Helping Out A Pow Mate

by Private John “Jack” Thorpe, 105 Transport Platoon, Prisoner of War, Burma

Vicious brutality was all one ever expected from our guards, but mateship and support was the way of the Australian POW. It was important for survival. You couldn’t make it without your mates. We were all there for each other. I was lucky to be able to save two of my great friends, Peter Gray and Spud Murphy, when they were both dying of deficiency diseases and I did so with the help of others – which was never, in my experience, withheld.

On one of my first evenings back at River Valley Camp a friend told me that my great mate and school pal from Armadale, Peter Gray, was very ill in the camp hospital. As soon as I woke up the next morning I went to see him. He was ill all right. He had wet Beriberi and was terribly swollen. He couldn’t talk much so I didn’t stay with him long. Peter needed some citrus to get rid of his fluids. However, citrus fruits were very scarce in Singapore, as they didn’t grow there. I was on a working party at the wharf that day and I thought that with a bit of luck I could get one of the Chinese workers to help. The Chinese were permitted to leave the wharf compound but were usually searched when they went out and when they came back. Would one of them agree to take this risk for a dying POW?

I found an old Chinese man who always went home for lunch because he lived near the wharf. I told him what I needed for a very dear friend of mine who looked like dying and, much to his credit, he agreed to try and help. At lunchtime I watched which gate he left by and kept my eye out for his return. When he came back he disappeared behind a stack of sawn timber for a minute or so. After a while he came out. I went in where he’d been and collected my two citrus. The blokes who’d been in Singapore before the war said they were pomellos. I’d never heard of them.

The next problem was to get them into the camp. Sometimes the guards searched you and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes when they found something that you shouldn’t have they gave you a belting and sometimes they didn’t. It was worth taking the risk. As it happened, they didn’t even search us that evening.

I took the two pomellos straight to Peter. They were dark green and about the size of an orange, but when I cut one of them the pith was about an inch thick and the actual fruit only the size of a golf ball. I was very disappointed; however I squeezed it gently into Peter’s mouth. It was too much for him and he nearly choked, so then I used a spoon to just wet his lips and tongue. It was all the poor bloke could handle. I stayed there until he’d finished the first one and left the other with the orderly, who said he’d feed it to him the next day.

The next day we were all down at the wharf again and my main object, if the guards kept out of the way, was to find a “go-down” (warehouse) with Red Cross parcels in it so that I could get a tin of milk for Peter. I didn’t want anything else from the parcel; I knew he’d be able to handle milk and that it would really do him good. Of course lots of Red Cross parcels didn’t include tins of condensed milk, so it might take a while to find one.

It turned out that there was a go-down about half full of Red Cross parcels on my section of wharf, but I didn’t get a chance to go inside as my gang was kept busy loading rubber onto a cargo boat. The rubber was in big slabs and had been there since before the war. The slabs were all covered in dirt and rat poo. A few of the blokes had been sent down to the other end of the wharf but they knew I was after a tin of milk for a sick mate. I knew if they found one they’d bring it back for me. That was just the way it was.

After a few hours the blokes who’d been sent to the other end of the wharf returned all smiles and wiping their mouths. They’d found a shed with Red Cross parcels and had each downed a tin of milk. They brought one back for Peter. We POWs had got pretty cunning. If we found anything edible on the wharf we ate it then and there. It could be fatal to get caught with anything on your person in a search. However you could be lucky. I had the tin on my head with my hat over it and I got through without being searched. Just lucky.

After I got back to my hut I went straight to see Peter. The citrus had worked and he was about half the size he’d been the day before. I’d punched a couple of holes in the tin already and I started to feed it to him straight away. You could see the light come back into his eyes after he’d had just a small amount. I was told by the doctor not to give him too much, just four or five teaspoonfuls. I left the tin with the orderly and he was going to feed him the rest, as the doctor had instructed.

