Charles Steel - Burma railway man : Secret letters from a Japanese POW

BURMA RAILWAY MAN

SECRET LETTERS FROM A JAPANESE POW

BURMA RAILWAY MAN

SECRET LETTERS FROM A JAPANESE POW

by
BRIAN BEST

First published in Great Britain in 2004
and reprinted in this format in 2013 and 2014 by
PEN & SWORD MILITARY
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright Brian Best, 2004, 2013, 2014

ISBN 978 1 78340 067 6

The right of Brian Best to be identified as Author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Previously published in 2004 under the title Secret Letters from the Railway

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by Robert Hope

Captured, taken prisoner and in the bag

Sounds so strange yet means the same

To be transported from the fray

The enemy to guard through night and day

Incarcerated behind barbed wire fences

Little to do, except time to while away

Long endless days and cold, cold nights

Now imprisoned and unable to fight

Many a long year through endless humdrum

But we were lucky with this weary boredom

Of our comrades out in the East

Sent to fight and the enemy to beat

Outmanoeuvred and taken out

Too far away, they would have to do without

The enemy to take and be beaten down

With fist or boot and rifle butt

Starved, abused and worked to death

Lose zest for life and to die within

If not disease, work and beatings, the bayonet will

Bring to an end so soft a kill

But such is war fate served an unjust hand

Who ever said war was grand

A soldier death in battle to die

But what of those who died a prisoner

Who served and suffered right to the end

Yet all were unable to self defend

Less we forget, but always remember

The nightmares and cries of the survivor

Through the harshness all suffered pain

And those that died, did not die in vain

When I was asked if I was interested in editing the letters kept by a prisoner of the Japanese, my initial reaction was that the subject matter would be both grim and depressing. I am glad I did not turn down the project, for I found in the letters of Charles Steel one of the most uplifting reading experiences I have ever enjoyed.

For this, I am grateful to Margaret and David Sargent for putting their trust in me and allowing full access to all of Charles and Louise Steels papers.

I must also thank the staffs at the Imperial War Museum Library and Crowborough and Tunbridge Wells Libraries for their help and suggestions.

Charles Steel had a most unfortunate war. He was one of the unlucky few who participated in two of the greatest disasters to befall the British Army Dunkirk and the fall of Singapore. He not only survived both experiences but emerged mentally stronger and surprisingly unembittered. His story is well worth the telling, for he was a survivor of that most appalling experience that could befall a soldier captured during the Pacific War he was held a prisoner of war by the Japanese.

For four long years he and his fellow prisoners endured cruelties and hardships that are, today, almost beyond comprehension. Many men did not survive the harrowing experiences of starvation, disease, slave labour and the barbaric acts of their captors. Unable to cope with the nightmare into which they had been pitched, so many suffered mentally and just gave up as if preferring death to any faint hope of eventual salvation.

Steel was not one of these Muselmanner, the German slang for the walking dead, whose divine spark had been extinguished within. Instead, he refused to be paralysed by a denial of what was happening to him and set about adopting a goal he could focus upon. Something that would kindle a fighting spirit so he would be able to trudge through the darkness toward a far distant pinprick of light.

Within days of being captured at Singapore, Charles wrote his first letter to Louise, his wife of just ninety days. From the chaos of that debacle, when he felt sure they would be shortly repatriated, Charles began writing letters that were never sent. Even when he was at his lowest ebb, a sick, starved slave on the Burma-Siam railway, he kept writing to his beloved Louise, relating not only the everyday horrors but also his observations of his captors, his fellow POWs, the surrounding countryside and wildlife. Above all, the letters were declarations of love written by a man who focused on his young wife as his personal reason to rise above the surrounding hopelessness and will himself to survive. Risking punishment for the Japanese forbade any writing or sketching that would record their inhuman behaviour Charles managed to document life as a slave labourer on one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the twentieth century. The letters were a form of record, but written for Louises eyes only and with no thought that they would be read by a curious posterity.

Steel wrote and hid 183 letters during captivity and another thirty-two after the Japanese surrender. They show a man who retained his sanity, humanity and even a sense of humour under the most testing of circumstances. Far from being a broken man, he put his experiences behind him and made his dreams during captivity come true.

These stark opening words written from Changi, just after the fall of Singapore, were the first of nearly 200 letters written, but never sent, by Battery Sergeant Major Charles Steel. They were written when there seemed hope that he and his fellow captives might be exchanged and repatriated. This was the time of phoney captivity, when the Japanese left the British and Australians to their own devices and the only suffering was poor food, overcrowding and boredom. When Steel wrote that he was a prisoner of the Japanese, it did not have the fearful connotation it was soon to gain. Indeed, those British officers who were familiar with the Japanese Army during the 1920s and 1930s did not predict the dramatic change of behaviour towards their prisoners. It was pointed out that, during the war of 190405, the Japanese treated their Russian prisoners in an exemplary fashion.