Veterans of WW2 ‘Death Railway’ unite 72 years later
AFTER years of loathing and then decades of mistrust, it was the most civilised of greetings.
A veteran of Japan’s brutal Imperial Army, who once instructed hundreds of Allied prisoners as they built the Burma Railway, shook hands with a British prisoner of war who worked further along the same track before using the only English phrase he knows to ask: “How do you do?”
They had never met in the jungles of the Far East, but Sir Harold Atcherley, 96, and Mikio Kinoshita, 95, still felt the need to rec- oncile after 72 years and a 9 600km journey.
Yesterday’s meeting, in a suite of a central London hotel, is thought to be one of the first times a British prisoner of war has ever met a Japanese veteran who worked on the “Death Railway”, built in 1943 to transport troops and supplies across Thailand.
But for Atcherley and Kinoshita it was merely a chance for two grandfathers to share their memories and finally bury the hatchet. They beamed at each other as Atcherley presented his guest with a bottle of Scotch and asked: “Can I call you Mickey?”
Atcherley invited Kinoshita to make his first visit to Europe after he saw an interview with the Japanese veteran on a BBC documentary about the railway last year. “I wanted to extend the hand of friendship and human understanding after so many years of misunderstanding and hatred – before it is too late,” he said.
Then known as Captain Atcherley, Harold was a 23-year-old intelligence officer in the 18th Infantry Division when he was taken prisoner by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942.
He was soon forced to begin work on the railway, which took only a year to complete, but cost the lives of about 13 000 prisoners of war and 100 000 native labourers. Japan refused to recognise international agreements on fair treatment of prisoners and its soldiers meted out cruel punishments and torture.
Atcherley worked 18-hour days, clearing a path through the jungle. He was given only 250g of rice a day and had to forage for anything else. Of the 1 700 sent to work on his section of the railway, only 400 survived.
Kinoshita was a reluctant warrior. He had just started work as a station master in his hometown of Osaka when war broke out and he was not keen to fight hundreds of kilometres away when he was conscripted in 1941.
“I really didn’t want to go,” he said. “It was my duty as a Japanese boy [but] I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t ever get used to it – the training was so unbearable.”
He, too, was put to work on the railway, in charge of a group of about 100 Australian prisoners of war in Burma, using elephants to carry timber to build a bridge.
Although he never saw anyone abusing the prisoners, he soon learnt of the abuses elsewhere. “Some of the Japanese treated the prisoners cruelly,” he said. “We did not do the right thing. I feel very sad about it. I am sorry.”
He also endured hardship, eating the same rations as the Australian soldiers, working in appalling conditions during the rainy season and living in constant fear of cholera, which killed many of his comrades.
After the war, Atcherley became a successful businessman at Royal Dutch Shell, while Kinoshita resumed his job at the train station, making a quiet pilgrimage to Burma each year to light candles in memory of his friends.