Any comment on such a staggeringly, insolently hypocritical speech is superfluous.

After the speech, some Jap-Happy rubber boots were issued and some people got cheap cotton shorts. That evening there was a combined Jap-British show (by order) under an atap roof hastily erected on the square, a show in which British performers were exceedingly few and very reluctant to appear. As with all Nip shows, it went on for hours; the Koreans were all roaring drunk on an issue of a pint of beer a man, and the British audience escaped as early as it could to the huts, where it examined and criticised the characteristics of the Japanese race far into the night.

Before going on to describe the very considerably improved conditions of the camp, which by Christmas became really quite a comparatively pleasant place, it is the right time to set down many of the true stories from above and around us that were for ever coming into our camp – for an H.Q. camp naturally receives news from all sources. Then, once the facts are publicly and faithfully recorded against the short-lived Bamboo Empire of Tojo, we can turn our backs on horrors and atrocities for a good while, and during a better time show how we filled our hours, and through native ingenuity made life more tolerable.

First of all, I wish to insist once again on the unspeakably terrible conditions of the Asiatic workers on the railway, and through stories told me by friends in the Malayan Civil Service and others, their conditions can best be illustrated. These Malayan Civil Servants and planters risked their lives and gave away part of their own meagre rations time and again to help coolies completely abandoned by the Nips, and for whom they, as representatives of the British Government, felt direct responsibility.

All these events occurred between July and November 1943, and we’ll begin with a visit to the Tamil ‘Base Hospital’ at 204 kms, which I made myself. In charge of this so-called hospital were two young British doctors, and in their camp at the moment were a thousand or two seriously ill Indians suffering from every conceivable disease, but very largely from huge, untreated ulcers. The only drug in the entire hospital was a limited quantity of Pot. Permang., and bandages were made from tearing up the filthy clothes of the men who’d died the previous day. I saw a sick parade come slowly forward and watched a weak solution of Pot. Permang. put on gaping ulcers that it turned the stomach to look at. One wretched Chinese I remember hobbling along and having it put on a foot with the worse complications of Singapore Foot I’d ever seen; the foot was swollen to the size of a balloon and from the tips of the bloated toes almost to the ankle, the whole organ was a mixture of purple and raw flesh. They had no anaesthetics and not one surgical instrument. On the previous day nine men had died, and up to 11 o’clock that morning another two. The coolies had only been in Thailand about four months, and these doctors estimated that at a minimum 100,000 had already died.