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Between Death and Commemoration

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Kate Ariotti discusses how Australians on the Railway treated their dead and canvasses the work of the War Graves survey party charged with searching for POW remains in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 13, 2024

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The study focuses on the experiences of Australian prisoners of war (POWs) under Japanese captivity during World War II, particularly those who died while constructing the Thai-Burma Railway. Following the rapid Japanese military advances early in the war, many Allied troops, including 22,000 Australians, were captured and forced into labor on this infamous railway project. The conditions in the work camps were dire, with inadequate food, shelter, and medical care, leading to high mortality rates among POWs due to diseases like cholera and malnutrition.

By mid-October 1943, approximately 12,000 Allied POWs had perished, including around 2,700 Australians. After Japan's surrender in 1945, Allied war graves officials and former POWs returned to the railway to locate and identify the deceased, which was essential for documenting the missing and gathering evidence for potential war crimes trials.

The research emphasizes how Australian POWs handled the deaths of their comrades, documenting the processes of burial and memorialization in challenging conditions. It highlights their determination to honor the dignity of the deceased through traditional military practices despite their own dire circumstances.

The study draws from a wide array of sources, including official military records, POW diaries, and later memoirs published by former POWs, to illuminate the complexities of their experiences and emotional responses to death and loss. It reveals that the prisoners actively engaged in caring for one another and maintained a sense of humanity even in captivity.

The findings underscore the important role of the post-war War Graves team in relocating the remains of deceased POWs to official cemeteries, a process often supported by former Japanese soldiers. Ultimately, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of how the experiences of death impacted POWs themselves, shifting focus from a broader societal perspective to the individual and communal responses within the camps.

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This study centers mainly on the experiences of Australian

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POWs or prisoners of war,

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of the Japanese on the TBE railway

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during the Second World War,

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and specifically the treatment of those

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who died on the railway.

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So the Japanese, entered what came to be known

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as the Second World War in late 1941 and early 1942,

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after they launched a series

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of attacks on various allied positions in Southeast Asia

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and in the Pacific, and the Japanese forces very swiftly

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and, and from the perspective of the allies,

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quite unexpectedly captured key sites, including,

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of course, Singapore.

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And in doing so, they also captured thousands of British

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American, Dutch, new Zealander,

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and some 22,000 Australian troops.

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So they all became prisoners

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of war, prisoners of the Japanese.

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So, the, the Japanese very quickly realized

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the labor potential of these thousands of prisoners of war.

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And they divided them up into, forces

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to be deployed throughout Southeast Asia

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and in Japan itself to, essentially

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help the Japanese military efforts.

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So to build air airfields, to work in mines

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and on wolves, that sort of thing.

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Um, perhaps the most infamous

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of these labor projects was the building

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of the Thai Burma railway.

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So this was the construction of a new rail line that linked,

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bong in Thailand to Poba Ziat in, Burma,

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what we now know as Myanmar.

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Um, and this was mainly

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through very inhospitable jungle terrain.

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And the rail line was for the Japanese to use,

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as an overland supply route for their troops in the region.

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Um, now I say this was infamous

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because the conditions of the work camps,

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the jungle work camps, where many of the POWs,

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who were constructing the railway lived were generally

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very, very poor.

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Um, so sleeping hearts

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and accommodation, cook houses, sick tents, they were all,

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basically constructed from bamboo and, and palm leaves.

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And food and medical supplies were,

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were in very short supply.

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Um, particularly during

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monsoon season when the very swollen river choir made many

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of the camps isolated disease was a big problem.

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Um, malaria, distant tree, nutritional deficiencies,

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tropical ulcers, cholera plagued the POWs,

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and the actual work of, of building the line

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meant clearing land, pick and shovel work, building bridges,

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and it was all done by hand.

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There was no, kind of machinery to assist with that.

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So it was really physically demanding.

