Han Samethini Remembered

2009-04-25T15:24:00.001-07:00

Photo by Nikola Drakulic
Surabaya, Java (1946)

2009-04-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

Introduction
1. The Stick and the Piano (1916-1934)
2. The Jazz Man of East Java (1935-1939)
3. Anna (1939-1940)
4. Waiting for War (January-December 1941)
5. The Onslaught (December 1941 - March 1942)
6. Into the Inferno (March-December 1942)
7. Hell Ship to Singapore (January 1943)

8. Changi (January 1943)
9. The Death Railway (January-December 1943)
10. Prison Camp Musician (January 1944 - August 1945)
11. The Shadow Under the Sun (March 1942 - November 1945)
12. Liberation and Heartbreak (August 1945 - May 1946)
13. From A to Z (June 1946 - January 1947)
14. In the Oil (January 1947 - May 1948)
15. "Margie, It's Your Father!" (1949-1950)
16. Clowning (1950-1954)
17. New Start in South Africa (1954-1969)
18. Blaze Away (1969-1974)
19. Old Comrades (1974-1982)
20. With Barely a Sound (1982-1985)
21. Visit to a "Bloody Big Country"(1985)
22. Uneasy Retirement (1985-1988)
23. Veertje (1988-1992)
24. The Song is Ended (1992)
Epilogue: "Always remember him..."

Appendix A: "Chunkai P.O.W. Camp Theatre" by Walter L. Davis
Appendix B: "The Exiles," a Bolero by Norman Smith
Appendix C: The Samethini Band in Bangkok, 1945-1946
Appendix D: Sketch Artist J. Chevallier
Appendix E: The Voyage of the Usu Maru (Ray Parkin's account)
Appendix F: The Diary of Anna Samethini (March-December 1943)
Reader Comments

Art by J. Chevallier, 1946 / Han Samethini Collection

Introduction

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Opa Henry and Mom (San Leandro, California, 1985)

Han Samethini Collection

His name was Han Samethini. To me he was always Opa Henry, opa being the Dutch word for "grandpa," and Henry the Americanized form of the French Henri (the proper first name he almost never used). He was my maternal grandfather. Mom wrote to him regularly, and he wrote back in letters that looked curiously like hers, with a fluid, cursive script that was small and closely spaced.

Sometimes he sent audio cassettes instead of letters, and I remember Mom calling me over one day to hear words addressed particularly to the grandson. From the cassette player came a deep voice speaking with a heavy Dutch accent:

Hello, Robin! This is your Opa Henry. You can call me Opa, you can call me Grandpa. Just so long as you don't call me Baldy or something.

As a boy I almost envied my friends for having grandfathers they could see on weekends or holidays. Certainly my sister Mylene and I grew up enjoying frequent visits to Oma (Grandma) Anna, Henry's ex-wife, who lived within easy driving distance of our home in California. But Opa remained a distant, mysterious, and faintly exotic figure. We knew that he lived in South Africa, a fact which for me always conjured images of lions and giraffes. We heard also that he had been a musician and even a circus clown. This compensated somewhat for his absence because he was, at least, a very interesting absentee grandfather.

Most astonishing was the claim that he had helped to build the Bridge on the River Kwai, the famous World War II Japanese railroad bridge constructed in Thailand by Allied prisoners of war. And not only did he serve as a forced laborer, he also entertained his fellow captives with the accordion. Mom emphasized the latter point with some pride as our family sat down to watch a television broadcast of the David Lean movie. I couldn't have been more than eight years old at the time, and I found much of the dialogue boring or elusive. But when the story progressed to the celebration of the newly completed bridge, and the ragged prison camp orchestra played while POWs danced on the bamboo-and-thatch stage, I felt a sense of wonder: He was there. Opa Henry was actually there.

Years later, in 1981, I said much the same thing as I gazed out over the shoreline and placid blue-green waters of the Makassar Strait: He was here. Here, 39 years before, in the town of Balikpapan on the island of Borneo. I could envision the sea black with landing barges disgorging wave after wave of shrieking, fanatical Japanese infantry. Here I imagined my grandfather must have stood, part of a forlorn and outnumbered Dutch garrison, with little hope of escape and none of victory. What were his thoughts as the enemy closed in? How did he survive to be taken prisoner?

In his letters to me Opa Henry always brushed off such questions. But when he came to America in 1985 (his first and only visit), he recounted a few of his Burma Railway experiences. He had been to the bridge at Tamarkan, the "Kwai" bridge, but declared it was nearly finished when he saw it. He'd worked elsewhere on the Railway, under conditions and treatment that no film of the 1950s would have dared - or been permitted - to show. His recollections of beatings, hunger, and the insane, pointless cruelty of the Japanese guards, were like terrible things swimming up from murky depths. He said to me, in words I will never forget, "You have no idea what you will do to survive, what you will eat, until you are in such a place as that."

Yet, odd as this seems, he volunteered even less information concerning his prewar jazz career in the Dutch East Indies. Nor was he forthcoming about his postwar years on the stage and in the circus in Europe and South Africa. I'd expected him to be a raconteur, overflowing with stories that would confirm the Opa Henry of family lore: the brilliant improvisational musician, the wacky comedian, the irrepressible showman whose spirit could not be crushed even by starvation and slave labor. It puzzled me that such a public man, accustomed to playing in front of crowds, had so little to say about his performances, his art, and his profession.

Not that he was dour. Quite the opposite! Samethini delighted in laughter, especially the laughter of others, dispensing jokes and humorous observations as if from an inexhaustible reservoir. But he was a humble, almost self-effacing man when talk turned to his accomplishments, or his misfortunes. It was admirable, and frustrating at the same time, that he kept the most fascinating elements of his personal history carefully hidden.

When my grandfather died in 1992 in faraway South Africa, it seemed that his story would never be told. I inherited his POW scrapbook, which contained intriguing photographs and documents, but alas, no explanatory notes to help me make sense of them. In 2001 I toyed with the idea of creating a simple web page based on the scrapbook, but gave it up because my interpretation would have been little more than conjecture mixed with expressions of family pride.

Han Samethini Collection

All this changed in late 2006, when Mom handed me the bulk of her father's papers and photographs. The new material included a meticulously arranged album of photos and press clippings chronicling Han Samethini's musical career from the mid 1930s to the beginning of 1947. Leafing through the album, I said in wonder and exultation to the young man smiling with his accordion from the black-and-white images, "Here you are. Opa, I've found you!"

The rest has proceeded with unforeseen speed and success, thanks chiefly to this marvelous invention, the Internet. Without having to purchase an airline ticket or even leave my house, I've contacted sources all over the globe: distant kin, friends of the family who remember the events of the war, and scholars and researchers both professional and amateur. Beyond all initial expectations, I've corresponded with survivors of the Burma Railway. These men are revered in our family, along with all Allied veterans of the Second World War. Due to their generous assistance with this project, we have added reason to be grateful to them.

If I were asked to give a single reason for telling the story of Han Samethini, it would not be the desire to give him some measure of posthumous fame, nor would it be the expression of my longing to understand a relative who was almost a stranger to me (though both motivations play a part). The story should be told, I think, so that the work of my grandfather - the bringing of laughter and delight, especially to those who were troubled or despondent - might in some small way continue. It is a remarkable tale. I hope you will enjoy it.

Robin Kalhorn
Houston, Texas
December 4, 2008

Update (July 20, 2011): Readers of this blog have generously sent me information, photos, and documents on Han Samethini and his colleagues. These include a stunning find: a scan of a 1944 show poster from Chungkai POW camp, Thailand, which was discovered in a junk shop in Australia. Correspondence can be viewed in the Reader Comments section. My thanks to everyone who has helped to expand and improve this modest biography.

The author posing with an Eclectus parrot
(Eclectus roratus, native to the East Indies)

1. The Stick and the Piano (1916-1934)

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Frank and Han Samethini (Bondowoso, Java, 1917)
Frank Samethini Collection

Henri Jacques (Han) Samethini was born in the Netherlands East Indies, on the island of Java, on September 4, 1916. He was the younger son of Henri Alexander Samethini and Emma Wilhelmina Frederika Wychgel. Han's elder brother, Francesco Karel (Frank), was born on June 6, 1915.

Of Henri Sr. (born 1889 in Surabaya) we know little, save that he had a military upbringing and that he made his living as a business manager, first in the sugar industry and later in freight shipping. It is possible that he had early musical aspirations, and if so, this trait proved to be the decisive paternal influence on Henri Jr. [1]

Emma (born 1892 in Magelang) busied herself as a zealous promoter of drama and dance. Inspired by the performances and costumes of famed Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, she eventually founded her own dance studio. Photographs of Han and Frank in stage costumes show how far the boys were induced to share their mother's enthusiasm. Doting and even domineering in her affections, she nevertheless enjoyed the full measure of her sons' love and devotion.

The Netherlands East Indies (click map to enlarge)

Sugar Cane
Photo Source: Zoo Leven Wij in Indie

The Samethini home on the sugar plantation (circa 1920)
Han Samethini Collection

The family home was situated on a sugar plantation in Bondowoso, and appears to have been more or less true to the type of Dutch colonial residence described by a contemporary American travel writer:

Their houses are usually big, one-storey buildings occupying a great deal of ground and set in the midst of the plants and flowers and trees of the tropics. There are no cellars in Java, but nearly every house has floors of cement or marble, raised to several feet above the earth. This is to guard against the little animals and insects which get into the houses despite every precaution. Meals are served in a large room in the centre, while the bedrooms are all open on a paved gallery....In front of this inner gallery is a large outer veranda that is roofed but open on both sides to catch any breeze that may blow. This is used as a reception room, and often another one parallel to it serves as the living room. The verandas are furnished for comfort and coolness. [2]

Frank and Han (circa 1920)
Han Samethini Collection

In this home, at the age of five, Han commenced his first piano lessons under the stern supervision of his father. Han's daughter, Margie, comments:

[Henri Sr.] wanted Han to be a concert pianist, not realizing his hands were too small. When Han would miss notes he would be beaten with a small stick. [3]

Han's sister-in-law Elisabeth elaborates:

Once there was a performance planned in Malang and Han was to play his piano. While [he was] practicing his father would stand over him with a stick. If he made a mistake he would hit him on the head. He had hit Han so much that he was unable to play that night! His father of course was very remorseful and hadn't realized he had hit him so hard. [4]

Map of the eastern half of Java, showing the location of Bondowoso (click map to enlarge)

The green, terraced hills of Bondowoso
Photo Source: www.eastjava.com

This is not to suggest that Han's childhood was somber or oppressive. He and Frank grew up in what was, for them, a virtual paradise: the beautiful land of rural East Java. This was a lush country of cane fields, forests, hills, and small streams, a realm fit for boyhood adventures. Tigers still roamed there in the 1920s, and around 1930, at the age of 16 or 17, Frank shot one with his rifle. [5]

Though unlike in appearance and temperament - Han being more reserved and studious, and Frank more outgoing and adventurous - the Samethinis were devoted brothers who stuck together through many scrapes and shenanigans. A few stories of those times are handed down by Elisabeth:

If one got into trouble, the other would immediately come to his aid. There wasn't the competition as one would expect, just the strong bond of love for one another. This bond remained throughout their years....

As young brothers on a large sugar plantation in Bondowoso, Java, they got into plenty of mischief. Their father was busy working and they had a guest house. Mother loved cooking for the guests, and her dishes were famous. They were a social couple and Frank recollected stories to me from those happy early childhood days.

Railway yard at a Java sugar plantation
Photo Source: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

There was a railway track across the plantation to transfer the sugar from one end of the property to the sale yards. It had a "hand pumped trolley car". One day the boys decided this could be fun and pumped the trolley car along the tracks, unaware that a train was coming! Their father raced toward the boys, and when the boys saw their father coming, cursing and waving his arms, they ran away. In a panic, Frank climbed the nearest tree, and was so afraid of his father's reprimand that he piddled from the tree onto his father's head. His father looked up and was so astounded that he laughed and laughed. There was a huge sigh of relief from their father that his boys were safe, and the boys were relieved that Father had laughed and had not spanked them!

Another story was of a fight at school between Frank and some other boys. Han, hearing the commotion, came of course to Frank's rescue by jumping on the back of the offender. When Han was consequently sat upon, Frank came to his rescue, and so the fight continued until the headmaster intervened. This story was told and retold because it was quite a big fight, and their father had to come to school the next day to sort things out. I daresay the boys enjoyed it thoroughly. [6]

The tale of the school fight gives us our first glimpse of Han's inner toughness and doughty sense of humor. The latter quality, especially in its playful and self-mocking forms, was to become his signature trait as a performer. It balanced his serious side and enabled him to overcome every adversity. For all the harshness of his early piano lessons, Han took to music as his first love, studying and practicing diligently (in contrast to Frank, who gladly bowed out whenever he could). Music became his abiding comfort and the language in which he best expressed himself. We may imagine the fearsome little stick held ever more loosely in his father's hand, the taskmaster's frown upturning to a smile of pride and delight, as Han's playing grew steadily more skillful and confident. There was no denying the boy had talent.

Frank and Han in The Hague (mid 1920s)
Frank Samethini Collection

Encouraged by this progress, and determined to give him the best training they could afford, Han's parents sent him to Holland. There, from 1930 to 1934, he studied classical music (performance, composition, and arrangement) at the Conservatory in The Hague.[7] These classes must have been contemporaneous with his general education, taken in the late afternoon or early evening after a full day of regular school. [8] The particulars of Frank's education are not known. The photo taken in The Hague, when he and Han were around the age of 12 and 11 respectively, suggests that both brothers studied in Holland. [9]

Frank and Han (circa 1930)
Photo probably taken in Malang
Frank Samethini Collection

More Family Photographs:

Han's parents: Emma and Henri Samethini (circa 1912)
Frank Samethini Collection

Later photos of Henri Sr. and Emma (probably mid-1930s)
Han Samethini Collection

Dance teacher Emma poses in two of her ballet costumes (1920s)
Han Samethini Collection

The boys costumed as fishermen
Frank Samethini Collection

"Beggar and Gentleman"
Frank Samethini Collection

Han and playmates wading in the river Brantas
Picture taken in Malang, circa 1925
Han Samethini Collection

__________________________

Footnotes

[1] There is no direct evidence of Henri Sr.'s musical accomplishments. But in describing Han's mature skills, Joop Postma (who worked with him as a POW entertainer) remarked that the younger Samethini's talent "was in his genes because his father played in a dance hall." H.L. Leffelaar / E. van Witsen, Werkers aan de Burma-spoorweg (1982 Uitgeverij T. Wever, bv Franeker), p. 249. Excerpt translated by Margie Samethini-Bellamy.

[2] Frank G. Carpenter, Java and the East Indies (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923), pp. 158-159.

[3] Margie Samethini-Bellamy, personal e-mail.

[4] Christine Chapman, "Thoughts and Recollections of Elisabeth (Lisa) Samethini", personal e-mail, January 2008. Christine Chapman (nee Samethini) is the daughter of Frank and Elisabeth, and Han Samethini's niece.

[5] Frank's successful tiger hunt had a humorous but potentially tragic aftermath. Elizabeth relates:

"There were many tigers in the area at the time, and the boys had learned to shoot a rifle. Frank loved every opportunity he could get. One day Frank (who was 16 or 17 years old at the time) ventured out by himself and actually shot a tiger who was caught off guard in the nearby woods. He ran home proudly to tell his father, who was horrified and asked his son, "Is your rifle cartridge now empty?" To which Frank replied, "Sure, Dad!" and pulled the trigger. A bullet fired from the cartridge and narrowly missed two guests who were sitting nearby." Christine Chapman, Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Werkers aan de Burma-spoorweg, p. 249. Postma does not specify which of the two Hague conservatories Samethini attended. There was the famous Royal Conservatory (Koninklijk Conservatorium), which still exists, and a less prestigious music school that has since closed.

[8] A 1946 Personeelsstaat (army personnel record) lists Han's education level as MULO II, with a diploma in stenotypy. MULO is a Dutch acronym signifying More Extended Elementary Education, equivalent to American high school. Copy of this document kindly furnished by Mr. L.H.G. Belleflamme of Stichting Administratie Indonesische Pensioenen (SAIP).

[9] Judging by the varied historical and philosophical allusions in The Sky Looked Down (Frank Samethini's World War II memoir, published in blog form in 2009), he received an education as good as Han's, if perhaps less specialized.

