CHAPTER 20   

Reunion

The bombed and burning Singapore that Frank and Judy had left hurriedly behind in mid-February 1942 was a vastly different city under Japanese occupation than it had been under British colonial rule. Called Syonan-To (“Light of the South”) by its conquerors, Singapore had been mostly rebuilt, thanks in part to POW labor. The city’s large Chinese population was used as slaves, at least those who were still alive. Tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese were massacred by the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police. One woman named Madam Wong Len Cheng, who survived the rampage, recalled this time as “a life of unremitting fear.” While the Japanese conquerors toasted military successes across the Pacific at Singapore’s nightspots, the locals did little but eat and sleep. “Sometimes we feared even having a light in the house, for fear it might attract a Japanese soldier to enter our home,” recalled Madam Wong. One who came to her house bludgeoned her brother to death, and Madam Wong delivered four stillborn babies due to her malnutrition during this awful period.

The city’s clocks were reset to Tokyo time. “If [the Japanese] told you it was midnight even when the sun was up in the sky, then it was midnight,” said Madam Wong. Food stores were mostly reduced to tapioca and sweet potatoes. Pork was hugely expensive, and the lines to obtain it stretched for hours. Black markets proliferated even as the Japanese punishment for taking part in one was beheading. Western schools and influences had been systematically removed, and the once vibrant local press reduced to a propaganda arm of the Empire of the Sun. As at Gloegoer, a massive Japanese shrine had been built by POWs, at the cost of a huge swath of original primeval rainforest. After the war, it was swiftly demolished.

The River Valley Road prison camp sat near the center of the transformed city, along the west bank of a quiet stretch of the Singapore River. The “valley” was formed by a narrow drain that ran through the center of the camp area. The camp itself consisted of a dilapidated series of bamboo frame buildings, most of them merely roofs and beams with no side walls. The thatch used for the roofs had blown away on several of the structures, leaving them open from above as well. Some of the two-story huts had sleeping berths ten feet or so above the ground, but the ground platforms were so disintegrated that it left the men roosting like birds high above.

Even by prison camp standards, River Valley was ugly. It certainly contrasted poorly with the permanent concrete structures the men had left behind in Gloegoer. Singapore itself under the Japanese was unattractive as well, hardly resembling the carefree party scene it was a few years before. Desperation had replaced insouciance. On one occasion, Hartley carried the camp dustbin outside the gates for pickup. Before the Japanese could carry it away, a group of starving Chinese rushed over and picked through the trash, which already had been dissected for anything edible by the POWs.

Most of all, the men themselves were the epitome of squalor. Their faces were mattes of dirt, grease, and smoke debris. Their hair was unruly, caked in sweat and salt water. They were unshaven, hollow-eyed and -chested, scarred across their naked torsos. Many were still in shock, and all were at the brink of their endurance, pushed to their limits by recent events.

Upon arrival at River Valley, Judy refused to follow Searle into his hut. Instead, the pointer went on several circumnavigations of the camp. She went into every building, every pen, even the latrines looking for Frank. She quartered the area, leaving no inch unsearched. But he wasn’t there. So she settled down on her belly just inside the front gate, hidden from obvious view by a slight incline, and waited. Her sad eyes scanned everyone who came in.

Frank’s truck had stopped en route to River Valley for supplies in a native village. So although he had left before Judy got to the dock, he arrived in the camp well after she did. Her loyalty and patience were rewarded when she saw Frank stagger off his transport and into the camp.

Judy was overjoyed, and she displayed her pleasure by racing up to Frank and flattening him to the ground. “When I entered the camp, a ragged dog jumped me from behind with a great amount of force, flooring me,” Frank remembered with a smile. “She was covered in bunker oil and her old, tired eyes were red.” Somehow, some way, man and dog had been reunited, despite the best efforts of the British (if accidental) and Captain Nishi.

Frank was in tears when he finally got up from where Judy had knocked him down. “C’mon, old girl, and stop acting so daft,” he said with typical English reserve. Moments before, he had been on the edge of a precipice. Now, with his best friend miraculously back at his side, his hope was renewed, his determination to survive restored. “His shoulders seemed to re-set,” said Searle.

Peter Hartley and Phil Dobson had a similar reunion at River Valley. As with Frank and Judy, the last Hartley had seen of his close friend was when Dobson was working his way through a porthole on the Van Waerwijck. Hartley was an early arrival at River Valley, and he paced nervously as scores of POWs were trucked to the camp, waiting for his buddy to be one of them. He began to question why he had even bothered to fight to live. “So many of my friends had perished.… Why did I not give up when I had the chance, instead of making the struggle to survive?”

At last, after a sleepless night of worry, a truck carrying thirty prisoners arrived the next afternoon. Dobson was among them. “It was not until we were smiling joyfully into each other’s faces and gripping each other’s hands that I realized how great had been my sense of loss,” Hartley wrote. “From now the outlook seemed to be so much brighter, as though a world of tarnished silver had been suddenly and miraculously polished.”

