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Our little party had been on the embankment first of all, and then onto bridge-building in the Hindato area. We had come down river and landed at Kinsyo and here it was shocking. The monsoons had started and everywhere was mud; the huts were falling to pieces, full of bugs, and all the prisoners, English and Australians looked so dreadful. They were working from early morning to late evening. There they were, tottering down the muddy track to their work on the railway, their skeleton like forms fading into the jungle like living zombies, their thin arms and their dirty uniforms hanging in tatters. Some bare footed, without hats, literally dying on their feet and walking, shouting and bellowing followed the Japanese guards, their rifles slung over one shoulder and a bamboo stick in the other.
There was a smell of decay in the whole camp of stagnation. The camp hospital was another miserable hut, falling to pieces and inside lay the remnants of what once were fine young men, dying in loathsome squalor. The stench of bed-pans, the groan of the men with malaria, the dirty smell of sweaty clothing, the lice and the smell of bug infested bamboo beds filled the picture. The Japs seemed to have one thought here; if you are not working you're dying. Their one thought was the railway. It had got to be built; nothing was to stand in the way. There were plenty of prisoners to be had and they were expendable and it was going to be so.
Everywhere in the jungle the grave-yards made their appearance; starting in a small way they gradually grew bigger, until when the railway was completed at the end of the year, thousands of bodies lay in the jungle from one end to the other.
Frank Tantum - FEPOW
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Kinsaiyok Main Camp
Japanese
IV Group