2. The Jazz Man of East Java (1935-1939)

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Emma Samethini's dance school show group (Malang, 1935)

Class pianist "Hanny" Samethini sits front and center.
In the back row stand Emma (4th from left) and Frank (5th from right)

Photo Source: Moesson magazine / www.onzeplek.nl

At age 18, Han returned to the East Indies as a fully trained musician. But home was no longer the rural plantation in Bondowoso. The once mighty sugar industry on Java had dwindled in the Great Depression and the family had moved to Malang. [1] Whether Henri Sr. lost his plantation management job in the widespread layoffs, or resigned to pursue a different career, we cannot say. Han's prospects as a young classical pianist can be guessed from his abject employment in his mother's dance studio. There he played the monotonous class music to which ballet students repetitively practiced their steps. His creative spirit chafed at this dull work:

He totally hated it. Accompanying dance classes is the worst that can be done to a true artist, as you have to play to a strict beat, strict measures. [2]

Han had greater ambitions and different aims than those envisaged by his parents. The classics he loved, but the jazz and swing music radiating across the Pacific from America fired his imagination. He began experimenting with these new musical forms, to the exasperation of his father. His rebellion found an outlet when the family relocated to Surabaya, the great port city and naval base of East Java. Here there was a vibrant jazz scene. Han secretly joined a semi-professional combo, John Kiliaan & His Band. They played at various night spots and had a regular gig at the Centrum, the dance hall of the Ice Cream Palace restaurant on the Tunjungan. [3]

John Kiliaan & His Band at the Centrum, circa 1936
Top Row (L-R): Joseph Haniff - drums, violin; Bert Zorbag - guitar, banjo, vocal;
Jan van Ligten - bass, piano; Hanny Samethini - piano, bass, vocal
Bottom Row (L-R): Karel Imam - tenor sax, clarinet; John Kiliaan - leader, alto sax, clarinet;
M.M. Djoeki - trumpet, trombone, violin; Emile van der Hartt - violin
(Musicians identified by Indonesian jazz scholar Alfred Ticoalu) [4]
Han Samethini Collection

Closeup from same photo

Kiliaan and his men formed a compact but versatile group. Nearly all of them were adept with two or more instruments. As a sideman Han learned to play the saxophone, string bass, drums, and accordion. The earliest group picture we have shows Han standing, unsurprisingly, at the grand piano. But he was to became a virtuoso on the piano accordion. The difficulties for a pianist in mastering the latter instrument are outlined by American accordionist Alan Sharkis:

The two instruments share a keyboard (or part of one) but the similarity ends there. There are stylistic differences, differences brought about because of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two instruments, differences in notation, differences in the way musical expression is achieved, differences in the position of the player with respect to the instrument, differences in the care and feeding of the instruments, and so on.

Let's start with the bellows. Pianists vary dynamics (loud and soft) by varying the force behind their touch, and with pedals. Accordionists vary dynamics by applying more or less "squeeze" or "pull" to the bellows. Accordion technicians tell me that they know when an accordion brought to them for repair is being played by a pianist! Pianists can sustain a note for just a short time, even with the sustain pedal depressed. Accordionists can sustain a note for as long as they can move the bellows. Related to that, of course, is the problem of phrasing. Think of the bellows of an accordion as related to the breathing organs of a singer. The singer must learn to breathe between musical phrases, and certainly not in the middle of a note; and the accordionist must learn not to reverse the direction of the bellows in the middle of a note or phrase, because for the fraction of a second that the bellows are not moving, the note or phrase will be interrupted.

Diagram of accordion bass buttons, Stradella layout
(Click image to enlarge)

Second, let's consider the keyboard and bass buttons. The largest piano accordions have 45 notes in the treble (most have 41) as opposed to the possibility of having nearly all the 88 notes of piano for use in the treble, even if most selections don't call for that. But the bigger difference is in the approach that the accordion student must take to learning the instrument. The treble keyboard (right hand) of a piano accordion is vertical and can only be seen by the player if the player bends their head down to look at it (not recommended). But the bass buttons of an accordion cannot be seen by the accordionist at all! There are various layouts of those buttons...but let's assume that the layouts are logical in a musical sense. There has to be some kind of tactile clue, and all accordions have either a depression carved into the C bass button, or a rhinestone, something that the accordionist can feel. Let's assume that the layout is the one called Stradella, the most common layout. This layout gives the accordionist both single bass notes and ready-made chords, but not the variety of chords that he'd get using his left hand on a piano keyboard. So, while the system is easy for a pianist to learn, it does have limitations and the pianist-turned-accordionist must find ways around those limitations.

Most accordionists today, if they read music, read lead sheets (the melody line is in a staff in treble clef and chord symbols are printed above that staff). Some accordionists are trained to recognize the chord in the bass clef of a piano score, and there are definite advantages to that system. However, there is a system of accordion notation (AAA notation) that treats the bass clef differently from that of a piano score. A pianist would find it very strange....

An accordion of [Samethini's] era, like the one in those pictures, would have been heavier than a modern instrument. He'd have to have that weight on his shoulders while playing, something he wouldn't have to do with a piano. So, the sitting and standing postures and positions would have to be learned.... [5]

A variety evening, circa 1936 (unknown venue)
John Kiliaan & His Band stand in the back row under the "HC" logo. Click photo to enlarge, and note the various costumes: Spanish, Scottish, Tyrolean, Pierrot and Pierret (cabaret clowns),
an Arab, sailors, and performers in blackface. One cabaretier wears a lei.
Hawaiian music was extremely popular in the East Indies during the Thirties.
Han Samethini Collection

Closeup from same photo

Below: Five photographs of a John Kiliaan Band promotional appearance at a car dealership in Surabaya (circa 1938). Kiliaan poses with his clarinet. Samethini bears his piano accordion with pride. The two Studebaker models shown are the 1936 Dictator (or 1936 President) and the 1937 President. [6]
Han Samethini Collection

Closeup of Samethini from Photo #5
Han Samethini Collection

Modern photo of a well preserved 1937 Studebaker President 4-Door Cruising Sedan
Photo Source: Oldcarandtruckpictures.com

Whether playing for dance parties or cabarets, at the Centrum or on a car dealership lot, young Samethini honed his skills until he was ready to become a band leader in his own right. Henri Sr. by this time had conceded defeat in the contest of wills, it being evident that Han was going to make his own way in the world. Like most musicians, Han worked at a day job, being employed at K.K. Knies, a seller of musical instruments. We can only speculate on his duties there, but certainly his training and varied experience would have made him an ideal salesman, able to demonstrate his wares as well as talk up their virtues.

At intervals Han was compelled to exchange his accordion for a rifle, under a law requiring all fit Dutch males to serve in the colonial militia. He'd reported for basic infantry training in December 1935, and proved himself a competent soldier by the relatively unexacting standards of a reserve force. The record shows he was assigned to the artillery and promoted to the rank of corporal before going on extended leave in May 1936. He would be called up again for one-month hitches in 1937 and 1939. [7]

Two aerial views of Surabaya as it appeared in the late 1930s
Photo Source: Skyscrapercity.com

Map of Surabaya
(Click map to enlarge)
Image Source: ferdinandus.com

The Kali Mas
Photo Source: skyscrapercity.com

Tanjong Perak, the harbor of Surabaya
Photo Source: malang.endonesa.net

The Samethini home in Surabaya was at Brantasstraat 35, so named for the nearby Brantas River that flowed, like its conjoined twin, the Kali Mas, through the town and into the Madura Strait. A portion of the house served as Emma's dance studio. In 1936 or 1937 the family was riven by divorce. The bitterness of the separation can be guessed by Emma's destruction or mutilation of every photo of Henri Sr. in her possession. Han and Frank sided with their mother, largely shutting their father out of their lives. In the settlement Henri Sr. left the house to his ex-wife.

Han's work with John Kiliaan seems to have lasted from 1936 to 1938. He then started his own combo with a pianist, trumpeter, string bassist, and drummer. This band, Han Samethini & His Spirituals, became well known in Surabaya, performing at clubs, social functions, and possibly on radio broadcasts.

Han Samethini & His Spirituals (1939)
Han Samethini Collection

A trio of articles, the first two most likely clipped from a Surabaya newspaper, shows the progress of Han's career in the period 1938-1939. The second article is fragmentary. Translated into English, they read:

(Click to enlarge)

Han Samethini Collection

Congress is Dancing
Performance by "Culture"

The long and tiring meetings of the 7th IEVVO [Women's Organization of the Indo European Association] had a pleasant interruption of several hours of relaxation and entertainment. The hosting department of Soerabaja organized a party at the Institute of Culture which was a great success.

By 9:00 p.m. the intimate upstairs hall of the Toenjoengan Dance Academy was fully occupied by the IEVVO ladies and their guests. Soerabaja's mayor, Mr. Fuchter, was also present and the IEV [Indo European Association] was as usual represented by Mr. Buurman van Vreeden.

Much of the evening's success was due to dance professor G. Sebok, whose students performed several excellent dance numbers which were previously shown in performance at the Kunstkring in October, so they won't be discussed here again.

During intermission, and after the performance, the dance floor was in good use to the excellent dance music of The Spirituals, led by H. Samethini.

A special attraction was the free lesson in the Lambeth Walk given by Mr. Sebok, which had the entire ballroom filled with dancers executing these happy and merry steps.

(Click to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Boys' Orphanage 80th Anniversary
Party on Embong Malang [Avenue]
Stage Performance and Ball

[First portion of article missing]

Next came a very well presented stage performance, each number of which was proof of excellent rehearsing. There was a Ribbon Dance choreographed by Miss Matimoe, a Tango Fantasy by Mr. Rellum, songs by the JWI Sisters and the Hill Billy Boys, an outstanding piano contribution by Mr. Samethini, and some entertaining one-act plays by Mr. Budding. Every number received a hearty round of applause, and several had to be repeated.

The performance ended at 10:30 p.m. and all participants were honored on the stage by Mr. Scholten. The ladies received flowers and Piet v.d. Hof received a laurel wreath for his efforts. Once this was concluded the stage was transformed into a ballroom, and until the wee hours of the morning the smooth floor was well used to the excellent strains of the well known band, The Spirituals.

The JWI boys orphanage on Jl. Embong Malang 31
Photo taken during the 1950s

Photo Source: YouTube

(Click to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Birthday Celebration for HRH Princess Beatrix

On the occasion of HRH [Her Royal Highness] Princess Beatrix's first birthday, a ball was organized on January 31 [1939] and the Harmonie [Club].

The large ballroom was beautifully decorated for the event, with the color orange as the main motif - but it looked more like an intimate dancing room [i.e., a small public party room, like a cocktail bar with a dance floor] than a ballroom.

The music was performed by the well known H. Samethini and His Spirituals from Soerabaja, and their contribution was one of the main reasons for the evening's success.

At midnight the band played the Wilhelmus [Dutch national anthem] and everyone joined in the song.

The Club's president, Mr. J.W. v. Rijn, then spoke, mentioning the fact that they were all gathered here to mark a joyous event. Even though the government had not deemed the birthday worthy of proclaiming a national holiday, the Club management thought it would be better not to let the occasion pass unnoticed, and therefore this celebration was organized. He wished everyone a great evening and concluded with three cheers for Princess Beatrix and the Royal Family.

The broke the official atmosphere and the party really got underway, not slowing down until 3:00 a.m. It was an old fashioned party with many wonderful memories to treasure. [8]

Sister-in-law Elisabeth expresses the view from the dance floor in those far-off, blissful days:

Han had his own dance band in Surabaya, and often Frank and I would dance to his music. Frank was so proud of his brother and the crowd loved his music. [9]

Frank Samethini, writing in the evocative present tense, describes the milieu of a Saturday evening in colonial Surabaya:

Day is done, darkness has fallen, the worst of the heat gone. Pastel-coloured lampshades shine gently through a filigree of potted plants and shrubs. In the warm, scented evening we read and talk out in front on the open porch. A thin spiral of grey smoke eddies up from a coil of mosquito repellent burning on a saucer on the floor. A wide-eyed brown kitten stalks, with great display of fuss, an imaginary prey between the magnolias. Back in the house the clock ding-dongs through soft radio music. The light circle of the porch lamp does not quite reach the dark hibiscus hedge at the front gate, where a lone cricket chirps incessantly. It is Saturday evening, after dinner time. All the news is read, all events of the day discussed, bemoaned or laughed about.

Sunset on the north coast of Java (late 1930s)
Photo Source: Zoo Leven Wij in Indie

A drive is then suggested and agreed upon. Soon we have joined the long line of motor cars out on the road for a little cruise to the entertainment district of Surabaya and on to the harbour for an hour of cool, refreshing sea breeze. The hood of the car is let down to make the most of the cool evening air. The motor sings, the wheels fly with a soft burr. Tall arc lights are caught in a dull shine moving along the the gleaming body of our car. Everyone is in the lighthearted mood of a Saturday evening, the whole night in front and all the free Sunday after that. When we enter Palm Lane we spot a burst of red neon of the left side. That's the "Tabarin" bar and dancing establishment, closed now, its opening time of ten o'clock catering to the after-theatre and supper folk. Opposite is the "Shanghai" restaurant, adorned with strings of pastel-coloured Chinese lamps on the open terrace. Munching and drinking people served by wooden-faced Indonesian waiters deftly balancing trays laden with delicacies. At the front of the restaurant a few native boys carry boxes with cigarettes loiter about. They will be there the whole night. On the corner of Palm Lane and Simpang Road, the Maxim Cinema blazes in floodlights, flanked by a file of Fiat Balilla taxis waiting for the end of the first session. The traffic signal switches to red, halting our car with a silent throb of its motor. We are facing the whitewashed facade and marble floors of the Simpang Club, select and suave, its members restricted to a better salaried class of people. Cozy little lampshades glow on small wicker tables on patios in front, where gentlemen with their lady companions are seated, sipping an aperitif or after-dinner coffee and liqueur. Blue cigar smoke and, now and then, a quiet sparkle of jewelry. Tyres crunch on the gravelled drive to the carpeted club entrance. The solid snap of an expensive automobile's door. New guests have arrived.

The Tunjungan
Photo Source:

The signal flashes to green. Our route goes by the park. In the distance strings of orange lights adorn the bandstand from which come muffled snatches of drums and clashing cymbals. We drive through the Tunjungan now with its numerous bars, hotels and theatres. The brilliant shop windows of the newly opened Japanese department store Tjijoda, and the more soberly illuminated facade of Whiteway Laidlaw. High above in the night air, the jumble of multi-coloured neon advertising, motionless or in running flashes. Further down the road, Town Hall Gardens with trees full of red, white and blue lights. Something must be on again there is Town Hall Gardens, where the small-income man finds diversion in word, music and dance. Perhaps a jubilee or congress of sorts, doubtlessly celebrated with endless speeches and a boring play. Then, to top it off, a ball with the inevitable Hawaiian band with its guitars twanging sweet melodies of moonlight and dreams come true in Waikiki and Honolulu. Girls, some in rather garish coloured dress, will try to follow the astonishingly complicated dance maneuvers of their escorts in suits of every taste and shade.

A bar in the Tunjungan
Photo Source:

Entering downtown, the night seems here deeper and still, with myriads of tiny moths circling the globes of tall lamp posts on William's Quay and Red Bridge, strangely quiet and deserted at this hour. An oil wick flutters in the small cabin of a native barge on the dark river. Glowing pinpoints light up and darken again in the porticoes and doorways of the locked up business houses along the quay, where Madurese wharf labourers are smoking their favourite cheroots of clove-saturated maize leaf. Proud and independent, spending the night outdoors on a bed of jute bags, anywhere they may fancy, rather than having to return dutifully to the one and same address.

Finally we reach the Heads and the car is brought to a halt. At the mouth of the Brantas the last ferry boat from Madura eases along her berth with a deep throb of her engines, her green and red lights shining through billows of swirling steam. High above, invisible in the darkness, a night bird cries for its mate. Far out in the Roads a yellow beacon winks slowly with measured intervals across a sea which lies there serene and peaceful. The Western Fairway, between two citadels armed to the teeth, Fort Menari and Fort Piring, their big guns rendering suicidal any attempt to enter the harbour by an aggressor, whoever it may be.

Another car pulls up near where we are. For a while we hear the intonation of its passengers filter through the mild sea breeze. They laugh a little, then fall silent. So pleasingly quiet it is here.

