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1943.
Reveille was at 0800, roll-call and breakfast at 0830, and work began an hour later. There was
supposed to be a half-hour break for lunch. Work ended at 6.0 pm. It was followed by a meal
at 7.0, roll-call at 8.0, and lights out at 10.0 pm. There were in fact no lights just camp fires at
night.
Swimming, and fishing in the River Kwai was allowed, and at the camp canteen, eggs, sugar,
fish, fruit, soap and cigarettes could be bought. All officers and ORs continued to be paid.
Dunlop wrote: 'Fights in our line rather common, probably due to tobacco shortage... The
system works like this. Nip commander fixes prices of tobacco, cigarettes and foodstuffs
coming in. Will not allow us to pay more, for example, than 25 cents per packet of cigarettes.
Nip troops then buy up all the valuables of the camp - watches, pens and trinkets - for a small
percentage of their real value, then offer to sell cigarettes, etc for twice their value at least, eg
cigarettes 50 cents...
'We must salute all Nip soldiers except when working, when only the NCO IC party salutes.
When a soldier is without a hat, he salutes by bowing... Something is terribly wrong with the
British camp; all the barracks have a terrible sick smell, and it is appalling to see the mess of
dirty gaunt bodies and unmade beds all hours of the day... The Dutch are an ill-disciplined
mob... Hospital state now rising and malaria cases are still coming in... Another curse of this site
is the frequency of very painful scorpion bites - usually several men daily... Frequently people
come in in the dark with severe bites and I suspect snakes, etc. There are many huge tarantulas
and centipedes, not to mention multitudinous ants, and every type of fly, sandflies, etc.
Mosquitos are not plentiful but sufficiently evident after dusk... English entertainers came over to
our camp tonight for a concert and put on a very good show, singing and light comedy... Great
fires lit the scene...
'The railway track being cleared is an astonishing affair. It seems to run without much regard to
the landscape... along the precipitous slope of a hill instead of a ridge. Terrible gaps and
boulders and descents... They drill with the crudest of hand-drills like a short crowbar, and a
hammer. White rock dust flies in all directions, so that the men are plastered with rocks and
sweat, like bakers or plasterers. The heat is infernal, hotter than in the camp... Two great sidings
are to be cut in the rocky mountainside, and a great deal of embanking to be done between...
Work in general is of three types: drilling and blasting; work on the embankment; and jungle
clearing... There is a great deal of bashing.'
Bill Clemence worked on this railway line for about a year.
'There were two cuttings at Konyu, one called Hellfire Pass. We were taken there because the
English working parties were becoming so depleted,
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through cholera, that they just couldn't finish the work. They'd had cholera through their camp.
We were reasonably fit and we finished off the job.
'I worked on the cutting. It had to be blasted through the mountain, with dynamite. Gangs
working on the blasting and drilling were called 'hammer and tap.' We did the drilling with a
metal bar, which had to be hammered in to a certain distance. A charge was inserted by a Jap
engineer and fired, the loose rock then being carted away in baskets and thrown down the hill.
The explosions didn't make much of an impression on the rock, and progress was slow.
'One bloke went right off his skull one night in the cutting. He bashed a guard. With a shovel.
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