Jim Brigginshaw - Survival on the Death Railway and Nagasaki

ANGRY, argumentative, a living skeleton – that was the Jim Bodero I met 27 years after the war had ended. I’d just taken over as editor of the newspaper where he was a compositor/reader, the scourge of any journalist who mutilated the English language.

I understood his irascibility when I learned of the terrifying ordeals he’d been through as a prisoner of the Japanese, ordeals that for 27 years had left him in constant agony from a multiplicity of injuries.

He was a bitter man, not towards the Japanese who had caused his injuries, but towards Australian officialdom. Never out of pain from his damaged back and limbs, eyesight partially lost from a scarred cornea, Jim Bodero had his post-war claims for a Repatriation pension rejected.

Twenty years after the war ended, he aggravated the injuries to his back while working, but was refused workers’ compensation by the insurance doctors, who said the injury was pre-existing. Of course it was pre-existing, the Japanese guards had seen to that.

Yet in contrast to Australia’s denial, the Japanese had paid him compensation when he was nearly blinded while working down a coalmine in their country.

I often offered to write about his experiences, but he always refused, saying he didn’t want to talk about the war. Then one day he asked me to tell his story.

When I started writing it, I was surprised by the extent of his memory. He was able to recall names, places, dates and incidents with vivid clarity.

We met only when he was well enough, and it took me the best part of twelve months before I had his story down on paper. I had just finished when I received a phone call. Jim Bodero was dead.

It was strange that after refusing me for so long, he had asked for his story to be told, strange also that he should have lasted just long enough for it to be completed.

BANKNOTES, hundreds of them in all denominations, littered the street. Australian boots were trampling them into the dust but no one stopped to pick up the money. The men knew they’d get a vicious jab from a Japanese rifle butt if they so much as faltered on the march to Changi Prison.

The money was no good, anyway. It was Straits Settlement dollars, worth nothing now that Singapore had fallen. Looters had thrown it away.

Still, it had Sol Heffernan drooling. ‘I might just do up me bootlace and pick up a motza-enough to retire to the south of France with a randy blonde for company.’

Trying to keep in step alongside him, Jim Bodero whispered that it’d be a bloody silly move. ‘The stuff’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.’

‘I know that, but I’ve never been close to so much dosh in all me life.’ Sol took a kick at a thick bundle. It flew into the air and banknotes fluttered to the ground like outsize confetti. ‘A six-pointer!’ he yelled, remembering the time when he was scoring goals as the full-forward for Collingwood.

A jab in the ribs from a rifle butt knocked him off his feet. He fell in the dirt among the banknotes and other debris of war.

His mates marched on. They knew better than to stop to help him.

The guard raised his rifle above Sol’s head. The marchers, looking back, despaired for him, but Sol’s skull wasn’t smashed in. The rifle was held menacingly until he struggled to his feet and staggered after the others.

The march continued as if nothing had happened. In the gutter, an executed man’s head, severed by a Japanese sword and impaled on a pole, displayed a death grimace as if amused at the proceedings.

The men of C Company 2/26 Battalion had been in Singapore for a week when they were captured. Singapore, the last bastion after the failure to stop the Japanese advance down the Malayan Peninsula, was regarded as impregnable.

Together with the 2/29 and 2/30 battalions, and under direct control of the British Malayan Command, the men had crossed the causeway to Kranji on the island’s northern coast and dug in. They could see hordes of Japanese massing in Johore, arrogantly making no attempt to conceal themselves. This contempt riled the Australians, who submitted repeated requests for permission to shell the enemy positions, but the British garrison brass refused.

One frustrated Australian artillery officer decided to do it anyway, and had his gun crews fire several shells. They didn’t cause much damage, but the sight of the Japanese scurrying for cover was a boost to morale.

The British Malayan Command was ready to court martial the Australian officer for his breach of its orders, and he only avoided this fate because the imminent attack kept them too busy.

Enemy planes and observation balloons, secure in the knowledge they had no aerial opposition, filled the skies above the Australians’ dug-in positions. In their slit trenches, two men to a trench, company platoons waited for the onslaught. Jim Bodero and Peter Murphy reinforced the roofing of their trench with heavy sleepers ripped up from the railway line.

The Japanese started a selective program of artillery harassment. Over an hour or more, they’d land hundreds of heavy rounds on a position, and then switch their attention to another, then another. They had ample ammunition, while the defenders had to conserve theirs.

The dug-in troops, expecting a full-scale attack to come at night, were particularly vigilant after dusk, but in daylight they relaxed sufficiently for inveterate gambler Peter Murphy to organise poker games in the Company Command building, a large, well-reinforced structure in a central position.

Play was often interrupted by fierce enemy shelling. When this happened, the cards were forgotten in the mad rush to get back to the slit trenches. In one of the hurried evacuations, Peter Murphy tried unsuccessfully to bar the exit, calling them a pack of dingoes for letting a few shells interrupt the game. It wasn’t until the barrage eased and players drifted back to the game that Peter told them, ‘I was holding the only decent hand I’d had all day and you pikers pissed off.’

‘And we thought you were being courageous’, one of his mates said.

There was another quick evacuation from a poker game when Jimmy Smith, the platoon truck driver, appeared in the doorway with an unexploded Japanese shell cradled in his arms.

This time Peter Murphy led the hurried exit.

Jimmy yelled at their departing backs, ‘The writing on it says it was made by the Brisbane City Council.’

Curiosity stopped the fleeing men. Everyone knew the pig iron Australia had sent to Japan pre-war could be what was being fired at them, but a local government council back home making shells for Japan was real treachery.

They cautiously approached Jimmy, keen to see the evidence. Jimmy was grinning now. ‘There’s nothing about the Brisbane City Council. I just made that up.’ He waved the live shell in the air, and everybody ducked. ‘I just wanted to know what I should do with this thing.’

Given that the suggestions that were forthcoming were physical impossibilities, Jimmy left with his unexploded shell, apparently with the aim of frightening the shit out of someone else.

By now the Japanese were strafing and bombing from the air without resistance. Their heavy artillery barrages were causing devastation and receiving little reply from guns that were short of ammunition.

Confident of their superiority, the Japanese made repeated attempts to swarm into the Australian sector, but each attack was repelled.

They then switched their attention to the island’s east and west coasts, where the defenders crumbled under the weight of enemy numbers.