This town, this beloved Surabaya, twinkling its lights, breathing under the stars. [10]

Silhouette cartoon by Mieke Dusseldorp, 1946
Han Samethini Collection

These idyllic nocturnal scenes give no hint of the greater darkness about to engulf the Netherlands and her East Indies colony. On September 1, 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Holland, neutral but wary, mobilized her forces and prepared for the worst. In the Far East, amidst the cold waters of the North Pacific, brooded the colossus that was Imperial Japan. The Japanese had absorbed Manchuria, and now their armies were overrunning eastern China.

Han may have regarded these developments with foreboding as the 1930s drew to a close, but he was not a worrier by nature. Moreover, he was about to acquire an interest deeper and dearer to him than any music.

More Photos of Han Samethini and His Spirituals

The band posing for a photo in an unidentified park. Han stands second from right.
Click on image to enlarge, and note the stylized W on the brickwork behind them.
Probable location is Wilhelminapark, Batavia.
Han Samethini Collection

Photo taken on opposite side of the monument. Han at far right.
Two of the band members have switched places, one to join the group and one to take the photo.
Han Samethini Collection

On the steps of a park building, possibly a music pavillion.
Han stands in the back row, to the left.
Han Samethini Collection

____________________

Footnotes

[1] Between 1929 and 1935 the number of sugar factories on Java had fallen from 179 to 45, and the land area planted to cane shrank from 200,831 hectares to 27,578. Figures cited in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol. 2, Part One, pp. 183-184.

[2] Comment by Margie Samethini-Bellamy, herself a ballet teacher and choreographer (personal e-mail).

[3] Details and location of the Centrum provided by Alfred Ticoalu, based on his study of contemporary sources on the Surabaya jazz scene. The Tunjungan is a street running through the city's entertainment district, lined with shops, clubs, hotels, and restaurants.

[4] Mr. Ticoalu is presently writing a two-volume history of jazz in Indonesia. He requests that anyone with information on this subject please contact him through this blog or via his Facebook page.

[5] Comments posted by Alan Sharkis in the online discussion forum Piano Accordion Players of the World, November 29, 2008.

[6] Makes and models in these photographs identified by Andrew Beckman of the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Indiana. The second photo, in which the seven musicians stand "line abreast", shows the Kiliaan Band jacket logo to best advantage. It appears to be a variation of the wapen (coat of arms) of the City of Surabaya: a shark and crocodile surmounted by the crown of the Netherlands.

[7] Uittreksel (summary) of Han Samethini's military service record, drawn up by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, Pensions Administration Department, on November 7, 1980. Copy of this document kindly furnished by Mr. L.H.G. Belleflamme of Stichting Administratie Indonesische Pensioenen (SAIP).

[8] The Harmonie Club (Societeit de Harmonie) was located on Rijswijkstraat in Batavia (now Jakarta), capital city of the Netherlands East Indies. The building was demolished in 1985.

[9] Christine Chapman, "Thoughts and Recollections of Elisabeth (Lisa) Samethini".

[10] Frank Samethini, The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 2: Surabaya.

GO TO NEXT CHAPTER

3. Anna (1939-1940)

2009-04-15T19:53:00.001-07:00

Han Samethini Collection

It was during a gig in Surabaya, perhaps on such a starlit tropical evening as Frank described, that Han Samethini looked out onto the dance floor and glimpsed a flash of blond hair. A second, more attentive look detected a slender, graceful Eurasian girl dancing to the strains of his music. This was Anna Caroline Gunthardt. He fell in love with her, but she became the girlfriend of one of his band mates. That relationship ended unhappily and Han caught Anna on the rebound. [1]

The orphanage in Surabaya where Anna grew up (click to enlarge)

Photo taken in 1999 by Margie Samethini-Bellamy

Anna's early life is obscure. She was born in the East Java town of Lumajang on August 26, 1915. Her parents died in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, leaving herself and three siblings to be raised in orphanages.[2] This harsh upbringing, so different from Han's youth of relative affluence and privilege, left its marks. Her blue eyes never shone without a trace of sadness. Yet she shared his delight in melody and, when happy, she hummed or sang in a mellifluous soprano voice. She took ballet classes at Emma's dance school, performing well enough to be promoted to a teaching position.

Anna demonstrates the Battement Tendu Fondu Devant Cambre
Han Samethini Collection

Children's ballet performance put on by Emma's studio.

Possibly Anna was their teacher.
Han Samethini Collection

The shadows in the world lengthened during the young couple's courtship. Over the radio and in the papers came the bulletins: Hitler's speech on January 30, 1940, in the Berlin Sportpalast, declaring that Poland's destruction ended only the first phase of the conflict, and that the second might open with "a war of bombs"; the German slaughter of merchant ships in the Atlantic and the North Sea, over 1 million tons sunk by the end of March; and, on April 9, the German invasion of Denmark and Norway.

Frank Samethini saw no cause for alarm. Hadn't Germany respected Holland's neutrality in the last war? And though Japan was nearer to the Indies, she appeared none the more menacing for it. As far as he was concerned, 1940 would be a year like any other, albeit more busy than usual:

In the Dutch East Indies there is no mobilisation but the call to report for military drill comes time after time. I am hardly back in civvies before I have to put on my uniform again for duty at another depot. They say we have to be ready. For what? For the Japanese, they say. For the little fellows with spectacles, barbers, watchmakers, you know, them!

They must be joking! The Japanese of all people, they must be aware of the terrific naval power Britain packs in Singapore. It would be madness! [3]

Frank Samethini (circa 1940)

Frank Samethini Collection

Frank's outlook was particularly bright on the evening of May 9, the 18th birthday of his girlfriend, Elisabeth Boerman. The party held in her parents' home proved to be a memorable occasion. As the festivities continued well past midnight, the music and merry conversation gave way to a new sound:

Suddenly army trucks come rolling by, full of soldiers, and more come, the heavies with powerful, growling motors. Where are they going to at this time of night? Everybody gets on their feet. A glass smashes on the floor followed by a nervous, giggled apology. Her mother says it is nothing, it will bring luck. Then no more trucks come and the agitation dies. Returning to the lounge room I notice that the radio has ceased playing music. Instead I hear a single voice saying over and over again through the crackling of static, "The code word is Berlin!" [4]

In Europe the sun rose on May 10 to reveal 136 German divisions pouring into the Low Countries. Hitler's forces overwhelmed Holland in five days. Queen Wilhelmina took refuge in Britain, forming a government-in-exile and vowing to continue the fight. Apart from impounding a few German merchant vessels, the colonial government could do little to help.

The outlook in Western Europe is dark indeed, but the sun is still very much shining in the colonies, the only remaining strongholds. The tricolour proudly flying from the mast gives strength to the cry that "Holland shall rise again!" Yes, the four words grow into a dictum, an epigram stamped across postage stamps, flashed across the screen in the cinemas, engraved on buttons. In the meanwhile, the radio and tabloids warn, we must realise that the defence of our so profitable colonies rests now entirely in our own hands. Remember, they say, that we must be prepared to stand up and fight with everything we have. True, this "everything" is not much; alarmingly small indeed are our military forces. But isn't it the spirit that counts, the old Dutch fighting spirit when the call comes to go to war for Queen and Country? [5]

On June 6, Han reported once more for militia duty. Now that war with Japan had become a distinct possibility, the ground forces needed non-commissioned officers in quantity. Han was not conscripted into the regular army, but when he left on extended leave on June 30, he'd been promoted to sergeant.

Dutch morale rose that summer at the news of England's defiance to the aerial might of Germany's bomber force. "Parties for the benefit of the British war machine are the order of the day," recalled Frank. "Parties where lots of fun is to be had....The Battle of Britain, comfortably distant, is applauded and toasted upon."[6] Even in the East Indies the Spitfire, premier fighter of the Royal Air Force, became a symbol of resistance to Nazi aggression.[7] By the end of autumn it was clear that the Luftwaffe had failed to achieve air superiority over the British Isles, a necessary precondition for any German invasion. Britain stood as yet unconquered, a safe haven for the exiled Queen and her cabinet, and a base for the future liberation of Holland.

So it was with hope than Han Samethini and Anna Gunthardt wedded on Wedensday morning, December 11, 1940. They spent their honeymoon in the district of Sawiran, East Java. As they strolled through the highland coffee plantations, or picked their way among the rocks of the small stream behind their bungalow, the European war and its miseries must have seemed especially distant. One honeymoon photograph shows Han by the bungalow porch, pipe in hand, grinning from ear to ear like the happiest man alive.

The Wedding

Wedding Announcement
Han Samethini Collection

The wedding party poses for a photo at 35 Brantasstraat
Han Samethini Collection

The wedding party sets out for the Stadhuis (Town Hall)
Han Samethini Collection

On the grounds of the Stadhuis
Han Samethini Collection

Just married! Photo taken inside Town Hall following the civil ceremony.
The bridesmaid at right is Elisabeth Boerman, Frank Samethini's future wife.
Han Samethini Collection

The Bubutan Church (Boeboetankerk) in Surabaya.
The wedding service was held here, following the civil ceremony.

Photo by Nikola Drakulic
Han Samethini Collection

The Honeymoon

Newlyweds in the garden by their bungalow in Sawiran, Java
Han Samethini Collection

The happiest man alive
Han Samethini Collection

Gathering fresh ingredients from the garden
Han Samethini Collection

Preparing a meal in the bungalow kitchen
Han Samethini Collection

Posing by a mountain stream
Han Samethini Collection

______________________

Footnotes

[1] Caught is perhaps too passive a term. Many years later, Han told his granddaughter, Mylene, that he marched into his rival's home and left with Anna in tow. The man must have been something of a rake, for Han declared in wonderment and disgust, "You would not believe the things I saw in that house!"

[2] The will stipulated that the orphans, Maggie, Godfried (called Piet), Anna, and Thomas, be kept together. Apparently none of their relatives was willing or able to take on four extra mouths to feed. The sisters grew up in the same orphanage (Protestant Meesjes Weeshuis on Boeboetan-weg in Surabaya), and it seems that Maggie died of tuberculosis at age 18. The boys were sent to a different institution. Anna lost track of her brothers during World War II. Through a member of the Gunthardt family in Holland, who telephoned me in January 2011, I have learned that Thomas died in Japanese captivity sometime between 1942 and 1945. Godfried survived the war, became an Indonesian citizen, and fathered ten children. So a flourishing branch of the Gunthardts remains on Java to this day.

Godfried Gunthardt and his family, circa early 1950s
Photo courtesy of Nancy and Thomas Gunthardt (niece and nephew of Anna Gunthardt)

[3] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 4: The Darkening Sky

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Images of the Spitfire even graced collection boxes for a scrap aluminum drive in Tanjong Priok, Java. T.Y. Hobma-Glastra, Bandjr: Een Indische Kroniek 1935-1950 (1988 Uitgeverij Lunet, Naarden), p. 37, photo plate 58. (Click the thumbnail image below to enlarge)

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4. Waiting for War (January-December 1941)

2009-04-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

Han Samethini Collection

The year 1941 began auspiciously for Han. He was a popular band leader, married to the woman he adored and pursuing the career he loved. The couple lived in the Brantasstraat house with Han's mother. This arrangement, though advantageous in some ways, must have been difficult for Anna. She was was on her mother-in-law's turf both domestically and in the dance school, dwelling in the shadow of Emma's often overbearing personality.

During this time Han assembled another jazz combo: a trio composed of himself, a string bass player, and a drummer. A local press clipping records one of their gigs, at a venue not quite as juvenile as the title suggests:

Han Samethini Collection

Performance for Children at "Culture"

Directed by Professor G. Sebok, students of the music, dance and gymnastics organization "Culture" gave a repeat performance of dances in a show aimed especially at children. Every seat in the cozy Culture hall was filled and the show was not only appreciated by the kids, but also by the adults, judging by the hearty applause following each number.

The young ladies S. van Milt and Th. Prottel performed again with great success and the small children shared in the acclaim, especially 4-year-old Antoinette Kruk, who danced a solo number. A special attraction was the "Protelli Puppet Show", directed by Miss Prottel, which entertained the audience after the dance recital and was received with enormous appreciation. This is a very unusual puppet show, with "live" heads on puppet bodies performing a simple but excellent program of songs in several languages. Afterwards the children joined in a ball organized just for them, followed by the adults making good use of their own dance floor to the music of the Samethini trio.

The Samethini Trio
(Han at the piano)
Han Samethini Collection

Anna Samethini relaxing at home in Surabaya
Han Samethini Collection

Meanwhile preparations for war accelerated. Charged with defending an archipelago spread over 735,000 square miles, the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL) could muster 85,000 regular and auxiliary troops. This was a total strength equivalent to only four U.S. Army divisions, and the KNIL's weaponry was mostly outdated. The navy and air force, despite a strong esprit de corps, were likewise deficient in material. The loss of Holland precluded any resupply or reinforcement from the mother country. In the virtual absence of a domestic armaments industry, the colonial government turned to foreign sources, purchasing light tanks from Britain and warplanes from America.

Dutch military and civil authorities exuded confidence despite these weaknesses. They had ruled over their Indonesian subjects for close to three hundred and fifty years, troubled only by local rebellions that they had suppressed with little difficulty. The swift rise and apparent security of the other Western empires - the British in India, Burma, and Malaya, the French in Indochina, and the Americans in the Philippines - seemed to establish beyond all doubt that Asiatics were inferior to whites, especially in the arts of war. Modern, industrialized Japan might prove a tougher opponent, but to strike at the oil-rich Indies the Japanese would have to smash their way through an Anglo-American shield of fortresses, garrisons, and naval bases. To accomplish this, they must defeat the mighty U.S. Pacific Fleet, which would come sailing in wrath out of Pearl Harbor. Conventional wisdom dismissed any possibility of a Japanese victory.

Months go by. Months of speeches about our war effort, delivered by experts, well spoken gentlemen in dinner suits, one hand loosely tugging at the knot of their tie, emitting one gem of informative advice after another. Desk marshals, chuckling complacently, offer free detailed forecasts of what is going to happen to Japan should that country be so impertinent as to start anything. But they won't of course. The U.S.A. is seeing to that, no risk. [1]

"The U.S.A. is seeing to that, no risk."
Battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

In May, Frank reported for NCO training in Bandung, West Java, the army's headquarters and chief arsenal:

May 1941 - First Battalion Infantry at Bandung, snap call-up for two months cadre training programme, consisting of hard drill, record time in stripping and assembling a machine gun, how to manipulate a bayonet that got stuck between ribs and how to salute an officer correctly. Within a month I am made corporal. [2]

Elisabeth was determined to accompany Frank on this trip. Her parents required marriage as the condition of this, to which the young couple happily agreed. They married in Bandung on June 4, the groom wearing his new corporal's uniform. The wedding was a bittersweet occasion, a purely civil ceremony arranged under hurried circumstances instead of the grand and beautiful celebration they had wished for. Of all their numerous family and friends, only Han and Anna were able to attend, serving as the legally required witnesses. [3]

Bandung, circa 1941
Photo Source: Zoo Leven Wij in Indie

Soldiers of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL) on training maneuvers
Photo Source: ww2incolor.com

Cpl. Frank Samethini and his bride, Elisabeth Boerman.
June 4, 1941
Frank Samethini Collection

In July the Samethinis returned to Surabaya, where air raid drills had become a part of daily life. People did their best to ignore the signs of approaching calamity as they worked at their jobs, raised their children, and socialized with friends, savoring the routines of a normal world. Above all, they pursued their amusements with a defiant intensity:

Refusing to be worried by the ever worsening news, we welcome every excuse for going out to movies, parties or just some dancing. To the stirring beat of drums, percussion and bass we dance, lost to the world. Suddenly the sirens howl, waiters run to draw the curtains for another snap black-out practice in war-prepared Surabaya. Tactfully, the band leader switches to national songs and everybody is singing away about Holland's Flag, about Piet Hein who took the Spanish Silver Fleet and about the Girl By the Mill. People singing perhaps louder, smiling perhaps more than ever before....[4]

On August 29, Anna gave birth to a daughter, Margareth Jacqueline Samethini. A photo of newborn Margie taken at Darmo Hospital shows a proud Uncle Frank cradling her in his arms, doubtless looking forward to holding a daughter of his own. To celebrate, Han led his band in a live radio performance of the swing hit "Margie":

My little Margie,
I'm always thinking of you, Margie!
I'll tell the whole wide world I love you;
Don't forget your promise to me,
You know, I bought the home, the ring and everything,
So, my little Margie,
Margie, oh, you've been my inspiration,
Darling, you're the only one!
After all is said and done,
There is really only one,
Margie, Margie, it's you! [5]

Darmo Hospital, Surabaya

Birthplace of Margie Samethini

Birth Announcement
Han Samethini Collection

Frank holds his newborn niece
Han Samethini Collection

Posing with the new mother: Emma and Elisabeth at Anna's bedside

Han Samethini Collection

Home with the baby: Anna and Margie at the Brantasstraat house
Han Samethini Collection

Margie in the cradle
Han Samethini Collection

Fatherhood brought added responsibility and the need for better income that only a steady job could provide. For the sake of his family, Han set aside his musical career and obtained a clerical position at BPM, a leading Dutch petroleum company. The job demanded a relocation to Balikpapan, a major oil port and refining center on the east coast of Borneo. The Samethinis moved there in November. Their new residence was a house on stilts, practically constructed for a city prone to flash floods. In the shady space beneath it they placed rattan chairs and a table, to enjoy cool mornings and evenings outdoors.

