William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

'After the spiking job we were sent up to Hellfire Pass, beyond Konyu. There were a lot of bashings from then on. It was "Speedo, speedo" all the time. The Japs must have got the word that the line was behind schedule, and this was when they really tore into everybody. They had to have 100 men out on a job, and if they only had 70 fit men, they'e take 30 out of the hospital, even if they lay on a stretcher all day in the sun. Some they'd kick out of hospital. They'd get these blokes on their feet by kicking and bashing them, with rifle butts and baseball bats. No one died through a bashing, as far as I know. But people were dying all the time through diseases like beri-beri, and cholera, which had broken out at some of the other camps. You see, they'd brought up a lot of coolie labour, some from Thailand, some from Malaya, and some from Indo-China. And they were the big problem when it came to cholera and the worst diseases. They had no hygiene at all.

'We were a mobile working party, and as we moved along up the line, we lived at various camps. Konyu was one of the worst'

Weary Dunlop was the senior officer at an Australian camp at Konyu at this time, in charge of 875 men, who lived in bamboo and rattan huts. He was at Konyu until the middle of March 1943.

Reveille was at 0800, roll-call and breakfast at 0830, and work began an hour later. There was supposed to be a half-hour break for lunch. Work ended at 6.0 pm. It was followed by a meal at 7.0, roll-call at 8.0, and lights out at 10.0 pm. There were in fact no lights just camp fires at night.

Swimming, and fishing in the River Kwai was allowed, and at the camp canteen, eggs, sugar, fish, fruit, soap and cigarettes could be bought. All officers and ORs continued to be paid.

Dunlop wrote: 'Fights in our line rather common, probably due to tobacco shortage... The system works like this. Nip commander fixes prices of tobacco, cigarettes and foodstuffs coming in. Will not allow us to pay more, for example, than 25 cents per packet of cigarettes. Nip troops then buy up all the valuables of the camp - watches, pens and trinkets - for a small percentage of their real value, then offer to sell cigarettes, etc for twice their value at least, eg cigarettes 50 cents...

'We must salute all Nip soldiers except when working, when only the NCO IC party salutes. When a soldier is without a hat, he salutes by bowing... Something is terribly wrong with the British camp; all the barracks have a terrible sick smell, and it is appalling to see the mess of dirty gaunt bodies and unmade beds all hours of the day... The Dutch are an ill-disciplined mob... Hospital state now rising and malaria cases are still coming in... Another curse of this site is the frequency of very painful scorpion bites - usually several men daily... Frequently people come in in the dark with severe bites and I suspect snakes, etc. There are many huge tarantulas and centipedes, not to mention multitudinous ants, and every type of fly, sandflies, etc. Mosquitos are not plentiful but sufficiently evident after dusk... English entertainers came over to our camp tonight for a concert and put on a very good show, singing and light comedy... Great fires lit the scene...

'The railway track being cleared is an astonishing affair. It seems to run without much regard to the landscape... along the precipitous slope of a hill instead of a ridge. Terrible gaps and boulders and descents... They drill with the crudest of hand-drills like a short crowbar, and a hammer. White rock dust flies in all directions, so that the men are plastered with rocks and sweat, like bakers or plasterers. The heat is infernal, hotter than in the camp... Two great sidings are to be cut in the rocky mountainside, and a great deal of embanking to be done between... Work in general is of three types: drilling and blasting; work on the embankment; and jungle clearing... There is a great deal of bashing.'

Bill Clemence worked on this railway line for about a year.

There were two cuttings at Konyu, one called Hellfire Pass. We were taken there because the English working parties were becoming so depleted,

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through cholera, that they just couldn't finish the work. They'd had cholera through their camp. We were reasonably fit and we finished off the job.

'One bloke went right off his skull one night in the cutting. He bashed a guard. With a shovel. Knocked him out. Fortunately for him there was a Japanese civil engineer there and he grabbed the man and took him back to camp, and when the Japanese guard came to, and went looking for this bloke, he wasn't around. The Jap wanted to know where he was and nobody told him. We didn't know of course. Then the engineer came back and we saw him speak to the guard. And that's all there was to it. Nothing happened. He was so lucky. He could have been shot on the spot. For that was the penalty for hitting back. If you attacked them they were allowed to shoot you. I never saw any of the Japanese use a sword.

