CHAPTER 21   

Pakan Baroe

There had been warning signs. Radio Batavia had reported as early as October of 1943 on a labor conference held by the Japanese in Singapore. During the talks, the masters of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere used couched terms to advocate for the use of slaves and prisoners to undertake labor projects in the area. “Adequate measures were decided to meet the demand for labor in Malaya, Sumatra and Borneo. Other matters discussed were housing and transportation of the laborers.”

Radio Berlin amplified the news the next day: “The newly established authorities for the mobilization of all available labor to intensify the war effort decided to increase war production on Malaya, Sumatra and Borneo still further than before, in view of the lack of labor in these three countries.” A headline in the Melbourne Argus noted “Japs Are Rushing Defence Roads” in Sumatra, and went on to hint at an even greater project about to be undertaken on the massive Indonesian island.

By mid-1944, the time had come to begin this project—the construction of a railroad to connect the east and west coasts of Sumatra, thus providing greater flexibility for defending the island from Allied attack. While the manpower callously hurled at this Death Railway didn’t match that of the better-known versions in Burma and Siam, the Sumatran version was equal in terms of cruelty—and was even more futile. As John Hedley points out in his oral history, “The Burma-Siam railway was built when the troops were comparatively fit. We had to build our railway in the last year of our incarceration. So we weren’t fit to do anything.”

The Dutch had considered such a transportation system during the 1930s, but ultimately passed on doing it for multiple reasons—mostly because of the scale of the work and the difficult terrain where the building would take place. A true cross-Sumatra railroad would pass through deep swamps brimming with malarial mosquitoes, over mountains as high as nine thousand feet, across rivers that flooded to twice their height in the rainy season, and in and around thick forests untouched by man.

Even the Japanese weren’t mad enough to try to link the northern and southern edges of the island. Sumatra’s northern half, scarcely populated and not nearly as blessed with resources as the south, was virtually ignored (the area is best known today for the coast city of Banda Aceh, which was wiped off the map by the tsunami of 2004). Instead, the Japanese planned to link the largest cities in Sumatra, after Medan—Padang in the west, Palembang in the southeast, and Pakan Baroe, which lies near the exact center of the island. There was already track between Padang and Sawah Luento, as the POWs well knew, having ridden trains on that route. That line ran farther east into the interior, to a hamlet called Moearo.

The initial stage of the Japanese plan was to build a railway between Pakan Baroe and Moearo, thus linking the former with Padang. This required laying track over roughly 140 miles of dense and deadly Sumatran wilderness (about the distance between Seattle and Vancouver). The extension to Palembang would follow, assuming the war didn’t result in Japanese defeat before it could be built.

By the spring of 1944, the Japanese command surely realized their era of victory and expansion was over. There was much fighting ahead, but the strength of American industrial power made the outcome a foregone conclusion to all but the most delusional of warriors.

So in this context, the decision to use the POWs, along with more than a hundred thousand Indonesian and Malay slave laborers, seems like nothing more than a subtle “final solution.” Unlike the Jews under the Nazis, the captured soldiers weren’t to be killed outright—that would be a waste of ammunition and manpower the Japanese couldn’t afford. Instead, the men would be worked to death in the jungle. Those who were strong enough to withstand the arduous labor, malnutrition, and disease would help the war effort. The rest would perish—and in the eyes of the Japanese, they should have died in battle anyway.

At first, the Japanese asked for the locals, called romushas (“laborers” in Japanese), to volunteer for the effort, promising decent food and good pay. When few signed up, they were enslaved by the thousands. Entire movie theaters and shopping markets were surrounded by troops, and all the men were taken away. At first, the majority came from Java, but later the Japanese took locals from their homes on almost all the islands of the Dutch East Indies to build the railway. In all about 120,000 romushas were taken to Pakan Baroe.

Only about 23,000 survived.

The slaves were brought in first to build a service road that would parallel the railway, a dangerous task that required monumental feats of terrain clearance, such as blowing up mountainsides and clearing the resulting piles of rubble. Some Allied POWs worked on this project as well, but the worst jobs went to the locals. Often, the dynamite went off even as the slaves were still setting charges. One blast killed thirty-six in an instant. The romushas were frequently left working under terrifying rock overhangs that were only partially blasted away. Often, these collapsed, killing all below. More romushas were then ordered to dig the corpses out of the rubble and continue the job.

