It seemed that there was an organisation at least two years old behind this show. One of the Thais in the H.Q. was one of the fifteen judges of the country, and many Thais had been trained in the U.S.A. and dropped all over Thailand in the last months. They were extremely well organised and the general Thai rising had been due before the end of August. Their plan had been to kill every Nip in the area including the guards on all P.O.W. camps, then to bring us into their safe zone and arm us. They had expected about 40 per cent casualties, but they were quite confident of their success in Kamburi. Bampong would have been a tougher proposition for there were almost as many Nips as Thais there and all the leaders of the pro- Ally Thais had been kicked out. Jack was also told that when the war finished they had feared that the Nips might bump us off, and there had been an Airborne Division standing by in Rangoon and with which they were in wireless communication, that could have been on the spot in Thailand within six hours. After staying there for the most interesting week of his life and seeing no hopes of getting to Malaya, Jack came back to Kamburi. But to think we’d never known they were there! One kilometre up that road and you would have been in a safe Thai zone – and for the last two months – my God!

But still we didn’t really know what a narrow squeak we had had. In the new camp at Nakom Niok they found out the following items. The camp was surrounded by Nip camps containing tens of thousands of Nips, and there was artillery and machine guns always covering them. The Nips had got wind of the coming of Thai trouble and all the officers were being moved into that area with a view to bumping them off as soon as it started. There wasn’t a slit trench in the camp, there were thousands of Nips all round, and they were 180 kms up in the jungle! Among Nip papers were discovered references to a Thai rising, and the probability of our total liquidation about August 21st.

We were very, very lucky to be alive. It had already been conservatively worked out that the railway had cost over 20,000 European and more than 200,000 Asiatic lives; but it seemed that the sudden and unexpected ending of the war saved those already terrible figures from a substantial increase.