Despite its economic and strategic importance, Balikpapan was a cultural backwater compared to cosmopolitan Surabaya. It was also something of a frontier town, the surrounding country being home to Dayak tribesmen, lethal experts with their blowguns and poisoned darts. Han later recalled that he felt a sense of adventure living in Borneo. Yet often his thoughts must have strayed back to Surabaya. In all probability he intended to return there once he'd established himself at BPM, and earned sufficient experience and seniority to be granted a transfer back home.

The house on stilts in Balikpapan, Borneo
Anna sits with 3-month-old Margie on the shaded "patio" beneath
Han Samethini Collection

Another view of the "patio" with its rattan furniture
Margie's baby stroller in the foreground
Han Samethini Collection

Anna and Margie in Balikpapan
Photo taken November 17, 1941
Han Samethini Collection

Petroleum tank farm
Photo Source: Zoo Leven Wij in Indie

Balikpapan oil port by day...

...and by night
Photo Source: Zoo Leven Wij in Indie

Dayak warriors

Perhaps Han dreamed of Surabaya in the earliest hours of Monday, December 8. At 1:49 a.m., local time, the night air of Balikpapan would be filled with the buzzing and chirping of tropical insects. Across the Pacific, the time at Pearl Harbor was 7:49 a.m. on Sunday morning, December 7. Here the air reverberated with different sounds: bombs exploding on Kaneohe Naval Air Station, and a droning roar heralding the first wave of Japanese torpedo planes boring in towards Battleship Row.

__________________

Footnotes

[1] The Sky Looked Down. Chapter 4: The Darkening Sky.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Elisabeth writes that Han also was ordered to report for army training in May 1941, but his military record states he was still on extended leave at that time. Perhaps this call-up was accidentally omitted in the summary. It is equally likely that Han and Anna went to Bandung for the express purpose of being at the wedding. Given the brothers' strong mutual devotion, we may reasonably presume that Han would be there for Frank even if no other relatives could attend. The Sky Looked Down, Appendix A.

[4] The worsening news of July 1941 would have included reports of continuing German advances deep into Russia, the freezing of Japanese assets in Britain and the United States (July 25), and Japan's retaliatory freezing of U.S. assets the following day. The most ominous development was Japan's seizure of French Indochina, completed July 29. By this move the Japanese acquired forward air bases ideally situated to support attacks on Malaya and Singapore.

[5] Lyrics from the 1934 version of "Margie", by Cab Calloway.

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5. The Onslaught (December 1941 - March 1942)

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7 December, 1941. Hundreds of Japanese airplanes attack in the early morning hours, without provocation or warning, the assembled fleet of the United States of America in Hawaii. The bulk of the naval power of a country not at war with Japan is sunk or crippled. The infamy of Pearl Harbour. The dreaded words are broadcast by radio to all of the Dutch East Indies. We are now also at war with Japan. [1]

- Frank Samethini, The Sky Looked Down

The storm had broken at last. With the news of war arrived the order for general mobilization. On December 8, 1941 Han Samethini was conscripted into the KNIL 6th Infantry Battalion in Balikpapan. This was the core unit of the town's 1,100 man garrison. BPM management hurriedly arranged evacuation of the employees' families to Java. Embracing Anna and Margie one last time before they departed, Han could only hope they would be safe at his mother's house in Surabaya. Certainly there was no better place to send them. Java was the redoubt, the home territory, to be stoutly defended even if all the other islands fell to the enemy.

From across the Far East came reports of Japanese attacks, Japanese advances, Japanese victories. Before dawn on December 8, they had bombed Singapore and landed troops in Malaya. At midday, Japanese warplanes struck the Philippines, smashing half of the American air force on the ground. Bangkok was taken on the 9th. On December 10, Japanese aircraft sank the HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales, eliminating the only Allied capital ships in the region. The invasion of Luzon commenced the same day. In both Malaya and the Philippines, Japan's tough, superbly trained armies quickly overcame forward defenses and swept south towards Singapore and Manila. Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day.

Japanese infantry storms ashore in the Natuna Islands, west of Borneo
Photo Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign

The Japanese offensive in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies
(Click map to enlarge)

Map of Borneo with arrows indicating the locations of Tarakan, Samarinda, and Balikpapan
(Click map to enlarge)

Following their rapid thrusts against the British and the Americans, the Japanese launched a great, three-pronged offensive against the Netherlands East Indies. The invasion of Borneo began on the night of December 16 with landings in British territory at Miri and Seria. Tarakan, a Dutch possession, fell on January 12 after a brief but vicious struggle, the Japanese killing most of the Dutch officers at close quarters with knives. Tarakan in hand, the Japanese commander, General Sakaguchi, prepared to move against his next objective, Balikpapan. He sent two captured Dutch officers to Lt. Colonel C. van den Hoogenband, the Balikpapan garrison commander. They delivered a written ultimatum demanding surrender. The message included a warning:

When the Balikpapan garrison destroys the natural resources and oil installations at Balikpapan and the surrounding country, all commanding officers, their Dutch soldiers and other Dutchmen related to them will be killed without exception. [2]

Undaunted, Hoogenband ordered the oil facilities to be put to the torch. Samethini took part in this operation, the resulting fires and explosions sending thick pillars of black smoke into the sky.

General Sakaguchi's ultimatum
(Click image to enlarge)

Smoke rises from burning oil facilities at Balikpapan (January 1942)
Photo Source: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

On January 22 the Balikpapan invasion force was sighted heading south through the Makassar Strait. The Dutch air force attacked the convoy continuously during daylight, but its antiquated Martin B-10 bombers inflicted little damage. In the predawn hours of the 24th the Japanese landed 5,500 soldiers in two separate groups. The bulk of Sakaguchi's 56th Regimental Group came ashore north of town. A detached battalion, the Surprise Attack Unit commanded by Major Kaneuchi, landed south of Balikpapan. Guided by Indonesian fifth columnists, the latter force proceeded to the village of Banubaru, cutting off the Dutch line of retreat. Having learned from hard experience at Tarakan, where Dutch coastal artillery had sunk two warships, the Japanese were avoiding the big guns defending Balikpapan.

In the event, the Dutch did not attempt to hold their positions. Hoogenband had received orders to withdraw inland after completing sabotage operations. He led an infantry column out of town, along the road to Banubaru. The Dutch ran into the advancing main body of Kaneuchi's Surprise Attack Unit, and the Japanese promptly gave battle. Han fought as part of a machine gun crew, feeding the ammunition belt into the weapon as the gunner mowed down the leading edge of the oncoming enemy. The KNIL troops were defeated and the Dutch force broke up. With no other alternatives but death or capture, Samethini joined a group of survivors heading north into the jungle towards their only hope of escape, the airfield at Samarinda. [3]

Offshore it had been a different story. At approximately 2000 hours (8 pm) on the 24th, American destroyers of DesDiv 59 attacked the invasion convoy, sinking four troop transports and an escort vessel. The next day two more transports were claimed, one by Dutch and American bombers, the other by a Dutch submarine. This was the largest naval action since the start of the Pacific War, but the brief Allied tactical victory could not change the outcome of events on land.

Over the next several days, Han and his companions hacked their way through a tangled wilderness teeming with malarial mosquitoes. Pursued and repeatedly attacked, they reached Samarinda and boarded a plane for Java. As the transport winged over Borneo's deep green forests and muddy brown rivers, Han might have gazed out the window and reflected on this land of opportunity that had so suddenly become a place of death and defeat. But he was not a man to dwell on regrets. Surely Anna and Margie were alive and waiting for him in Surabaya. That mattered more than anything. [4]

Back in Balikpapan, the Japanese rounded up civilians and the newly captured prisoners of war. They delayed their promised vengeance until February 20. On that day, they took their captives to the nearby sea shore:

Even eight patients from the local hospital were among the group of 78 victims marched to a beach near the old Klandasan Fortress. Two of the victims were then beheaded on the beach, the other 76 forced into the sea...all were shot one by one, their bodies left to drift with the tide. [5]

The only way out: Samarinda II airfield, Borneo
(Allied air recce photo taken in 1944)

Han arrived in Java at the end of January. Making his way to Surabaya, he searched at once for Anna and Margie. To his great worry, they were not at his mother's house and he was unable to find them. He then fell ill with malaria contracted during the forced march in Borneo. The disease evolved the dangerous complication called blackwater fever, and he was sent to a hospital. [6]

The report of Balikpapan's loss added to the litany of woes announced by the radio broadcasts on Java. Frank Samethini heard the news at Fort Menari, near Surabaya, where he'd been posted since the outbreak of the war:

Weeks pass without a shot being fired by us at the fort. But the radio tells of defeat, of bitter defeat by the ridiculed little men, the former smiling, bowing and hissing barbers, merchants of inferior goods made in Japan. There are also numerous reports of bravery from other sectors of our forces, but the closing message of the bulletin is always the same: battle lost, we retreat before the swarming ants....[7]

The day before Balikpapan's fall the Japanese overran Kendari on the island of Celebes, capturing the finest air base in the East Indies. This put Surabaya within range of enemy bombers. From Kendari, on February 3, the Japanese launched their first major air attacks on the city. Frank was on anti-aircraft observation duty that day:

I am reading a letter from Lisa while on duty in the listening post ("Darling, do you want it to be a boy or a girl?"), when suddenly a sound from a great distance enters the earphones. Growing louder and louder, it seems to come from every direction. No, wait, from high in the invisible vault above the cloud banks it comes! In a flash I recognise it with a sudden, racing heart: approaching aircraft. Can't be ours, we haven't got that many! My thumb sinks the alarm button while I reach for her letter fluttering to the floor. My field glasses show the Jap airplanes up as silver-winged, transparent dragonflies, three flights of five bombers in each squadron, moving slowly across the sky, too high for the black and white popping blossoms of our ack-ack. What little is left of our fighter planes whiningly soar upwards to meet their fate. The dragonflies move on southwards - southwards! But that is Surabaya! Fear clutches my throat. My God! Almost immediately I hear the dull boom of exploding bombs in a muffled staccato that pierces through my heart. Where, oh God, have they fallen? [8]

In Surabaya, Elisabeth was visiting a friend of her mother's. She recalls:

The sirens started with a horrible noise and we thought they were just practicing, but then the bombs started to fall and the aeroplanes were fighting in the air. We were so afraid and we all dived under the bed. After what seemed like hours, the all clear came. We were all dazed and didn't know what to think about it all. There was chaos everywhere.... [9]

A formation of Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" Japanese medium bombers.
This type flew missions against Surabaya from Kendari, Celebes.

"There was chaos everywhere...."
Japanese bombs fall on Surabaya (February 1942)
Photo Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign

Sydney Morning Herald (February 6, 1942)
National Library of Australia

Japan's fearsome Zero fighter planes inflicted heavy casualties on the Dutch and Allied interceptors, and the city was soon without effective air defense:

The following week a few more air raids are directed on fortifications outside Surabaya, but the scattered pillboxes and gun emplacements are perfectly camouflaged and no direct hit is suffered. The enemy aircraft, unchallenged since the last Dutch plane was downed, fly low over the dense swamp vegetation in an effort to draw fire and so pinpoint our gun positions. But the order by the fort commander is clear: repulse enemy landings on the beaches and nothing else. Do not shoot at aircraft, do not even shake a fist at them lest they spot you. Keep your head low and swear if you must, but all all events stay out of sight. What kind of war is this? [10]

By the middle of February, Singapore had surrendered, the bulk of the American army in the Philippines was bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula, and the Japanese had taken Palembang in southern Sumatra. The enemy was now on Java's doorstep. Getting 24 hours' leave, Frank entered Surabaya to find the town "swarming with British and Australian soldiers." There were also American air and artillery units on Java. These hastily collected reinforcements, belatedly shipped to the East Indies without adequate arms or supplies, were too little, too late.

On February 27, Frank looked out from Fort Menari to see a small fleet of Allied cruisers and destroyers - American, British, Dutch, and Australian - steaming through the Western Fairway:

...the binoculars pick up the sleek outlines in camouflage grey, stealing through the mist of dawn out into the open sea. Our gallant Navy sailing to their last engagement with the enemy, to bear the brunt of the great onslaught. [11]

In the Java Sea the ABDA fleet boldly attacked the more powerful Japanese warships escorting the East Java invasion force, hoping to break through and sink the troop transports. The Japanese, with their heavier guns and advanced "Long Lance" torpedoes, drove them off after inflicting severe losses. Among the vessels sunk was the Dutch flagship, the light cruiser De Ruyter. She went down with 345 of her crew, including Warrant Officer Frans Anton Boerman, Frank's father-in-law.

The invasion of Java
(Click map to enlarge)

On March 1 the Japanese landed at four points on the north coast of Java: Merak, Bantam Bay, Eretenwetan, and Kragan. The invaders encountered occasionally heavy resistance as they advanced across the island, but wherever the Allies stood, the enemy smashed them, drove them back, or simply outflanked them. The colonial government fled the capital, Batavia, for the relative safety of Bandung. On March 8 the Dutch leadership, demoralized and fearful of possible Japanese reprisals against civilians, ordered the military forces to surrender. [12]

Soldiers of the Japanese 2nd Division celebrate their landing at Merak
Photo Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign

48th Division landing trucks at Kragan

Photo Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign

The Japanese Army enters Surabaya

Photo Source: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

Dutch soldiers surrender on Java

Photo Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign

At Fort Menari, Frank Samethini and his comrades obeyed the command with heavy hearts:

In bitter silence they come, from the firing positions, from the big guns so perfectly camouflaged against air attack. They come to pile arms and ammunition in one big heap before the commander's bunker. This has been ordered by the Imperial Japanese Army, which will arrive to take over tomorrow. We all go to the canteen to drink, and drink. "Here's to victory, blast the Japs!" sounding hollow and desperate. [13]

Han heard the report of capitulation at a hospital in Malang. By this time he'd recovered sufficiently from the malaria to get back on his feet. He surrendered to the local Japanese occupation troops on March 9. In his own words, "I marched straight from the hospital to the POW camp." Reflecting on the lopsided struggle that was the NEI Campaign over 40 years later, he commented sadly, "We had rifles, some machine guns, some artillery, and a few tanks. They gave us a little bit of training. But we were not really an army. We were just a police force." [14]

After more than three centuries of proud mastery in the East Indies, the Dutch had been overthrown in just three months.

_____________________

Footnotes

[1] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 4: The Darkening Sky.

[2] Quoted in "The Balikpapan Massacre", on the web site The Dutch East Indies Campaign 1941-1942.

[3] Most of the information on events at Balikpapan is drawn drawn from "The Capture of Balikpapan", Ibid. In 1985 Samethini told me about his part in the infantry battle. He could not remember any details concerning the position of his unit, but I surmise that he was with Hoogenband's column because this was the only Dutch land force at Balikpapan that offered any organized resistance.

[4] Samethini recounted the desperate journey to Samarinda in a 1989 interview with Rosemarie Neithercutt in East London, South Africa. The resulting article, a short biographical piece, appeared in the Bee Gee Bulletin, the newsletter of the Berea Gardens retirement community: "[Han] and the others escaped through the jungle. They were under constant attack and had to cut their way through deep forests, but finally, arrived at a pre-prepared airport and were flown back to Java." The closeness of the pursuit suggests that Dayak tribesmen had joined in the hunt. Shortsightedly, the Dutch authorities had neglected to cultivate good relations with these fierce aboriginal hunters. The Japanese Army paid them to track and kill Dutch soldiers, a task the Dayaks performed with great skill and relish. (Click on the thumbnail image to read the article)

[5] George Duncan's Massacres and Atrocities of World War II.

