Long Way Back to the River Kwai Read online

  LONG WAY BACK TO THE

  RIVER KWAI

  LONG WAY BACK TO THE

  RIVER KWAI

  A Harrowing True Story

  of Survival in

  World War II

  LOET VELMANS

  For Edith

  Copyright © 2003, 2011 by Loet Velmans

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-185-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Maps

  Reflections

  Prologue

  1 Boyhood

  2 Escape

  3 Refuge

  4 Prison

  5 Death Camp

  6 Recovery

  7 Renascence

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  LONG WAY BACK TO THE

  RIVER KWAI

  Reflections

  Japan has often abundantly deserved the world’s empathy and compassion for its endurance of earthquakes and other natural disasters. The country’s first recorded major earthquake dates back to the year 684 AD. Since then, more than forty major quakes have decimated cities, villages, and countryside. In our modern time, with its instant worldwide coverage, we have witnessed the great Kobe earthquake of 1995 and its successor, 2011’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. The devastating television images from Japan have inspired universal respect and admiration for the way the Japanese people respond to adversity. What is it in the Japanese character that gives rise to such a disciplined reaction to a succession of disasters? Japan experts and legions of pundits are called on to spout their views about the heroic and stoic Japanese. Even in wary China and Korea, traditional competitors who have always been suspicious of Japan, the Japanese Empire’s reaction to catastrophe is admired and held up as a model.

  For me, the repercussions of such disasters pose a dilemma. How do I reconcile Japan’s sterling character with the utterly ruthless and cruel behavior that I experienced during my three-and-a-half-year stint as a starved and beaten prisoner of war during World War II? Now, it seems, the grandchildren of the Japanese soldiers who brought so much pain and grief to their prisoners have become the world’s models of self-sacrificing behavior. Should I now feel different? I never did manage to engage with any Japanese persons of my generation to discuss what happened in the war from our opposing perspectives. So I have always remained suspicious of their dealings and motives. Has the time arrived for me to become more tolerant, especially of the postwar generations? Can I finally bring myself to forgive the brutal beating, the starvation, the disease, and the deaths of my friends?

  My preoccupation with Japan started over half a century ago, a month or two before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The white minority in the Dutch East Indies, among whom I had landed early in the war, had lived a sheltered life for generations. Now, as tensions between Japan and the West increased, the Dutch colonial community—a homogeneous group of expatriates—became nervous about its future. Internal tensions, fueled by apprehension, intensified when the Pacific War erupted. As a seventeen-year-old, living in Java, I wasn’t aware of the strengths and weaknesses of our army, but I did not share the colonials’ complacent (and racist) conviction that the Japanese would easily be defeated. Once I was drafted, I grew increasingly skeptical of our army’s chances to withstand the inevitable invasion.

  The war years were filled with hatred.

  Even after the war, I continued to have Japan on my mind. My old fury flared up again when I read about the Tokyo War Crimes trials where, I felt, so many leading Japanese officials and military brass escaped harsh punishment. For many years I was haunted by two questions: Who are these people? And what drives them?

  It is nearly impossible to define a culture, whether foreign or one’s own. The subject is too complicated. The only supposition I can advance, tired as it may be, is that the Japanese have a greater sense of cohesion than any Western nation. This may be stating the obvious, especially since it concerns such a homogeneous population, where immigrants represent just 2 percent of the population. Yet we cannot help but make comparisons between the Japanese and ourselves. This has led to a pattern of questionable conclusions. Japanese stoicism under stress shouldn’t be considered a miracle: in Japan, self-discipline is derived from a common conviction that the goals of the nation precede the well-being of the individual. Japanese unity equals fealty to the tribe, a striving toward a common goal, and, when the historical occasion demands, the sharing of sacrifice. This comes out strongly in times of natural disaster and nuclear catastrophe. It also applies, with a vengeance, to the political enemy as well as the foreign business competitor. It explains the treatment of the dishonored and dishonorable prisoners of war, and the barely tolerated minorities such as the Korean immigrants. The hopes and the ambitions of the Japanese individual play a secondary role.

  In my slowly dawning understanding of the Japanese, I have begun to comprehend how the nation religiously, even fanatically, came to believe that it was the West that had started World War II. The Emperor and his leadership had so ordained. Japanese society was an edifice in which all decisions made from the top were slavishly obeyed. There was no tolerance for the idea that initiatives could germinate at the bottom and work their way to the top. As a result, for many generations, the homeland had become a sacred shrine, which in war needed to be defended to the last man, woman, and child. In the Japanese concept of honor, no soldier could contemplate surrender: from the kamikaze pilot to the Japanese soldier fighting in the battle of Okinawa and other islands, suicide was the only option. It also explained to me that the 1945 surrender, ordered by the Emperor, resulted in the complete acceptance of the American occupation. Obedience meant not only cooperation with the occupying American forces, but also no reexamination of one’s own conduct during the war, resulting in the (mystifying to Westerners) attitude that no apology for wartime misdeeds was required.