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And then, of course, the Japanese were also,

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notorious from, for kind

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of meeting out brutal punishments for, for failure to work

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or, supposed misdemeanors.

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So the, the POWs working on the railway became very

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debilitated very quickly, and thousands of them died.

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So approximately 60,000 allied POWs were sent

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to work on the railway.

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Um, and by mid-October 1943, when the two ends

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of the line met, so the whole line was almost complete,

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about 12,000 had died,

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and that included 2,700 Australians.

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So almost immediately

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after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945, a team

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of Allied Wal Graves officials, who were accompanied

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by former railway POWs, went back to the railway to try

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and locate the dead.

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And this was deemed to be a really important task

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because it would help determine who had

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and who hadn't survived captivity,

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because there was a lot of ambiguity over the numbers

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of POWs, the names of POWs who had been taken captive

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by the Japanese because, they, the Japanese were not,

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technically bound by the Geneva conventions relative

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to the treatment of prisoners of war.

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And they were not particularly forthcoming

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with information about the captives.

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Um, so it was really important in that regard.

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But it was also important

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because the prisoners on the railway were known

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to have buried important evidence about their treatment in

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the graves of the dead.

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And with post-war trials of the Japanese for war crimes

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on the horizon, this evidence was very significant.

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What I really wanted to know, and

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and what became the focus of this study was

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how the Australians on the railway had dealt with the dead

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during an immediately after the war.

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So this isn't really a study of POW life,

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and it isn't a study of how the POWs have been commemorated.

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It's, it's, instead of, it's very focused,

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as I said earlier, on the period

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between death and commemoration.

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So it's about how the Australians on the railway reacted

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to the deaths of their fellow prisoners, how they had dealt

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with the actual physical bodies of those

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who died on the railway,

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and then how in the aftermath of the war, the,

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the remains of the railway dead were relocated from the

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sites of these former prison camps along the railway to one

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of three official,

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Imperial Wool Grapes Commission cemeteries in the region,

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which are now of course,

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Commonwealth Wool Grapes Commission cemeteries.

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Um, so this meant marshaling various sources, including

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official military records, personal papers

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and published memoirs and, and diaries.

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Historians of the prisoners

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of the Japanese are quite lucky in some respects

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because the prisoners were generally very

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good record keepers.

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Um, so roles and registers of names,

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and the movement of POWs between camps, requests

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to the Japanese commanders of the camps

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for extra food and supplies.

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Those kinds of official records were kept by,

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officer prisoners.

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Um, Dr. POWs also tried to keep records, records

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of their patients,

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and their treatment, lists of their kind

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of meager medical supplies and that sort of thing.

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Um, and then individual prisoners kept their own records,

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mainly diaries, which were technically forbidden,

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and so they had to be kind of done in secret

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and concealed, but also sketches.

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And, some prisoners wrote poems.

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Um, so these records, they're not necessarily on, on neat,

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kind of lined paper because the lack of material

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and the lack of supplies meant that, you know,

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improvisation was key to life on the railway work camp.

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So, a lot of this kind of evidence has been written on,

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bamboo on o other pages that have been ripped out

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of books, sometimes inscribed on sheets of tin.

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Um, so that all became part of POW record keeping.

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Um, and then the Wool Graves Survey party

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who traveled the railway

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after the war looking for POW remains also

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were very good at keeping records, official records

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that were maintained

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and sent to, Wal Gray's headquarters.

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Um, one of the members of that party, the chaplain,

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who accompanied the party, kept a diary,

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and they also took a lot of photographs.

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So we have that really, evocative

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pictorial evidence of their work as well.

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So there's those kinds of sources, which,

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which provide insights into the immediate kind of,

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of the time experiences of the POWs and the railway

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and of the Wal Graves team afterwards.

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Um, and then

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after the war,

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many former prisoners published their memoirs

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of life in captivity.

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So both men and women nurses who'd been taken POWs

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and some civilian women too.