[6] From a communique dated February 1, 1942 ( SD 5145), sent by ABDACOM Batavia to Army HQ Melbourne: "All Dutch aircraft removed from Samarinda but believe aerodrome not yet demolished." Time of receipt 1300 hours. Samethini's group might have reached the airfield as late as the morning of February 1, catching one of the last planes out (This and other ABDACOM communiques can be viewed at the Dutch National Archives web site Afscheid van Indie: Digitale documenten over de jaren 1940-1950). The absence of Anna and Margie is a mystery. After evacuation from Balikpapan they'd returned to Emma's house in Surabaya. Possibly they were caught away from home by a sudden Japanese air raid, and forced to take shelter in another part of the city. Unable to return to Brantasstraat until the all-clear was sounded, they would have missed meeting Han by hours, perhaps minutes.

[7] The Sky Looked Down, Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Sky Looked Down, Appendix A: Lisa's Story.

[10] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 4: The Darkening Sky.

[11] Ibid.

[12] To get some idea of the unpreparedness of the Dutch on Java, see: Interview with Felix Bakker, Dutch East Indies Campaign 1941-1942. Bakker fought the Japanese in East Java as a soldier in the Marine Battalion.

[13] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 4: The Darkening Sky.

[14] Recalled from a conversation with Han Samethini, May 1985. Bakker mentions the retreat of Dutch units from Surabaya to Malang on March 7. This is probably how Samethini arrived there. Like Bakker, he recalled some vague talk of guerilla warfare among his comrades, but said that nothing ever came of it.

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6. Into the Inferno (March - December 1942)

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As the gates of his first prison camp closed behind him, Han could have harbored only the vaguest suspicion of what lay ahead. Certainly he was in for months, perhaps years, of tedious confinement. Very likely there would be compulsory labor, strict discipline, and less-than-appetizing food rations. All of these he might expect as the ordinary lot of a defeated soldier. But Imperial Japan was no ordinary victor by Western standards. Animated by its bushido code, which decreed that an enemy who surrendered forfeited any claim to human dignity, the Japanese Army treated prisoners of war with utter brutality. Felix Bakker, a Dutch marine interned in the same camp, writes:

Quite early into our POW life, we understood you would be killed if you tried to escape. In our camp in Malang, we had to watch the shooting of five men who had fled the camp. Later on we heard that, in other camps on Java, the Japs used bayonets for this purpose. Also, getting into a physical argument with a guard would result in death, as this was the punishment for insulting the Imperial Japanese Army. Often the guards tried to provoke aggressive behavior from a prisoner, so self-control, no matter how hard, was of the utmost importance. [1]

Felix Bakker
(Photo taken in January 1942)
Source: Moesson

Han Samethini's Japanese POW Index Card
Date of capture: March 9, 1942
(Year indicated as Showa 17, the seventeenth year of Emperor Hirohito's reign)
Han Samethini Collection

Hunger and beatings (kicks and punches to the face, shins, and groin) became part of daily existence, and the prisoners sank ever lower into physical degradation. But within them arose a spirit that defied humiliation and despair. They found small ways to outwit the Japanese wherever possible, and invented many humorous or insulting nicknames for the guards. Frank Samethini wrote:

The rags we wear, what meagre possessions we have tucked away in frayed rucksacks, our very lives, all of that is owned by the Japanese. But the rumours, improbable as they may sound, are ours, ours to be passed on in whispers and listened to hungrily. Yes, the rumours are ours. And the unsquashable, incredible sense of humour, witty and often biting, that too is ours. That also the Japanese cannot take away. [2]

Joop Postma
From a drawing preserved at the Museon, in The Hague
Source: Geheugen van Nederland

Music and comedy, performed in makeshift variety shows, were essential morale boosters. Somewhere in camp Samethini found an accordion. Together with Joop Postma, a Dutch navy corporal who was to become a brilliant POW cabaret producer, he organized a number of entertainments for their fellow prisoners. Postma recalled:

Soon after the capitulation, at Malang, we started our cabaret. We kept at it until we were transported to Batavia....We started with just the two of us at first, Samethini on accordion and me as emcee. [3]

Bakker elaborates:

I am quite certain I met Han Samethini first in the POW camp at Malang, East Java, in December 1942. In this camp several shows with cabaret and music were performed for us in the barracks of the army soldiers. I was housed in the barracks for marines. Joop Postma was onstage as well. I already knew him as a stand up comedian who told rather dirty jokes, but now it didn't matter since we were with men only (9,000 to 11,000 of us) and there were no ladies present. [4] [5]

During all this time, Han had neither seen nor heard anything of his wife and daughter. Unable to receive letters or visits, he treasured the one memento in his possession, a tiny locket containing Anna's portrait. Margie would be over a year old now. What did she look like? Would the Allies liberate the East Indies in time to for him to see his little girl take her first steps, or hear her speak her first words? Similar thoughts of home gnawed at all the men in camp, but at least they were still on Java, relatively near to their families. That was about to change.

Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign, 1941-1942

Throughout the conquered territories of Southeast Asia, masses of POWs were on the move. By road, rail, and sea they went, hauled away by the Japanese like the cargoes of looted oil, rubber, and strategic minerals, to feed and maintain the churning war machine. Some were sent to distant islands, to build military airstrips virtually with bare hands. Others were taken to Japan itself, to toil in the mines and factories of the imperial homeland. In the sweltering jungles of Thailand and Burma awaited the most immense slave labor project: a railway that would link Bangkok and Moulmein to supply Japan's 15th Army in Burma, an enormous force pressing on the very borders of India. European companies had earlier examined the feasibility of constructing such a railroad, but judged it impossible because the cost in human lives would be too high. This consideration posed no obstacle to the bushido spirit. The Japanese had prisoners aplenty and they would spend them freely. The Java camps were levied.

The year had turned. It was January 1943. Han Samethini and his comrades stepped out of the gates of the Malang stockade to begin the first leg of their journey to Thailand.

Poking fun at old horrors

Caricature of Samethini drawn by J. Chevallier. [6]
Han Samethini Collection

____________________

Footnotes

[1] Felix Bakker, personal e-mail to Margie Samethini-Bellamy (September 2006). Translated by Margie.

[2] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 10: Railroad. The context of that quote is slave labor on the Burma Railway in 1943. By that time, the POWs' uniforms had grown threadbare.

[3] Werkers aan de Burma-spoorweg, p. 239.

[4] Felix Bakker, Ibid.

[5] Of Han Samethini's character, Bakker recalls: "My impression of him was that of a sympathetic, well educated and well mannered man. And quite modest, like most Eurasians are. During that event I did not once hear Samethini raising his voice." Bakker, personal e-mail to author (November 28, 2006).

[6] Chevallier drew this cartoon after the war, in 1945 or 1946. The Japanese guard shouts a mixture of Malay and Japanese imprecations: "No-good Dutchman! Bastard!"

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7. Hell Ship to Singapore (January 1943)

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POWs boarding the Usu Maru in Tanjong Priok, Java (January 4, 1943)

Illustration by Australian POW Ray Parkin

Source: Into the Smother

The Japanese shipped the Dutch POWs west by rail across Java, then north over sea to Singapore on the freighter Usu Maru. Felix Bakker recounts their journey:

The first week of January 1943, a thousand men from our camp, [Samethini] among them, were transported to Batavia (Jakarta) in a boarded-up train. One week later we were crammed, 1,100 men, into an old Japanese freighter, not knowing where the Japs were going to bring us. We were packed deep inside the ship, like herrings in a tin can. The hatches above us were open day and night, so we suffered the intense heat of the sun during the day. When it rained hard, the Japanese sailors put a tarp over the open hatch. We got very little food and drink, and pretty soon it got suffocating down there.

Conditions in the hold of a hellship bound for Singapore (January, 1943)
Note the open hatches above, matching Bakker's description.
Illustration by Dutch POW W.F. Brinks
Source: Geheugen van Nederland / The Museon

Source: Geheugen van Nederland / The Museon

The so-called toilets were small, wooden spaces along ship's railing. To get there, we had to climb a very steep and long steel ladder. Once there, we often had to wait in line for a long time. If there were too many in line, according to the guard, he would use the butt of his rifle to beat them back down the ladder. On top of that, many prisoners came down with dysentery. Those patients were unable to climb the ladder, and did everything where they were. We had to clean the mess because the illness is contagious. Many could not sleep for fear the ship would be torpedoed by the Allies during the night. Many of us felt mentally and physically broken soon, especially those with families left behind. In a word, it was misery.

Then, one evening (I will never forget this as long as I live), something incredibly beautiful happened. The sea was calm, the evening was clear, and we could even see some stars from our dark hellhole. Suddenly we heard the wonderful sounds of beautiful music played on an accordion. We knew right away it was Han Samethini. He sat on top of the hatch with the Dutch transport commander next to him, and some Japanese a bit further away. We heard later that the Japanese captain had given permission for him to play. That night Han Samethini played the stars down from the sky. Strauss, Mozart, Brahms. It was overwhelming. The ship, crammed with over a thousand prisoners of war, was totally silent. Even the sick stopped moaning. But around me I could hear strong men weeping, and to be honest, I shed some tears as well. Listening to this heavenly music from another time and world, we turned all our thoughts to our loved ones, who were being separated farther and farther from us with each turn of the ship's screws. Han Samethini must have thought of his family too, as he played with such intense feeling. I don't know how long he played. It was not long enough for us.

We applauded, not only because of admiration but even more so out of gratitude. In this midst of this horrible situation, Han Samethini used his blessed musical talent that unforgettable night, to not only forget the misery for a few moments, but to give us strength to face the very perilous future. [1] [2]

______________________

Footnotes

[1] Felix Bakker, personal e-mail to Margie Samethini-Bellamy (September 2006). Translated by Margie. The ship's identity is confirmed by the List of Hellship Voyages. The vessel departed the port of Tanjong Priok (Batavia) on January 4 and arrived in Singapore on the 7th.

[2] Compare Bakker's account with that of Ray Parkin (see Appendix E), who was with the Australian "Dunlop Force", confined in Usu Maru's Hold Number 3 aft. Parkin carefully recorded every entertainment he witnessed as a POW, including songs by solitary prisoners, but his memoir does not mention Samethini's performance. It seems the Dutch were kept in a forward cargo hold. If so, the sound of Han's accordion would not have been audible to the Aussies over the distance and the noise of the ship's machinery.

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8. Changi (January 1943)

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Selarang Barracks, Changi POW Camp
Source: New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

After three days of misery in the hellship's hold, Han and his comrades emerged into the light and marched down the gangplank to their next transit camp. Felix Bakker continues:

It turned out our destination was Singapore. We disembarked there and were housed in the Changi camp, where we joined most of the 70,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops captured at the fall of Singapore. [1]

Frank Samethini too had been transferred to Changi. His group of Dutch POWs had arrived in November 1942, being sent to the AIF (Australian Imperial Forces) section. Shortly after Han's contingent arrived, Frank got word that his brother was in the vicinity. He went at once to find him:

My brother Han is reported seen in the hospital area of Changi. On my way there, good care is taken to salute the Sikh guards in the correct manner. Calling themselves "Free Indians", they have gone over to the enemy. A mean lot they are, worse than the Japs when it comes to finding an excuse for bashing us up. A chapel stands further down the road, its door open. Inside, an Aussie on a stepladder, repairing the stained-glass window, says, "Howdie" without looking up from his work. On an impulse, I take a seat before the small altar and bend my head. But words will not come. Do I still believe? Then it all wells up, gushing forth into violent prayer. A moment later I am outside again, feeling much relieved. Han is not in the hospital and, thanks to the Lord, also not in the ever growing plot of mounds of freshly dug soil. Back in my camp, Han runs to meet me at the gate, and all is well. [2]

"The ever growing plot of mounds of freshly dug soil"
Funeral of RAMC captain in Changi camp cemetery (October 1942)
Source: www.fepow-community.org.uk

British POWs at Changi
Men of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment (October 1942)
Source: www.fepow-community.org.uk

Briefly reunited, the Samethinis set off on an unusual quest:

Han, the wizard on the accordion, as he is known, is craving to try his hand again on the keyboard of a piano. Hasn't touched one in donkey years. We find the officer in charge of entertainment, sporting a fierce martial moustache, supervising a Shakespearean play performed in the open air theatre. First an attempt is made to ignore us, but we plant ourselves right in front of him.

"Yes?" with contempt in his eyes for the two foreigners who dare to interrupt his listening. We tell him.

"Yes, of course, that's a piano there on the stage. But not for amateurs, thank you. However, there's another one in the church which could be made available at some time or other. But mind, none of this swing music. We do not permit jazz in church." [3]

The British officer's lofty admonition not only only failed to deter Han, it provoked him into stealing the show:

Not wishing to waste another word on the empire builder, we return to our section, which happens to border on the entertainment grounds.

Han takes the old "squeeze box" from the hook, accepting a tailor-made cigarette from one of the boys who anticipates what is coming. "Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond" is followed by "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" and "Beautiful Dreamer." When he gets to "Tipperary," everyone in the open air theatre has walked out on the Bard to join us in the great sing-song, led by the amateur. [4]

The Java Lines section at Changi

Prisoners transiting from Java to the Burma Railway were assembled here.
Illustration by British POW Charles Thrale
Source: FEPOW Monthly Review

Frank was to remain at Changi until April 1943, but Han and his group were sent north after only a short time. Bakker relates:

We did not stay very long, as ten days later we were on our way to Thailand by train. Han Samethini was among the Dutch POWs in this transport. [5]

Riding the Singapore-Bangkok rail line up the length of the Malay Peninsula, they approached the southernmost base camps of the Burma Railway, outliers of a domain of hardship and savagery that were to surpass anything the Japanese had inflicted on them so far.

Singapore and the southern portion of the Burma Railway
(Click map to enlarge)

___________________

Footnotes

[1] Felix Bakker, personal e-mail to Margie Samethini-Bellamy (September 2006)

[2] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 6: Destination Railroad

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Bakker, Ibid.

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9. The Death Railway (January - December 1943)

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"We were crammed, thirty-five men, in steel compartments"

Illustration by Charles Thrale
Source: Fepow Monthly Review

The journey from Singapore to the southern end of the Burma Railway took nearly a week. Felix Bakker again takes up the narrative:

We were crammed, thirty-five men, in steel compartments. The doors were kept ajar, with a rope stretched between them, so that we could hold on to the rope when "going to the toilet." After a few days, dysentery erupted again with all its misery. Those patients had to be held tightly or they would fall out of the train due to their weakness. During the day it was boiling hot in those steel wagons, and at night we froze. Under those circumstances it was almost impossible to sleep; we had to try that sitting down and pulling our knees up. For the tall guys among us this was even worse than for those who were shorter and more supple. I was not among the latter.

Ban Pong railway station, Thailand
Source: Australian War Memorial (P00761.029)

Twice during daylight the train would stop, and from each wagon two men were allowed to get a small barrel of water and another one of rice gruel. That was all we got for food and water per day. If one of the sick men tried to leave the wagons to void, the Japs would beat him back into the train with their rifle butts. As on the ship, conditions inside the train became almost intolerable. This train trip took five days and five nights, until we arrived at Ban Pong, Thailand. There we were crammed into trucks so we could not fall out, even though we could barely stand for lack of sleep. We had to walk from Kanchanaburi to Chungkai camp. It was really more like sleepwalking, but the rifle butts of our guards made sure we kept staggering on. In the camp were already a few thousand British POWs, who had built bamboo barracks and who had started working on the railroad. After roll call, which lasted longer than an hour while the Japanese kept counting us over and over, we could finally go to our barracks, where most of us simply collapsed from lack of sleep.

After a few days in Chungkai, our group of 500 Dutch POWs had to move up country to our first labor camp, but not before we had to listen to a speech by the Jap camp commander. I, and most of us, don't remember much about his nonsense other than:

"You should be honored and feel privileged that you are helping to undertake such a great project under Japanese leadership, and therefore you shall have to work hard to earn this honor."

Well, we learned the truth of that last statement. We walked, a long line of men, on a small sandy road which soon became a jungle trail. The walk took three days. Many fell ill with dysentery, malaria, and injured feet. In the late afternoon of the third day, we halted in a clearing in the forest along the River Kwai. On one side, near the river, were three large, new tents for the Japanese camp commander and the Korean guards. On the other side, near the edge of the forest, stood an old, threadbare, grubby tent which was the hospital tent for the gravely ill. Everybody else had to find a spot near the bushes or under the trees at the edges of the camp.

