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Burma Railway Survivor

JACK Thomas survived the horrors of the Burma Railway and slave labour in a Japanese coalmine – and lived to be 101.

That fortitude was nurtured right from the start in Broken Hill during the Great Depression.



Jack would recall that his father, William Thomas, “worked his guts out” to keep the family’s Argent St grocery shop going. After school, the young Jack packaged up potatoes and filled bottles of kerosene.

On the death of his mother, “when she was barely 40”, he left Broken Hill High to take a job as an office boy, at 15 shillings a week, for the stock and station agents Bennett & Fisher.



With this existence interrupted by war, he enlisted in the 2/3rd Australian Machine Gun Battalion and boarded a troopship for the Middle East.


“We sailed on a millpond Red Sea towards a fiery sunset,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Soon, the sun would set on his freedom.

Arriving in the Middle East in May 1941, the battalion served alongside the 7th Australian Division in action against Vichy French forces.

By the second week of July, the campaign was over, with the enemy’s surrender.

The machine gunners remained in Syria and Lebanon as members of an occupation force for the rest of the year.



When Japan entered the war, though, they were diverted to the Dutch East Indies early in 1942 with the role of stopping the Japanese advance.

But the machine guns and vehicles were loaded on to a separate ship all the way to Australia. In one of the greatest blunders in military history, SX6327 Private Jack Thomas and his comrades landed in Java drastically short of firepower.

It was, he recalled, “a debacle”.



Their Japanese captors sent them to Singapore and then on to the railway camps in Thailand in appalling conditions.

This was the beginning, for the boy from Broken Hill, of 3½ years of prisoner-of-war life, assailed by debilitating diseases and relentless physical abuse.

Even when the railway was built there was more mistreatment to come.

Jack was dispatched to Japan on a patched up hulk named the Byoki Maru.

“It was not a lot of fun,” was his laconic recollection of that 70-day voyage.

Down a primitive coalmine under the Sea of Japan, he worked through the winter of 1944-45 in thin cotton clothing and with belts around his feet because slaves were not seen as deserving boots.

Another such winter would have killed them, but the US brought the war to a rapid conclusion with the atom bomb.

Japan surrendered, the prisoners were set free, and Jack Thomas found himself back at Broken Hill.



This time, he was in partnership with his father at the grocery store.

When business declined and the shop had to close in the shifting commercial times of the 1950s, he became secretary-manager of the Broken Hill Club.

A directorship with a timber company followed, and then – in 1983 – retirement to Adelaide.



Twice widowed, Jack is survived by the two sons from his first marriage, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Wartime memories were rekindled late in life by travel to the site of his Burma railway prison camp.

And, in 2015, on a mission to Japan when chosen by the RSL as a member of a three-strong Australian exprisoner of war goodwill delegation.

That same year, he delivered the Ode of Remembrance at the South Australian ceremony marking the 75th Victory in the Pacific anniversary.



Interviewed at the time, he said: “I think of the dozens of boys who perished on the railway.

I think of everyone who has felt the love of our country and defended it to the end.” 


Born: November 4, 1920, Broken Hill, NSW
Died: December 12, 2021, Flagstaff Hill, Adelaide, South Australia 

Published Obituary - Adelaide Advertiser
15th January 2022

By: Andrew Faulkner

They sailed to war together, became PoWs together and survived the Burma Railway together. This month, Jack Thomas and Keith Fowler will turn 100 together.

Reclining after fish and chips and a couple of beers, Jack Thomas and Keith Fowler reflect on their happy lot.

“You can’t beat a really cold beer,” Thomas says.

“We’ve had a pretty good day,” Fowler replies . “We’ve had a lot of pretty good days,” Thomas says.

“Actually, I might join up again,” Fowler says. “We’d do it all again mate,” his comrade replies.

Do all what again? Oh, wage fierce war in the Middle East and the Pacific, endure the Burma Railway with Weary Dunlop’s Thousand , and, as part of the greatest generation , build a new prosperity after the world’s bloodiest conflagration.

