An Introduction
A Japanese mortar bomb landing in my platoon truck in Singapore helped determine the whole course of my life. Some weeks after we had been rounded up at Changi, we were allowed back to the battlefield to bury our dead. It was during this macabre visit [that] I found my gutted platoon truck and learned that my last pair of glasses had been burnt. I found one blackened lens, but even if I’d managed to clean it there was no way of keeping it in my eye. I lacked the necessary beetle brow. So I had to resign myself to remaining a short-sighted prisoner – a dangerous condition – for we had to salute every Japanese we saw, and if we failed to recognise them we were beaten up as a matter of course . . . [After the railway had been completed] . . . the Japanese relaxed a little . . . we were allowed to build a camp theatre . . . [which] I suppose, was my first remote step towards the discovery of Pavarotti (Coast, 1988: Crazy Ideas. Unpublished memoirs).
Writing Railroad of Death
Following his capture during the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Lieutenant John Alan Coast (30 October 1916 – 23 July 1989) survived three and a half years in Japanese prisoner of war camps along the route of the notorious Thai-Burma Railway. He was incarcerated variously at the camps of Changi, Chungkai, Wun Lue, Tamarkan, and Kanchanaburi. John’s story reflects the bravery, tenacity and loyalty of many FEPOWs [Far East Prisoners of War], but it is exceptional for its eloquence and prompt publication. Not only did he tolerate the impairment of his eyesight and many unpleasant and painful tropical diseases, but he also managed to keep a secret diary – strictly prohibited by the Japanese – throughout his internment. From this diary John produced the manuscript of Railroad of Death, which was published by Hyperion Press in July 1946, less than a year after his return to Britain. It was also translated into Thai in 1947.
John was almost caught writing in his ‘dim, half-seen world’ (Dancing out of Bali, 20-21) several times during the three and a half years he spent in the Japanese prison camps. At one point he had to convince a Japanese guard, who walked in on him while he was ‘revising some early chapters . . . [and] trying to decipher my own writing,’ that his diary was actually ‘just an ordinary book’ (Railroad Chapter 11). John then proceeded to engage him in a discussion of the greats of English literature. Along with his close friend ‘Gibby’ (Gilbert Inglefield) John managed to barter for the guard’s silence—as well as an unexpected commission of a packet of sugar, some toilet paper and two fishhooks—in return for a nice fountain pen and some further exploration of the works of Shakespeare and Byron. Gilbert Inglefield, was a talented musician who was later to become Mayor of the City of London. Gilbert later described John as a ‘Bolshie subaltern made good’ in a letter congratulating him on the publication of the book and on the tour of Javanese dancers he went on to produce in 1947.
More than just a personal memoir, John had intended this diary to be published both for posterity and to tell the world about the appalling conditions that the POWs had endured; he had been editing and refining it from early on. But recording life inside the camps was always a risky business. On 18 January 1945, word went round the camp that a Japanese search of all POW kit was imminent. All writing materials and text discovered by the guards were confiscated and never returned. John’s manuscript, written in his small, intense hand, was buried under ‘an atap shack beneath a huge tree’ (Railroad of Death) in Chungkai before the Allied officers were to march back to Kamburi (Kanchanaburi) via Tamarkan. It was hidden, along with the diary of his enduring friend ‘Jim Dixon’ (James Richardson), to be retrieved after the war. Jim Richardson, an eminent government geologist in Malaya, was a ‘vast strong fellow of Cornish and possibly a little Spanish extraction . . . [whose] granite-looking physique was relieved by his ability to use his well-formed hands in a delicate and Gallic way, and also an oddly quiet and mild voice’ (Railroad Chapter 11). The map of the Bangkok-Moulmein railway reproduced in the first pages of this book was carefully hand-drawn by Jim for Railroad.
Other items buried by friends of John’s included evidence gathered during the life-saving work of Dr Hugh de Wardener (‘Ginger de Huguenot’ in Railroad), which would form the basis of two classic medical papers that were later published in The Lancet: ‘Cholera epidemic among prisoners-of-war in Siam’ (1946) and “Cerebral beriberi (Wernicke’s encephalopathy): review of 52 cases in a Singapore prisoner-of-war hospital” (1947).1
But while John found and returned Richardson’s diary after the Japanese capitulation in August 1945, his own had disappeared.2
Jim Richardson’s unpublished and unedited diary, against which many of the events mentioned in Railroad of Death can be compared, can be found in the Imperial War Museum manuscripts collection. On page 89 of the diary Richardson makes the following comments about the burial of his and John’s diary and John’s failure to retrieve John’s own manuscript:
‘We had warning of a massive Nip search of all kit (everything) imminent. On 18th January 1945 I buried the diary in a tin can beneath a large tree in Chungkai. John buried the MS. of his book “The Railroad of Death” similarly after capitulation of the I.J.A. [Imperial Japanese Army] John Coast recovered my diary in August, 1945 and returned it to me in Rangoon. His MS. had disappeared (Why?)’ (Documents 1705, Private Papers of Lieutenant J.R. Richardson).
John later described the tree under which his and Richardson’s diaries were buried as that ‘old enemy of mine’ (1952: 4) and in an article about his 1947 return visit to Siam he writes: ‘I paid my respects to the confounded tree under which I buried my original book and whence it disappeared’ (The Singapore Free Press, 3 February 1948: 4).