Frank, Judy, Peter, and Phil were the lucky ones. Some of the friendships made at Gloegoer had been permanently rendered. And some of the survivors didn’t make it to River Valley at all; the severely wounded from the Van Waerwijck sinking were moved to Changi to recuperate.

One of these more fortunate men was Edward Porter, whose legs were shattered by the beam that fell on him in the doomed ship’s hold. Porter became well known at Changi for his skillful forgery of counterfeit watches and pens. His ability to engrave phony Rolex and Parker emblems on ordinary items was so amazing that he fooled the Japanese into not only believing they were the genuine article but into paying good money for them (the pull of the brands was so strong that the Japanese overcame any urge to simply confiscate the watches and pens). The money raised was used to buy medical supplies stolen from the Japanese and smuggled into the prison by locals.

Porter also spent much time in Changi composing songs and waltzes, most of which mirrored his lonely and mournful imprisoned state. His ditty “Always You’ll Be Mine” could have been written by Frank during the hours he believed Judy to be lost at sea.

Parting brings much sadness

Hearts seem meant for pain

But who shall tell the gladness

When we meet again?

Thoughts of you dear keep returning

Thro’ the lonely days

And my aching heart is yearning

For your fond embrace

Though we may be worlds apart

You’re for ever in my heart

More beloved through being parted

Always you’ll be mine.

When Frank, Judy, and the other survivors of the Van Waerwijck arrived in Singapore, they joined prisoners already in residence at River Valley. They were mainly POWs who had been held in Java and transported to this way station in anticipation of another move.

The Java men were, like the Gloegoer group, mainly Dutch and Commonwealthers, but there were at least a few Americans, the majority of them merchant marines. The most notable of the bunch was George Duffy. He was twenty-two when he was brought to River Valley, but he had had experiences over the last three years to last a lifetime.

Duffy had been a nineteen-year-old when he graduated from the Massachusetts Nautical School in late September 1941. His gruff New England accent and manner were offset by an easy smile and a twinkle in his eye. A week after graduation, he was in New York for his first contracted posting, aboard a brand-new diesel-powered vessel called, appropriately enough, the American Leader. Duffy and the crew had passed through Pearl Harbor just days before the attack, and they were fortunate to escape the Manila area when the Japanese bombed the American forces there. They worked as an escort vessel and hauled war matériel across the world’s oceans until encountering a German raider off the coast of South Africa in September 1942.

American Leader was sunk by torpedoes, and Duffy went over the side, eventually clambering aboard a raft. After some time, another raft paddled to his craft and asked how many were aboard. When told there were twenty-three men, none badly wounded, the German-accented voice replied, “Gut, I will tow you.”

Duffy was now a prisoner of the Nazis. He and the other surviving crewmen were held on board the German ship for several weeks until they were dropped off in Batavia, essentially traded to the Japanese. He was held prisoner in Java for nearly two years before being shipped to River Valley. Like the Gloegoer men, Duffy assumed this was not his final destination.

That was okay with them, for Singapore was little improvement over Gloegoer. The men had lost all the possessions they had accumulated in Sumatra, including utensils. Purvis remembered, “[I] managed to find a flat piece of tin which I bent into a plate and also a coconut shell which I cut in half and used as a mug. My spoon was made of a piece of bamboo.” There was no mail, no Red Cross. If anything, there was less food, for the prisoners at least. The entirety of their diet consisted of small balls of rice and some dried fish and seaweed, “which both looked and tasted like dried rope,” according to Hartley. The men quickly stripped leaves and bark from the trees to supplement their meager rations, but it did little to stave off the constant rumblings of their stomachs and the rapid spread of beriberi.

Even more cruel, in the estimation of many POWs, was the dire lack of tobacco. What had been so plentiful back on Sumatra was rare in Singapore, and the nicotine-addicted men keenly felt its absence. So did the Japanese, who eventually arranged for a vendor to sell some smokes to the hankering men, then noticed how their morale improved when they could light up. After that, the POWs never lacked for tobacco.

Another difference was the regular sight, albeit through the fence, of actual females. The women of Singapore went about their daily rituals in plain view of the prisoners, unaware of the fact they were being watched. “Tall, slender Malay and Chinese ladies in tight-fitting long gowns were a common sight,” Duffy recalls. The men hadn’t seen much of the fairer sex in over two years, save the occasional villager. One might imagine they would stare greedily at these well-groomed and fashionable young women, but at least in Duffy’s case, the harsh treatment had quelled any sexual urge. “We had been poorly fed for so long, they had no physical impact on us,” he writes. Les Searle would later say, “I, for one, shall never again believe that sex is the main urge; the motivating power; the driving force. Food without any doubt at all is the main target for man’s arrows.”

