N.Z. VICTIMS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 224, 21 September 1945, Page 5

N.Z. VICTIMS

JAP PRISON CAMP

SERGEANT’S RESCUE FROM THE GRAVE Reed. G. 15 p.m. Brisbane, Sept. 2b Eighty per cent, of an Australian and New Zealand force of 5000 who were working on the notorious Thai-land-Burma railway died of cholera, said a New Zealand Army medical orderly, Sergeant S. W. Peers, of Auckland, who was one of a party of 16 liberated New Zealanders who arrived in Brisbane yes. er day afternoon. They were the first liberated New Zealanders to reach Australia from Singapore.

Sergeant Peers said that there was a severe outbreak of cholera at Tamurah Pah Camp, in Thailand, and that because of the lack of proper equipment the force of 5000 was reduced to hundreds. Only the line work of a Melbourne doctor saved the others. He worked unceasingly with crude, improvised instruments.

“I was unfortunate to get cholera soon after I arrived in Thailand,” said Sergeant Peers. ‘‘lt was a bad attack. and I knew I had but a slight chance of recovery. In a few hours I had lapsed into a coma, and the next thing I knew I was being lowered into a grave by some Australians. When I moved and showed signs of

recovery they had the shock of their lives. It appears .that when I was in the coma Japanese guards came through the huts and collected me among the other dead. I was thrown into a heap of dead Australians and left to await burial. My Australian friends saw me there and dug a grave for me. It was just as I was being lowered that I rallied. Having cheated death so narrowly, I was determined to recover, and injected saline into my leg by cutting away the skin with a pen-knife. The crisis passed, and I recovered.”

Sergeant Peers said that the Japanese were not concerned with the high death-rate, except that they shot Australians who had cholera to prevent it spreading to their camps. WRISTS RESET WRONG WAY Private M. A. Brennan, also of New Zealand, said that as punishment, for knocking out a Japanese guard in a camp ’a Thailand, he had his wrists broken and set by a Japanese doctor so that the palms faced upwards. When he returned to Singapore an Australian doctor reset his wrists and now he can use ihem normally again. Brennan said that after his wrists were broken and reset the wrong way by the Japanese doctor, he was thrown into a cage. Food was tossed into the dirt and he had to crawl for it and eat it on the ground. But for an Australian doctor who used to sneak to him at night and give him morphia, said Brennan, he would have died.

A party of New Zealanders will fly direct to Auckland to-day. It will be the longest flight ever made in a Dakota—l3oo nautical miles—and extra petrol tanks will be carried. Civilian women interned at Changi Gaol and later at Wyme Road internee camp, Singapore, were forced to undress in the presence of Japanese guards, said Sister E. M. Uniake, of Taranaki, who Is the firs' woman internee to reach Australia from Singapore. She arrived at Darwin yesterday with 15 male internees and prisoners of war. She was employed at a large civil hospital in Singapore. Sister Uniacke said that the Japanese guards forced native women to live with them. This probably saved the white women in the goal from being molested. The women internees were given 14 ounces of rice a day, but it was infested with weevils and maggots. To supplement this diet, they ate grass, leaves, and flowers. They started to catch snails, but the Japanese issued an order that snails could not be caught as they were camp property.