I would climb up and tie them off at the top because I was good at climbing ladders.  All of a sudden a bloke at the bottom of the ladder shouts, “look out Jim ‘cos there’s a bloody plane coming”.  I looked round and there was this plane coming straight for me.  It was too late to climb down so all I could think of doing was hiding behind the post and keeping still.  I thought their guns might go either side of me.  They did fire upon me and fortunately I was right.  My mates were below the tree line so they were safe.  That was the closest I came to being killed.

The fight for Singapore

The Japs were just across the water and they were all laughing at us on the other side.  We knew we were in trouble and we could sense they were going to attack us the next morning.  Our morale was actually quite good though.  However if the Japanese had attacked we could never have held them off.  We had hardly ever used rifles, as we were signallers and artillery.  Then something happened that night and we capitulated.   So we were taken prisoner.  We did go into a hospital that had been attacked and it was not very nice.  I didn’t see much in the hospital and I didn’t go in the wards.  I do remember seeing three bodies laying in a cot and they had a handkerchief over their faces.  We knew they were dead.

Capture and life as a POW

We didn’t know what to do and we knew nothing about the Japanese, so we just waited for them to arrive.  When they did, they put us in trucks and took us to billets where we were split into parties for clearing up.  I was taken with a load of others to the old golf course where we had to make a shrine.  They called us the boys who built the shrine at Buka Tima.  I can still hear them singing it…

“As we walk along the Golf Course,
With an independent air,
You’ll hear them all declare,
He must be a millionaire, 
With ten cents a day and five cents bonus,
The Japanese to feed and clothe us, 
We’re the boys who built the shrine at Buka Tima.”

Then one day the came and took us to the railway station to board trains.  The train took us right up through Malaya.  We weren’t in carriages, they were cattle trucks and there were about 20 to 30-odd men in each truck.  Once the heat got to the trucks then they were stifling, so we often travelled with the doors open just to get some air.  If you wanted to go to the toilet then you would get to the front and men would hold you out through the open door at arms length while you had a pee.  It wasn’t a very nice journey I can tell you.  The journey must have lasted two or three days before we arrived up in Burma, where we were unloaded.  We then started building huts for us to live in and next we built roads.  They fed us rice and vegetables.  No meat.  The cook would build a fire and cook rice in huge containers, but of course the rice would burn inside the containers.  We had to line up for it and eat the burnt rice.  There used to be a skin on the rice too, so if you were lucky then you used to get a bit of that too.  We did have a little bit of veg with it sometimes, but there were not enough calories when you are building.

From there we got up as far as the River Kwai.  I helped build that bridge!  I can assure you we never walked into came singing Colonel Bogey.  We were bedraggled and basically crawled back on our knees.  They used to take us all out into the jungle and told us “EVERYBODY WORKS!”  The Colonel said “officers don’t work”, so the Japanese Commander said again, “everybody works … officers and men”.  The Colonel still said no, then the commander said, “I shall say this once more, EVERYONE works or we get the machine guns out.”  So in the end the officers worked, but the Colonel ended up in a little hut at the top.  It was bloody scary.  Then we started building the bridge.  It was okay actually because it meant we got regular meals and we would take the ‘mickey’ out of the guards.  We would make the cross pieces on the bridge, where they overlap, and saw the ends off.  Sometimes the men would saw into the inner parts, so by the time the Japs walked onto the outer ends it would give way.   Then there was a bang and a splash, down they went.  The Japs would retaliate though, shouting at us, “this soldier no good”.  Otherwise they didn’t trouble us much, as long as we worked.  Sometimes we could even have a bit of a joke with them.

There were a lot of Scots with us.  I remember on my 23rd birthday (1943), the Scots had made some drink and very potent it was too.  Well I had too much and started singing. One of their senior NCOs came up and said, “Put that bloody man down that hole and sit on his head!  Otherwise we’ll all be in bloody trouble”.  We would wash in the river and sometimes have a bit of a swim there.  I remember one time I was swimming when the men on the bank began shouting for me to look over to the other bank.  There was a bloody great 20-foot long snake.  So I didn’t hang about and quickly I swam back.

There was a lot of illness and quite a few deaths.  They would not allow us to bury our dead.  Instead we would have to put them in a rice sack and set them alight.  That wasn’t very nice at all, especially when the heat from the fire got into the body and it would sit up.  I know a couple of squaddies who volunteered to carry me from one camp to another, that must have been about two or three miles.  They had one at the front and one at the back, and they carried me all the way because I was ill.  That was bloody lovely though.  Toward the end there was quite a few fellas dying because of the poor food.  We would moved camp as we worked further along the road.  We still worked even when we were ill.  I don’t recall anyone trying to escape, during my time.  Where would you go?  What would you do?

We worked on the roads further up into Burma.  Then one night, after going so far, we went to bed and when we got up in the morning everything was uncannily quiet.  It turned out the Japanese had quit.  They had just left us during the middle of the night.  We had no idea this was going to happen because we did not know how the war was going.  Everyone was looking around and asking, “Well what are we going to do?  What the hell is happening?”  Then our NCOs said the Japs must have capitulated.  I just couldn’t stand it, so I walked right round the inside of the camp to where there was nobody.  I laid down on the ground, put my hands together and said, “Thank you Lord”.  And that was it!  It was a very emotional time.  We then had to stay in camp and wait for someone to come to us, but it wasn’t too long.  I think the reason we had to wait was they had to bring boats up to us, but finally it was the British who came to us.  Then we were took up to some port, boarded a boat and came back home.  It wasn’t a straightforward return and we stopped at Ceylon for a rest.  Here they gave us a packet of tea to take home!  It did mean that by the time I got home I had time to stop along the way and recover, so I did not look too bad when I got home.  I think we came back to Scotland, because I remember coming home on the train.

Afterwards I was demobbed and straight away got a job in Ashford, Kent.  Then I went to London because one of my old mates invited me up there.  Here I met a girl and we married.  So I lived in London.  Then when I retired, I came to live in Brandon.