Worst of all perhaps was the teasing presence of civilization. From the camp windows, the neon glow of the city’s downtown could be seen, close enough to almost smell the gin and hear the bands play. To the POWs, it appeared as though there was no war, or at least as though there was a war that the Japanese were winning comfortably. From a distance, the city at night appeared much the same as it had when the British were in control. The proximity of the fun available in the Lion City reminded them of what they had lost—and weren’t likely to regain. And the men found it indecent that good times went on while they were cut off from it. One prisoner likened the situation to a woman remarrying before her husband was “properly dead.”

So in some ways, it wasn’t bad news when rumors began to circulate that most of them were going to be sent back to Sumatra. A special mission was at hand in some unknown part of the island—something to do with harvesting fruits and cereals. Only the fittest would be allowed to make the journey, those who passed a test to prove they were still in decent condition.

The test was a farce, though. The prisoners were lined up in groups of ten at one end of the compound. They were then marched at bayonet point to the other end. Everyone who made it without collapsing was deemed fit enough to join the traveling group. All but the very sickest of men were able to do it.

There was another, more humiliating test they had to pass. A van pulled up with a pair of Japanese doctors and a pair of Japanese nurses who were there to conduct a mass dysentery test. Each prisoner was made to pull down his shorts, bend over, and allow one of the nurses to insert a nine-inch glass tube in his rectum. No man was disqualified from being selected for travel, despite the fact that the large majority had at least mild dysentery.

The men were marched through Singapore to Keppel Harbor, where so many of them had left in desperate flight just under thirty months before. Here they were again, having transformed from despairing to utterly numb. No one cared much about the humiliating jaunt through town, the hostile stares from the crowds, or the guards shoving them onward with rifle butts. But a few Chinese flashed covert “V for Victory” signs to them, a gesture the more canny POWs took to mean the war was going less well for the Japanese than they had been bragging about.

There was certainly a note of unease about going back to sea. A great many of the men had abandoned ship at least once or twice in the very stretch of water they were now returning to. Even an old navy hand like Judy had to be skittish after her recent travails on the ocean main. Tramp paddle steamers had been chosen for their journey back across the strait, which was fortunate because these smaller vessels were unlikely to draw torpedoes from marauding subs. Even better, these were no hell ships—they didn’t have dungeons belowdecks in which the prisoners could be crammed. The men were squeezed together on deck, but what they lacked in space was made up for by the fresh air.

Judy was smuggled aboard once again (her ship was called the Elizabeth), but this time there didn’t seem to be much interest from the guards in ferreting her out. Perhaps this should have been a warning sign. Judy had spent most of her time in River Valley foraging like everyone else, catching some citified snakes and rats. But it was clear she was feeling the effects of hunger. Her weight had dropped from sixty pounds into the low forties. Her once rich brown spots turned a sickly tan, and her coat hung like a dappled curtain on her body. Her ribs were prominent, her eye sockets bulging. All Frank could hope was that this supposed mission to harvest food meant he and Judy could eat properly.

This time, Judy’s boat made it across the water without being sunk. It wasn’t until they reached the mouth of the Siak River and turned southeast that they knew for sure that they weren’t headed right back to Gloegoer, that this all wasn’t some elaborate ruse to mess with their heads. Instead, their destination was Pakan Baroe, the capital settlement of Central Sumatra.

They splashed ashore in late July. Immediately, they saw that there were other POWs here, but they didn’t realize their new home and mission would have nothing to do with farming until they were put on a forced march through the jungle. Frank had been spared a previous tour of the Sumatran interior, but the trip was a sickening rerun for Judy, Searle, Devani, and the others who had done it already two years earlier.

Upon arrival, they had taken a short train ride, then disembarked and were told to get walking. After a while, the men encountered a ravine fifty yards wide, with a madly rushing river some sixty feet below. Instead of a legitimate bridge, the Japanese had jerry-rigged a span made of timber and wooden girders. There was no proper floor to walk on, just boards driven at intervals between enormous piles. There were no handrails either. Crossing was thus a terrifying ordeal, especially for beaten-down, starving men without shoes. One Dutchman refused to cross and began screaming hysterically. He was given the option of descending the ravine and swimming across. He was never seen again.

The rest managed to make it to the other side. There was a long wait while they picked their way carefully over the “bridge,” and those who had made it already got a decent rest. Refreshed a bit, they marched the seven miles to their new home, singing “Roll Out the Barrel” and the popular soldiers’ protest song “Bless ’Em All.” But the good feelings quickly dwindled away back into hopelessness. Soon, the towering forest cut off all light. Swamp gas boiled up all around them, shrouding them in mist. Tongues swelled from thirst as the guards shoved them forward. Judy walked gingerly along, staying even with Frank’s shuffling pace.

The men could eventually make out dim campfires along the sides of the trail in the distance. At last, they arrived at a clearing deep in the remote jungle. They had arrived at their new home. The pitch-black night obscured their frightening new reality. But not for long.