'Funny things happened. We'd been out all day and were waiting for a train to come up, and they brought some rice up to us with a bit of vegetable in it. Quite often it was off. Not that it worried you. You still ate it - even if you lost it. You ate anything you could push into your mouth. I said to the bloke who was with me: "This smells a bit crook today." And he said: "It's not that bad." And I said: "Well, something stinks!" We were sitting down and there was a big bush behind us, and I went around the bush and there was a dead Chinese. I reckon he'd been there for about two weeks. That was funny.

'Some of our blokes who died in Hellfire Pass were buried beside the line, and are probably there today. A big cemetery was built at Kanohanaburi after the war, but although the names are there, I don't think some of the bodies are. I think they were lost up the line.

'Wooden crosses were put up when anyone died, and they always had a service in camp. Services were done whenever they could be organised - you couldn't keep bodies unburied for too long - and even in the toughest times everything was done the right way, as well as you could. And there was always somebody in camp who could go to a service - even blokes on crutches. Somebody would always pay his respects. Sometimes you had to carry the bodies for burial, wrapped in rice bags, two sewn together. They weren't heavy. You only needed two men to carry them. You didn't need four'

In March 1943, Lt Col Weary Dunlop moved up the line to a mountain camp at Hintok.

In May he wrote: 'There are at present about 140 avitaminosis cases in hospital, many suffering from other conditions as well, particularly septic sores,

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In mid-May the rains came and with them rumours of a cholera outbreak up the line.

Dunlop wrote: 'Heavy rain all day and work parties in very late. The roll-

call under the canvas-covered huts is a sea of mud, slush and dripping water...

Rain all night. My bed soaked as usual... Rain and mud everywhere. The

troops must have hearts like lions to go out somehow to work.' On 31 May: 'The

fly problem is now terrific in the hot, moist conditions. The whole camp is just

crawling with them... Men with sores and such lesions are tormented with

them... The camp is a sea of mud, and God knows how the cooks go on keeping

fires going in their open redoubts... Nearly 15 weary interminable months as a

POW.' On 2 June: 'Private EL Edwards died of dysentery in hospital at

1100 hours. This is the first death in our camp since coming to Siam. God knows the angel's wings must have been over us in view of the terrible mortality in all other camps up and down this line... Konyu is a real camp of death these days - at least an average of one death a day, and five in one day recently.' On 7 June: 'The beginning of severe, acute dermatitis of the feet. Many have no boots. The feet become red raw with tinea, injury, and secondary infection; they swell grossly with redness, weeping and loss of skin. The poor wretches stand either in mud or water or on rocks all day and the feet never get dry. Those suffering the miseries of ever present diarrhoea and dysentery, of course, are for ever getting up in the mud and slush at night and that makes things worse. The plight of these men is pitiful. They take hours to walk four to five kilometres in from work and just about cry with the pain of walking and standing on raw, bleeding feet. The Nipponese, of course, just bash them for being late to work or too slow.'

Hospital admissions and deaths increased; 35 men died at Konyu in five days. But at the coolie camp near Tarsau 240 died of cholera in two days. In mid-June cholera broke out in the British and Australian camps.

Bill Clemence: 'The last camp we were in up the line was Konkoita. I had an ulcer start there, a leg ulcer, and it got worse and worse. Then they said:

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'You're going back." They didn't know where. They were now cutting back the working parties. I didn't much care where I went, so long as I got off the damned line.

'But the one that cut me up more than anything was in Non Pladuk, where I ended up after coming off the line. I met a young fellow in the latrine area one day and he said: "God, I'm in trouble, mate." And he was in trouble. His insides were hanging out of his anus. His stomach lining had gone. He said: "What can I do?" He was about my age 21 or 22. I said: "I'm sorry, mate. I can't do anything." He said: "No. Neither can the doctors." He wanted to talk to somebody - that's all he wanted to do. He died two days later. The medics couldn't do a thing. They couldn't perform miracles. They pushed his insides back into him, but they kept coming out again.

'A thing like that you can't, you don't, tell anyone. Things like that were like a nightmare.'