Whereas the POWs who fell ill were at least taken away and given a semblance of care, sick and wounded romushas were left to die where they dropped. POWs often stumbled onto decomposing corpses while working, or found others who were still alive but who could not be helped.

The first mass of Allied prison labor was sent over from Padang on May 19, 1944. Their initial order of business was to build the base camp, aka Camp Two (Camp One became the Japanese headquarters and the main railway supply depot), as well as the first stretch of the railway out from the new railhead near the Siak River. Old, rotting barracks that had been built by a Dutch oil company served as the starting point. The buildings were about one hundred meters from the river. The frequent rain flooded the area with such thorough regularity that the entire Camp Two basin was a quagmire of knee-deep mud. The prisoners, many of whom were barefoot, gave the place the nickname “The Mud Resort.”

Camp Two was close to the village of Pakan Baroe and various satellite hamlets, and in time would house a rotating cast of between eighteen hundred and two thousand POWs—mainly the sick, dying, or otherwise unfit to work. Among the first structures to be erected were a pair of hospital huts, one of which would later come to be known as the Death House.

At times officers were fortunate to pull light duty and work from here, although the proximity to those suffering in the hospital huts would temper their enthusiasm. Otherwise, the only permanent residents of the camp were some Japanese, a handful of poorly equipped Allied doctors, and a group of cooks (who were mostly Dutchmen).

Everyone else was posted for construction duty. The plan was to leapfrog gangs of workers as the line progressed, each establishing field camps in the jungle. From there the men would fell trees; cut them into sleepers, or wooden ties; lay them on the predetermined path (over, around, or through whatever natural barriers happened to be in the way); and drive steel dogs, or nails, to join the wooden planks to iron girders and form recognizable train tracks.

Pakan Baroe was exponentially worse than Padang or Gloegoer. The gnawing hunger and physical wasting remained, to which was added sadistically grueling manual labor and naked exposure to extreme wilderness. The open spaces may have been welcome after more traditional confinement elsewhere, but as Joe Fitzgerald, a POW who ended up working alongside Frank and Judy, put it, “Much freedom of movement was afforded but only a minimum of human dignity.”

Eventually, there would number at least a dozen camps, with more than six thousand Allied POWs working the lines. As Len Williams said, “Every sleeper laid cost lives.”

Frank and Judy woke up that first morning on the railway at their new home, Camp Five. It was near a speck on the map called Loeboeksakat, twenty-three kilometers out from Pakan Baroe and a shade under ten from Camp Three, which housed a large number of British POWs, including Searle and Devani. As a fellow POW in Camp Five recalled, “One look was enough to dampen the stoutest spirits.” At its busiest, roughly one thousand men worked there, half Dutch, half British and Australian.

The ranking British officer in the camp was a Captain Gordon, and his hancho was Lieutenant Sparks. Both served under the senior officer in command of the British on the railway, RAF Wing Commander Patrick Davis, a Londoner just past thirty years old. Like most of the air contingent, Davis had evacuated to Java from Singapore before the city fell, so he had spent time in POW camps there prior to his transport to Pakan Baroe in May 1943, when he suddenly found himself in command of a group of men brought to the jungle to be worked to death. Unlike the romantic portrayal of officers in POW camps, there were no escape attempts for Davis to plan, no authority for him to bravely defy in an ideological test of wills. The Japanese commander, Captain Ryohei Miyazaki, explained with a shrug that all hardships inflicted upon the men under Davis’ command were ordered from above, and there was nothing he could do about them.

Meanwhile, as Davis pointed out in an official report to Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia command headquarters, “It was extraordinarily difficult to run these camps, because the Japs did not give me the freedom to act as I saw fit and two-thirds of the personnel under my command were Dutch with a very limited understanding of English.” Most communications were conducted in Malay, which few—English, Dutch, or Japanese—spoke fluently. And though Davis was the ranking officer, few Dutch actually considered him their leader.

Despite the difficulties he faced, or perhaps because of them, Davis would eventually receive a knighthood for his gallantry at Pakan Baroe. His citation, awarded October 1, 1946, read, “This officer, while a prisoner of war in Japanese hands, displayed remarkable integrity and bravery in the face of very adverse conditions. He tried everything possible to persuade the Japanese to improve the standard of living for the prisoners of war. Throughout his period of captivity Wing Commander Davis set a magnificent example to all.”