Map of the Burma Railway
(Click to Enlarge)
Source: perthone.com

Luckily the dry monsoon was still there for a few more months. Roll call had everybody out next morning before daylight. For breakfast we got a small bowl of rice gruel. Our doctor had kept some sick men away from the labor groups. This was not appreciated by the Japs, who kicked a number of these men towards the labor details. When the doctor protested vehemently, four guards went at him with sticks until he fell unconscious to the ground. After a few hours the guards threw water on his face and allowed him to be dragged off to his "hospital tent." This way the Japs made it clear how they would run things.

The railroad to be worked on was about 6 kilometers from camp. One detail cut a wide swath through the forest by sawing down trees and hacking away the brush. Other groups started the initial foundation work for the railroad. The work was done by hand, with picks and shovels. Woven baskets were used to dump the soil where it was needed. Each man had to move one cubic meter of soil. This was measured very precisely by the Japs at the end of the day by the finished section of railroad. Only when the measurement was correct could the labor details return to camp. If not, we had to keep working by torch light. This happened more and more, as increasing numbers of men fell ill. It was very heavy labor under the broiling sun. The water in our canteens was soon gone, and water for tea was brought by two men once a day, from the river 6 kilometers away. Those men also brought the rice gruel for lunch. We got ten minutes to eat gruel and drink tea, and then it was back to work. If things did not go fast enough, or if we did not work hard enough, according to the Japs, we would get beaten with bamboo sticks, shovels, or rifle butts. For the first time in my life, I learned what thirst really meant: mouth and throat dry as a cork, swollen lips, visions of faucets giving cool, clear water, as much as you wished.

Illustration by Francess Richardson
Image courtesy of former British POW Len Baynes

"Green Hell"
Source: Geheugen van Nederland / The Museon

Due to the merciless slave labor conditions, not enough food (three bowls of gruel, and at night sometimes pumpkin soup), and lack of sleep on account of mosquitoes and diarrhea, the number of seriously ill rose daily. There was dysentery, malaria, and feet badly injured by tropical ulcers because many of us did not have shoes anymore and worked with bare feet. Now every day people were dying. Nobody escaped contagious illnesses like dysentery. I also suffered my first painful bout with that. The nights were worst when the cramps forced you to crawl in pitch darkness to the latrines at the edge of the forest. The latrines were ditches up to three meters deep with bamboo trunks laid across. Among familiar faces, I saw your father [Samethini] at a roll call of dysentery patients. In spite of his pleading, our doctor did not receive any medications. The Thai name for the camp site was Nombredai, which we immediately changed to "Nonparadise." It was hell more than anything else. And yet it would get much worse later, in the labor camps upstream in the rocky jungle mountains, in the rainy season.

We got a few days rest after finishing our part of the railroad, and then we marched to the next labor camp. I don't know the name of that next labor camp. We did not stay there long, but went on again, working on the route of the railroad, moving earth and building embankments.

Source: BBC

At the next camp, called Wampo, we worked on the rocky parts of the railway bridges. This was a huge project, as the two-part bridge was to be built underneath and against the rocks hanging over the river. As far as I remember, we were a labor force of 2,000 Allied POWs: about 600 Australians, 700 British, and 450 Dutch. There were also about 100 Thai workers, whose elephants dragged the felled trees, to be used in the bridges, from the forest to the river. The three POW labor camps were situated on sand banks in the river bend. The rainy monsoon had not arrived yet. For the first time we had tents for bivouacs. Really not enough of them, as we had to lie down very close together. But because we worked in shifts, there was barely enough room for everyone.

The British and Australians were detailed to build the bridges, and we Dutch and a few hundred Brits got the task of hacking away the huge rock, so the railroad could proceed towards the bridges. The bridge builders worked all day during daylight. But we rock cutters worked in three shifts, day and night. The first shift, by twos, had to make holes 1.2 meters deep manually, using chisel and hammer. The goal was for each pair to make two holes, so one hole per man. Dynamite was then exploded in those holes. The second shift had to clear away the debris - chunks of rock, stones, and gravel - pushing it down the mountainside with shovels, or using steel jacks for the large rocks. As soon as they were finished, the third shift showed up to makes holes with hammer and chisel. And so it went, day and night. After dark, we worked by torch lights called hellfires. During the day it was searingly hot on those rocks. The thirst was very bad, especially when we saw the river streaming below.

Southern approach to the railway viaduct at Wampo South.

Note the massive cutting in the bluff above the bridge.
Source: Australian War Memorial (AWM122325)

Sketch of Wampo South by Dutch POW A.G. Muller
View from the north
Source: Geheugen van Nederland / The Museon

A section of the Wampo viaduct today
Source: picasaweb.google.com

Here also, we were harassed and beaten for any reason, or no reason. We got a little more rice than in the previous camps, and there were fewer gravely ill POWs. But the night-and-day work schedule was a killer, and the sharp stone fragments tore up our feet because most of us had no shoes left to wear. We had to keep working on those sore and cut-up feet. After a while, you lost count of hours, days, nights. No more thoughts, only work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep. The lack of sleep brought most of us to utter exhaustion. Because of this, malaria and dysentery came back in force, and the foot injuries got worse and worse. It took about four weeks to cut that rock of 15 meters height and 100 meters long to pieces. Afterwards we had to hoist tree trunks, meant for the final sections of the bridges, from the river to the rocks. When the bridges were finally completed, and the wooden cross ties and the rails could be laid down, we were marched to the next camp without a break.

Only the gravely ill stayed behind. Many of them had seriously injured feet. They were transported to the base/hospital camp Chungkai. Henri Samethini must have been among them, as he was ill, with injured feet, and because I saw him much later in Chungkai. [1]

Han Samethini was indeed separated from Bakker's party at Wampo, but regardless of his condition, the Japanese put him back to work on the railroad. He continued up-country with another group of Dutch POWs. At every camp where they stopped, Han must have asked for news of his brother. When the column reached Kinsayok, in April 1943, Han found Frank lying in a squalid hospital tent. Frank's group had started from Ban Pong earlier that month, originally a force of 900 men. After a ten day march with only brief halts, little more than 500 of them were still standing. Frank contracted dysentery almost immediately upon arrival at Kinsayok. The doctors had no medicines to combat the disease. There were not even any beds for the patients, just groundsheets laid out on bare earth. He'd been fighting grimly for his life, managing to keep down a little food long enough to be digested, as men died all around him. Frank writes:

At dusk my name is called, and a moment later my brother Han enters, sporting a long, thin beard. Stooping down, he calls my name again and again, and starts to cry, begging me not to die. What does he mean, die! I rave about flies, orderlies, the bad food and the filth. His face lights up while he brushes tears from his cheeks, saying that to hear me carrying on like that means, thank heaven, that he has no reason to worry. Is there anything he can do? Yes, a pair of pants is badly needed; I've only got one pair left on my body. He takes a pair of faded khaki pants out of his haversack and hands them over. Good old Han. A minute later and he is gone again, running all the way back to his outfit. He was given ten minutes to see me before marching off to a river camp way up north. [2]

Frank recovered from the dysentery after some weeks, whereupon the Japanese assigned him to a labor gang clearing bamboo along the planned route of the railroad. In May he was sent to Tamarkan, a base camp near Kanchanaburi. He was moved again in December, to Chungkai. With every transfer, Frank surreptitiously recorded the name of each successive POW camp on the inside cover of his bible.

Source: picasaweb.google.com

We know next to nothing of Han's movements during the remainder of 1943. A Dutch eyewitness recalls seeing him in 100 Kilo Camp (Regue), north of the Thailand-Burma border.[3] Apart from that sighting he figuratively vanishes into the jungle. What he experienced in those eight months he reluctantly revealed to his grandchildren, decades later, in sparse anecdotes: The terror of forced marches, where exhaustion and collapse meant certain death. The screams of men afflicted with dry beriberi, tormented by unbearably itching or tingling feet. The use of pitiful food rations, a mere handful of rice per man, as bait to lure insects which the prisoners devoured hungrily. Beatings and more beatings. Yet through it all, it was still possible for him to look up at the night sky and revel, for a moment or two, in the glory of the moon and the shining stars.

"By the Fire"
Illustration by Dutch POW Kees van Willigen
(Identity of accordionist unknown)
Source: Geheugen van Nederland / The Museon

___________________

Footnotes

[1] Felix Bakker, personal e-mail to Margie Samethini-Bellamy (September 2006)

[2] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 8: The River.

[3] Recollections of Dutch ex-POW J.J. den Outer, edited by G.H. Bartman: "De Vertellers van de Doodenspoorweg" [Tales of the Death Railway], Tong Tong magazine (May 1, 1971), p. 21. I plan to have this article translated into English in the near future. When the translation is finished, a link to it will be posted here.

(Click Image to Enlarge)
Source: Digitale Tijdschriftenarchief - Moesson

100 Kilo was a bridge building camp in the mountains near Three Pagodas Pass (click on the map above to see its location). There were American POWs in this camp. One of them, Charley L. Pryor, USMC (USS Houston), describes conditions there:

Supply was getting to be a big problem now that the rainy season had set in with fierceness of purpose. From now on we had steady rain. One Hundred Kilo was one of the most unlikely campsites that we had on the road. It was built more or less in a swamp. The whole camp was nothing but a swamp. You'd wade around there in the water and in the mud, and we'd clear right-of-way, make cuts and fills, and make bridges. There was no bottom to all the mud. The Japs had three trucks that moved in the area. All three had been captured from the British, but they were American trucks - a six-wheel drive Studebaker, a four-wheel drive Chevrolet, and I think the other one was a six-wheel drive Reo. They all had front mounted winches. They were sold by the U.S. Army to the English and then captured. They were all that would move, and they just moved essential supplies. So our rations were drastically reduced.

We were just as hungry as we had been in the first few days. We were not able to get near enough to satisfy your wants. At this time fever and dysentery became a common thing for our people, and in the midst of this rainy season we began to get tropical ulcers. Any scratch or cut would get infected and start to spread. We had nothing: no dressings, nor any sort of medicine with any kind of antiseptic power or antibiotic to combat infection. So the ulcers would grow. I know I got one just from a cut. We were making ballast for the roads, trying to improve the service roads so we could get supplies. So I was working on that, and a piece of rock cut my shin.

We never experienced these tropical ulcers until the rainy season came along, and when we talk of the rainy season there, by gosh, it rains every day. I know in one period - I believe in July 1943 - we counted that it rained fourteen days and nights. Of course, we were out in it all the time. Our camp was built in a mudhole. You're in mud and filth all the time, and in the jungle everything is decaying vegetation. So any scratch you'd get would become infected by nightfall. That was my experience. I got a scratch early in the morning, and by nightfall it was infected, and within a week the ulcer had spread to three or four inches in diameter. It had eaten to the bone in a week.

Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American POWs in Burma, 1942-1945, edited by Robert S. La Forte and Ronald E. Marcello (Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books, 1993), pp. 157-158.

GO TO NEXT CHAPTER

10. Prison Camp Musician (January 1944 - August 1945)

2009-04-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

In January 1944, Han Samethini appeared at the entrance to Chungkai camp. He was in such a state that his own brother hardly recognized him at first:

A man stumbles through the gate, leaning on bamboo crutches, one of his legs covered in a dirt-blackened bandage. His uniform hangs loosely in tatters on his pitiful, shrunken frame. His face is bent downwards, which is why I need moment or two to recognise...my brother, Han! Panic stricken, I run to him.

"Han!"

His tired eyes in the sallow face light up. "Frank! So glad to see you. They said you were dead! Oh, my leg. It hurts, it hurts. What's happening to me?"

Taking his arm, I support him to the hut, with fear in my heart as I smell the odour of a tropical ulcer. Oh my God, how far he is gone! He is so light, so awfully light! With a cold, sinking feeling I lay him down on the bamboo slats. "Jesus, not my brother, not him! You hear me?!" Han, too tired to speak, falls at once into a deep slumber. Only then do I realise that all the time I haven't spoken a single word to him. [1]

Hospital huts at Chungkai
Watercolor by POW Jack Chalker
Source: Australian War Memorial (ART91822)

As he ran to the hospital huts to summon help, Frank shouted to Han in reassurance, "No fear!" But he had reason to worry. Tropical ulcers - festering skin lesions that could begin with the smallest cut - were a disfiguring and deadly scourge on the Burma Railway. Untreated, they consumed muscle and connective tissue down to the bone. The worst cases required amputation. Less drastic treatments included regular scraping of dead tissue from the gaping wounds until new tissue formed. Typically the work was done with sharpened spoons (scalpels being hard to come by) and without anesthetics. The screaming patient was simply held down by fellow POWs while an orderly did the scraping. In addition to the ulcers and severe malnutrition, Han had contracted malaria again. But a POW doctor reassured Frank that his brother might just pull through with rest, food, and quinine treatments. These life-sustaining essentials, usually meager in the jungle work camps, were relatively abundant here. Frank elaborates:

Like Tamarkan, Chungkai is not too bad as far as POW camps go. The Japs are reasonable because their commander is humane, the work is not too hard and the food is pretty good. There is even a canteen where one may buy fried eggs, omelets, spicy snacks, ginger bread and rice flour doughnuts! Finely cut native tobacco, properly cured by former tobacco experts from the British-American Tobacco Company in the Indies, is rolled with cleverly constructed tools into cigarettes of reasonably thin paper. Scores of men, unfit for manual work, are being employed by the "factories", the entire profit of which is donated into the hospital fund." [2]

Partially healed tropical ulcers on the leg of a Burma Railway POW
Source: Australian War Memorial (P01433.028)

Though Chungkai was designated a base hospital camp, doctors had to work with scant resources under the most primitive conditions. A few drugs were obtainable through black market trading with the Thais, but the quantity was insufficient for the great number of sick and broken men. The Japanese withheld or stole nearly all medical supplies sent by the Red Cross. Malnutrition compounded illness and injury. Critical for a patient's recovery was the sheer will to live. This Han possessed, and fortified by the generosity of friends, who gave him all they could spare in food and quinine, his vitality gradually returned. [3]

Finally there comes the day when the silent prayers are answered, when the stinking holes in his leg close and the feverish gleam disappears from his eyes. In the hours spent at his bedside, he tells me all about the ordeal he had to go through, the horror of the railroad, his share of the suffering. It is nothing new. His story is but an echo of that from many others, though with typical human selfishness, we here in Chungkai had forced ourselves to forget, to push back the screaming evil into the dark recesses of the mind, until the day of reckoning. [4]

Until then, the only way to resist the Japanese was to stay alive and do everything possible to lift the spirits of the men. Han asked for his accordion as soon as he was able to sit up.

At last Han has beaten the malaria and ulcers, but it's taken almost all the strength he has left in him. He is too weak as yet to walk by himself, but he says that he can play for the boys if they want him to. And so a time is set, and one evening they take him to the stage on a stretcher. They place him in a chair before a large crowd assembled on the parade ground. For a moment or two, his fingers run tentatively over the keyboard of his old accordion. A hush has fallen over the audience. Then, up spring and sparkle the notes, rising and tumbling down, in singles and in pairs, in chords of low and high notes like a musical fountain.

First they let him play a little while on his own, but not for long. As many times before, the magic of the sweeping rhythm and harmony of his music makes them burst forth into singing. "Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee" sounds over the heads of the men. "Home, home on the range" echoes against the dusty attap walls, touching the trees looming in the darkness, touching the hardened souls of these ragged, skinny people drawn together in close unity. A unity which goes beyond the boundaries of rank and standing. For now the only important things are Dinah and My Blue Heaven, and She's My Lady Luck, and Always, and more of the songs of old. But not Home Sweet Home, that is forbidden. The accordion is only audible at the start of each tune, the singing taking over immediately, drowning the mechanical sound in the human voices of the one and same hope they all carry in their hearts.