Undeterred by the loss of his diary, John proceeded to rewrite the manuscript on the voyage from Rangoon to Southampton:
‘During the voyage I had but one occupation and that was to complete the manuscript of my book on our prisoner experiences, a task which I had imperfectly achieved in seventeen days, seated in the crowded Officers’ Lounge with my friends, scribbling away rapidly among the debris of beer mugs and rejected mepacrine pills [a treatment for malaria and certain other tropical infections]’ (1952: 13).
John readied Railroad for publication while recuperating at his sister Daphne’s home in London. John and his sister were immediately aware of the popular potential of what he was writing, as can also be seen from this excerpt from an article in The Straits Times in 1947: ‘My sister already had a publisher waiting for me when I reached home’ (The Straits Times, 2 April 1947: 5). According to the same source, ‘Mr Coast reached Southampton on 7 Oct. 1945. The first edition of his book had sold out by Christmas.’ Christmas is likely to mean Christmas 1946, as the first edition of the book was not published until that year.
As a chronicler of the human cost of the notorious ‘death railway’, John was a pioneer among former POWs. His account was not only the first off the press, but it is still widely considered to be one of the most accurate and detailed. Railroad is, in John’s words, ‘a very nearly completely true book’ (Introduction to the 1946 edition of Railroad of Death). John chose to give pseudonyms to the Allied prisoners and ‘sometimes rolled a few of them together and typified them as one man’ (ibid). All the Japanese were called by their real names, often in addition to the nicknames given to them by the prisoners—for example, Medical Sergeant Nobasawa was nicknamed the ‘Horse Doctor’ (Railroad, Chapter 6). In the process of researching this new edition of Railroad of Death, we have been able to identify over fifty of the Allied FEPOWs who feature in John’s narrative, as well as some of the more elusive Eurasian prisoners: the list of real names can be found in Appendix Nine. As these have been identified, it becomes clear that this book is not only a great read, but also an invaluable historical resource.
Several of these men, particularly those in John’s kongsi, mentioned in the dedication of the book, remained close after the war. Jim Richardson, Gilbert Inglefield, George Sully, Hugh de Wardener as well as Joop Nittel, all wrote to congratulate him on the publication of this book and continued to correspond throughout their lives.
His memoir is vivid in its detail, raw and compelling in its narrative style. However, it also displays the calm and even-handed perspective and intellectual curiosity that was typical of his character and which shaped the remarkable trajectory of the rest of his life. John chronicled the physical, mental and emotional challenges faced daily by the POWs and described the various ingenious and creative ways in which these challenges were overcome.
The culture and reality of the camps
The appalling conditions of forced labour, inadequate nutrition and callous neglect of prisoners’ health are well-documented, both in this book and in the others that followed. However, Railroad highlights how an ad hoc but vibrant cultural life in several of the camps helped to save sanity and lives. The prompt establishment of camp ‘universities’ and ‘bamboo theatres’ did much to keep the POWs’ spirits up and alleviate the crushing boredom that punctuated the work and inevitable periods of sickness. The universities of Changi and Chungkai are the best known, but similar efforts were made in other camps. As Brian MacArthur notes, musical or theatrical events were staged in at least twenty-four camps and some sort of cultural activity was organised by POWs in most of the camps along the line. Although the first concert party took place in Changi as early as March 1942, the bar was set by the performances staged at Chungkai, the biggest camp in Thailand, which was commanded by the theatre-loving Owtram, the ‘Singing Colonel’.
POWs gave lectures on a wide range of subjects related to their pre-war interests and expertise, which collectively amounted to an extraordinary depth and breadth of knowledge. The men learned new languages and studied history to compensate for the lack of newspapers, books and radio. They were desperate to focus their minds and keep their memories sharp when the spoken word was the only freely available form of communication or record-keeping; detailed reminiscences and explorations served this purpose. John and the kongsi were active in the universities, but also kept their group very tight. Their friendships were based on mutual respect and trust, but the group was really cemented by their intense intellectual and linguistic study. When the day’s physical work was done, they retreated to their dark bamboo huts to debate philosophical, religious and political ideas late into the night. And a few of them also retreated into their diaries, their private documentation of camp life.
That John was an effective chronicler of the physical, mental and social aspects of camp life can be seen by comparing the details of John’s descriptions of events and relationships with the surviving diary of one of his companions, Jim Richardson, and to the ideas of fellow prisoner Ian Watt (‘Ian White’), who was later to become a professor of English at Stanford University.
