Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero (21 page)

The huts were made of rough-hewn wooden frames, supposedly topped off with atap—rough thatch harvested from the jungle. But with many the roofing had blown away or rotted through completely. This accursed place was called the River Valley Road Camp, presumably because there was a garbage-choked drain running through the center of it.

The first survivors from the SS
Van Waerwijck
marched into the camp, passing through a group of huts that were already occupied by Allied POWs. They were forbidden from stopping or talking to anyone. They were herded across the stream-cum-sewer, through a barbed-wire gate guarded by sentries, and into what appeared to be the most godforsaken corner of the entire godforsaken place.

This end of the camp was strewn with garbage and filth. On the far side was a rank of bare huts, each equipped with wooden sleeping platforms. For now, this was home.

These men had lost everything when the SS
Van Waerwijck
went down. What few possessions they'd taken with them from Gloegoer One had gone to the bottom of the Malacca Strait. Reduced to numbed, naked animals, suffering from shock and exposure, their hair matted and oily and their faces covered in filthy stubble, most were almost as crazed as they looked—for right now the survivors of the
Van Waerwijck
sinking were close to being an army of the insane and the damned.

Landfills were ransacked for empty cans to use as mugs or bits of sacking from which to improvise clothing. A meal was served. It was rice and dried, salted fish. The men were forced to eat with their hands, using leaves cut from the trees as their plates. Harsh unsweetened black tea was sipped from rusty, dirt-encrusted cans. But the ration drove some even closer to the brink, for it wasn't enough even to begin to satiate their gnawing hunger. There had been little to eat after the sinking of their ship, for the tongkang's crew hadn't expected to need to cater for dozens of Allied POWs.

And now this—
starvation rations
.

When Les Searle retired to his hut to rest his aching limbs, his shrunken stomach grumbling painfully, he expected Judy to come with him. But oddly, she refused. Instead she went from hut to hut, checking each in turn. That done, she proceeded to crisscross the entire length and breadth of the camp. By now Les had an inkling what she might be up to: she had to be searching for their missing friend—for Frank Williams. But he could think of little to say or do to comfort her.

It was as much as he had been able to manage to save Judy from Captain Nissi's ire—with Colonel Banno's help. He had no idea if Frank Williams had survived the shipwreck. They'd all heard the story of Frank pushing Judy through the porthole, but after that, who knew? Yet Judy was not to be deterred from her quest. Once she was certain that Frank wasn't anywhere in the camp, she settled down at the gate, her head resting on her forepaws and her somber eyes fixed in the direction from which she hoped her master would miraculously reappear.

For two days she kept her lonely vigil. Judy's was a watch that would not be broken. Too often in life she'd been parted from her greatest protectors—Petty Officer Jefferey and Tankey Cooper of the
Gnat
, Petty Officer George White of the
Grasshopper
, plus Private Cousens the Gloegoer One shoemaker, to name but a few. Losing Frank Williams was something that Judy simply refused to accept, as if by force of will alone she might bring him to her alive.

And so she waited patiently for a reunion that she felt certain was coming.

Some forty-eight hours after the first arrivals had reached the River Valley Road Camp, Frank Williams made it there too. Weakened by exposure, physically and mentally exhausted from the shipwreck, he was doubly traumatized by what he believed to be the loss of his beloved dog. Bit by bit, he seemed to be losing his will to live.

He clambered down from the truck, every movement causing him agony, and stumbled into the dreadful camp. He was blind to much of what was around him and lost in a dark world of his own.
So cut off was he from his surroundings that when he felt the first blow to his shoulders as he staggered through the barbed-wire gate, he shrugged it off as just another exhausted prisoner stumbling into him.

The second blow had the power to send him sprawling facedown in the dirt, so weakened was his physical condition. He lay there feeling little but dull incomprehension as someone or something scrabbled anxiously at his head and shoulders as if desperate to attract his attention.

And then he heard it. At first he couldn't—
wouldn't
—believe his ears. A low, insistent whine had reached him, cutting through the hunger, the trauma, and the crushing exhaustion that had so befuddled his mind. As if to confirm his impossible hopes, he felt something cold and wet nuzzling into his face—and now the whining was right in his ear.