While Davis certainly was brave and forthright, his efforts had little practical effect in sparing the POWs on the railway any suffering. About the only solace Davis and the other prisoners could take was that Miyazaki, like his superiors, would eventually be sentenced to death—in the junior officer’s case, it was for blindly following inhumane orders to complete the railway at any cost.

“We worked all hours of the daylight,” remembered Fred Freeman. “There were no rest days or anything.” It was this endless toil under the punishing sun that sent the men to the edge of their limits, and sometimes past it. Building the railway was a grueling, never-ending job that made the temple project at Gloegoer and the motorworks demolition at Belawan seem like a leisurely stroll in the park.

Travel from camp to work site was usually made by train and took mere minutes in some places to over an hour in others, depending on progress and terrain. “When it was thought we spent too much time ‘commuting’ the camp would move up the line,” remembered Fitzgerald. The journey back to their huts after a painful day of work “was anything but comfortable,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and if it rained, sheer misery.” These trains often derailed, especially come the rainy season, requiring the POWs to get out and push.

Frank and his fellow prisoners’ first job at Camp Five was to create an embankment made of sand to shore up the path the track was to go through. During the previous rainy season it had washed away, a common failing along the entire line, as the Japanese had chosen a particularly soggy area in which to build. For weeks they filled wagons with “yellow-white sand,” according to a Dutch prisoner named Fred Seljee, “sometimes for two kilometers.” Some men were tasked with widening the road so cars could have passage while the railway was being built. Soon enough, construction began.

Every day, Frank took one of the nine separate jobs in the rail-laying process. The Rope Man placed colored rope on the track to mark the path. The Marker Man scratched a line in the sand under the rope with a steel hook attached to a four-foot pole. The twelve Rail Men carried the heavy rails (which rode to the work site along with the POWs each morning) from the train car to the proper spot on the track ahead. It was “really strenuous work,” wrote POW Raymond Smith, who prepared a detailed accounting of life at Pakan Baroe for posterity. “A length of rail measures fifteen meters (almost fifty feet) and weighs 570 kilograms (1,266 pounds). Apart from the weight of the rail, the narrowness of the side footway and the soft soil made things exceedingly difficult.… The sun heated the steel to the extent they couldn’t be handled with bare hands.” Any padding on his shoulders and neck Frank may have had had long since wasted away, and the iron cut deeply into his flesh regardless of the makeshift buffers he used to ease the agony. His height was an issue too—the weight of the steel disproportionately fell on the taller men. “We tried to get teams of about the same height so that anybody tall would not be carrying most of the weight,” a Camp Five POW named Ken Robson recalled, but that wasn’t always possible. Fingers and toes were routinely crushed when men lost their footing.

Once the rails were painfully hauled to the right spot and the Sleeper Men laid their wood into place, the Dassi Man drilled holes in the sleepers with an auger, and the Bar Men crowbarred the steel into position. In came the Hammer Men, a role Frank also filled quite often. “Whilst the bar men held the sleeper solidly,” Smith described, “he would hammer with a wood shafted steel hammer, fixing spikes into the pre-drilled holes until their flanges gripped the bottom of the steel rails.” Said Robson, “He needed quite a good eye.”

Once the spike was in tightly, the Noko Man, so-called for nokogiri, the large hacksaw he used, had the exhausting job of sawing the excess steel away. The blades often broke “for the simple reason that the Japanese saws cut on the stroke made toward you, while the Western version cuts on the forward stroke,” Smith explained. When they did, the Noko Man caught a beating from the guards. Lastly, the Joint Men (also called Spanner Men) fit the plates to the rails with steel bolts using spanner wrenches.

“It all sounds terribly organized, and on paper it was so,” Robson said, “but in practice everyone had to take part in all facets of the work.” Frank mostly hauled steel and hammered it into the wooden sleepers, but he took part in every facet of construction, including felling timber in the forest and swamps, then cutting the wood into planks.

The guards were always hovering closely, yelling “Hyaku!” (“Hurry up!”) or “Speedo!” (the pidgin version). Fitzgerald remembered one guard:

“Black Joe” to his friends, had the habit of standing over the spanner men, yelling words of encouragement. His voice at close quarters let all know what is meant by the “threshold of pain.” Should a bolting fail, he would immediately blame the spanner man, rewarding him with a tap on the head from the fishplate spanner he invariably carried. When he realized a replacement bolt was required, he would call, in his stentorian tones, for the peripatetic “Boltoman” to attend with a replacement nut and bolt. When he did, he got the spanner treatment too.