Richardson writes in a matter-of-fact style that mixes information about events, the people he met and the Japanese that, with editing, would not seem out of place in Railroad:
‘Sun 1st: [August 1943, Tarsao Camp] Heavy rain all morning. Late breakfast due to no bamboo for fire. Swine of a Nip cook wouldn’t allow food to be cooked until all of day’s firewood was in. All fit men turned out 0800 to collect bamboo etc. George and I collected wood for our fire; rain put it out. Not a hope of keeping it alight. George and I walked up to 207 km Camp of the main Takanun to see Officer’s Working Party. Only 26 now working out of original 104. Sickness rate very high. They get fairly good rations including 7-8 oz meat per day. Have been worked very hard and beaten up by a bloody set of Nips. About 300 deaths out of 1500 troops; cholera, fever, dysentery etc. Met Smith, Sam Taylor, Bill Richardson of Malay Regt, Jackson of 11th Div, Robert Woods of 122 Field R.A., Sailor Clare, Eric Roger, Tom Williams, Dicky Bond and many others. Heard all their news and told them mine. They rather expect to go down river later. Saw “Kechil” Carr, Doug Weir, Col Young, Jack Masefield in another section of Camp. Nips had rush job unloading barges in evening. I detailed to take troops down so I called off, thank the Lord (i.e. got out of the unloading). Had dinner 2145; Bloody people!’ (Richardson IWM, Documents. 1705: 62).
Jim Richardson did in fact spend some evenings helping John to edit Railroad.
John’s ability to note the kinds of comings and goings described above by Richardson, but in a way tailored to help the understanding of the general reader, is clear to anyone who reads Railroad of Death.
Ian Watt, in his article ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’ almost perfectly captures how the interest in language and other intellectual pursuits described in Railroad, Richardson’s diary and many other writings from or related to the FEPOW experience were formed, with references to the use of ‘loanwords’ or words shared between the different national groups in the camps. Some of these were developed for comic effect or to emphasise the solidarity of different groups in the camps; at other times they were cleverly designed to hide the true meaning of certain activities from the Japanese (Watt 2002: 230).
For example, in Chapter 8 of Railroad John gives a long definition of the origins, according to his knowledge, of the term ‘Jap-Happy’, which shows how words could mutate, change and attach themselves to new objects and meanings, just as they do in today’s street slang: ‘
‘At Wun Lun there had been a man who worked for the Japanese, and he was known as “Jap-Happy”. The word Jap-Happy was capable of various meanings and came about like this, the troops who did regular work for the Nips in the Nip huts or cookhouses used to receive from them various privileges, such as extra food and clothing, and never working on the railway. A job in a Japanese cookhouse meant a very much better chance of survival for that man than for another man just doing the ordinary work. The first clothing of any sort issued to our troops by the Nips were cheap pairs of rubber boots, given to their batmen when they had worn their own leather ones out. These boots became known as Jap-Happys, and then gradually the meaning changed so that the word became an adjective meaning pro-Jap; or it meant, alternatively, that a Jap-Happy person would always try to propitiate the Nips even to British detriment. Ultimately there were three clear meanings – Jap-Happy, the adjective, meant pro-Nip to some degree or other; Jap Happies the plural noun, meant Jap rubber boots; and a Jap-Happy was a “G” string as issued and worn by the Nips. This latter Jap-Happy was a rectangular piece of cheap cloth with a tape at one end . . . But the adjectival use of the word was the ultimate insult, and all those in administrative jobs could expect to be called “Jap-Happy Bastards” if they slipped into the only too easy way of dealing with disputes between the Nips and ourselves of “trying to see the Nip point of view.”’
John’s record of the nicknames given to the guards, and particularly some of the most notorious war criminals, is also important. In the case of ‘Nattering Norman’, a guard at Takanun camp, we can see how the nickname came about:
‘In charge of the officers there was always a certain cretin of a Nip who could never stop mumbling and whom we christened “Nattering Norman”. He knew one word of English, and that was “bamboo”; and apparently only one word of Japanese, too, which sounded like “mortikoi”, and meant “bring”; otherwise he just mumbled, dribbled and worked – a complete dopey; and as for us, well we “bamboomortikoi-ed!’
Although John’s book does not record anything like the full range of the slang language devised and used by the POWs (which would have made it inaccessible to the reading public) it does reflect the oral culture of the camps. It also describes some of the hunger for conversation and learning, motivated by boredom and frustration, mentioned by Watt and others (Watt 2002: 231).
Two examples of the latter, both comic, will suffice:
‘It’s not really fair to laugh at George [Sully], but on one occasion, when Jim [Richardson], who used to visit him patiently and daily, was reading out an essay he’d just written, George slipped quietly into sleep and spoilt the proceedings by a loud snore. And on another afternoon I took over a long poem of T.S. Eliot for unravelling by George, and he propounded so slowly and mountainously that I forgot what he’d said about Verse I before we got to Verse II and so on.’
or
‘Then old planter Jock was the originator of all sorts of round games— Jock must have been a wonderful father with his children—and on non-musical nights we had every sort of quiz, spelling game, “animal, vegetable or mineral” that we could think of. These three cheerful people did more to buck up the officers of the camp than anything else; it was lucky for us they were all in our tent. There was a young but senior Territorial Major who slept opposite me, and I don’t think he ever answered a single “quiz” question correctly, and in the end he dubbed himself “Stupidity Corner”. Knowing that he’d been an amateur racing motorist, he was specially asked one night when his turn came, “What could you buy in England before the war for exactly £750?” Old “Stupidity Corner” came suddenly to life, and we had a certain model of an Aston-Martin described to us in a sort of ecstasy right down to the last nut’ (Railroad, Chapter 10).
Not everyone in John’s world was a potential intellectual, but most could share a remembered interest—however practical or esoteric— to help maintain their own and others’ morale.