His hearing wasn't playing tricks on him!
It was her! It was Judy!
Somehow the dog he thought had perished in the seas around the stricken
Van Waerwijck
—the dog he'd pushed through the ship's porthole in an effort to save her—had come back from the dead!

Sensing that he recognized her at last, Judy flung herself upon Frank's prostrate form in a wild frenzy of delight. Managing to roll over, he clasped his arms around her and gazed into her suffering but ever-hopeful eyes. He felt the thick crust of oil and soot that matted her fur. He felt how dreadfully bony were her ribs and her haunches. He sensed too how desperate she'd been to find him.

They embraced for a while, miraculously reunited and with nothing needing to be said between them. It was one of the sweetest of moments. Frank felt as if his heart would break with sheer unadulterated joy. As for Judy, her long wait had been rewarded. And in this one moment Frank seemed to have found the will to live again. He clambered to his feet, and summoning up his newly found reserves of strength, he scooped up his dog in his arms.

“Come on, old girl,” he told her with tears in his eyes, “and stop acting so daft.”

Together, man and dog moved into their new quarters.

That first night Judy lay stretched out at Frank's feet. In spite of her recent ordeal, she remained ever watchful over the one she loved the most. At any movement from across the slumbering camp she'd open one eye, sniff the air, and flick her ears forward, checking for the barest hint of any danger. Judy was determined not to lose her best friend ever again.

Only when she was certain that nothing wicked was approaching did she close her eyes and drift into an aching, exhausted sleep.

The next few days were spent in rest and recuperation—not that the camp provided much of the means for either. It—and Singapore in general—offered none of the luxuries that these desperate men had so longed for. There would be no mail from home and little news of the fortunes of the wider war, their rations were worse than they had been at Gloegoer One, and the camp itself was a shabby, leaking, windswept ruin of a place when compared with their solidly built barracks on Sumatra.

The daily ration of rice and dried fish lacked the essential green vegetables or fruit needed to stave off beriberi, a debilitating disease caused by acute vitamin deficiencies. Already, every green and edible leaf had been stripped from the trees around camp. Occasionally, a dollop of dried seaweed accompanied the daily ration, but it looked and tasted like salty old rope. The Dutch and British doctors were forecasting dire consequences should the rations not be improved in both quality and quantity.

But nothing changed.

The Japanese issued new clothes to replace those lost in the shipwreck—yet these were mostly patched and repatched Japanese Army uniforms, ones that looked as if they had been removed from the bodies of the dead. A few battered British Army boots were handed out, but there were nowhere near enough to go around. For the first time since they had been taken prisoner, a blanket was issued to each man. They were sorely needed, for the huts leaked like sieves. Time was spent trying to sleep and recover or manufacturing
crude spoons and plates from old cans and makeshift toothbrushes from tree branches.

On the first Sunday after their arrival Peter Hartley—Gloegoer One's make-do padre—cobbled together a makeshift service. He had no Bible, having lost everything when the
Van Waerwijck
sank. He managed to beg and borrow some scraps of paper and a pencil, and he scribbled down as much as he could remember of four hymns, filling in forgotten lines with the help of other prisoners. The service was held in one of the skeletal huts. The singing would have raised the roof had it not been so rotten, as those who had survived the worst mourned friends gone but not forgotten and offered thanks for their own deliverance.

But in truth, that deliverance was a mirage. Their stay here would last only four weeks—the time that the Japanese reckoned the POWs needed to recover from their ordeal. This was but a transit camp, and in the last week of July 1944 the announcement was made that the Gloegoer One POWs were moving on. In Gloegoer—and now here in River Valley Road Camp—these men had thought themselves in a place very close to the underworld. But where man and dog were headed next would take them into the very jaws of hell itself.

They were returning to Sumatra to work as slave labor on the hell railroad.