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Um, 'cause there was a real appetite

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for their stories immediately after the war.

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And then there was another big publishing boom in the

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eighties and the nineties and into the two thousands.

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As these former, servicemen

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and women, including the former POWs,

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they started to grow older.

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They wanted to tell their stories of war to family members

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and to, an Australian public that had a,

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a renewed interest in traumatic experiences

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of military personnel in times of war, and an,

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and an acceptance of traumatic experiences

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of military personnel.

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So this is when Weary Dunlop, for example,

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who's probably one of the most famous Australian prisoners

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of the Japanese, published

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the extensive diaries that he'd kept as a prisoner

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and a medical officer on the railway

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and elsewhere in Japanese captivity.

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And, Jack Lehman, who was one of the

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war graves, survey party,

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also published his memoir in the two thousands.

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So, drawing on all these sources

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and taking this particular approach of focusing on

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that period between death

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and commemoration meant I was able

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to write this very com multifaceted history of the emotions

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that underpinned the POW's attitudes towards the dead.

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Um, the practicalities of disposing of corpses

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and the ways in which,

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after the war, the war Graves personnel were

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affected by their work.

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The study reveals just how determined the prisoners had been

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to maintain the dignity of their comrades who had died.

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What they saw was very undignified deaths on the railway,

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so from the wasting effects of cholera,

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infection from tropical ulcers,

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incredible fevers from malaria,

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or the effects of starvation.

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Um, and despite their own often emaciated condition,

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and in really the most constrained of circumstances,

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the Australian prisoners on the railway blended traditional

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western cultural practice with military ritual

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to honor their dead.

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Um, they laid out bodies,

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they performed funerals they built,

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and they maintained camp cemeteries,

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often literally carving them out of the jungle.

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Um, there was an epidemic of cholera in 1943,

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which forced the prisoners to,

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adapt their treatment of the dead.

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And, and very big cremation pies became a common site in

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some of the afflicted camps.

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Um, and many of the prisoners were very deeply affected

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by the cremation of cholera victims.

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It was emotionally, and it was sensorially confronting.

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Um, and the burning

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of bodies over open flames really haunted those

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who had witnessed it for many years after the war.

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Um, one of the other key findings

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or central findings was just

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how hard the war Graves team continued the prisoner's care

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of the dead in the immediate aftermath of the war.

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Um, they faced their own challenges of terrain,

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weather, bandits

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and other things including, tigers.

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Um, they worked very hard to locate former camp cemeteries

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to cross reference grave sites with maps that had been

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provided by former prisoners, to identify remains

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and to salvage personal possessions.

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And that really important evidence that I mentioned earlier.

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Um, interestingly, a lot of their work was supported

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by the Japanese troops in the region who had surrendered,

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but was still, waiting to be repatriated.

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Um, and in what seems to have been,

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for the former prisoners in the team at at least,

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a very enjoyable kind of reversal of fate.

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Um, Japanese soldiers cooked their war graves teams food.

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They washed their clothes, they even drew their baths

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for them, and they also did much of the physical work

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that was required to rescue these.

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Uh, once reverently tended cemeteries from the jungle.

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Um, and in some cases,

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they actually recovered the buried rec records

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of their own mistreatment of the prisoners.

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So this, the team might've got, you know,

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they might've enjoyed that kind of reversal,

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but, it didn't really assuage the impact

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of the work they were doing.

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Um, they were finding the remains of thousands of POWs.

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Um, and on one particularly confronting day,

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the team found three camp cemeteries containing,

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a combined total of nearly 900 grapes.

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Uh, but their work was really important

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because it set in motion the, the relocation

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of the dead from the former railway camp cemeteries to one

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of three permanent cemeteries, two in Thailand

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and one in in Myanmar.

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Where they do are today the prisoners of the Japanese

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and the Thai Burma railway in particular, their,

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their central to Australian, history

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and memory of the Second World War.

