Article written by Dr Tim Flanagan from Tasmania and published in 'Barbed Wire & Bamboo' Feb 2016.
‘F’ FORCE SURVIVOR – STILL AT HOME
Albert Benjamin ‘Ben’ WEST TX 5828
Ben West, ex2/29, an F-force survivor and still at home.
At the 2015 annual reunion of the 2/29th Battalion, held in Melbourne, there was only one former POW present- Ben West. He was though surrounded by the next three generations of his own family, all testimony to the remarkable life he has lived, and person he is.
I visited Ben at his home, still on the Soldier Settler block his father was granted after returning wounded from World War One. Ben came to live there as a 5 year old. The farm is on north-west Tasmania’s Table Cape, just outside the town of Wynyard. The cape is now famous for the tulips grown on it, and their colours which with the rich brown soil, sea and a lighthouse perched on a high cliff makes for a photographer’s paradise. On this farm Ben and his wife who died earlier in the year, raised their 7 children, one of whom now works the farm, 3 others live nearby.
In all likelihood walking up and down the steep paddocks as a lad helped attune Ben for what was to lie ahead.
Ben is the only bloke left, from a group of about 80 Tasmanians who enlisted in September 1941. After initial training at Brighton camp near Hobart they went to Victoria. In January 1942, about midway through the Malaya-Singapore campaign, they were amongst 3500 personnel who sailed from Sydney on the Aquitania. The Tasmanians were part of a draft of about 500 reinforcements who were sent to Johor in southern Malaya to reinforce the 2/29th Battalion shortly after ‘it was cut about badly at (the battle of) Muar River’ on 20 January 1942. Then the retreat back to Singapore- all on foot.
Ben sees life’s various turns as lucky- in Singapore only two days after the surrender he was put in the first work party to go to the city, and did not return to Changi until ten months later. As a result he told me he missed out on being put in A-Force which went to Burma, or B-Force which went to Borneo and as he says ’And only six of them survived’; or the Selerang Barrack affair.
His luck deserted him when he was drafted to F-Force, 7,000 men slightly more than Australian and British POWs. F-Force was ‘loaned’ by the Japanese command in Singapore, to the Japanese command in Thailand, which was an added complication, and added to the groups’ deprivations. They left Singapore by rail in ‘….. April 1943, in F Force, Pond’s Party, 700 of us, we never had a permanent camp, just carried our gear, you’d walk and work – finished up at Nieke, up near the border with Burma’ (which is 302 km from Bampong where they had got off the train that bought them up from Singapore). The group carried their chunkels and qualies, and few worldly possessions on themselves; and eight men to a stretcher but soon only four left capable of doing that; and on top of this still expected to work by day.
Ben quietly tells me of his experiences, and I am mesmerised as I listen to this humble old man. ‘ The Japs set us up in companies, in alphabetical order; Hec Watson, Jimmy Welsh. It was all night time travel, about 20 km a night. I remember when we pulled into Tarsau, only a little bloke, got him up …he told me to stop and have a break, I said “If I put you down cock, I’ll never be able to pick you up again”…put him and his pack up on my back and pack, sort of like a fireman’s lift’.
Did you ever see him again? ‘No, I don’t think he made it, half of them (F-Force) never returned’.’
After the Thai-Railway was completed, Ben started the long walk back down the Line, but inevitably ill health came and he travelled part of the way on a barge.
Ben though does not see life in terms of misery and suffering. He was a tough footballer, who knew how to take a blow; and a realist so when a Japanese guard abused them for being too slow going down a greasy slope, and showed them how but slipped and landed on his backside the group of Australians all laughed, which I commented on was a brave thing to do ‘Not really, they couldn’t shoot us all, they had to have someone to do the work’.
Ben was in Thailand for 12 months. Upon his return to Singapore he spent much of his time working on Changi airport. On the 15 August 1945 when the Japanese surrendered he was in the River Valley Camp, working on Tagglin Hill digging foxholes for the Japanese. Coincidentally, this was the same place where he had been at the time of the British surrender on 15 February 1942, at that time he had been with other Australians guarding a crossroad.
The Japanese initially made no announcement of the surrender, it was a growing presumption, badly interrupted a few day later when a British plane flew over, and the Japanese opened fire with their Ack Ack guns. The surrender became real, when a 6 feet 3 inches tall British lieutenant who had parachuted onto the island, commandeered a car and came to their camp. It was to be a little longer before they saw the next ally, but it was none other than Lord Louis Mountbatten himself with his wife and entourage, but the delay had caused the Australians to begin to refer to the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia as ‘Linger, Louis longer’
Ben returned to Australia on the Esperance Bay, via Darwin where they were issued with new uniforms, then to Sydney. As he says, by this stage he had completed a circumnavigation of Australia!
Then a train to Melbourne, and boat to Burnie. The Wynyard RSL had a bus for the 4 or 5 other POWs from his town returning home. Later in the day when Ben and I went for a drive in Wynyard, he showed me where the bunting was up in the street, and the townspeople had gathered to greet the survivors home.
Returning home was to have its own sadness, as he was to find out that his oldest brother Jack -Bertram John West TX3397, a member of the 2/40th Battalion, who was captured on Timor in March 1942; after escaping and going bush, was betrayed, recaptured, tortured then executed by the Japanese there in October of that year.