A POW's account of building the 'Death Railway'

Albert Moreton, a British POW who endured terrible deprivation through forced labor on the notorious Thailand-Burma Railway, never shared his wartime experiences with his family.

But decades later, three diaries detailing his thoughts and activities while he was a captive of the Imperial Japanese Army turned up, and one of his grandchildren, David Moreton, who lives in Japan, helped publish them in Japanese.

The book, "Surviving the War--the secret diaries of an English POW along the Thailand-Burma Railway, 1942-1945," was published by Tokyo-based Yuzankaku Inc. in August. The English edition is available from Trafford Publishing .

The book is the culmination of efforts by David, who teaches English at Tokushima Bunri University, and five women involved in international exchanges in Tokushima Prefecture over the past three years to translate the entries into Japanese.

The book project took David to Thailand in March to gain a better picture of what his grandfather and other Allied POWs had faced. He visited remnants of the railway route and related locations.

David, 40, was shown his grandfather's diaries for the first time in 2003 by his uncle, Peter, who discovered them inside a leather briefcase in Albert's bedroom closet after he died. Although Peter took up transcribing the diaries, which were painstakingly written in small script, about 20 years ago, he abandoned the effort because he found it too wrenching. David took up where he left off.

Albert Moreton joined the British Army in 1932 at age 22.

After being posted to India, he was transferred to Singapore to defend what was then a British colony from invading Japanese forces.

He was taken prisoner, along with 100,000 other Commonwealth soldiers, when the British forces surrendered Singapore in February 1942.

Moreton was later shipped to Ban Pong in central Thailand to help construct the Thailand-Burma Railway.

More than 60,000 Allied POWs as well as hundreds of thousands of laborers from parts of Southeast Asia that Japan had already occupied were mobilized for the colossal project.

Building the 415-kilometer railway connecting Thailand and Burma was crucial to Japan's war effort because it offered a badly needed supply route to its troops on the Burma front.

Moreton was near the Thai-Burmese border when the railway opened in October 1943 after 15 months of construction work.

But it was completed at enormous human cost.

Some 13,000 Allied POWs and several tens of thousands of Asian laborers perished during the effort, characterized by endless hours of heavy labor, insufficient food, poor hygiene and relentless bouts of endemic diseases such as cholera and malaria.

The rail route was later dubbed "the Death Railway." British director David Lean's 1957 film "The Bridge on the River Kwai" portrays the ordeal. The film, starring William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins and Sessue Hayakawa, won seven Academy Awards, including one for best picture.

The first entry in Moreton's diaries was Nov. 4, 1942, after he became a POW. The final entry, Dec. 29, 1945, followed his return home.

His gripes about poor diet came up almost daily.

The entry for Dec. 16, 1942, reads: "There is a good deal of hunger and rations are not enough." On Aug. 12, 1943, he wrote: "... I (am) eating a little rice and mixed stew, although it is rotten muck--I have no strength."

The prisoners worked in awful conditions, felling trees in dense jungle and working waist-high in water at times.

Moreton's outrage against the Imperial Japanese Army poured out when he learned that other POWs had succumbed to diseases or had been killed in air raids by the Allied forces.

"... They are savages, uncivilized and always have treated humans as animals and machines as if to work us till we fall to pieces--all worn out!!" (Sept. 7, 1944).

Despite the hostilities, his entries also recorded some hearty exchanges with his Japanese captors.

"The Doctor. Said to me yesterday, 'In one year the fighting will stop, so you must look after health to go home to your wife and children.'" (Dec. 19, 1943).

The entry for June 28, 1945, reads: "There is much sport with the Nips guard who are rather nervous and who seem to have first experience with POWs. On the whole, the Nip guards are quite OK."

At times, Moreton spilled out his disillusionment with his fellow British POWs.

"Day by day, I see what these English are really like and what a rotten, selfish crowd they are," reads the entry for Feb. 13, 1944. "They don't mind if their comrades are sick (and) needing help. They see before them but don't come forward to offer help."

As the war dragged on, Moreton could not help noticing a feeling of war weariness even among the Japanese soldiers. He wrote: "Nips are reported to predict that the end of war will be soon and seem to be fed up as much as we. (Theirs is a poor outlook!) We have all to gain, they have everything to lose and the only compensation is that they might get back to Japan," reads the entry for March 3, 1945.

As for his yearning to return home and be united with his wife and son, Moreton wrote on Aug. 29, 1943: "I wonder what kind of weather it is at home and how my Cheesy and little Tiddly are doing? I hope that they are not worrying, but they are bound to be. It is only natural. I am longing to see them and get settled in our own little home away from continual moving of Army life. Curse it!"

In 1949, after his return to Britain, Moreton moved with his family to Canada, a country he fell in love with when he visited as a teenager.

He worked in various jobs, including sales of insurance policies and as a nurse, before he passed away at age 72 in 1983.

Keeping a journal in captivity was apparently a perilous undertaking. Moreton once told Peter that if he had been caught by the Imperial Japanese Army, he would have been shot.

"It is imperative that stories like his not be hidden away, be available for all to read, so we can learn from our past to better our future," David said.(IHT/Asahi: September 17,2009)