Another extract from Richardson’s diary shows how much John’s lost prototype for Railroad of Death grew from and was a part of the oral and collective culture of the camps. The following would not be out of place in a book group discussing a manuscript shared by an aspirant author today:
‘Sat 4th March [1944]: Remainder of 11 Group down from up-country. Yoop [Joop Nittel] here. Hope to get discussion circle working with Yoop, Coast, Sully, Fowler and JAR [James A Richardson]. Read Coast’s “Book on Captivity, Part II” [and in a handwritten note added to the typed manuscript and obviously not part of the text of the original diary] (I helped J.C. [John Coast] in editing MS)’ (Richardson IWM, Documents. 1705: 62).
It is impossible now to see how much influence Richardson may have had on the style of John’s eventual reconstructed book, but Richardson’s dairies serve as a reminder that Railroad is an epic built on discussions and events chewed over, analysed and reconstructed in the camps well before John shared them with the wider world.
Railroad is also the story of the frustration of young and relatively young officers with the older officers around them. John’s response to the question #6 from the MI9 questionnaire giving to liberated prisoners about their incarceration—‘Have you any other matter of any kind which you wish to bring to notice?’—is revealing:
‘Yes. It is a great mistake to allow Commanding Officers to lead fighting units in war time who are too old & incapable of fulfilling their duties in many cases. Over and over again Junior Officers are disappointed at lack of support and inefficient handling of the Japanese due to the fact that many of the Senior Officers saw themselves as detached from those who had to work, & were themselves too old to bear any useful part’ (National Archives WO344/369/2).
Arguably, John’s apparent dislike of older authority figures may have been precipitated by his rather fraught relationship with his elitist and somewhat disappointed father. However, Railroad is full of examples of John and his fellow junior officers’ resentment of older senior officers, who they saw as incompetent or hypocritical. John’s feelings on this matter were far from unique as can be seen in similar substantiated complaints made in Richardson’s diary, and in the appendices to this book dealing with practical examples relating to radios and escape attempts.
In more than one of the letters sent to John after the war by his fellow young officers from the camps this feeling of anger towards senior officers remains. However, it would be unfair to say that this is the whole of the picture. John and his fellow junior officers did admire those senior officers who in their judgement could and did protect their men from the Japanese. In John’s view, such men included Lt Colonels ‘Champagne’ Toosey at Kamburi and Owtram at Chungkai, to name just two.
Although it is true to say that in subsequent years at least two of John’s contemporaries remarked that they would in some ways like— in a sense that may seem difficult for anyone brought up with a knowledge of this period to accept—to return to the ‘freedom to think’ of the camps once the railway had been built, it must not be forgotten that Railroad is in part a gripping and authoritative account of war crimes committed between 1942 to 1945.
The lasting influence of the camps
Given the often brutal treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese in World War II, it may be surprising that the camps could also be a place of cultural and intellectual enrichment and meaning.
John was a case in point, as was his friend Ian Watt, who read the complete works of Shakespeare whilst suffering from malaria (Watt, 1956: 525) and whose experiences in the camps deeply influenced his views on human nature and in turn his interpretation of literature as a leading scholar (Kermode, 2000: ix). Likewise, Railroad is the story of John’s formative years.
In particular, his contact with Dutch and Eurasian prisoners brought him into contact with the music and dance traditions of the nation that would soon become Indonesia. Theatrical entertainments were crucial to maintaining morale in the camps. John was very keen to attend the performances, though without his glasses he often struggled to see what was happening on stage. He took up the position of ‘prompt’ in the famous shows produced by ‘Leo Frick’ (Leo Britt) at Chungkai and was thereby introduced to the world of theatre. In time, he established an ‘Anglo-Dutch theatrical company’ and set about producing a ‘Balinese Ballet’ and an elaborate Javanese-style music and dance show, complete with tin-can gamelan orchestra. Its star, Tari, along with most of the cast, was sent upcountry to work on the final push to complete the railway before the show hit the stage. Tari is the word for ‘dance’ in Malay and Indonesian. This is likely to have been the half-Javanese performer Edouard Bertling, who was a dancer at the Central Javanese palace of the Sultan of Surakarta.
After the war John mused that he had been so enthralled with this theatrical work that, ‘if you’d told me that the war was over and I could go home, I’d have said: not now—let’s get this show on first— I’ll be ready to go home in a month or so’ (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Treatment 1967/8: 26). John’s creative path had already been set; it was indeed the first step towards the discovery of Pavarotti.
Before the war, John had shown some literary and artistic leanings, but these only became fully apparent during his incarceration when he began to record his thoughts on scraps of paper. He went on to be a prolific memoirist and author of non-fiction, as well as a blockade-runner and revolutionary in Indonesia, a leading international theatrical agent and impresario, and film-maker, among other things. As a young man at Cheltenham College he had aspired to train as a doctor, but was placed in the military stream and in any case did not excel academically. His father, James Percy Chatterton Coast, could not or would not send him to university, much to John’s dismay. Instead he took up a clerk’s position at Rothschild Bank in London, (a job to which he was ill-suited and which he in turn despised in every way). He escaped this desk job when he joined the Coldstream Guards in 1939.