Chapter Eighteen

It was in the late 1800s that the Dutch had first considered driving a railroad through Sumatra's seemingly impenetrable central highlands. The terrain was impossible. It consisted of rugged peaks wreathed in mist and cloud, their perilous slopes cloaked in a carpet of dense jungle, one crisscrossed with fast-flowing rivers and deep gorges and undercut by a labyrinthine network of caves and tunnels. But the prize was also potentially stupendous:
black gold
. The Sumatran mountains harbored some of the richest coal reserves on earth.

The route that the Dutch railway engineers had first explored was only a little different from that taken by Judy and her fellows in the spring of 1942 as they traveled up the Indragiri River, trying to escape from the encircling Japanese. Much of it followed a knife-cut gorge where the Kuantan River—a tributary of the Indragiri—carved its way between jagged-toothed ridges. The sides of the gorge were nearly vertical slabs of rock, and where massive boulders had tumbled into the river its flow was rendered into a series of tortured rapids white with foam.

At places the river appeared almost to disappear entirely into the earth, only to gush forth again like a giant geyser farther downstream. At one stage a dark, bat-infested cave led off from the river valley some four kilometers into the stony heart of the mountains. At first it seemingly offered the Dutch engineers the promise of a route to push the railway through the worst of the terrain, only for all further progress to be blocked by a massive underground lake.

W. Ijzerman, the Dutch engineer leading the perilous expedition, never had a chance to see the fruits of his labors realized. He was standing in shallow water in the Kuantan with his measuring instrument in hand, when all of a sudden the sand beneath his feet gave way and he was sucked into a swirling subterranean abyss. His body was never found.

Subsequent surveys confirmed that the route Ijzerman had pioneered—from the riverside town of Pakan Baroe southwest to Moera via the Kuantan gorge—did offer the possibility of driving a railway through this daunting terrain. But still the Dutch government balked at the prospect: it would prove staggeringly expensive, there was no guarantee of success, and the railway would have to penetrate an area largely uninhabited by man but rife with wild animals and diseases like malaria and typhoid. Such an undertaking would very likely prove costly in human lives, and so the project was abandoned before it ever really got up a head of steam.

For the Japanese in 1944, however, there were to be no such limitations, blessed as they were with thousands of Allied POWs making up a free—and wholly dispensable—labor force. As the fortunes of the war began to turn inexorably against Imperial Japan, she was in ever more desperate need of natural resources. In particular, the Japanese motherland was bereft of reserves of raw energy, and many of the older ships feeding her war machine were coal-fired.

The untapped coalfields of the central Sumatran highlands were capable of producing 500,000 tons of the finest black gold a year. So it was that the Japanese, in extremis, resurrected the long-abandoned colonial Dutch railway project. Their aim was to open up a rail and river route into the Sumatran highlands so the rich coal reserves could be dug out of the ground and shipped east to fuel their ships, first in Singapore and then to all corners of the Japanese conquests.

By far the largest contingent of forced—slave—labor earmarked for the railroad were locals, the so-called romushas.
Romusha
is the Japanese word for “laborer,” and tens of thousands were forced to work on the railway at the end of the barrel of a gun. But on
Friday May 19, 1944, the first contingent of Allied POWs arrived in Pakan Baroe to join the romushas driving the iron rails into the jungle. Frank Williams, Les Searle, Jock Devani, Judy of Sussex, and their fellows from the SS
Van Waerwijck
shipwreck were only a few weeks behind them.

The SS
Van Waerwijck
survivors reentered Sumatra on July 27, 1944, following a route that all but mirrored many of the prisoners' first forays into this harsh but beautiful land. The main difference was this: now their journey's end would be the remote settlement of Pakan Baroe, surrounded on all sides by a seemingly endless expanse of swampy, malaria-infested jungle—as opposed to potential escape via an Allied ship from the port city of Padang on the coast.

Upon arrival at Pakan Baroe, the
Van Waerwijck
survivors were met by the Japanese camp commandant, Lieutenant Miura, who informed them of their fate. To that point they'd been led to believe they were being sent to work on a fruit plantation. Lieutenant Miura rapidly dispelled all such misapprehensions. The prisoners were to have the “honor” of building a railway line for the emperor of Japan. When finished, they would all receive a medal from the emperor for their efforts.

