Captured!

Brenda M. Tranter

Description

Australian Lieutenant, A.E. Tranter, from Heathcote, Victoria, (Australia) spends time in Malaya training young soldiers during the waiting period prior to WW2 in Asia. He survives the battle against the Japanese in Muar and the fall of Singapore, before escaping by boat to the wilds of Sumatra. However, his luck fails and he becomes one of the thousands of prisoners of war in the slave labour camps in Sumatra. He writes a tender book for his little daughter which he manages to keep hidden from the guards throughout his ordeal. Remarkably the book is all about the pleasant and beautiful things he has seen and learned in his enforced travel, even if witnessed from the heat and stench of locked box cars “ … in spite of the discomfort , we saw much that was interesting and beautiful”.
Despite this long ordeal, his writing conveys a message of tolerance, understanding and responsibility.
Tranter is amongst those put to work building a road through the jungle in Atjeh, then later, the second death railway - the Pakenbaroe/Moeara Railway, ironically completed on the day WW2 ended; never used and now forgotten in Australia by all but a few.
Here the Japanese and Koreans’ treatment of the prisoners becomes increasingly brutal with death and disease common, especially amongst “ the Romushas” - Asian enforced labourers - 80 000 of whom die. Meanwhile his little daughter is growing up in his hometown, under her mother’s care, both unaware of her father’s whereabouts.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Captured!
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 03 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664105935
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

Captured! Living with Death on the Sumatran Railway
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Brenda M. Tranter
 
Copyright © 2022 by Brenda M. Tranter.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6641-0594-2

eBook
978-1-6641-0593-5
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 09/15/2022
 
 
 
 
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In memory of all those who suffered in POW camps and those who waited.
Galah
When we saw the seriously injured galah, struggling, it was obvious it had to be destroyed.
“We’ll have to put the poor thing out its misery,” said my father, “otherwise a fox will kill it.”
He despatched the galah efficiently, rapidly.
We caught the slightly sweet scent of a long dead sheep some distance away, floating on the crisp air of a very cold windy day. As I rubbed my numb hands, I was thinking about soldiers who had perished in the agonising cold on the Russian Front.
In my ignorance I remarked to my father, “I think if one has to be in battlefield, it is better to be in a hot climate.”
“No”, he replied, “in such cold, you don’t have to put up with the smell of death.”
A pause.
“It never leaves you.”
We trudged through the paddock, saying no more. The sensitive tone of his voice indicated a subject best left. I had grown up with the instinctive knowledge that some questions should not be asked; that certain topics should only be discussed amongst those who had been there; that oblique references such as “Sumatra”, “Atjeh Party” and “Pakenbaroe”, were heavy with meaning and pain.
Over time I met some of my father’s POW comrades and read widely about WW2, especially about the prisoners of the Japanese. My father had written an optimistic book for me during the second year of his captivity in Gloegoer, Northern Sumatra, just before he went to Atjeh. He had given it to me when I was fourteen. It was full of information about the places he had been, the local peoples, Indonesian folk stories, poems and verses, and an account of a “Melbourne Frog Cup, 1942”, which his frog had won. It contained an account of his escape route across Sumatra and the journey to Northern Sumatra from Padang on the west coast. Despite all the deprivation and cruelty which had followed Gloegoer, he managed to bring it home to me.
As the years passed, I gradually found out small snippets of information about his experiences and eventually, long after his death, researched and wrote a record of some. I read letters from fellow POWs and relatives of the deceased young men, forever lost to a pointless exercise in futility - the building of a railway in Sumatra, which sank back into the jungle, to be used only once: the needless deaths of 82,500 men and boys and the damaged, starved bodies of the survivors.
The smell of decaying unburied bodies along a 220 kilometre track of death.
The smell of a dead sheep.
The small death of a galah.
•••••
 