They are both about to turn 100. Thomas on Wednesday (November 4) and Fowler on November 19.

“It’s only in the last month or so that I’ve realised what a momentous moment it is,” Fowler says.

“When you go back and think about your life and all the things that have happened … well, I’m bloody glad I’ve done something that was worthwhile.”

After experiencing so much – and living so long – minor celebrity has been thrust upon men who acutely feel the responsibility of being two of the few left standing.

“Keith and I feel very fortunate to have grown old together,” Thomas says. “It really is a wonderful thing. It’s been a very interesting part of our lives. I like to think that I’ve been privileged to have been part of history . I was privileged to have served with some great heroes. I don’t look back at it as a bad time – it was an adventure.”

Thomas and Fowler share much more than camaraderie and a birth month. They were both grocer’s assistants when they enlisted in the same unit within days of each other in 1940. Their 2/3rd Machinegun Battalion was bivouacked at Wayville Showgrounds and commanded by the legendary Arthur Blackburn VC. Thomas and Fowler quickly learned the army was not all smart uniforms and glory and VCs.

Thomas was sent to the mess and spent his first day in the army stirring porridge. The meals were served in the poultry pavilion under a sign that read ‘Turkeys and Geese” . (“ Chook” Fowler was right at home. When told the special at the pub we visited for this interview was chicken, he screwed up his face and said: “I always feel like a bloody cannibal when I eat it.”)

They embarked for the Middle East in April 1941. Thomas’s recollection of their troopship steaming “on a millpond Red Sea towards a fiery sunset” is typical of a thoughtful and reflective man with a penchant for the sublime.

As the Diggers prepared for the Allied invasion of Syria, security was paramount. Australian sentries challenged strangers with: “Halt! Where is the kookaburra?” The password was Canberra. “Ask any Arab in the Middle East and they all knew the kookaburra was in Canberra,” Thomas says.

The five-week Syrian campaign was a rare Allied victory in the dark early days of the war. It was a costly triumph; 416 Diggers were killed and 1100 wounded. Including Fowler, who was hugging a comrade made insensible by shelling when he realised he also had a problem – he couldn’t see. He was admitted to hospital but mercifully the blindness was temporary.

Victory earned them a blissful respite garrisoning Syria and Lebanon; they toured ancient ruins, got drunk on Arak – a potent local spirit – and skied among Lebanon’s mountain cedars. Broken Hill-born Thomas saw his first snow after an overnight dusting of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains: “It was a benign time,” he says. “The Mediterranean lapping at our feet, the Biblical hills up behind us, and us in our little bivouacs.”

They knew it was a reprieve, not a release. In time they’d be pitched into the campaign to stop the Axis powers seizing the Suez Canal. Until Japan intervened, and the 2/3rd Machinegun Battalion steamed south-by-southeast to meet the Japanese thrust. As they steamed the troops were lectured about “myopic Japanese and their planes made of bamboo” . Their transport, the liner Orcades, was the fastest ship in the convoy, which was great for outrunning submarines, but the flip side was they were the first troops to arrive from the Middle East. The Orcades deposited Thomas and Fowler at Batavia and the Diggers readied for a last stand in central Java.

Fighting as infantry, because their machineguns had been loaded on a different ship and also because there was no infantry , the battalion performed brilliantly. A scratch Australian force of a few thousand troops held up the enemy for three days, making the invaders believe they faced 15,000 or more Australians. Outnumbered and without air cover or support, the doomed stand ended in their capitulation on March 9, 1942. Thomas and Fowler went into the bag with the rest of their lost legion … officially they were “missing” until confirmed as prisoners of war 15 months later.

The Australians had been beaten but remained unbowed. They mocked the Japanese by growing beards to parody their captors’ goatees. There were retaliatory beatings. So an Australian officer posted an order on the camp noticeboard: “Truculent, spadelike or revolutionary beards shall not be worn.”