From the muttered comments of those gathered to hear the lieutenant speak, it was clear where they felt the emperor could stick his medal. Luckily, neither Lieutenant Miura nor his fellow officers understood enough English to catch the under-the-breath remarks. The Japanese—and Koreans—in charge of the railway construction were experienced in such work, most coming directly from the infamous Thai–Burma railroad. They'd grown accustomed to seeing thousands of Allied POWs worked to their graves.

Peter Hartley had made it to Pakan Baroe, and before leaving River Valley Road Camp the Japanese guards had procured for him an English Bible. It was darkly fortuitous, for now more than ever before the make-do padre would need it, as he was called upon to officiate over the burial of the dead in droves.

The
Van Waerwijck
survivors were placed temporarily in Camp 2, about five kilometers along the route of the proposed
railroad. Camp 2 was supposedly the hospital camp, but it would soon become known as the Death Camp. There they fell under the leadership of Wing Commander Patrick Slaney Davis, himself only recently arrived in Sumatra from the prison camps of neighboring Java.

The Japanese had appointed Wing Commander Davis as the Allied commander responsible for all POWs laboring on the railway. Tall, emaciated, and with dark rings around his sunken eyes, he would forge for himself a somewhat conflicted reputation. While some of the POWs saw him as distant and aloof, he would earn unsurpassed renown for his fearlessness in the face of Japanese brutality and for his courageous and wily negotiations to manipulate and compel the enemy on behalf of his human charges.

But the task facing this twenty-eight-year-old RAF officer was a nearly impossible one. Wing Commander Davis would have thousands of Allied POWs under his purview, spread across a 220-kilometer stretch of railway traversing horrendous terrain that was served by as many as seventeen separate camps along its length. Out in the far jungle, where the word of the sadistic and brutal guards would be law, there was precious little the wing commander could do to protect his POWs.

After resting up in Camp 2 for just long enough to prove they were—in the eyes of the camp guards—fit, the shipwreck survivors were sent down the line into the jungle. Their destination was Camp 4, at Tera Takboeloeh, some twenty-five kilometers along the route of the still barely nascent railway.

The Japanese had fitted an old diesel truck with steel railway wheels for shuttling prisoners to and from the camps. As the truck chugged its way along a perilously thin knife cut slashed through the jungle, towing two railcars in its wake, the atmosphere among the prisoners was at its darkest. Like many of his fellows, Les Searle sensed that their fortunes had reached their very nadir.

All had heard stories of the terrible privations and degradations of the Thai–Burma railroad. There was every reason to fear that this
would be as bad and possibly worse. Les Searle was sure that ahead of them, to paraphrase Churchill, lay only blood, sweat, and tears, but here they would be shed not to defend Britain from Nazi domination but to further the war effort of the hated Japanese. To be used as slave labor of the most expendable kind and all to fuel the enemy war machine—what fate could be less enticing?

As the converted truck motored down the line, Judy and her fellows felt utterly forgotten—lost men in a lost world. Most had accepted that their chances of survival were at best slim. Perhaps the most awful thing of all was that to the outside world they were already dead. They'd received not a postcard or letter from Britain, and the few official cards that the Japanese had handed out for them to write home had been burned on the camp fire. As they were sucked into this wilderness without end, a place utterly lost in time, the sense of being dead to the world was all-consuming.

Yet in the midst of this truckload of the damned sat an emblematic figure—the erect and apparently undaunted figure of Judy. Dogs have long been bred to embody particular traits, one of the most important of which is to be man's best friend. Their faithful companionship is a quality that we value in them possibly above all others. Over the millennia they have become extraordinarily well attuned to human emotions. In that cursed rail truck rumbling through the wet, rotting heat and the suffocating riot of vegetation, Judy's companions could sense that she knew how they were feeling.

Her gaze fell upon them, and it was full of a gentle warmth and empathy. One look from her long-suffering but caring eyes spoke volumes. It spoke of compassion and understanding. More than that, there was something in her panting, open-mouthed smile that was utterly maternal and reassuring. It was if she was saying,
I know how you're feeling, but trust me—we're going to be fine
. Judy's very presence among them, plus her indomitable spirit, gave these men the strength to face whatever lay ahead with shoulders just a little more squared.