The equipment was hardly first-rate. Many of the rails, bolts, and plates had been “filched from Java,” in Fitzgerald’s memory, “and some were believed to have been laid there before the turn of the century.” Other, especially heavy rails were labeled “Broken Hole Point, Australia.” When anything failed to operate properly, nearby POWs paid the price.

Sometimes they didn’t work because the men had deliberately spiked the works. Guerrilla-style sabotage was an important part of the men keeping up a semblance of opposition against their captors, which in turn helped morale, at least a little. Engines were incapacitated by banana mush. Spikes were deliberately laid into soft sections of earth, causing the train engines to slide into the bush when they rolled over them. Spikes were also driven too hard until they broke, or not hard enough, so that the spike would split. Many spikes were broken so that only the heads remained—these were then driven into the earth so that it appeared a section of wood was connected by a proper spike. Once a train car went over it, however, it flew apart.

Frank laid out his attempts at disrupting the Japanese efforts on the official POW form he filled out upon liberation: he ensured the “destruction of petrol supplies by loosening bungs of petrol drums and stacking drums in inverted position” and “by burying spare parts of motor vehicles.”

He made the Japanese vehicles less efficient by “adding sand and native brown sugar to aviation and transport petrols and lubricants.”

He interfered with the railway building itself “by driving railway spikes into railway sleepers with the chisel edge of the spike in line with the sleeper wood grain, so the sleepers split when the weight of train and truck passed over them, sometimes causing derailment. Also by packing lines with decaying wood.”

At times the sabotage attempts were far bolder. On one memorable occasion, a particularly crazy yet indomitable Aussie named Slinger spent days fixing a broken steamroller, earning plaudits from the Japanese and whispers of “traitor” from his fellow prisoners. But when the Korean guard fired it up, the machine exploded, along with the guard.

Regardless of the slowdowns, the men were expected to lay twelve hundred meters, or three-fourths of a mile, of track a day, though this was greatly affected by terrain and often came up short. As the men weakened drastically, the quota dropped to merely two or three hundred meters per day. The effort required to lay even a few meters was prodigious. Fitzgerald, a Welshman from Cardiff who was called “Japerin” by the Japanese for his Charlie Chaplin–style mustache, captured the scene in his short memoir of life at Pakan Baroe:

Sweat rolled down our faces and bodies, sweat rags were soaking with it and our parched lips could taste nothing but the salt tang.… In with a peg, up with a hammer, down it comes, misses and clangs on the line. A screaming voice penetrates the mists, and as you straighten up from putting the peg straight, a fist, a piece of wood, a rifle, something, hits you on the side of the face, and in your weakness, the mind now a blanket of deadened misery, down you go. You pick yourself up, and somewhere through the blanket a glimmer of light; you try to explain but at the same time the voice screams again and the fist or whatever it was hits you on the other side of your face and down you go again. A redness, an unexplainable red that grows more vivid at the third time you are down and at the boot that kicks into your side… the red mist suddenly lifts and you become aware that you are standing on your feet again and that the voice is shouting again. But this time one of your own officers, who is seeing your plight, has come to help, and before long the incident is over. Keep going! It can’t be long now! They must be stopping for food soon! Blast this sweat! Wipe it away! Sod it! Sod it! Sod it! Sod everything!

They slept in crude huts that had been built years earlier by coal miners. There was no electricity—light was provided by homemade lamps that were pieces of rags set ablaze and floated in a tin of coconut oil. The roofs and walls were merely palm leaves wrapped around poles. The POWs slept on wood platforms eighteen inches wide that ran the length of the exterior, with bare earth in the center of the hut. Nature owned this space, but the weeds and grasses also grew through holes in the platforms, totally unchecked. “Rats used to run up and down over our heads at night,” wrote Robson. Insects were everywhere, flying in the men’s ears, crawling on their legs, chewing on them in bed. The stench of rotting vegetation permeated the huts. Bullfrogs croaked incessantly from a nearby swamp.

A British bugler sounded reveille at seven a.m. Tokyo time, meaning the POWs rose at four thirty a.m., before the sun came up. Exhausted as they were after twelve, fourteen, even twenty hours of punishing exertion, sleep didn’t come easily on their bedbug-ridden racks. Hunger pangs kept them tossing and turning. Many were actually afraid to sleep, lest the bugle sound for work more quickly. “Soon, much too soon, it was tomorrow, and we set off for a repeat of the previous day,” Robson lamented.