John’s sister Daphne Forde in her memoir A Stick called Will records how the class system in the Army continued to operate, even in wartime:
‘So John started life [after beginning his training for the Guards] each day at 5.30 a.m. and drilled and polished, cleaned and ironed, then drilled some more. So punctilious did he become about his appearance and his uniform that after ironing razor-sharp pleats into the back of his greatcoat, when returning to barracks from a weekend leave, he would stand all the way in the train, rather than crease this masterpiece of uniform perfection. By the end of six months he qualified for his commission, passing out with flying colours, but here came the rub. Despite the war, despite the fact that he had done well, he did not possess a private income and without that he wasn’t eligible to be an officer in the Guards Regiment. Amazing! It was an accepted fact that pre-war, a private income was required for any officer wishing to make the Army his career, but it came as a shock now to find that it applied in the Guards, even in wartime.’
(Forde, D. 1998, A Stick called Will: 45)
In 1941, instead of becoming an officer in the Guards, he received a commission as an officer in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. The battalion arrived in Singapore just three weeks before the Japanese invasion.
In his years as a POW, John also moved away from far right political views which had previously seen him associated before the war with The Right Club and with figures such as the novelist and Fascist sympathiser Henry Williamson and Churchill’s controversial nephew Captain Pitt Rivers.3 The Right Club was a secret group formed by the former Scottish MP Captain Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay. John was attracted to Henry Williamson’s vision of a self-sufficient rural life and interested in his Fascist philosophy. He went briefly in the late 1930s to work on Williamson’s farm in Norfolk; although they corresponded for some time, their friendship was brief and Williamson was ambivalent about John’s capacity to labour as a farm hand. He features in Williamson’s The Story of A Norfolk Farm (1986), in which he is called ‘The Inquiline’, and in The Phoenix Generation (Volume 12 of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight) where he features as ‘Hurst’. Interestingly, John later bought a second home in Norfolk, which is where he eventually ended his days. He was also involved in the film production of Tarka the Otter based on Williamson’s novel.
John’s experiences as a POW, together with the cross cultural and anti-colonial influences in the camps, helped to completely transform John’s views and bolstered his enduring dedication to intercultural and international bridge-building in his future career. It was also the end of what his sister Daphne saw as a boyish and confused approach to politics before the war, with John being interested in the most controversial left and right wing politics (Forde 1998: 44). His disgust with the racism of some of his Dutch fellow prisoners towards their Eurasian fellow prisoners is clear when he writes about the insurgent nationalist struggle against the Dutch in what is now Indonesia: “So what will the ponderous old Totok’ [‘pure’] Dutchman do? He is intensely proud of, and often boasts about Java, for it was just before the war a comparatively well administered, though carefully controlled, colony. But he has created there a problem there that is the biggest of its kind in the world and he’s got to do something about it. When they have time to divert their eyes from their own affairs, the eyes of Eurasians, Asiatics and Europeans will be focused on the Java stage’ (Railroad, Chapter 16).
After his release and return to London, John’s fascination with Southeast Asia, and the former Dutch East Indies in particular, continued. Meanwhile, Indonesia was negotiating her own freedom, and the proclamation of Independence by President Sukarno and Vice-President Hatta was broadcast to a nation in waiting on 17 August 1945. John recounts the blissful greyness of the London weather and spending time inhaling the clean smell of soap in chemist shops and sniffing the various scents of the Tube—but he was immediately restless to attend to his two main passions: he wanted to enjoy as many ballet and opera performances as possible; and he wanted to find a way to get to Indonesia.
This last was easier said than done, though it seems John was both tenacious and creative in his approach. He made contact with a small but dedicated group of Indonesian exiles, who were working from a tiny office. He helped with translation of key political documents and started gently lobbying his more prominent contacts in London to recognise the nationalist cause. The performance of Javanese dance that he had so much anticipated staging at Chungkai in 1944 came to fruition in England in 1946. During a visit to Leiden, he recruited a small and diverse group of Indonesians and Eurasians who were studying at Dutch universities. While none of them were professional dancers, all had the ability, willingness and enthusiasm to perform. The show at London’s Embassy Theatre was met with popular acclaim and was another important step for John, towards both Indonesia and his later career in theatre management.
Plotting his return to Southeast Asia, John took a job at the Foreign Office. While he wasn’t yet able to reach Java, by the summer of 1947 he was offered a junior position at the Embassy in Bangkok, where he sought out ways to make himself useful to the republican cause. This was a precarious move while still working for the British government, which was by then attempting to deal with the increasingly bloody situation mounting between the Indonesians and the Dutch. Arriving in Siam it seemed essential to revisit the sites of the railway; he was one of the first former prisoners to return. John had kept in touch with the Thai businessman Nai Boonpong Sirivejjabhandu (‘Boon Pong’) who had saved so many prisoners’ lives through the ‘V scheme’ that smuggled desperately needed supplies into the camps; after war he had established a bus company in Kanchanaburi. As detailed in the eight-page memoir of this visit on 8 June 1947, reproduced in Appendix One, John rode one of Pong’s buses while he visited the scenes of his captivity, which were almost unrecognisable—either overgrown with jungle or replaced with village shacks—after this short time. Again, his balanced attitude and poise is remarkable: ‘the absence of Japanese in Siam made the trip back to Kamburi quite unvindictive,’ he writes ‘and the ghosts are laid’ (Coast, unpublished novel: 1). The ‘drama’ of the place and his hatred for the Japanese (which he hadn’t felt ‘for ages’) hits him again when he sees the Kamburi Base Cemetery for the first time and encounters the grave of his batman (ibid: 3). Years later, when John was drafting his autobiographical novel Bachelor in Bangkok, his character ‘John Burnham’ speaks of how he came to feel resolved in Thailand and Southeast Asia, despite having been a POW: ‘I feel that if you’ve lived in Siamese forest, built your own huts from bamboo you’ve felled yourself, survived malaria, eaten food that the local people could have thrown away, well, that country can hold no further terrors for you, and, whether you like it or not, you become part of it’ (Coast, ibid: 21).
