As a teenager working at F. Fallshaw & Sons I had the privilege of meeting Bill Heard who was a close workmate of my father. Bill, of the 2/29 Battalion, had been a Prisoner Of War during WWII,and had been put to work on the Thai-Burma Railway by his captors.
Bill was distinguished by his very thick lensed spectacles, and I recall that his poor eyesight was due to deprivations suffered in captivity. Of course he came home with malaria. One day he bought in a photograph of himself working on the railway, he was piactured driving a jeep. The jeep was just a shell, and was used for the transport of heavy rocks. It had no engine, and was being pulled by other prisioners using ropes. Bill joked that since he was the most intelligent POW he got the job of driving the jeep, instead of the grunt work of pulling the ropes. He didn't tell me any of the bad things.
"A lot of men lost their legs at that camp and one was my mate, Lloyd Ridge. I got a message that I was on the amputation list as well as being requested to help Lloyd through his leg amputation, which was to be first thing next morning. My job was to hold his head down and stop him banging his brains out on the table. I did that for the seven minues it took Dr. Coates to take his leg off; he had his right leg amputated above the knee. My other job was to keep his Burma cheroot alight; it calmed the nerves and gave him something to do. He survived and he made it until only a couple of months ago.
It's not very reassuring when you are holding a mate down on the amputation table and you're on the list to have your own done. In those seven minues you watch the scalpel and the saw, knowing that they had sent to the kitchen for the saw, which had just been cutting up the ox bones for the soup. It was a 14-tooth-per inch saw; being a tech study teacher I know something about saws. For me, I took it for granted that I was going to be a one-legged bloke and all would be well, because when the leg was gone and the curetting and spraying or whatever you were having done at the time wasn't needed any more, you simply wouldn't have that rotten bottom part of your leg to worry about."
[ A reminisence of Kenneth Harold Darwin, p.79, The Men Of The Line - Stories of the Thai-Burma Railway Survivors by Pattie Wright,The Miegunyah Press, 2008 ]
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