Those for whom sleep was elusive heard the call of the wild all night long. “One could hear the roars of tigers answering each other, on the prowl for wild pig,” said Robson. Both he and another POW, Rouse Voisey, recalled the incessant screams of monkeys from the jungle. “They screeched day and night, but you never saw them,” Voisey says today, the sound still fresh in his ears after nearly seven decades. Robson said the POWs called them “siren-monkeys,” due to their whoop, which reminded them of “a destroyer siren.” Come dawn, Fitzgerald remembered, “another creature intrigued us by producing the first few bars of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ each morning.” The change in sounds was accompanied by what Fitzgerald called “a chilling mist reminiscent of those we disliked at home, but for now which we yearned.” Soon enough, the sweat would be pouring freely again.

They went to bed in their work clothes: tattered shorts and, if they were lucky, a torn shirt or ruined socks. POW Harry Badger remembered, “I only had one shirt for most of the time which I kept for night. We had no shirts at all for the working parties and a simple loin cloth was the most comfortable clothing for the lower regions.” The loin cloths were called fundoshi, or “Jap-happy,” for reasons that elude the modern reader. Some of the men, especially the Royal Navy POWs such as Searle and Devani, were competent with a needle and thread and made clothes of whatever materials they could obtain. “We got hold of some canvas once and they turned it into shirts,” Badger said. “The only problem was they were too damn hot to wear on other than cool nights.” George Duffy, one of only a dozen Americans on the railway, owned four socks, all mismatched, a jacket he wore every night at dinner, and two pairs of shorts. “One is patched and threadbare and won’t stand any more repairing. The other pair is just patched, but the condition is pretty good,” he wrote of them. In his diary, he asked Mountbatten to hurry up and free him. “Lord Looie had better get a move on or most of us will be wearing grass skirts or leaves or something.” For footwear, the men had two choices—going barefoot or teetering around on “Klompers,” thick wooden platform shoes with fabric holding the toes in. This was a style familiar to most of the Dutch, but the others needed practice wearing them. “The [Klompers were] acceptable, once the knack of maneuvering them was acquired, whereas [going barefoot] involved many trials and tribulations,” recalled Fitzgerald. He also said the barefoot brigade often walked on the railway itself until the sun made it too hot.

The tenko, or roll call, was an omnipresent fact of their lives. The men were counted upon awakening, before and after the train rides to the work site, upon arrival back at their huts, and before lights-out. “The number of times a POW was counted during the course of his captivity must be almost infinite,” Fitzgerald noted. The guards would count the men by scratching slashes in the dirt with sticks.

Keeping up a modicum of hygiene was crucial, as much for morale as health. There were no morning ablutions upon wake-up; the men were taken directly from the huts to the work site. Teeth rotted from lack of fluoride and were stained dark. Rivers of sweat dried on the skin, adding body odor to the already formidable assault upon the olfactory senses.

In every hut, in every camp, there was a man who made a sharp implement and charged his fellow prisoners for hair cutting and beard trimming. Not everyone availed themselves of these services, however, letting their facial hair grow into shaggy beards and their locks reach their shoulders. Others, including Frank, kept the growth in check. “I had long since learned that self-respect and an interest in one’s personal hygiene and appearance was one of the essentials of survival,” recorded Hartley, who was among the more fastidious of prisoners. “Once having accepted defeat in this area, he went with increasing rapidity towards his lonely jungle grave.”

Bathing was more difficult. The nearest fresh water at this camp was a long, difficult hike away, one that included a tiptoe across partially submerged tree trunks. The journey could only be made after the day’s work, when most of the men were too exhausted to do so. So they waited—and prayed—for rain. A torrential downpour would be accompanied by hundreds of men standing naked under the eaves of the hut, washing in the runoff. The cold water would cause the men to tremble and their teeth to chatter, but at least the top layer of grime was removed. Then they would cluster in their huts, the room filling with the smells of men in from the weather, and for a brief moment the POWs could forget their plight.