Because I had to leave for Japan so soon afterwards, I didn’t get a chance to see Peter again. I didn’t know if he’d lived or died until 1993 when I went to a memorial service for Weary Dunlop in Perth. Who should be there with the HMAS Perth boys but Peter Gray with his wife Betty! It was great meeting up with him again after all those years. We retired to a coffee shop together and had a good talk about our POW days. As can often happen in these circumstances, our friendship resumed without skipping a beat.

Another tin of condensed milk – which this time I was able to provide myself – made all the difference for another old mate of mine when we were on the Awa Maru on our way to Japan. We’d endured about three weeks in the dark hold of this hell-ship when I had a visit from one of the blokes from HMAS Perth. He told me that a great friend of mine from my home town of Armadale in Western Australia, Alex ‘Spud’ Murphy, looked as if he wouldn’t live through the night. I went and saw Spud and he was really ill, lapsing in and out of consciousness. He had amoebic dysentery and was bleeding from his back end. I opened my haversack to see if my emergency can of condensed milk was still there. It was the same tin I’d got when we were working on the wharf in Singapore. I’d been keeping it just in case I got sick myself but now I could use it to hopefully save the life of one of my best friends. I didn’t know if Spud had gone too far for the milk to save him but I was determined to try.

Opening the tin was a problem but we found a quarter inch bolt protruding from under floor boards. We put the top of the tin on the bolt and hit the other end and that did the trick. I opened his mouth to let just a little bit go onto his tongue but a big blob came out and it completely took his breath away and nearly killed him. It was many minutes before we could get him settled and breathing properly. I stayed with Spud for several days, giving him a little milk every now and again. He improved greatly and when we arrived in Japan he was able to walk off the ship. He married when he returned home and now lives in Frankston, Victoria. I was in Victoria some years back and thought I’d pay my old mate a surprise visit. It turned out that he was down at the RSL but when I went to go in and find him I wasn’t allowed to enter. Not wearing a tie.

‘Just tell Spud Murphy that Jack Thorpe’s here to see him,’ I said.

Spud came out a few minutes later and charged over to me.

‘I haven’t come all this way to see you, you bugger; I’ve come to collect that tin of condensed milk you owe me!’ I told him.

With that, Spud skidded to a halt, turned, and dashed off again. When he re-appeared it was with a tin of condensed milk he’d borrowed from the kitchen. When the blokes on the door heard his story they decided that perhaps I didn’t need a tie after all.

So here again was an example of how the Australian POW mateship system worked. People looked out for each other in a general way, passed information along, and helped where they could. And everyone supported a man’s special mates who would care for him when he was in urgent need. It was an informal system that operated very efficiently.

It is perhaps less usual to see mateship in operation when enemy soldiers are involved. Towards the end of our time in the Burmese jungle we started seeing many groups of Japanese soldiers pass through from the fighting front. All walking, though some were missing arms and legs. All were wounded. You could still see the blood on their bandages. These men were terribly thirsty and our blokes went over to them and gave them a drink from their own water bottles. I thought that was great, especially since we were miles away from camp and wouldn’t be able to refill our bottles until we got back.

This simple act of human kindness was reciprocated by Japanese civilians when I was in Japan. There was a cluster of about six houses along the way between the mine and our camp, and if there were no air raids the mums and grandparents would be sitting around chatting while the children played in the street on hot evenings. One evening, when the kids got off the road to let us through on our way back from working in the mine, we saw their mothers putting something in the children’s hands. As we drew abreast they rushed towards us and gave us a rice ball each. Well, at that the nearest guards went crazy with their rifle butts, knocking over first the little kids and then their mothers as they rushed to their aid. The rest of the guards made sure we just kept marching, to get us clear of the affray.

We never saw that group together again after that. I imagine they still had their little evening chats, but that they went inside as soon as they heard the guards and prisoners approaching. We had mixed feelings about that incident. It was heartening that these people had tried to share with us although they had so little themselves, but the fact that they were so harshly punished for this kindness was a source of anger and regret. What kind of society was Japan, where women and children could be brutally beaten by their own nation’s armed forces?