“I would try to collect for you a little book…
I have seen some interesting places, and peoples, and have met some interesting persons...
… include in this my little offering to you, as a pledge of my love and constant thoughts of you. With this intention, Brenda darling, I dedicate this to you.”
From a letter by her father to Brenda, dated June 21, 1943
“ I first met your dad when we were prisoners of war in Sumatra. Your father proved to be a very caring officer particularly to the lower ranks of the 2/29 th Battalion. He worked tirelessly during those horrendous times to try to improve conditions for any members of the Battalion.
Unfortunately, the longer we were prisoners the worse our conditions became and in the end it was just about every man for himself in an effort to survive.”
Bob (Slim) Nelson 2/29 th 29/06/00 From a condolence letter to Neville Tranter.
“Upon reflection and bearing in mind the old saying that “a tree grows from the bottom up, but dies from the top down”, it seems to me that you must have been a great officer in encouraging these men in those terrible times, and you were the tree that continued to stand tall in the time of adversity.
I will forever be grateful to have had my mind put at rest about the loving, thoughtful people who did their best to help Ted and the dignity with which he was laid to rest.”
From a letter to my father by Betty Raison – cousin of Ted Hopson, the first Australian to die at Atjeh.
Contents:
Galah
Prefac e:
Family:
Military Organisation:
Lieutenant Arthur Edmund Tranter (VX52843)
Childhood Memories
The Wait
The Invasion of Malaya and Singapore
After Muar
Escapes and Capture
Captured: To Gloegoer
Melbourne Frog Cup 1942
Soedra
The Kurchicha – or Indian Nightingale
The Tale of Amra and Raksasa
The White Tjempaka and the Red Shoeflower
Taken From Kangaroo Kabbar
Sumatra: East to West: 1943
Sumatra - South to North (1943)
Siboeroet 1943
Malacca
Atjeh
Pakenbaroe
Reunion
Life After Liberation
After Indonesian Independence
Finale
Appendices
References
Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Prefac e:
This account is based on my memories, memorabilia collected by my parents, conversations with my father, my mother, my brother and my uncle, Hilton Stanton and others, over many years, as well as archival material, much of which was supplied by Hilton Stanton, and email conversations with sons and daughters and other relatives of the prisoners. Spelling variations are due to differences in records and modernisation of written Bahasa Indonesia. Much of the information about camp conditions is attributable to Dutch journalist and author, Henk Hovinga, with whom I corresponded for several years and whose thorough research of the Pakenbaroe-Moeara Railway camps revealed the atrocious and inhumane conditions, mostly unreported and little known about, in Australia – perhaps because there were so few Australians there. However, in The Netherlands at Bronbeek, Arnhem, and in England, at the National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas, Staffordshire, there are fitting memorials to those who worked as slave labourers under the Japanese in Sumatra: those who survived and approximately 82,500 Asians (Romushas), Indo-Europeans and Europeans who died as a consequence of illness, disease, maltreatment, deliberate starvation or being lost at sea, in order to construct the Pakenbaroe-Moeara Railway. In recent years more research has been done and much is available on the internet.
Some bodies were never recovered. Relatives and loved ones were left to grieve. Information of any kind was welcomed.
Although we children led our normal lives in safety and comparative austerity during the period of our relatives’ incarceration, families did not know where their husbands, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, brothers, cousins and loved ones were and none knew of what they were enduring. Consequently, the children and the grandchildren of those stoic POWs have sought to find out what their fathers and grandfathers endured and the contrasting lives between those still at home and those in captivity. Life for the prisoners was a constant test of bravery and shared adversity.
The prisoners coped with life after the war in various ways. They rarely spoke about their experiences and consequently, wives and families had little idea of what had befallen them. Some carried a hatred for their captors, others were reconciled to their experiences. Some, like my father, respected the fighting ability of the Japanese soldiers, but realised that the Japanese system was responsible for the way prisoners were treated and understood that the system of bullying extended all the way down the line, from senior officers to the lowliest foot soldier. Beneath the foot soldiers were the Korean guards whose cruelty exceeded that of the Japanese and below them, the prisoners. At the very bottom were the Romushas.
The extracts which I have included from Kangaroo Kabbar were recorded in my father’s document in 1943, and, as far as I know, are the only records retained of that camp newspaper
•••••

From the original writings at Gloegoer, By Arthur E. Tranter
Family:


Arthur 1941
Brenda and Pat




Brenda Aged 3
Brenda Aged 6



My father received this photo and kept it for the rest of his imprisonment.
Military Organisation:
8 th Division: formed on 01/07/1940 consisted of:
Brigades:
22 nd Infantry
32 rd Infantry
24 th Infantry
* 27 th formed Octob