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Um, historians have written about individual POW camps about

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the work of pow POW doctors, the experiences of,

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women nurses taking captive,

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and about the challenges faced by PW families.

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And more recently, they have investigated, the aftermath

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of the captivity of captivity

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and its manifold, kind of legacies for, ex prisoners

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and their families as well as the nation.

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More broadly, most of these histories,

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or most of these accounts typically mention

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POW mortality rates within the first few pages.

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And indeed, the deaths of prisoners

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of the Japanese have generated a kind of a,

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a sub-genre in Australian POW historiography.

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So we have studies of, the unique grief

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of those who lost loved ones in Japanese captivity, of

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how former prison camps, particularly those

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that were associated with high death rates,

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evolved into places of pilgrimage,

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and of how memorials

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to the prisoners were erected in Australia and overseas.

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But this literature is kind of focused outwards.

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Um, it explores

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or it examines the effects of prisoner deaths for non POWs,

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as well as their broader cultural,

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and commemorative legacies.

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So this particular study shifts the focus inwards

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to the effects of death on the prisoners themselves.

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Um, and in examining what happened

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to those prisoners who died on the railway in that period

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between death and commemoration, the study really

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emphasizes the agency of the PWS on the railway, okay?

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So these prisoners were not passive powerless

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recipients of captivity.

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Um, we can see that they were active agents

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in caring for their dead.

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So it adds another dimension to our understanding

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of the experiences of the POWs

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and the ways in which they sought to shape their experience

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of captivity and to ensure

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the humanity and preserve the memory

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of their comrades.

00:00 - This study centers mainly on the experiences of Australian POWs or prisoners of war, of the Japanese on the TBE railway during the Second World War, and specifically the treatment of those who died on the railway.

00:14 - So the Japanese, entered what came to be known as the Second World War in late 1941 and early 1942, after they launched a series of attacks on various allied positions in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific, and the Japanese forces very swiftly and, and from the perspective of the allies, quite unexpectedly captured key sites, including, of course, Singapore. And in doing so, they also captured thousands of British American, Dutch, new Zealander,

00:44 - and some 22,000 Australian troops. So they all became prisoners of war, prisoners of the Japanese. So, the, the Japanese very quickly realized the labor potential of these thousands of prisoners of war. And they divided them up into, forces to be deployed throughout Southeast Asia and in Japan itself to, essentially help the Japanese military efforts. So to build air airfields, to work in mines

01:16 - and on wolves, that sort of thing. perhaps the most infamous of these labor projects was the building of the Thai Burma railway. So this was the construction of a new rail line that linked, bong in Thailand to Poba Ziat in, Burma, what we now know as Myanmar. and this was mainly through very inhospitable jungle terrain. And the rail line was for the Japanese to use,

01:43 - as an overland supply route for their troops in the region. now I say this was infamous because the conditions of the work camps, the jungle work camps, where many of the POWs, who were constructing the railway lived were generally very, very poor. so sleeping hearts and accommodation, cook houses, sick tents, they were all, basically constructed from bamboo and, and palm leaves. And food and medical supplies were,

02:14 - were in very short supply. particularly during monsoon season when the very swollen river choir made many of the camps isolated disease was a big problem. malaria, distant tree, nutritional deficiencies, tropical ulcers, cholera plagued the POWs, and the actual work of, of building the line meant clearing land, pick and shovel work, building bridges, and it was all done by hand. There was no, kind of machinery to assist with that.