Lights-out comes much too soon. After Auld Lang Syne the men walk back to their quarters, contented, for had they not, for a little while at least, beaten the enemy? [5]

Caricature of Samethini at Chungkai
Sketch by Walter L. "Wally" Davis
Source: Han Samethini Collection

Chungkai Theater
Pencil and watercolor by Jack Chalker
Source: Australian War Memorial (AWM ART91826)

Chungkai Theater orchestra with the cast of Leo Britt's "Wonderbar" (May, 1944)
Eight Japanese (or Korean) POW camp guards sit in the front row onstage.
Samethini sits in the orchestra pit, at bottom, second from right.
Source: Han Samethini Collection

The Japanese commander was so impressed with Han's accordion playing that he exempted him from further railroad work. Samethini was assigned camp chores. When these were completed at the end of each day, he devoted much of his free time to helping with entertainments at the POW theater. Constructed in 1943 out of bamboo and attap (palm thatch), Chungkai Theater was the locus of the camp's artistic talent. An orchestra pit delved in front of the stage accommodated the band, and the rising ground beyond formed a natural amphitheater that could seat an audience of 2,000. Prisoners crafted costumes, sets, and musical instruments out of whatever materials they could scrounge. Scripts of prewar plays and dialogue from cinema films were reconstructed from memory. Original material was written as well. Through their combined efforts, the POW musicians, comedians, actors, and dancers made the theater an island of light and laughter in a sea of despair.

Leading lights of The Dutch Cabaret at Chungkai
(Clockwise from bottom left) Joop Postma, Philip "Flip" Brugman, and Ferry.
Source: The Museon

Here Samethini linked up again with Joop Postma, his old colleague from the camp in Malang. Postma headed the Dutch show group, Het Hollandsch Cabaret, in partnership with Philip Brugman and Ferry (whose real name is not known). The British and Australians also had their own groups of performers, but artists were not strictly segregated according to nationality. Show posters and handwritten programs often displayed names from all three nations. The versatile, gregarious Samethini participated in several Chungkai bands and ensembles, as an accordionist, music arranger, and on one occasion at least, as a singer.

Postma recalls Samethini's start as a regular performer at Chungkai:

The first show was performed with Samethini and an English orchestra where he played. It had a homemade drum, a few violins, and an accordion. These were made with railroad material, of course. An old soap box with strings made of telegraph wire. We had to steal those, you understand. But anyway, we got what we needed. It was a success. We had a Dutch-Indonesian young man - really more Javanese than Dutch-Indonesian - named Liddel, with a bass made of the soap box with wire strings. It had such a fantastic sound that it drowned out everything else except Samethini, who had a huge accordion and knew every piece of music. He [Samethini] had studied four years at the conservatorium in The Hague, and was very proud he was an Indo [a Dutch Eurasian]. But it was in his genes because his father played in a dance hall. This was a good time. He easily switched between playing for the English and for us. But he always had to do all the musical arrangements for our show, for whatever instruments were available, because the English did have a conductor but he could not arrange music. And so it happened that this English conductor had composed a piece of music just like the Bolero of Ravel. That man was called Smith. Samethini had to make the entire arrangement and did such an incredible job that he became indispensable. [6]

First page of the "The Exiles"
Composed by Norman Smith and arranged by Han Samethini
(See Appendix B for the complete score)
Source: Han Samethini Collection

Philip Brugman adds:

Every POW doctor will agree that these evenings in the Chungkai Theater were the best medicine for the sick men and the other POWs, yet after the war this has never been made clear. The performers of course had the advantage that their activities entailed a lot of exemptions from railroad work. They were kept back as much as possible, especially when a work group was being formed to go up country. But most of them did have a chore in camp, and they had the extra duties to prepare the performances. And it was hard work to get a show stage-ready in five weeks time. Joop Postma, for example, was the camp cook. Yours truly, the head masseur in the hospital. We both had a full day's job, and in our free time we worked and rehearsed for the theater in The Dutch Cabaret. Every five weeks we had to stage a musical. This was our specialty. Joop Postma was the director, who also took care of the comedy parts. Yours truly was the choreographer because, before the war, I studied folk and ballet dance. The musical portion was entirely the province of Han Samethini. The songs were written by Flip van Delden and the costumes made by Puck Jonkmans. And each group had its own set designer. [7]

Poster for "The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse," produced by Leo Britt
Geheugen van Nederland/The Museon

Poster for Eddie's Road Show, emceed by Eddie Edwins
Samethini's name appears in the credits
Geheugen van Nederland/The Museon

Besides The Dutch Cabaret, there were two English groups consisting of professional actors as well as amateurs, and these groups gave performances of high caliber. Then there was a revue troupe led by the professional director Leo Britt, who also staged musicals and an operetta called "Wonderbar." Also productions of very high quality. Between our group and Leo Britt's group there was a healthy rivalry resulting in much better performances by both groups. Joop and I performed in Leo Britt's productions a few times. Then there was a road show group led by an Australian named Eddie Edwins, which performed brief improvisations like drama, singing, and dance numbers with himself as a comical emcee. These Edwins shows were on a much lower level than Britt's and Postma's. The sixth group was a musical troupe, an Allied promenade concert party performing light classics. This orchestra was conducted by the Englishman Norman Smith. Of course, Han Samethini played a large part in this orchestra, as most of the members were in his Samethini band. Sammy was very popular everywhere. [8]

In April, Frank left with a party of POWs whom the Japanese promised, "Speedo big yasme" ("very soon a long resting time"). It was a lie. The men were being taken to Japan for further slave labor. For a third time the Samethini brothers had been reunited in captivity, but they were not to see each other again for the duration of the war.

Pte. Walter L. "Wally" Davis, 5th Bn., Royal Norfolk Regiment
Drummer for the Chungkai POW Orchestra
Imperial War Museum

"English Drummer"
Sketch by Dutch POW Kees van Willigen
(The man depicted appears to be Wally Davis)
Legermuseum

One of Han's colleagues at Chungkai was a British POW named Walter L. "Wally" Davis, who'd been the drummer for the Royal Norfolks regimental dance band. He recalls the physical hazards of playing in the presence of Japanese soldiers, who attended every performance. When displeased, for whatever reason, the guards interrupted shows by assaulting the actors and musicians. Davis began as a spectator. Of the period between between January and June 1944, he writes:

I nearly saw two [shows], as I remember a pal lent me a pair of trousers to go in, but half way there I had what we called a "slight mishap" and had to go down to the river and wash them out before returning them, and back to my slats. The only one I saw was Dr. Gottler's [sic] Revue "Thai-Diddle-Diddle" who not only got bashed up for one sketch, but also got sent away from the camp because he could not give the Japanese a satisfactory answer to what the cow jumping over the moon on the poster meant or even Thai-Diddle-Diddle. [9]

Poster for "Thai Diddle Diddle"
Produced by Dudley Gotla
The Burma-Siam Railway: The Secret Diary of Dr. Robert Hardie 1942-45

On June 15, Davis joined the orchestra as a drummer, performing with Samethini in many shows. When too ill to participate on one occasion, he was at least fortunate to avoid an especially zealous round of abuse:

Dec 25...I went down with malaria, yellow jaundice, etc. and whilst [I was] sick the Australians, British and Dutch put on a Revue "Cuts from the Movies" but owing to the Japanese thinking that the monkey in the Australian "Road to Singapore" Dorothy Lamour/Bing Crosby scene was taking the mickey, they bashed up all the band and artists, and the theatre had to be pulled down the next day. [10]

Concert program for "Sweet and Swing"
(Click images to enlarge)
Drawn by Piet van Velthuysen
Samethini credited as accordionist and vocalist.
Han Samethini Collection

Poster for "Lichten Op" (Hit the Lights!)
Dutch Cabaret show
Geheugen van Nederland/The Museon

Poster for "Zijn Groote Reis" (His Big Trip)
Dutch Cabaret show
Geheugen van Nederland/The Museon

Poster for "Van Lach tot Lach" (From Laugh to Laugh)
Dutch Cabaret show
Geheugen van Nederland/The Museon

Among the groups Samethini joined was an ensemble called The Swingtette. It proved highly popular, and was sent by the Japanese on tour to other POW camps. In July or August 1944, these musicians gave a concert at nearby Tamarkan. Australian Major James Jacobs writes:

Following my visit to Chunkai, and by arrangement with Major Bill Pyecock, O.C. of the Chunkai Concert Party, we obtained permission for their "Swingtette" to visit Tamarkan and give us a programme. This swing band was a very clever combination of drums, slap bass, trumpet and piano accordeon. The accordeonist was a Dutch Eurasian named Samathini, and was far and away the best performer on the instrument I have ever heard. A sound musician, and a showman to his fingertips, Samathini made a tremendous hit with the Tamarkanites. [11]

Major James W. Jacobs
Royal Australian Signals Corps
Prisoners of the Japanese 1942-1945

A tour in November took The Swingtette up-country to a series of railway maintenance camps, where Japanese and Korean guards craved relief from boredom. Their performance at Kinsayok is recorded in the diary of C.D.L. Aylwin:

They came here primarily to play at a Nip concert on November 3rd - a big celebration of some sort but none of us attended. We benefited by two concerts during their stay. The first in this camp held inside a hut as it was raining and the second in the Korean camp in the open. Both were much enjoyed. They played light music and jazz. The illuminations provided by the Koreans for the latter concert was terrific. It was held after dark. I've not seen as a p.o.w. such generosity with candles, lamps and flares for lighting. [12]

As much as entertainments did to boost POW morale, still more encouragement came from news of mounting Allied victories and continuing Axis retreats during 1944. These reports were obtained through clandestine radios and passed along by word of mouth. One British-built shortwave receiver was kept well hidden at Chungkai. Its operators, the Webber brothers, continued their work even after the Japanese discovered a radio set in neighboring Kanchanaburi camp and beat two British officers to death. [13]

Allied air attack on the Tamarkan rail bridges, circa 1945
Australian War Memorial (P01433.004)

The most dramatic evidence of Japan's waning fortunes came from the air, as Allied bombers hammered targets up and down the Burma Railway. American B-24s attacking the bridges at Tamarkan began their bomb runs at a point just southwest of Chungkai, flying low enough to be easily observed by Han and his comrades: [14]

....we saw many planes flying their bomb loads to a spot dead-right over the bridge, which was promptly blown up. [15]

POW railroad labor was now used increasingly to repair bomb damage. By early 1945, trains returning from Burma carried growing numbers of wounded Japanese soldiers. With these obvious signs of approaching defeat, the captors became less tolerant of entertainments at Chungkai. Davis writes:

....On Jan 10 [1945] we were told that anybody who had valuables (still) had got to hand them in for safe keeping by the Japanese....Later we were told that the officers were all going down to Kanchanaburi, concerts would be allowed but censored. Each week a new order was given until we finished up with no announcing, no singing, no applause and a Japanese tune to be played in both halves [of the concert]. Although "Bill" G. Bainbridge the conductor and "Samathini" the accordionist used to put in the odd bars of British and Dutch patriotic tunes (and Col. Bogey) this caused controversy amongst the POWs as to whether to continue with the concerts or not. Some thought to continue [would have] looked as though as though we were Jap-happy. Others thought to stop altogether was just what the Japs wanted.

We continued for a while, but as Bill kept getting bashed up before we could find the interpreter to explain such things as "Tale" of Hoffman or Vienna Woods, [we] finished up with [the]"Swingtette" going round the hospital huts.... [16]

As a result of one such bash-up, or a beating received earlier in his captivity, Samethini suffered a ruptured eardrum. He took this injury in stride, never letting it impede either his music or his easygoing nature.

Chungkai cemetery
Geheugen van Nederland/The Museon

Davis sums up the quiet determination that animated the performers at Chungkai Theater, and indeed all POWs who survived the Burma Railway:

During the daytime if one was working in camp or sick, it was usual to hear Last Post being sounded three or four times a day as the funeral parties arrived at the cemetery where over 1,200 bodies of POWs lay. [These] are things that most men who were there will never forget. When the Last Post was played all the men in camp would stand to attention and as soon as it was over, it was back to work on whatever they were doing. I mention this because with the band and concerts it was, "The show must go on," regardless of whether any of them had malaria with temperatures well over 100, touch of the trots, or feeling rough otherwise because a very close friend had passed away that day. The shows went on as usual, partly for morale and also to let the Japanese know they still could not break the spirit that kept us going. [17]

Tamuang POW camp, 1945
Australian War Memorial

On June 2, 1945 the other ranks prisoners at Chungkai were moved to Tamuang. It seems there was a small chapel in this camp, and on June 5, Samethini was inspired by the ringing of its bells to compose the song "Church Bells in the Morning." The lyrics were written by Australian POW Ron Wells, a swing musician who'd performed with the Tamarkan concert party:

I hear bells with the morning light,
Ringing clear through the air so quiet.
Do they say, "Very soon have faith,
Loved ones at home pray for you always?"
There are church bells ringing in the morning,
Reminding me of the old folks at home.
And my heart is aching for that morning,
When I'm returning across the foam.
Then the church bells of my home town,
And the choir as they sing,
Will remind me of church bells in the morning
And the faith that they brought to me.
And the faith that they brought to me. [18]

Opening bars of "Church Bells in the Morning"
Composed by Han Samethini
Lyrics by Ron Wells

Han Samethini Collection

At Tamuang the Japanese ordered the prisoners to build a theater. Davis writes:

This [theater] was up in no time but was not used until one day when Colonel Ishi had gone to Bangkok for reasons unknown, and Sgt. Kokabu told us that we had got to have a musical concert, which started all sorts of wild rumours going in camp. I shall never forget that date. It was August 15 and in the middle of the very impromptu evening musical concert with no applause, etc., S.M. Atkins told us that the war was at last over and we were free once again... [19]

With the end of the war came Allied air drops of canned food, medical supplies, and leaflets telling of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender. In many camps the Japanese released the Red Cross parcels they had been withholding from the prisoners. POWs also obtained goods through trade with the local Thai population. It was a sudden, almost rapturous transition from fear and wretchedness to security and plenty. But though the hunger for food could at last be satisfied, rags and loincloths exchanged for new uniforms, and proper bathing and shaving enjoyed with soap and fresh razor blades, the greatest desire of every ex-POW was simply to return home.

The jungle reclaims its own
A section of the Burma Railway, September 1945

Australian War Memorial (P02310.009)

Over 61,000 Allied prisoners of war had been forced to work on the Burma Railway. Of these, 12,619 had died. The death toll among the Asian slave laborers was even higher, in excess of 85,000. One life, it is said, for every wooden crosstie laid. Though built at an appalling cost, it never provided more than a fraction of the logistical support the Japanese Army had hoped for. Without the constant maintenance provided by the POWs, much of the railroad soon vanished into the encroaching jungle, together with the abandoned camps that lay along its now desolate track. [20]

Han Samethini would bear the marks of the Railway for the rest of his life: ulcer scars on both shins, partial deafness, eyesight weakened by malnutrition, and recurring malaria. But he was alive. All that mattered now was getting back to Surabaya to find Anna and Margie. What had become of them?

_____________________

Footnotes

[1] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 13: More of Chungkai.

[2] Ibid., Chapter 12: Chungkai.

[3] Australian Major E.E. "Weary" Dunlop took over command of Chungkai hospital in early 1944. His diary contains the following observations on hospital shortcomings: "21 January 1944. Camp and hospital hygiene is extremely unsatisfactory: shallow, open latrines for the most part, very offensive and badly flyblown and used as both a deposit for excreta and refuse. The dysentery wards are particularly bad....The scabies centre has no disinfestation and no large drums for boiling. As at Tarsau, almost everyone is covered with scabs and sores...." Of the ulcer huts, where Samethini was being treated, he writes: "3 February 1944. My first day in the ulcer wards: the equipment is appalling. The patients are almost all scabies ridden and many have impetiginous sores all over them. No use has been made of beef or other fats for ointment. I am at once approaching the camp command for a supply of beef fat and am urging the construction of ward sterilisers and irrigating cans. There is no boracic acid for boric ointment so I am using carbolic ointment 1% as a sort of universal dressing. Something must be done at once to deal with scabies and infectious bedding and clothing. " E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop (Wheathampstead, UK: Lennard Publishing, 1987), pp. 323, 326.

Under Dunlop's leadership conditions improved substantially as the year progressed: "Discipline, supremely high morale, and the pooling of resources in foodstuffs, money, materials, and human ability were even more important than purely medical treatment. A duck's egg daily might be all that was needed to turn the scales of a man's life. Herculean labors improved sanitation and accommodation. Patients were trained as medical orderlies, others were employed in the mass production of improvised equipment, even if they were only able to whittle with a knife on their beds. Sick-welfare money from various national and unit sources was directed into a common pool, and used with the utmost economy in a planned series of special diets, or in the clandestine purchase of essential drugs from the Siamese. For example, at Chungkai from January to April 1944 we raised 38,000 dollars from prisoners' meagre resources, largely from the officers' pay of 30 dollars a month." E. E. Dunlop, "Medical Experiences in Japanese Captivity" (London: British Medical Journal, October 5, 1946), p. 482. For details and statistics on the Chungkai POW hospital, click on the thumbnail images below:

[4] The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 12.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Werkers aan de Burmaspoorweg, p. 249. Excerpt translated by Margie Samethini-Bellamy. On the matter of Han Samethini's ethnicity ("very proud he was an Indo"), Postma uses the expression Indische jonge, literally "Indies boy". It signifies a Dutchman born and raised in the East Indies, especially one of mixed European and Indonesian blood.

