by recurring bouts of malaria.

Only a handful of New Zealand prisoners of war were among the mainly Australian, British, Dutch, American and Asian labourers, but each year either New Zealand or Australia hosts Anzac Day memorial services at the huge war cemetery at Kanchanaburi.

This year, the Speaker of Parliament, Jonathan Hunt, is representing New Zealand.

More than 12,000 Allied prisoners died building the "Railway of Death" - and 80,000 to 100,000 Asian labourers are believed to have also perished.

While some survivors of the horror make the pilgrimage back to the jungle, 87-year-old Ken Macduff has no desire to return.

British-born Mr Macduff has lived in New Zealand for 44 years with his 86-year-old wife, Brenda, who was also a prisoner of the Japanese.

Cuddled on the couch in their Torbay home, they shake their heads with amazement at the thought that they made it through their separate ordeals and were reunited soon after being freed.

As Mr Macduff slaved on the railway in what was then Siam, Mrs Macduff was a nurse. She was imprisoned in a Tenko-style women's camp in Sumatra and worked in the hospital battling endless cases of dysentery, diphtheria, jaundice and malaria.

Mr Macduff says conditions in the jungle were worse than appalling. Simple cuts and scratches turned to ulcers and often flesh would rot.

"The only treatment was to scrape the gangrenous flesh away with a sharpened spoon while the patient was held down."

There were no drugs and many prisoners had limbs amputated.

The elephants that hauled tree trunks for the railway structure were treated better than the prisoners, said Mr Macduff.

One particularly awful memory was when cholera first struck. It hit a camp of Tamil labourers badly and many crawled into the jungle to die.

Mr Macduff was among men ordered to dig a huge pit and then go into the jungle to find bodies.

"I can well remember pulling skinny bodies out of the undergrowth by their heads and tossing them into the pit."

Towards the end of the war, Mr Macduff was one of 1000 men sent to build a road through the jungle. The railway was being bombed so constantly that the Japanese wanted another escape route.

Four hundred of the 1000 died within three months of the war's end.

Mr Macduff's few nice memories are of the local Thai people. Thailand was occupied by the Japanese, but the Thais were kind to the prisoners, bringing food and helping where they could. It is said Anzac Day is revered in Thailand.