02:48 - So it was really physically demanding. And then, of course, the Japanese were also, notorious from, for kind of meeting out brutal punishments for, for failure to work or, supposed misdemeanors. So the, the POWs working on the railway became very debilitated very quickly, and thousands of them died. So approximately 60,000 allied POWs were sent to work on the railway. and by mid-October 1943, when the two ends

03:17 - of the line met, so the whole line was almost complete, about 12,000 had died, and that included 2,700 Australians. So almost immediately after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945, a team of Allied Wal Graves officials, who were accompanied by former railway POWs, went back to the railway to try and locate the dead. And this was deemed to be a really important task because it would help determine who had

03:49 - and who hadn't survived captivity, because there was a lot of ambiguity over the numbers of POWs, the names of POWs who had been taken captive by the Japanese because, they, the Japanese were not, technically bound by the Geneva conventions relative to the treatment of prisoners of war. And they were not particularly forthcoming with information about the captives. so it was really important in that regard. But it was also important

04:15 - because the prisoners on the railway were known to have buried important evidence about their treatment in the graves of the dead. And with post-war trials of the Japanese for war crimes on the horizon, this evidence was very significant. What I really wanted to know, and and what became the focus of this study was how the Australians on the railway had dealt with the dead during an immediately after the war. So this isn't really a study of POW life,

04:41 - and it isn't a study of how the POWs have been commemorated. It's, it's, instead of, it's very focused, as I said earlier, on the period between death and commemoration. So it's about how the Australians on the railway reacted to the deaths of their fellow prisoners, how they had dealt with the actual physical bodies of those who died on the railway, and then how in the aftermath of the war, the, the remains of the railway dead were relocated from the

05:08 - sites of these former prison camps along the railway to one of three official, Imperial Wool Grapes Commission cemeteries in the region, which are now of course, Commonwealth Wool Grapes Commission cemeteries. so this meant marshaling various sources, including official military records, personal papers and published memoirs and, and diaries. Historians of the prisoners of the Japanese are quite lucky in some respects

05:37 - because the prisoners were generally very good record keepers. so roles and registers of names, and the movement of POWs between camps, requests to the Japanese commanders of the camps for extra food and supplies. Those kinds of official records were kept by, officer prisoners. Dr. POWs also tried to keep records, records of their patients,

06:00 - and their treatment, lists of their kind of meager medical supplies and that sort of thing. and then individual prisoners kept their own records, mainly diaries, which were technically forbidden, and so they had to be kind of done in secret and concealed, but also sketches. And, some prisoners wrote poems. so these records, they're not necessarily on, on neat, kind of lined paper because the lack of material and the lack of supplies meant that, you know,

06:30 - improvisation was key to life on the railway work camp. So, a lot of this kind of evidence has been written on, bamboo on o other pages that have been ripped out of books, sometimes inscribed on sheets of tin. so that all became part of POW record keeping. and then the Wool Graves Survey party who traveled the railway after the war looking for POW remains also were very good at keeping records, official records that were maintained

07:02 - and sent to, Wal Gray's headquarters. one of the members of that party, the chaplain, who accompanied the party, kept a diary, and they also took a lot of photographs. So we have that really, evocative pictorial evidence of their work as well. So there's those kinds of sources, which, which provide insights into the immediate kind of, of the time experiences of the POWs and the railway and of the Wal Graves team afterwards.

07:30 - and then after the war, many former prisoners published their memoirs of life in captivity. So both men and women nurses who'd been taken POWs and some civilian women too. 'cause there was a real appetite for their stories immediately after the war. And then there was another big publishing boom in the eighties and the nineties and into the two thousands.

07:52 - As these former, servicemen and women, including the former POWs, they started to grow older. They wanted to tell their stories of war to family members and to, an Australian public that had a, a renewed interest in traumatic experiences of military personnel in times of war, and an, and an acceptance of traumatic experiences of military personnel. So this is when Weary Dunlop, for example,

08:19 - who's probably one of the most famous Australian prisoners of the Japanese, published the extensive diaries that he'd kept as a prisoner and a medical officer on the railway and elsewhere in Japanese captivity. And, Jack Lehman, who was one of the war graves, survey party, also published his memoir in the two thousands. So, drawing on all these sources and taking this particular approach of focusing on

08:49 - that period between death and commemoration meant I was able to write this very com multifaceted history of the emotions that underpinned the POW's attitudes towards the dead. the practicalities of disposing of corpses and the ways in which, after the war, the war Graves personnel were affected by their work. The study reveals just how determined the prisoners had been to maintain the dignity of their comrades who had died.

