The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [59]
Faith in God could not prevent the beatings on the railway, which were totally routine. The threat of a rifle butt across your head or bamboo cane across your body forever loomed large. For no reason at all wire whips would lash into our backs and draw blood. Some guards would creep up on you and strike the open tropical ulcers on your legs with a bamboo stick, causing intense agony. Often they delivered these beatings with such brutality and swiftness that you did not see them coming or even know what they were for. Sometimes you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Korean guards took a certain pleasure in the beatings. They had express permission to kill prisoners without any reference to higher authority. But most of them would be satisfied to stop at the sight of trickling blood. The beatings, no matter how frequent, never got any easier to take. In fact they got tougher. Each time I took a beating it chipped away, not just at my bones and waning muscles, but at my will to endure them. The dilemma was whether to swallow your pride by going down at the first blow or to retain some of your dignity by taking several blows and standing up to them. If you refused to show that their blows were hurting you, they would fly into rages and the beating could be severe, even fatal.
From an early period the Japanese camp commandant, whom I called the ‘Black Prince’, became ever more inventive with his punishments. I could not imagine a more sadistic and evil person on the planet. The more heinous the so-called ‘crime’, the sicker the sentence. Under his instructions the guards had free rein. If they felt you deserved something more than a beating, it meant taking you aside and making you pick up a large boulder. For the rest of the day you had to hold the rock over your head in the blazing heat. Within minutes your already weak and malnourished arm muscles would start to twitch and fail you. Before long you would have to drop the rock, usually the size of a rugby ball or football, mindful you did so without letting it fall on your own skull. When you let go the guards would pounce – fists, rifle butts and boots flailing into your body until you picked the rock up again. It would go on all day. And if the Japanese officer did not think you had learned your lesson sufficiently, the punishment would be repeated back at camp.
The Black Prince was a true bastard. Others called him the ‘Kanyu Kid’ but I thought my name suited Lieutenant Usuki really well. He was darker than the other Japanese soldiers and strutted around like royalty, his beefy gut protruding from beneath a shabby uniform. He despised us totally. We were scum to him. His absolute power over us and capacity for pitiless brutality made him so terrifying to me.
Long before our decision to incarcerate crazy men, the Japanese had built their own cages. The ‘black holes’, as they were known, were a higher form of punishment. Those unfortunate enough to be locked inside the semi-subterranean cages, proportioned so you could not stand, lie down or even kneel fully, would be kept in for a month typically. Corrugated iron and metal covered the bamboo to intensify the heat and deprive victims of air and any cooling breeze. Few who went in came out alive.
The Black Prince’s right-hand man was Sergeant Seiichi Okada, known to us Brits simply as ‘Dr Death’. Short and squat he took the roll-calls and carried out all of the camp commandant’s orders. Presumably he was more educated than the other Japanese or Koreans but he was evil to the marrow. Ruthless in the extreme he loved tormenting us. He especially revelled in a sickening