By 1948, John had left his job in Bangkok and been accepted into the inner circle of the Indonesian republican government: first as an advisor to Sutan Shjarir in Jogjakarta and then as an international public relations official for President Sukarno. This period of John’s life is recorded in his fascinating book Recruit to Revolution: Adventure and Politics in Indonesia (1952). That he was given such intimate access to the machinations of the anti-colonial government was testament to his newfound cultural sensitivity and linguistic skills developed in the camps. As Independence dawned for Indonesia, John felt the time had come to realise the dream that had taken shape during his captivity. With Sukarno’s support, he moved to the island of Bali and—together with his Javanese wife, Supianti or ‘Luce’— found a group of musicians and dancers and prepared them to embark on a grand tour of the West End and Broadway. John’s memoir Dancing out of Bali (1956) recounts this next extraordinary chapter of his life. His Dancers of Bali of 1953 sold out at the box office and was feted as a major breakthrough in East-West cultural relations. It also established John as a theatrical agent and impresario, a career in which he would excel for the rest of his life, and which would take him back once more to the River Kwai.
Return to the River Kwai
Unlike this book, which had received relatively little attention after its initial success, Pierre Boulle’s 1952 novel Bridge over the River Kwai and David Lean’s ubiquitous film adaptation (1957) of the same title captured the public imagination. John, and many other former POWs, were deeply offended by the inaccuracies of the novel and film. John had a strong sense that the true story of the railway needed to be reasserted. By the 1960s, he had good contacts in the media and entertainment industries. Ever the pioneer, John contacted David Attenborough and Richard Cawston at the BBC and pitched the idea for a film documenting his return to the site of the railway, interviewing both former prisoners and their captors and—crucially— attempting to ‘set the record straight’ about what had really happened in the camps. The idea was positively received and offered a slot on the BBC documentary series One Pair of Eyes. Letters to the commissioners reveal that John was initially sceptical about this format, as he thought it should give multiple perspectives rather than just that of his own (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Letter to Cawston, 14 March 1968). However, the finished film, Return to the River Kwai— directed by Anthony de Lotbinière and first broadcast on BBC1 on 15 March 1969—portrayed a wide and delicately balanced range of viewpoints. It also received the highest viewing and audience satisfaction figures of the year, an achievement for which John received a personal letter of congratulation from Sir David Attenborough.
Copies of the documentary are held at the BBC film archives, as well as the holdings of the Imperial War Museum. Alongside Return to the River Kwai John was also working on a couple of other documentary projects about the musical culture of Indonesia with David Attenborough. John’s documentary received very favourable reviews, sometimes in contrast with Lean’s film. He sent the following clipping (provenance unknown, from a second broadcast at Christmas 1974) to his long standing companion Laura Rosenberg:
‘The Bridge on the River Kwai (BBC1) was the season’s Distinguished Film. As nobody should ever have needed telling, this picture is a load of high-toned codswallop. It was depressing to see various people in the preview business recommending its thoughtfulness. Providentially a relevant documentary (Return to the River Kwai, BBC2) turned up to give the viewing audience an idea of what things were really like. John Coast, an ex-POW, had the unstudied eloquence which made the film’s expensive footage look like tat,’ adding that: ‘My enclosed clipping pleased my vanity and even more satisfied me as being evidence of what I wanted my film to achieve . . . God knows how many people saw it this time, but I’ve had quite a fan mail and most people thought I was too British fair to the cunning Nips—as we used to call them.’
In the original plan for the documentary, John proposed that Colonel Philip Toosey (‘Colonel Champaigne’), who had been the commander of Tamarkan camp and had given the command that officers should work alongside their troops to build a bridge across the river there, should feature both in the journey back to Thailand and as part of a round-table discussion, along with Pierre Boulle and Alec Guinness, who played Colonel Nicholson in the film. The documentary opens with a scene of tourists standing in front of a bridge at Kanchanaburi that is signposted as The Bridge over the River Kwai, though of course it is neither the bridge of Boulle’s novel nor an original bridge built by POWs. The film of the novel created many such misnomers, accepted by the public as fact.
