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Notes:
British Sumatra Battalion
January 13th 1944
The British Sumatra Battalion had been working the railway from the Burma end from October 1942, the majority being sick, were transported from Changaraya to Kan’Buri Hospital arriving January 13th 1944. When they arrived they found a large camp with about 1000 British already there. A fence was built dividing the camp into equal two parts. Parties did work within the town of Kanchanburi but it was not regarded as a working camp. Local traders sold their goods in the canteen and the health of the Battalion improved, the death rate falling dramatically.
The Battalion was now less then three hundred and was to be split once more. The prisoners were inspected by a Japanese Medical Officer on 23rd March 1944 and the fit were listed to be transported to Japan, they were to be moved first to Tha Makhan.
Information from British Sumatra Battalion by A.A. Apthorp
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1945 - ‘F’ and ‘H’ Force Hospital
Reginald Burton was an officer in the 4th Norfolks. He was sent up country to Thailand with 'H' Force. When the railway was finished the PoWs who survived 'H' and 'F' Forces were taken back to Kan'buri (Kanchanaburi) Hospital. The officers took it in turn to perform night duty, which was removing those who had died in the night from the wards, before those who survived the night awoke in the morning. He refers to Tamils, these were the Rumusha in a cholera camp on the Thailand-Burma Railway.
This passage brought a lump to my throat, I tried reading it to my wife, but couldn’t.
‘Although I'd seen much of death, I found this night a very harrowing one. There was not the nightmare ghastliness of that gathering up the Tamil cholera corpses. This was something much more intimate, as though each body that I helped to carry from the wards was some relative. It was impossible to think of the burden as just another corpse. I was too conscious that this had been a man, that somewhere a wife or a mother would mourn him, he had come out east with a determination to do his bit, that he had faced the defeat, despair and degradation of the ghastly ordeals to follow. Now he was dead and I was carrying his body just a little nearer to its last resting place. It might so easily have happened the other way round. A feeling of brotherhood was created and as I staggered through the dark wards with these pathetic dead I couldn’t keep tears from my eyes.’
Information from 'Railway of Hell' by Reginald Burton
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