09:18 - What they saw was very undignified deaths on the railway, so from the wasting effects of cholera, infection from tropical ulcers, incredible fevers from malaria, or the effects of starvation. and despite their own often emaciated condition, and in really the most constrained of circumstances, the Australian prisoners on the railway blended traditional western cultural practice with military ritual to honor their dead.

09:47 - they laid out bodies, they performed funerals they built, and they maintained camp cemeteries, often literally carving them out of the jungle. there was an epidemic of cholera in 1943, which forced the prisoners to, adapt their treatment of the dead. And, and very big cremation pies became a common site in some of the afflicted camps. and many of the prisoners were very deeply affected

10:16 - by the cremation of cholera victims. It was emotionally, and it was sensorially confronting. and the burning of bodies over open flames really haunted those who had witnessed it for many years after the war. one of the other key findings or central findings was just how hard the war Graves team continued the prisoner's care of the dead in the immediate aftermath of the war. they faced their own challenges of terrain,

10:48 - weather, bandits and other things including, tigers. they worked very hard to locate former camp cemeteries to cross reference grave sites with maps that had been provided by former prisoners, to identify remains and to salvage personal possessions. And that really important evidence that I mentioned earlier. interestingly, a lot of their work was supported by the Japanese troops in the region who had surrendered, but was still, waiting to be repatriated.

11:26 - and in what seems to have been, for the former prisoners in the team at at least, a very enjoyable kind of reversal of fate. Japanese soldiers cooked their war graves teams food. They washed their clothes, they even drew their baths for them, and they also did much of the physical work that was required to rescue these. once reverently tended cemeteries from the jungle. and in some cases, they actually recovered the buried rec records

11:56 - of their own mistreatment of the prisoners. So this, the team might've got, you know, they might've enjoyed that kind of reversal, but, it didn't really assuage the impact of the work they were doing. they were finding the remains of thousands of POWs. and on one particularly confronting day, the team found three camp cemeteries containing, a combined total of nearly 900 grapes. but their work was really important

12:25 - because it set in motion the, the relocation of the dead from the former railway camp cemeteries to one of three permanent cemeteries, two in Thailand and one in in Myanmar. Where they do are today the prisoners of the Japanese and the Thai Burma railway in particular, their, their central to Australian, history and memory of the Second World War. historians have written about individual POW camps about the work of pow POW doctors, the experiences of,

12:59 - women nurses taking captive, and about the challenges faced by PW families. And more recently, they have investigated, the aftermath of the captivity of captivity and its manifold, kind of legacies for, ex prisoners and their families as well as the nation. More broadly, most of these histories, or most of these accounts typically mention POW mortality rates within the first few pages. And indeed, the deaths of prisoners

13:32 - of the Japanese have generated a kind of a, a sub-genre in Australian POW historiography. So we have studies of, the unique grief of those who lost loved ones in Japanese captivity, of how former prison camps, particularly those that were associated with high death rates, evolved into places of pilgrimage, and of how memorials to the prisoners were erected in Australia and overseas. But this literature is kind of focused outwards.

14:08 - it explores or it examines the effects of prisoner deaths for non POWs, as well as their broader cultural, and commemorative legacies. So this particular study shifts the focus inwards to the effects of death on the prisoners themselves. and in examining what happened to those prisoners who died on the railway in that period between death and commemoration, the study really emphasizes the agency of the PWS on the railway, okay?

14:44 - So these prisoners were not passive powerless recipients of captivity. we can see that they were active agents in caring for their dead. So it adds another dimension to our understanding of the experiences of the POWs and the ways in which they sought to shape their experience of captivity and to ensure the humanity and preserve the memory of their comrades.

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