Two of Australia’s few surviving ex-prisoners of war from World War II will be in Ballarat on Tuesday to honour their comrades on the 75th anniversary of the completion of the notorious Burma railway.
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A service will be held at the Ex-Prisoner of War memorial in the Botanic Gardens at 11am to remember those who toiled and suffered at the hands of their Japanese captors and brutal Korean guards.
Colin Hamley and Norman Anderton are 99 and 98 years old, and have no trouble recalling the names of the camps where they worked, the privations they underwent and their fallen fellow POWs.
Colin Hamley served in both the Middle East, fighting the Vichy in Syria, before being diverted to the defence of Java and Singapore in 1941 while on the way home to Australia, while Norman Anderton enlisted in the 8th Signals Division in Sydney in 1940 and was also sent to Java.
Placed under the command of the Dutch, the Australian forces were hopelessly outnumbered by the fast-moving Japanese Imperial Army, and their Middle Eastern issued arms and ammunition never arrived in Java. The Dutch soon ordered them to surrender, and the troops became prisoners.
Colin Hamley is still critical of the Dutch command.
“They had no idea where the Japanese were,” he says of the Dutch.
“Our intelligence officer rang them up at the Dutch Headquarters one day, wanting to know where the Japanese had landed, and the fellow there said, ‘I don’t know, the morning papers haven’t come out yet.’”
The Japanese assembled a workforce of an estimated 270,000 Asian labourers and some 60,000 Australian, British, Dutch and American POWs.
Colin and his brother Don were captured.
“We met the Japs head-on at a little place down near Bandung. We held them up for a couple of days, perhaps a week. But we were completely outnumbered, and the Dutch HQ decided to surrender. It disgusted us.”
Held at The Bicycle Camp in Batavia for eight months, they were then shipped to Singapore. He saw his brother Don just once again, in Burma, where he tossed Colin a hatful of precious cigarettes. He died working on the railway.
For Australians, the most well-known of many notorious sites along the Thai–Burma railway was Hellfire Pass. Named for both the brutal conditions under which prisoners worked and the fact that at night the scene was lit by carbide lights, bamboo fires and hessian wicks in containers full of diesel oil, Hellfire Pass, remarked one former prisoner, 'looked like a scene out of Dante's inferno'.
Located at Konyu, Thailand, Hellfire Pass consisted of two cuttings; the first measured 460-metres long by 7.6-metres deep, the second was 73-metres long and 24-metres deep. The work here, which involved drilling, blasting and digging through solid rock, was as dangerous as any on the railway.
Work began at Hellfire Pass in late April 1943. At the beginning, prisoners had to move one square metre of earth per day; within two days this was doubled and after a week increased to three square metres.
Survivors of the initial draft of 380 men sent to the pass were joined in June by more prisoners and compelled to work even harder. South-east Asian labourers, including Cambodian jack-hammer operators, also worked on this section of the track.
Shifts lasted 18 hours a day, a regimen that continued until the cutting was complete after some six weeks. Work on the railway continued until 16 October 1943 when the two ends of the track were joined. More than 2,800 Australians are believed to have died working on the Thai-Burma Railway, some 700 of them at Hellfire Pass.
The service marking the 75th anniversary of Australian work on Hellfire Pass and the completion of the Thai–Burma Railway is at 11am on Tuesday, 16 October 2018 at the Australian Ex-PoW Memorial, Ballarat.