In October, Lt Col Dunlop was back in the big hospital at Tarsau, where over 2,400 officers and ORs lay sick. 364 died in a three month period at this time. In January 1944 he was sent down the line to the hospital at Chungkai, where about 500 had died in the last three months, and in May he moved to Nakom Patom.

In June 1944 it was calculated that of 43,000 prisoners of war in Thailand, over 7,600 had died.

In April 1944 Dunlop wrote: 'I seem to have lost all emotional depths these days and am living in a drab way without much thought, or feeling, or reaction to anything... One can't feel very much any more. Further, I can't react very much to physical suffering or death.'

I asked Bill Clemence how he survived.

'A certain amount of it would be due to luck. There was always luck involved. On the other hand I think youth was on our side. The older men -even blokes in their late twenties - didn't take it as well as we did. Not all of them. A lot of the men who died - and I was terribly surprised at this - were tough country blokes. They didn't come through. We all came from the city. We were supposed to be mummy's boys who wouldn't last. But we did.

'We always helped each other. Right from the start two, three or four blokes would be pretty close to each other. One bloke out of four would steal something and the other three would share it. If a bloke was sick or something, the others would help him with his work. It was more than friendship. It was kinship. And there were lots of laughs. You made jokes. You thought deliberately about funny incidents that had happened in the past, about your

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'We used to talk a lot about home, about various things. We mostly talked about food. At night. There'd be 100 men in a hut, and everybody would listen in. Somebody would say: "What was your favourite meal?" And there'd be dead silence. And you'd dream up the most fantastic menu. My favourite was a tomato and onion pie my mother used to make, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and baked in an oven. It was absolutely magnificent. And I told this particular bloke about it once, and when he got really hungry he'd say: "For God's sake, tell me about that tomato and onion pie, will you?" And I'd have to tell him how it was cooked and what it tasted like. And he'd say: "Thanks. I feel a lot better now."

'The married men used to get pretty upset, more upset than us. One of my friends was married and he never stopped talking about her - how marvellous she was. And when he got home, she'd gone. Nearly killed him. She'd gone off with somebody else. He came from Queensland, one of the nicest blokes. He married again, a lovely girl.

'If you were ever miserable, you shared your misery with a friend. Some of the blokes were miserable all the time. For three and a half bloody years! Others didn't show it. I never had any doubts that I was going to get home.

'I never thought about escape. I looked at the situation early and I thought: Well, we're in Singapore. Java and Sumatra are down there, India is way up there, Burma's up there, Indo-China's there, Borneo is out that way. No way known am I going to escape. I reckoned you'd have to be a ding-dong to try and escape. Always I was going to get home. I never doubted it. Except once, when we were bombed.

'We were bombed by the RAF. At Non Pladuk. We were bombed three times. The first was a day raid, and I watched the bombs coming down, and I said to the bloke with me: "My God! I think this is it!" They were bombing a railway marshalling yard and the camp was right beside it. They had to come across the camp and they caught a corner of the camp - three times. They also made a hell of a mess of the marshalling yard, and we had to go and fix it up. We were cross about that. But once the RAF showed up we knew we were almost on our way home.

'This was in the early part of 1944. It still took a while. But we knew we were winning then. We were getting wireless messages throughout the war. There were a number of wireless sets in every camp. We also got news from the Thais. I never listened to any of the sets. I didn't want to be anywhere near them. I'd rather be a live coward than a dead hero. Because if they caught you with these sets - Boy! Did they give you hell!

Then the Americans came over and bombed Bangkok. It was great. You'd look up and see these big B29 flying fortresses - we'd never seen them before. And they were magnificent. We cheered. The Japs were scared stiff of the bombing. The first night we were bombed there wasn't a Jap guard in the camp. They took off. They just disappeared.

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'My last camp was at Ubon [on the border with Laos]. In 1945. That was the easiest time of the whole three and a half years. We worked on an aerodrome, levelling off the ground for an aerodrome on the Indo-China border. During the Vietnam war it was used by the Americans as a base.

'We heard that the war was over from the Thais. We were out on a working party, a dozen of us. We were out overnight. And in the morning a Jap motorcycle raced in and we heard a great jabbering in Japanese, and they rushed us into a truck and took us back to the camp. And as we were going into the camp there were some Thais bringing in some rice. And they said: "War finish." Nothing more was said until the next day.