The lack of food had been a serious concern at Padang, Gloegoer, and River Valley. At Pakan Baroe it was a dire threat. Rations barely reached the sustenance range for the indolent, much less for men engaging in such strenuous physical work. Breakfast was the familiar, vile tapioca and water glop, ongle-ongle. Lunch was a cup of rice, leveled off with a stick to ensure equivalent amounts for all, plus a cup of watery vegetable soup (a ladleful of grotesque brown liquid that congealed as it cooled). The evening meal was generally the same as lunch, augmented by whatever the men could forage during the day’s work. As Fitzgerald put it, “This was little enough to get excited about… but there was always a chance some meat might be present.” All was washed down with green tea or boiled swamp water.

“We tried to supplement the minimal daily diet in every possible manner with everything that was eatable, such as tubers, leafs, snakes, rats and sometimes even monkey meat,” Frank remembered. Everything that could be caught or plucked was on the menu. The POWs adhered to the same maxim of the oft famine-struck Chinese—“If its back faces the sun, it can be eaten.” They caught fish, salamanders, insects, and lizards; picked nuts, berries, toadstools, flowers, green leaves, and even stripped bark from trees, which Freeman said tore their stomach linings. “We used to take tin cans with us to collect jungle vegetables on the way to work,” he added. “This entailed quite a risk, as if the Japanese caught us, woe betide us.” They dumped handfuls of chilies onto their concoctions in order to make them more palatable to the taste buds. Cutlery was improvised from small pieces of zinc and tin.

But it was impossible to ever get enough. “We were all perpetually, agonizingly, hungry,” Hartley recalled.

Every organ in our bodies seemed to send out messages of pain, demanding to be fed. Our stomachs felt bruised and our knees trembled; we lived from meal to meal with a dumb hopelessness, knowing that even when the meal had been eaten the pains and the cravings would remain only partially and momentarily dulled. The food had as much effect on us as a short shower after a prolonged drought has on a garden. It did no more than wet the surface.

Thirst bedeviled the POWs too. Here the problem wasn’t quantity but quality—the local water was rife with organisms carrying disease. “The Japanese supplied us with a petrol drum to boil water to prevent typhoid and we used to put our cans around the fire and cook it that way,” Freeman recalled. The first order of business upon arriving at the work site each day was to boil the sixty-four-gallon drum. “As soon as this had boiled for a few minutes,” a POW named J. D. Pentney described, “a whistle would be blown to signal that the drinking water was ready and we would dash like mad to get a container of it. We drank this off as soon as we could bear it in our mouths and it literally ran straight out of us through our pores, so we stood, drinking away at almost boiling water whilst the perspiration poured down our bodies in streams.”

Intestinal issues plagued the POWs. Amoebic dysentery was a ruthless killer, and roundworm from poorly washed vegetables infected digestive tracts across the railway. One of Ken Robson’s friends named Harry found out he had been infected in a most gruesome manner. “Harry suddenly shot up,” Robson recalled, “sat on the edge of the bed boards and gave a cough. Putting his fingers in his mouth he produced a long worm, about as thick as a pencil and some ten inches long.”

Meanwhile, the policy of reduced rations for the sick continued, preventing ill prisoners from getting enough nourishment to recover properly. As a result, many sick men refused to admit their illnesses and worked until they collapsed on the side of the tracks, left there to tremble until their fellow prisoners carried them back to camp at day’s end. The Japanese told the men that if it were up to them, sick (and thus dishonorable) POWs would get no food at all; the half-rations came as a result of the emperor’s mercy. Beriberi flourished, while the rampant dysentery was a double blow, hitting the men both physically and psychologically, as Ken Robson explained. “With no control over bodily functions there was not only the pain, but the humiliation of not being able to control oneself… the self-disgust at your own inability to prevent it.”

Through it all, Judy suffered alongside the men.

While Frank toiled twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours on the railway, Judy stayed in the brush nearby, running around and playing a potentially deadly game of hide-and-seek. Her conversion from a pure “people dog,” a ship’s mascot who spent most of her time on the water and couldn’t even reliably point despite her genetic predisposition, into a wilder canine capable of survival in untamed wilderness was ongoing—and quite remarkable. “She wasn’t that tame, obedient dog anymore,” Frank noted. “She was a skinny animal that kept herself alive through cunning and instinct.”

With her nose attuned to this new environment, foraging was her main role, both for herself and for Frank and his friends on the line. She would catch snakes and rats for the grateful men, who would add the meat to their minuscule evening rations.