In time, Thomas and Fowler were shipped to Changi in Singapore and then sent up the line to labour on the Burma Railway. “No fat, so salt, no sugar, no smokes, no beer, so soap,” says Thomas, but “lots of exercise” . Lots of malaria too, and dysentery. The dreaded cholera. And tropical ulcers that “smelt like death itself” .

Thomas found solace in nature. “It was a beautiful place. Siam sunsets and lovely birds on the river. Your soul could fly free.” Fellow captive Ray Parkin was also set free by nature’s wonder; wonder he portrayed in sketches of butterflies and lizards and flowers.

The celebrated artist and author also captured a prostrate Thomas wearing only a loin cloth, a bandage on his leg and a slouch hat tipped over his face. It is the final picture in Parkin’s seminal account of the Burma Railway, Into the Smother.

After the Railway, Thomas was shipped to Japan, an unimaginable 70-day ordeal on a Japanese rust-bucket . The Australians were then made to work in a coal mine sunk under the Inland Sea; their camp was roughly halfway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thomas and his mates were likely saved by the atomic bombs that razed both cities.

When it was over, the survivors assembled for photos, arranged in rows like footballers after a premiership. Thomas missed the moment – he was on a barracks roof, painting a huge “400” to alert the American pilots to their whereabouts and number. Soon the Americans dropped “44-gallon drums filled with chocolate and cigarettes and boots and flea powder” . He was evacuated to Okinawa, or as he described it, a “land of plenty” . One clement evening, after a dinner of turkey, apple pie and Coca-Cola , he lay on a blanket watching an outdoor movie. The soundtrack could not have been more apt – Don’t Fence Me In. “My cup was full,” he says.

When the war ended, Fowler was still in Thailand, cutting a rail tunnel through a mountain. His work gang included a couple of tough Western Australian miners, who one day refused to enter the shaft because the tunnel was “talking” . This sent the Japanese sergeant into a rage and had a naive Fowler asking: “How the hell can a tunnel talk?” It was miner-speak for creaking. The Japanese sergeant stormed into the shaft to prove it was safe, whereupon the tunnel collapsed, Fowler was spared, and the war was over.

The incident was the last of a string of lucky escapes, starting with Fowler being passed as medically unfit when he first tried to join up. “They said: ‘This man is not fit for overseas service.’ You’ve got to be kidding – I’m as fit as a wild Mallee bull.” He counted it as a blessing, for had he passed he would’ve been posted to the 2/10th infantry battalion, a unit that suffered high casualties in Tobruk and New Guinea.

Fate smiled again on the Railway. Debilitated by dysentery and starvation rations, Fowler wore what the men of the line called the “jungle stare” . “My whole system was breaking down.” But he had a guardian angel in Sergeant Red Sheedy. “I can’t remember ever meeting Red Sheedy before that day,” he says. “He said, ‘You follow me’ . He took me into the jungle and lit a fire.” Anyone who missed a work party was beaten at a minimum. But inexplicably there was no roll call on the day that Fowler rested in the jungle. Sheedy returned in the evening to guide him back to camp.

“Nobody knew that I wasn’t out on the line,” Fowler says. “It was the first bloody time that they didn’t have a count. Why me, out of a thousand men? I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since. I was blessed. Someone must have been watching over me given all the times I’ve been such a silly bastard.”

Both men have forgiven the Japanese. Both men receive a calendar every year from the Japanese embassy in Melbourne. Thomas has been helping a Japanese migrant improve his English: “When he came to see me it was such a joy,” Thomas says. “He is a very fine young man.” Both old Diggers have been to Japan as honoured guests accompanied by gaggles of nurses to care for them. Fowler likes to tell the story of Sascha the Japanese nurse: “She’d take your temperature every night. She came in this night and said ‘Oh Mr Fowler, your temperature’s up’ . I said, ‘Well don’t worry Sascha, it’ll soon go down when you leave’ .”

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