Of course, Judy would be sharing the same fate as they, and indeed her chances of survival were arguably less than those of her
fellow human prisoners. In the eyes of the railway guards she was a much-loathed but entirely edible dog. And as unspeakable brutality was unleashed upon her fellow companions she would feel compelled more than ever to protect them, which in turn would incur the guards' savagery and ire as never before.

That first night in Camp 4 provided a searing indication of things to come. Les Searle, Frank Williams, Jock Devani, Peter Hartley: each was allotted a slice of hard wooden shelf eighteen inches wide as his new home. POW 81A-Medan got nothing, but she was happy enough to curl up at Frank's feet, content in the knowledge that she was still—miraculously—with the one she loved the most, plus their fellows. By the crude light of a homemade lantern—a scrap of rag floating in a can of coconut oil—the appalling state of the hut in which they were billeted was clear to see.

Wall and roof were made of nothing more substantial than palm leaves bound to rough bamboo poles. Under the sleeping platforms tropical weeds reached out their hungry fingers, and the interior of the hut was thick with the voracious insect life that infested the jungle. A swarm of biting, bloodsucking flying things circled around the light, unidentified critters peeling off to left and right to attack one or another of the hut's human occupants. And from the jungle on every side the rhythmic
preep-preep-preep
of the insect chorus rang out deafeningly. Who could ever manage to sleep through all of this?

The air in the hut was thick with the stench of damp, waterlogged wood and rotting vegetation, to which was soon added the stink of unwashed sweat and sleepless fear. Bullfrogs took up a chorus of damp, throaty croaks, calling to one another across the darkened jungle. Howls and shrieks of unknown beasts sent eerie echoes rebounding back and forth through the trees like crazed laughter. At times they sounded spitting-distance close. It was mind-bending.

A warm bath, the feel of a clean towel, the caress of a loved one, the comfort of a home-cooked meal—all the norms of life seemed so impossibly distant.

On that first night the men felt as if they had been asleep only for a matter of seconds when the harsh call of a bugle tore through the fetid hut. It was pitch-dark still, but no doubt this was their wake-up call. Life began at seven o'clock on the railway, but that was seven o'clock
Tokyo time
. Here in Sumatra it was four-thirty in the morning, the depths of the night. No matter: in the minds of their Japanese taskmasters everything from Imperial Japan was superior, and that included even time itself.

Responding to the blare of the bugle, figures stumbled about in the dark trying to find the hut doorway and get out on parade. There was a brutish simplicity to life here that reflected how low these men had fallen: there was no need to change into day clothes, for there were none; no need to pull on shoes, for most had none; no need to scrape a blade across angular features, for their thick, matted beards would have defeated all but the sharpest cutthroat razors and few had any shaving kit, less still the facilities with which to wash or to shave.

Under the ghostly light of the moon the prisoners lined up for parade, plus the obligatory head count. Before them in the shadowy half-light lay the smoking silhouettes of oil drums with fires burning beneath them, signifying that breakfast was served. The first light of dawn was filtering into camp by the time each man received his one ladleful of gray-brown slop in a battered can or bowl. This was the entirety of breakfast—so-called ongle-ongle, a sludge of tapioca flour boiled in water that set like tadpole jelly as it cooled.

Tapioca is made from the pounded root of the cassava plant, a kind of tropical potato. Devoid of sugar or salt, ongle-ongle was entirely tasteless and completely lacking in vitamins or sustenance other than a small dose of carbohydrates. Yet this was the ration upon which these men were supposed to embark upon a full day's—invariably more than a full day's—hard labor on the railway.

The work gangs were divided by task. One group of men was sent deep into the jungle in front of the railhead to build successive camps for the main body of laborers to follow. A second, larger body of men was tasked to raise the embankment for the railway
itself—digging out sand or mud by hand and carrying it in woven baskets to the rail route. This was some of the toughest work of all, and it was mostly given to the romushas—the local slave laborers, most of whom hailed from the neighboring island of Java—the living dead of the railroad.