When she wasn’t looking for food or hiding from other animals, she would simply lie in the brush and wait for the signal to rejoin Frank. While other camps were more open, the rail line extending out from Camp Five was mostly hemmed in by trees and bush, so Judy could keep her eyes on her best friend while remaining utterly invisible to whatever guard was nearby. “Another danger came from the local population,” Frank recalled, but here again the remoteness of their work site was a boon. “Luckily she rarely came into contact with the inhabitants, because there were only a few villages near the railroad.”

This wasn’t the case elsewhere, and dogs were very scarce as a result. They were a delicacy to the Japanese and Koreans, a rare treat for the Sumatrans, and, as it happened, sustenance to the starving prisoners, who ate dog if and when they could get their hands on it—even the westerners. John Purvis was a good example. At one point later in the war he was transferred away from Judy to a different camp, but his experiences and relationship with the pointer didn’t affect the rumbling in his stomach one iota. At this new camp, the Japanese officers were keeping a small dog, apparently to consume in celebration when the time was right.

Instead, the prisoners stole him one night and ate the dog themselves. “I had a bit of him,” Purvis admitted. As it happens, Purvis didn’t discriminate among domesticated animals. “In one camp there was a cat,” he remembered. “The cat used to come and meow outside my hut each night and I decided it would be better in a pot. I tried night after night to catch it.” Purvis would try to attract it by purring in a friendly manner, then making a leap, but the cat remained maddeningly out of reach. His frustration mounted when another prisoner managed to snag the cat and cook it. “However, he knew that I had been trying for so long that he gave me a nice piece,” Purvis recalled decades later.

Stories of westerners consuming dogs in POW camps were legion, especially in camps in Japan, where canines were more plentiful. Even Englishmen, noted dog lovers who looked down with a condescending sneer upon the Asian custom of eating dog, were driven to eat the beloved animal, usually in its traditional form as soup or stew. As Pearl Buck once wrote, “A hungry man cannot see right and wrong. He just sees food.” This was the operating principle among the men held by the Japanese.

As such, it behooved Judy to remain out of sight, which was helped by her extraordinary ability to communicate with Frank. “I only needed to click with a thumb and middle finger or whistle softly,” Frank said later. “It was our language of understanding which she understood perfectly and without hesitation obeyed.”

“The simple instruction ‘go away’ was enough for Judy to disappear,” Frank said. “She calmly remained waiting, sometimes even for hours on end, until she received my signal to reappear. This didn’t save her once—it saved her many times from certain death.”

One man who often found himself on Frank’s steel-carrying team, thanks to his similar height, was another radarman named Tom Scott. He gave this account of the relationship between man and dog:

I was always fascinated at the complete understanding which existed between Frank and Judy—they were truly an amazing team. Judy was no longer a dog that anyone in his right mind would recommend as a suitable household pet. Thin, half-starved, always on the prowl, her eyes only softened when Frank touched her or spoke to her, or when she looked up at him. Whenever she found herself too close to one of the guards, her lip curled back in a snarl, and her eyes seemed to glow with almost a red glare.

Sometimes this sort of thing would lead to trouble, and when a guard threatened to retaliate, Frank would click his fingers and Judy would disappear into the nearby jungle. We didn’t see her and didn’t hear her, yet the moment he gave a low whistle, she’d reappear at his side as if from nowhere.

That this tactic actually worked so well is difficult to believe, even—or perhaps especially—to men who survived Pakan Baroe but never witnessed Judy and Frank in action. This includes a good number of the POWs who spent their imprisonment at different spots along the railway. One of these nonbelievers is George Duffy. From his nursing home in Brentwood, New Hampshire, the crusty old sailor, still quite mentally agile at ninety-two, flintily dismisses the idea that a dog could have survived the same hellscape he did. “I don’t know how it’s possible,” he says. “I can’t imagine any animal living more than a day in that jungle. I only survived because I was tough and I was young. No dog could have done the same.”

But one did. Judy’s ability to remain alive in such an extraordinary manner would seem to indicate the guards on the railway were a slack, easily duped bunch. In fact, nothing was further from the truth, making her consistent skirting of danger even more remarkable.

Indeed, Duffy’s skepticism, in the face of many direct eyewitness accounts, only underscores just how astonishing Judy’s story of survival is. George Duffy saw all manner of scarcely believable happenstance during his wartime captivity, yet Judy’s capacity to outlast the jungle and the Japanese is what gets him to shake his head and say “enough.”