  To believe that Japan’s unique character will ever change is an illusion. For me, an ex-POW writing this almost seventy years after my imprisonment, Japan still fascinates. At times it will seem admirable; at others it will be frightening, possibly hateful. It remains on my mind, with all its strengths, weaknesses, and ambiguities.

  Loet Velmans

  Sheffield, Massachusetts

  May 2011

  Prologue

  I WANTED TO FIND SPRING CAMP, where, fifty-seven years ago, I nearly died. I wanted to revisit the jungle where my friend George’s bones lay buried.

  George was not the last of my friends to die, but the memory of his death was the one that settled itself into the inside of one of my brain cells over fifty years ago and has remained there ever since. I buried George hastily, yanking and pushing his arms and legs unceremoniously in order to stuff him into the burlap sack that se
rved as his coffin. It was 1943. George and I had been bunkmates, working side by side on the Thailand-Burma railroad, the “Railway of Death,” as slave laborers and prisoners of war of the Japanese. We were famished, beaten, emaciated, and diseased.

  George was twenty-seven years old and had been a plantation manager in the Dutch East Indies before the war. His health had been failing for several months, and he had given up the will to live. Despite his weakened state, the Japanese guards would drive him out of our hut every morning to his labor detail. “They won’t let me go,” he had said to me over and over before the malaria-induced dementia set in. But it was his last hour that made his death unforgettable: his babbling gibberish; his pale, bloated stomach horribly swollen with beriberi; his mottled limbs gouged to the bone by gangrenous ulcers; and, finally, those piercing shrieks and deep moans of anger, pain, and despair.

  I was seventeen years old when the Germans invaded my native Holland. I became a fugitive, an escape artist, always one step ahead of the enemy, until he caught up with me on the island of Java. Even though I started off fleeing from the Nazis, the enemy I came to know intimately had a Japanese face: impassive, masklike. I spent my POW years trying to figure out what lay behind that brutal mask: what made this enemy tick. It has only been in recent years, when I started thinking about writing this book, that I realized that much of my life since the war has been spent trying to understand the Japanese.

  For years I thought about going back to Thailand. But each time that I planned a trip there with my wife Edith, some more urgent event in our lives resulted in the sort of postponement that lasts from year to year, decade to decade. I suppose I was suffering from a lingering reluctance to face memories of the blackest time of my life. Finally, in February 2000, I could put it off no longer. Edith and I were on our way from New York to Kanchanaburi, about ninety miles west of Bangkok, to meet up with a fellow POW survivor and good friend, Lex Noyon. Lex, a retired professor in the social sciences, had flown in from his home in Amsterdam. It was Lex who had whetted my appetite for this trip, for he had visited the river Kwai several times. On his last visit, some ten years earlier, he had bicycled off the main road and found a spot in the bush that he recognized and identified as Spring Camp, one of the forty-odd encampments along the Thailand-Burma railroad, where over 20,000 British, Australian, Dutch, and American POWs and an estimated 200,000 Asian slave laborers were worked to death.

  I wasn’t expecting much: I knew that all traces of our camp had been swallowed up by the jungle. After the war, the Thais themselves had destroyed most of the railway—trade with Burma had not been important enough to justify a rail link with a nation that was historically prone to invade its neighbor. I knew that in recent years Thailand’s rapid economic development had further changed the landscape—large stretches of jungle had been cleared into lush farmland, suburbs, soccer fields, and vast golf courses.

  We had arranged for a car and driver, but we soon discovered that our “guide” neither spoke nor understood any Western language. We were well provided with maps, but these were of little help in pinpointing the exact location of our camp. We started out driving north from Kanchanaburi, on a modern two-lane highway. Two and a half hours later, we were becoming increasingly frustrated, for any attempt at communication with our driver—we thought an earlier turnoff would have brought us nearer to our destination—was met with no response. He was determined to take us to the place he had decided we must visit: a picturesque waterfall, visited by tour buses and groups of Thai families who had spread out blankets and picnics among the trees.

  No, no, we indicated, this was not it. Off we drove again, at breakneck speed. Our pleas to go a little slower met with stone-faced incomprehension. Then, unexpectedly, our driver veered off the main road and screeched to a stop in front of a modern building on a green, densely wooded hillside in the middle of the tropical wilderness.

  “Welcome to Hellfire Pass Memorial.” A strong handshake accompanied the hearty booming Australian voice. He was tall, heavily built, khaki clad, and introduced himself as Terry Beaton, the manager of the memorial, a museum funded by the Australian government, corporations, and private individuals that had been completed in 1998. When Beaton, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Australian army, heard about our quest, he was delighted. “Most of our visitors have been the children or grandchildren of POWs, but you two are the genuine article. You are the first Dutch POWs I have met. Welcome indeed.”