Another distortion occurred because of the atypical system of command along the railway camps. The Japanese didn’t have sufficient troops to command all the POWs and so they left the Allied system of command in place, which put commanding officers in a very difficult position. John wanted Toosey to explore ‘the borderline between collaboration and sensible co-operation to achieve good results [and, by extension, to keep men alive]’ (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Treatment, 1967/8: 31). He noted that Colonel, by then Brigadier Toosey, was ‘nothing at all like Nicholson’, and had been an outstanding and rational commanding officer, unlike his fictional counterpart (BBC archives). Unlike, Colonel Nicholson’, who would no doubt have been dubbed ‘Jap-happy’ by the men, ‘in all the dozens of camps up and down the River Kwai, Toosey became a legend: he was the man who could handle the Nips (Watt, 200: 196)’. In Julie Summer’s biography of her grandfather, The Colonel of Tamarkan, she notes that when Toosey saw the film at the cinema he had absolutely no notion that the character of Nicholson had ‘anything to do with him’: he had deemed the film ‘a good work of fiction’ (Summers, 2006: 347; 346-353). However, once comparisons were publically drawn and a series of angry articles and letters from former prisoners published, Toosey fully realised the position he was in: the mix between fact and fiction in the film was too close for comfort; although the bulk of it was pure fiction, certain scenes were distortions of events that had actually occurred. He eventually declined the invitation to appear in John’s documentary, as did Alec Guinness who, according to Summers, also realised that the film could not be defended. Neither Toosey nor Guinness informed John that this was their main reason for not appearing in John’s documentary, with Toosey using the excuse that he was unhappy with the reaction to Ian Watt’s 1968 Observer article, which very successfully pointed out the differences between fact and reality in the film. Toosey was being evasive; he actually felt Watt had said everything that needed to be said on the issue. Guinness eventually just declined to appear (Summers (2006: 351-352) and BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1: Philip Toosey letter to Anthony de Lotbiniere (3 September 1968) and Dennis Van Thal letter to Anthony de Lotbiniere (10 September 1968)).
However, with gentle persuasion and assurances that it would not be edited into an ‘anti-Japanese film’, John and the BBC convinced two of his former captors to participate (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Nagase Takashi, Letter (11th October 1968)). Both men were understandably nervous of the reactions their appearance might provoke among both the British and Japanese publics, but they were reassured by John’s guarantee that ‘In no way is this film motivated by revenge or sensationalism . . . The whole essence of this film is to collect the real opinions of Japanese, [and] British . . . who were actually on site of the railway between 1942 to 1945”’ (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1: John Coast letter to Nagase Takashi (26 September 1968)). Lieutenant Takeroh Inoh, who was respected as a fair and decent camp commander, and the officer and interpreter, Takashi Nagase, travelled to Thailand and engaged in interviews at the sites of the camps, the cemetery, and the notorious bridge at Tamarkan. Another former Japanese soldier, Sergeant-Major Saito, who Toosey had to work with at Tamarkan Camp and Toosey held in high regard thereafter, was also present for part of the documentary (for Toosey and Saito’s relatively good working relationship at Tamarkan, see Summers (2006)).
John, both in Railway and his actions after the war, had shown his desire for justice rather than retribution. He had written an anonymous letter to The Times in 1947, criticising the twenty year sentence meted out to Colonel Yanagida (misspelled as ‘Yanagita’ in the printed letter) at the War Crimes trials in Tokyo. He describes Yanagida as being ‘comparatively humane’ while others who behaved far worse got relatively lighter sentences (Anonymous letter to The Times, “Japanese War Criminals” (4 January 1947)). In the documentary, John reiterates that Yanagida’s punishment was unjust.
When Inoh had been tried for war crimes, his characterisation in Railroad was used in his defence, along with the testimonies of senior British officers. John is sympathetic in his tone during these interviews, recognising that Inoh’s punishment was not commensurate with his actions, which were even-handed and humane in comparison with those of other senior Japanese.
Inoh appears reticent and nervous when John asks whether the Japanese would have respected the POWs more if they had been ‘heroes’ and had risked being shot by defying their captors and refusing to work—a scene recalled in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Inoh replies that the POWs had not in fact been shot, that it was just a threat, and that any subordination would have more likely resulted in a beating instead; John responds that ‘we were convinced that had we not started work then those machine guns would fire on us.’ This view is corroborated in the documentary by Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Ernest Knights (‘Colonel Day’), who states that officers agreed to work alongside the Other Ranks as they ‘should share in their troubles . . . [though] by doing so we had been guilty of aiding the enemy’ (See Knights (2013)). In the voice-over, John explains that it took the officers ‘three gallant minutes before we decided we would work’. As Colonel Toosey and the other commanding officers had understood, these compromises were a matter of survival.
John goes on to question why the health of the POWs was allowed to deteriorate so much and so rapidly, resulting in a very weakened state. ‘Why did the Japanese, if they wanted a labour force, not keep us healthy?’ he asks to camera. Inoh’s response to this very pragmatic questioning is that there was enough food and that ‘the health of the POWs was quite good’, which John wryly describes as ‘a different definition of good health’. He took further issue with the scenes in the Bridge over the River Kwai film where a British medical officer sent sick men out to work. Dr Hugh de Wardener (‘Ginger de Huguenot’), being interviewed in a London hospital, replies that this never happened, and that a medical officer’s job was to negotiate and protect sick men from being forced out to work.