'The next day the Japanese commander came out after getting us all out on the parade ground. He said, through an interpreter, that the great East Asia war was finished - 'You are now free men, and you will be going back to your families." Blah, blah, blah. There wasn't a sound. I reckon that camp must have held about 1,000 men. And there wasn't a sound. It was stunning - eerie. You'd think there would have been raucous laughter, or catcalls, or cheers. There was nothing. Not a sound. And everybody broke away and wandered back to their huts.

'But then it started. And we sat there and said: "God!"

We went out of the camp and sank a lot of grog in the town, which was a six or seven kilometre walk away. Rice wine. We were out of our minds. We couldn't really take it, and afterwards were a lot sicker. But that's when we started to enjoy it - being free.

'We didn't hear about the atom bombs until later on.'

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At Nakom Patom, Lt Col Dunlop heard on 16 August 1945 that the war against Japan had ended, Japan having surrendered unconditionally the day before, six days after the second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki.

A general assembly of all ranks was held, and they were told by the English and Dutch camp commanders that the war was over.

Dunlop wrote: 'Immediately, long-hidden and cherished flags - the Union Jack, Australian and Dutch - were hoisted to the accompaniment of cheering, shouting, and in many cases unashamed tears. These flags seemed to fly proudly in a cleaner, fresher air, charged with deep, overwhelming emotion, a boundless joy still trailing robes of sadness. So many had suffered and died; some even now would never see home; but the momentous day had come.'

Bill Clemence: 'After we were told the war had finished, the first thing we saw coming up the road was a British paratrooper, marching up on his own. He marched into the camp and took it over. He was a British major. He wanted to know who the worst of the Japanese were and what they'd done. And we told him. And there were six or seven Japs who'd been working down on the aerodrome. They were taken out and shot. And they took away two of the guards who'd shot Bluey, and I think they were shot. This major wasn't pissing around. He was a tough boy. They were other paratroopers with him, and they were the ones who shot those Japs.

'RAF planes then came over and dropped tons of food, which was great. A couple of blokes were killed trying to catch one of those metal cylinders coming down.

'We remained at Ubon for at least three weeks. And then word came through that we all had to go down to the local station, and on to Bangkok. I sent myself and three others into Ubon as an advance party, with whatever goods and chattels we had, which wasn't a lot. The river was in flood there, and they ferried us over and we dropped our stuff at the station. Then, as we had to wait a few hours for the rest of the camp to come down and get on the train, we thought we'd go and get a feed. We went into the town - didn't like the look of it much - and found a Thai army camp. We thought: If anybody's going to feed us, they'll feed us. So four very ragged, scarecrowy-looking blokes staggered up to this camp. To cut a long story short we finally got into the colonel's quarters, and he said: 'You blokes have had a pretty rough time. What would you like to eat?" I forget what it was, but he gave us a magnificent meal, and we drank some French cognac. Quite a lot. I remember singing the Thai national anthem, and I can't speak Thai. And the colonel was singing "God Save the King." Then we said we had to get back to the station, as the others might be waiting for us.

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And when we got there, the whole lot, 2,000 men, were waiting for us four. A Scottish major ticked us off. But by this time we didn't give a twopenny damn who ticked us off. He got the right answer, and we got on the train and tootled off down to Bangkok.

'The best moment was when I stepped off the boat onto the wharf. That was the greatest. I kissed the wharf. The funniest part of it was that before we came off the boat at Port Melbourne there was an official party ushered up the gangway onto the boat, the old top-hat brigade, come to give us a great welcome. And I couldn't believe my eyes! The bloke at the end was my father's brother, my revered Uncle Bob, who was a reprobate at any time. He'd attached himself to the official party, and there he was, lifting his hat to everybody. And Bob wasn't anybody. I went to meet him and took him away, and when we were all ready to disembark he and t walked down the gangway together. How he did it, I don't know. He'd been in the war and was discharged from the army. He was injured at Tobruk.

'My parents heard about me first from a bloke in WA. He picked up a wireless message with a long list of names sent out from Singapore. In 1944. Up to then they didn't know if I was dead or alive. I was reported missing, believed to be a POW. This bloke rang my father and told him I was on the list. My parents were later advised by the War Officer, via Bangkok, that I was on my way home.