  Beaton took us down the mountain on a newly constructed concrete walkway to a clearing in the jungle where the railway had been restored to its original state, using fifty-year-old railroad ties, which are commonly known as sleepers. We walked for about an hour in the hot and humid midday sun through Hellfire Pass, a narrow, seventy-five-foot-deep gorge that had been carved out of the rock by slave labor. We remembered how we had been teamed up to hammer long spikes into the rock by hand, to make holes deep enough for blasting. Beaton, a railroad engineer by profession, greatly admired the scope of the enterprise. “You have to give the Japanese credit,” he said. “They built a three-hundred-mile-long railroad without the benefit of proper equipment, in fifteen months, through this kind of mountainous jungle terrain. And in the rainy season, this is one of the worst climate zones in the whole world. It’s a feat equal to the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.”

  “And like the pharaohs,” observed Lex dryly, “they didn’t give a fig what it cost in human lives.”

  Our new friend began speculating what had made Lex and me survivors. “You aren’t very big fellows,” he said. “Every prisoner received the same miserable rations. If you were tall and heavy, with a bigger body to feed, you’d be the first to run out of gas.”

  At Hellfire Pass, he told us, the natural animosity between the Brits and their Aussie cousins had given rise to a fierce contest: which side could drill the most holes. The lackadaisical Dutch, working at the slowest pace they could, despite the beatings they brought on themselves for not working fast enough, stayed out of the competition, saved their strength, and enjoyed a higher survival rate.

  At a spot near the end of the clearing, work was in progress on the reconstruction of a wooden bridge across a ravine, where dozens of POWs had fallen to their deaths. Sixty-nine others were believed to have been beaten to death there by their guards.

  Armed with refreshed memories and new directions—in Thai, for our driver—Lex and I were more determined than ever to find our own camp. And finally we did achieve our goal. At the end of a dirt road riddled with deep potholes, we came to a small clearing. Our driver jumped out of the car and took off in a hurry, leaving us to scratch our heads. We were relieved to see him return a short while later, gesturing to us to follow him on a narrow trail. After a few minutes we arrived at another picturesque clearing beside a pond. A large handwritten sign read NATURAL SPRING. There was no sign of human habitation, but within a few minutes we were surrounded by little children, who seemed to spring out of nowhere. The children were enthralled when my wife offered to let them look at themselves on the screen of her digital video camera.

  Lex doubted that we were in the right spot. Although it was true that Spring Camp had been named after a nearby spring, the other markers had disappeared. The last time he had visited the spot, there had been a small bridge. Muttering to himself, Lex walked off, leaving Edith and me to admire the beautiful children, who were making faces and laughing at themselves in the mirror of Edith’s camera. After about ten minutes, I grew apprehensive. Lex, the intrepid seventy-six-year-old traveler, suffered from glaucoma and a bad heart. I went after him and was relieved when I heard a distant response to my repeated calls. I reached him standing on the edge of a large open field with a clear view of a low mountain range not too far away.

  “This is it,” he said. “It’s the same spot where I stood eight years ago, even though the small bridge that was here before has disappeared. Look at those two stone formations on the mountain, which we could only see
in those mornings when the rain stopped.” I had no recollection of the bridge, nor of the stone formations, but I did remember that I had been too sick and weak to admire any scenery. Standing in that pristine spot in the middle of nowhere, calm and lovely and empty. I felt no emotion. So this is it, I thought. And that’s all there is to it. I looked around perfunctorily to see if I could see any artifact, any sign of human habitation. But there was nothing. Spring Camp had been swallowed up by time. “Come on, Lex, let’s go,” I said impatiently.

  It wasn’t until we were seated in the car, driving back to our hotel after a long and tiring day, that I felt something—some of the old fear and the old anger stirring. Startled, I recalled our first day in Kananchaburi, when we had visited the famous “Bridge over the River Kwai,” one of the area’s major tourist attractions. Dozens of hotels and rooming houses had sprung up together with souvenir stands; craft exhibits; street merchants hawking clothing, scarves, hats, and postcards; food stalls; restaurants; and all the other paraphernalia of the tourist trade. That restored railway bridge—the only survivor of the railway’s three steel and sixty-six wooden bridges—was apparently a popular destination for Japanese tourists, who, we were told, visited this area in large numbers, attracted by the easily accessible and inexpensive golf courses. The bridge rose high above the water, its rails perched on a narrow track on which it was wise to move forward no more than two abreast, slowly and cautiously. As we walked across, groups of Japanese passed us from the opposite side. They seemed impervious to any risk to themselves or anyone else in their path. Small square platforms had been built every few yards to give pedestrians room to let each other pass, but the Japanese did not avail themselves of these. They would not step out of their way to let us through, but barreled onward in groups of twenty or more, leaving us quaking on the sidelines. Edith and I would wait until we saw an opportunity to make a quick dash to the next platform; Lex, who could hardly see two steps ahead, blithely walked on, forcing the Japanese to stop in their tracks for a second, even though they would not yield. Edith grabbed my hand and said she was a little scared; I felt more irritated than anything else. We didn’t see the Japanese paying any attention to the memorials along the bank of the river. They were too busy filming and photographing each other with the river as background. But now, in the car, my irritation swelled to anger—at myself as much as at the Japanese. How long would I continue to let these people walk all over me? Had nothing changed?