Nagase, who had long been filled with remorse about his role in the Japanese treatment of POWs, and militarism more generally, had been visiting the cemeteries at Kanchanaburi since 1963, when the Japanese government lifted the restrictions on foreign travel. Although he featured in John’s documentary 26 years earlier, Nagase is better known for his subsequent meeting of reconciliation with Eric Lomax in 1993. Lomax, whose autobiography has recently been brought to cinema screens in a major feature film The Railway Man (2013), was one of the brave men who were tortured and severely punished for building and operating the radios that brought prisoners news of the outside world, in Lomax’s case compounded by his possession of a map he had made of the railway.4 Lomax is not mentioned by name in Railroad, though his torture and imprisonment is noted. John does, however, dedicate his book in part to the bravery of the Webber, brothers, who also kept alive a radio ‘canary’ at great personal risk; details are included in Appendices 5, 6 & 7. Despite the extreme hardship and horror recounted in Railroad, John had not been a direct victim of torture and appeared not to have the lasting physical and psychic damage suffered by many camp survivors. His motivation in One Pair of Eyes seems to be the separation of fact from fiction, in the spirit of fair resolution and mutual understanding, rather than a personal need to exorcise demons.
It is also for John a matter of justice, not vengeance, that the former Japanese soldiers should confront the crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. For example, he shows them a famous picture by Ronald Searle depicting the torture by a Japanese soldier of a POW working on the railway. John calmly waits, after an initial denial, for Nagase to bravely agree that the Japanese Army had indeed acted in this way. This was a courageous admission on their part, considering both Nagase and Inoh’s fears about the reaction in Japan to their appearance in John’s film. In 1969, in front of an audience of nearly a million viewers—in a three channel Britain—this was a truly groundbreaking film. Though, until now, it has been largely forgotten.
John’s even-handed way of dealing with the Japanese also landed him the one bad review that research has brought to light. Among all the documentary’s numerous accolades, Martin Jackson in the Daily Express called the programme a ‘Whitewash’ that ‘would cause protest calls to the BBC, (Martin Jackson, ‘Back to the Kwai with a Whitewash’, Daily Express, 15 March 1969). There were no such protests; the documentary achieved outstanding viewing figures and emphatically positive reviews.
After the making of the documentary Coast also writes at greater length in the article written for Argosy magazine his and the Japanese participants feelings that justice had not been done (Coast, 1969).
Pierre Boulle also agreed to appear and John’s approach to the novelist—‘a highly imaginative man [who] never saw the railway and was never in Thailand . . . [but] wrote the brilliant satire Bridge Over the River Kwai’ (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Coast’s cast list)—is harsher than his treatment of the Japanese. He is riled with Boulle’s crude fictionalisation of the POW experience, though Boulle argues that he was more concerned with the universal condition of ‘human absurdity and its novelistic possibilities than with the historical accuracy of his characterisations and context. John was aware that Railroad had been mined to borrow characters and context; ‘Kwai’, for example, was borrowed from John’s (mis)spelling of the name Khwae (which simply means ‘stream’ in Thai), and the sadistic Colonel Saito was presumably sketched from the real Sergeant-Major Risaburo Saito, who had been considered relatively fair and was later defended by Colonel Toosey during his war crimes trial. Although several of the more extreme distortions of fact depicted in the feature film are not inventions of the novel, John is visibly rattled as he interrogates Boulle.
In the 20-year hiatus between 1945 and John’s ‘return’ to make the documentary in 1969, his connection with Southeast Asia had grown strong and deep. These intense years of inter-cultural work may account for his very apparent ease with the climate and people, and for his impeccably calm presentation. John is not vengeful; he is objective and questioning. Throughout his life he was fascinated by the rich variety of human existence and effort, by the vagaries and frailties of the human condition, by the stories unfolding. He recorded these stories with resolute accuracy and eloquence. There is little sentimentality or heroic romance in any of his memoirs or in this documentary; instead there is a sense of truth-seeking and steadiness in his narration.
John did not return again to the camps; One Pair of Eyes was only broadcast twice by the BBC before languishing in the archives, and this book fell out of print and largely out of mind. The rest of John’s extraordinary journey was focused on music and theatre. It did eventually lead him to discover the young Luciano Pavarotti at an operatic festival in Italy, and to represent many of the greats of opera and pop music, including José Carreras, Mario Lanza, Jon Vickers and Montserrat Caballé, Bob Dylan, Ravi Shankar among many others. John died in July 1989 after undergoing heart surgery in Norfolk. He left behind a wonderful cultural and literary legacy, not least this account of his time working on the Railroad of Death. We hope that this new edition, and the previously unseen materials that make up its appendices, will restore it to its proper place.
Laura Noszlopy
Shrewsbury, 2014
1 For Dr Hugh de Wardener’s career after liberation see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10361740/Professor-Hugh-de-Wardener.html.
2 A photograph of the kind of jars/tins used by many prisoners to bury their diaries and manuscripts can be found in Brian MacArthur (2005). MacArthur notes that the picture shows the jars following their retrieval eighteen months after the war’s end.
3 For John’s involvement with Captain Pitt-Rivers see Captain Pitt Rivers: ‘A Dorset Campaign, Why the Scheme is opposed, Captain Pitt-Rivers and the Reasons’, The Western Gazette, February 3, 1939 and John Coast ‘Billeting’, The Western Gazette, March 3, 1939.
4 See Michael Finlason’s 1995 documentary ‘Enemy, My Friend?’ (http://www.the realrailwayman.com) to witness Lomax’s meeting with Nagase.