[7] Ibid., p. 252-253.

[8] Brugman's reference to his masseur job might seem incongruous with conditions in a Japanese prison camp, but it had nothing to do with luxury. POW doctors and orderlies used massage as physical therapy, e.g., to rehabilitate muscles damaged by tropical ulcers, work injuries, or heavy beatings.

[9] Chunkai P.O.W. Camp Theatre, by Walter L. Davis. Copy of an unpublished manuscript sent by Davis to Samethini. The document is not dated, but was probably written in the early 1970s. Dudley Gotla was a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, hence Davis' reference to him as "Dr. Gottler."

Robert Hardie speculated that the title, "Thai Diddle-Diddle", aroused the suspicion of the Japanese interpreter because one of the meanings of diddle is to deceive or cheat. Robert Hardie, The Burma-Siam Railway, The Secret Diary of Dr. Robert Hardie 1942-45 (London: Imperial War Museum, 1984), p. 141.

Assistant stage manager John Coast saw trouble brewing in the first act, which made liberal use of coarse Japanese and pidgin "Japlish" words ("Kurrah!" "Buggero!" "Benjo speedo!"). It was risky to poke fun, however subtly, at the war or the degradations of POW life. John Coast, Railroad of Death (London: The Aiglon Press, 1948), pp. 181-182.

[10] Ibid. " Taking the mickey " is a British expression meaning to mock or ridicule. The guards believed the comical monkey character was intended to represent themselves. American war propaganda often depicted the Japanese as simian brutes. See here, here and here.

[11] The Burma Railway: One Man's Story, by James William (Jim) Jacobs (1947), page 118. Accessed on the web site Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942-1945. Coast gives a similar appraisal: "The 'Swingtet' consisted of the double-bass, a guitar, trumpet, drums and accordeon; the Dutch accordeonist was the best any of us had ever heard, and he and the 'bass player made the Swingtet into a combination that would have been of a genuinely high peace-time standard." Coast, Railroad of Death, p. 182.

[12] Imperial War Museum (Aylwin, Major C.D.L., IWM 67/330/1, Folder 8, 121). Text and source citation provided by Prof. Sears Eldredge.

[13] The work of the Webber brothers at Chungkai, and the murder of the British officers at Kanchanaburi, is mentioned in: Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese (New York: Quill/William Morrow & Company, 1994 ) pp. 214-215.

[14] William Henderson, an American bombardier who flew on missions against the Tamarkan bridges, writes that the IP [Initial Point] was "slightly west and south of Chungkai prison camp." Lt. Col. W. A. Henderson, From China Burma India to the Kwai, (Waco: Texian Press, 2001), p. 72. Wally Davis was one of the ex-POWs Henderson interviewed while researching his book. Davis recalled being on the wooden bridge with a work party on February 13, 1945, when American bombers attacked the neighboring steel bridge. Ibid., p. 86.

In a letter to the FEPOW Forum in 1976, Davis wrote:

"...I was in a work party in the middle of the wooden bridge at the time. We were all looking up at a lone four engined plane which we thought was on pamphlet dropping, but when his parcel did not scatter like snowflakes, we did. I dived off the bridge into the river and had just got near the bank when there was a terrific metallic crash. I cannot remember which side of the river I swum to, where I ran to, or even how long I was there. When we went back to work on the wooden bridge we noticed that No. 8 pier and span lay in the river and No. 7 span at 45 degrees from pier No. 7. I have found out since that 6 B-24s of 493rd Squadron U.S.A.A. Force were credited with this raid. I have never been able to make out if it was the noise of the first bomb which affected my memory (at the time) in some way, or whether I was just scared on February 13th, 1945." FEPOW Forum, The Official Magazine, Far East Prisoners of War Club, London (Number 15, Tenth Series, February-March 1976), p. 11.

[15] Quoted from a letter written by Han Samethini to his brother after the war. The Sky Looked Down, Chapter 13: Peace? As noted above, there were two rail bridges at Tamarkan, the first constructed of wood and the second of steel. Han refers to the steel bridge, famously known today as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Parenthetically, the "Bridge on the River Kwai" actually spans the Mae Klong River. Beyond that point the Burma Railway runs north, through the valley of the Kwai Noi River. Thus the Kwai Noi is the "real" River Kwai. The distinction between the two rivers was ignored in the postwar mythologizing of the steel bridge in literature and film. Accommodating foreign misconceptions in the service of tourism, the Thais have given the Mae Klong a second name: the Kwai Yai.

[16] Davis, Chunkai POW Camp Theatre

[17] Ibid.

[18] "Church Bells in the Morning", Han Samethini Collection.

[19] Davis, Chunkai POW Camp Theatre. Hardie gives a slightly more accurate and detailed account of the surrender announcement at Tamuang:

"17 August 1945. Yesterday, after several days in which rumours were quite subdued, there were great comings and goings. Ishii went off, they said to Bangkok, excitement grew, a small party was brought in from another camp, who said they had heard the Japanese were giving in...then a high Japanese officer arrived and was closeted with the Jap officers in their camp. Finally RSM Edkins was called across to the Japanese office, and briefly informed that the war was over and that we would now come under our own discipline.

Edkins came straight across to the hospital area, where a concert was in progress, and made the announcement to the audience. There was a tremendous burst of cheering. The National Anthems of Britain, Holland and the United States were sung, and then 'Abide with me'. One's emotions were almost numb, after such long suppression of hopes and fears. One could hardly realise that the moment for which one had waited with such desperate but such doubtful hopes had come at last. It was over: we were free again, and would soon be in touch with the outside world, home...." Hardie, The Burma-Siam Railway, pp. 175-176.

[20] See the figures compiled by Neil MacPherson: Death Railway Movements. 85,000 would be a very conservative estimate for the number of Asian forced labor deaths. The initial figure, as reported in the Australian press in September 1945, was 150,000. The toll may well be higher. No one knows for certain.

GO TO NEXT CHAPTER

11. The Shadow Under the Sun (March 1942 - November 1945)

2009-04-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Anna and Margie in occupied Surabaya, circa early 1943

Margie holds a portrait of her "Pappie"
Photo by Nikola Drakulic
Han Samethini Collection

Evacuated from Borneo in December 1941, Anna and Margie returned to Surabaya as planned. They lived in the Brantasstraat house with mother-in-law Emma and sister-in-law Elisabeth, who was now pregnant. During the frequent Japanese air raids of February 1942, they took refuge in a bomb shelter in the front yard. This was a dugout reinforced with sandbags, built by Emma's neighbors from across the street. At times they had to remain in the shelter for up to eight hours.

Any expectation of reinforcement from America was dashed on March 1 by the news of Japanese landings on Java. Enemy troops reached Surabaya on the 6th, fighting their way into the suburbs in the Wonokromo district and advancing along the Surabaya River towards the Gunungsari golf course. The Samethinis must have heard the artillery fire from American defensive positions, but this ceased on the 7th as Allied resistance crumbled. From the direction of the port and naval base came the sound of heavy explosions. Black smoke clouds billowed from burning oil stocks and war material, set ablaze to deny them to the invaders. On the 8th, at 9:00 a.m., General Ter Poorten, commander-in-chief of Dutch forces, surrendered all of Java to the Japanese. At 11:00 p.m., NIROM, the radio network of the Netherlands East Indies, concluded its final broadcast: "We are closing now. Farewell until better times. Long live the Queen!" The night deepened and Surabaya passed into a shadow that was to prevail, even under the brightest noonday sun, for the next three and a half years.

Oil stocks torched by retreating Dutch forces in Surabaya
Source: The Dutch East Indies Campaign

In the hours following the Dutch collapse, mobs of Indonesian looters swept through the city, plundering factories, shops, offices, and homes. The Japanese soon imposed order, but this relief from anarchy meant neither law nor justice. It was merely the start of a more systematic robbery. Bank accounts were frozen and then confiscated. Ruinous levies, including a property tax 70 times higher than the prewar rate, bled off any remaining sound currency. When they scrupled to pay for what they took, the Japanese purchased goods with fiat paper money. Printed in vast quantities and forced upon sellers as legal tender, this depreciating scrip would cause severe price inflation and its attendant woes. [1]

Japanese occupation money for the Netherlands East Indies, issued in 1942
Wikipedia

The Japanese Army seized Dutch homes to provide living quarters for its officers, turning the former owners out into the streets. The hospitals were likewise commandeered. When Elisabeth went into labor on April 8, she could not be taken to a maternity ward:

I could not go to the hospital because the Japs had taken everything. So Mum [Emma] called the Indonesian doctor and Mary-em was born the next day, 7 lb. 950 grams. [2]

With equal vigor the conquerors began the extirpation of European culture, a policy implicit in their slogan, "Asia for the Asians." Dutch schools were closed, the Dutch language banned from publication. Surviving newspapers had to print all articles in High Malay. Personal life became degrading and fraught with danger. Encounters with Japanese soldiers required a ritual servility which, if not instantly displayed, was exacted with military strictness. The Dutch learned to respond to the barked orders: "Kiotske!" (Stand to attention!) "Kerei!" (Bow!), "Naore!" (Return to attention!). Tardiness to show proper respect could be punished with face slapping or outright beatings. Harsher treatment awaited those who ran afoul of the Imperial Army's security police, the Kempei-tai, whose province was the concentration camp and the torture chamber.

Indonesian bus conductress bows to a Japanese officer
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

Officers of the Kempei-tai
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

Having locked up Dutch military personnel in POW camps, the occupiers meticulously registered all "enemy alien residents of the Japanese Empire." Effectively this was a screening process to determine which Dutch civilians should be imprisoned immediately and which should be arrested later. The Samethinis reported for registration in May 1942. Anna stood in line holding 6-month-old Margie in her arms, trembling with fear, until she was called before the desk of a Kempei officer.

"What are you?" he demanded. "Are you Dutch or are you Indonesian?"

"Indonesian," she stammered.

The officer bowed his head and placed his hands flat on the papers covering his desk. For a moment he sat motionless, as if in meditation. Gathering himself into a sudden rage, he shouted, "No!" He fixed Anna with an accusing stare and pointed to her green eyes, declaring, "You have traitor eyes!" Thinking quickly, Emma broke in:

"She's German. Her maiden name is Gunthardt."

Amazingly, the bluff worked and the Japanese relented, allowing Anna to complete the registration process and return home. Emma's German surname, Wychgel, was of similar advantage. Elisabeth also successfully ran the gauntlet, but she was at greatest risk of receiving further attention. She was a white Dutchwoman, of the race most suspected and hated by the Japanese, and the daughter of a naval officer. [3]

Home was a place of relative safety, and the Samethinis were not poor according to the severe standards of the time. Anna's diary records the employment of housemaids, purchases of children's shoes, trips to the zoo and the ice cream parlor, and a visit to the Nikola Drakulic photography studio to have family pictures taken. There is no mention of hunger. Emma's dance school continued to give classes, though this probably generated only a modest income.

The former Samethini home on Brantrasstraat, in Surabaya
A new veranda has been added in front
Today the street is called Jalan Irian Barat
Photo by Adi Hartono (August 2010)

Jean Muller (Jeannette Muller von Czernicki)
1939 driver's license photo
Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

Albert Emil Muller von Czernicki
Japanese ID photo, 1942
Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

Added financial support came from Anna's friends, Jean and Albert Muller, who lived on Altingstraat (where they had settled following the confiscation of their house on Koetaistraat). Albert, it seems, worked as an illustrator for the publisher H. Van Ingen. Jean was an accountant at the Suikersyndicaat (Sugar Association), a consortium of sugar producers. High ranking Japanese military officers also employed her as a tennis instructor for their daughters, because she had been a champion tennis player before the war. With thousands being deprived of their jobs and sent to concentration camps, the Mullers were fortunate to continue earning a livelihood. But Albert suffered from tuberculosis and grew weaker with each passing month.

Emma with Mary-em (seated) and Margie, 1943

Photo by Nikola Drakulic
Han Samethini Collection

A page from Anna's diary
March 17-22, 1943
Han Samethini Collection

In her diary, Anna wrote mostly about the doings of Margie and her younger cousin, Mary-em. Margie had grown into a precocious toddler by mid-1943, speaking words and short phrases distinctly enough to ask for music:

Margie and M.E. now have the whole studio to themselves. They want music, go to the record player and go at it. You won't believe Margie's agility. We could never do such movements. She will be a star someday, Hans! [4]

Han's portrait was an object of special importance. The little girl had bonded strongly with her father despite being separated from him at an extremely young age:

If she is naughty she asks for her father's forgiveness. And she walks around carrying your picture, Hans, and says, "Bagie naughty. Sorry, Pappie, sorry." At night she wakes up and asks for Pappie's picture and falls asleep holding it in her arms. She asks while pointing to the phonograph, "Mama, open. Bagie dance." When she hears the music she says, "Oh, Pappie." [5]

B-24 Liberators of the U.S. 5th Air Force, 380th Bomb Group
This unit flew missions against Surabaya, 1943-1944
The sound of their engines is one of Margie's earliest memories

Margie paid keen attention to the city's air raid sirens. On June 23 she remarked, as they began to wail, "Naughty noise, Mommy, watch out." Java lay deep within the Japanese Empire, but not so deep that it was beyond the reach of Allied warplanes. Flying some 1,170 miles from their base in Northern Australia, American B-24 Liberators bombed Surabaya's harbor docks, the railway yards, and the BPM oil refinery. It was the first of three missions flown against the city that year. These targets were safely distant from Brantasstraat, and the raid must have inspired cautious hopes that the end of the war might be near. But it was not near enough. On September 25, Elisabeth received a summons from the Japanese. Anna writes:

A bad day. We got the news that Lies [Elisabeth], M.E., and Ida have to go into the camps on the 30th. I've bawled like a baby. We will miss them so very much. The children won't know each other anymore. We hope the good Lord will bring us together again, with our boys and men. [6]

The parting came sooner than expected, on the 28th.

A dreadful day. Lies, M.E., and Ida have to go into the camps immediately, only allowed two suitcases with belongings. We are so upset, as we had counted on the 30th. The farewell was horrible. Mom [Emma] shrieked with anguish, also because she believes M.E. cannot do without her.....Oh well, this is behind us now. What else can befall us? [7]

Elisabeth Samethini's Japanese ID certificate
Anna's name and signature appears in the "Orang Saksi" (witness) section,
beneath that of Elisabeth's mother, Maria Boerman
Frank Samethini Collection

Front and reverse of the postcard mailed to Elisabeth at Ambarawa camp.
The card is postmarked 9 January, 1944
Frank Samethini Collection

The Japanese sent Elisabeth and Mary-em to Ambarawa Camp No. 4 in Central Java, near Semarang. Elisabeth managed to get word to the family of her whereabouts, and they sent her a postcard bearing well-wishes written in a combination of Malay and Javanese:

Dearest ones: Very happy to receive news. We are all fine. Jannie [Jean], Ceciel, Rita, Alma together with Mom [Emma] and Ans [Anna]. Margie talks a lot about MaryEm. Lots of kisses from the seven of us. [8]

Conditions at Ambarawa were bad: hunger, disease, brutality. Determined to keep Mary-em and herself alive to be reunited with Frank, Elisabeth developed a toughness equal to the ordeal. She marveled at her little girl's cheerfulness despite all the privations they suffered. Like cousin Margie, Mary-em treasured a picture of her father, saying good night to him every evening before she went to sleep. [9]

At home, Anna worried about Margie's frequent bouts of illness, a dangerous development given the lack hospitals and proper medicines. Emma increasingly usurped the maternal role, confusing the girl so that she sometimes recoiled from her own mother. A stronger-willed woman would have stood up for herself and her child, but Anna was not strong.

Sometime in late 1943 Albert Muller died. Jean remained briefly at Altingstraat before coming to live with the Samethinis in January 1944. It was a fateful move. Jean resented Emma's domineering treatment of Anna and could not abide the apparent neglect of Margie, whose health continued to worsen. Taking matters into her own hands, she brought Margie to a Chinese doctor and persuaded Anna that the three of them should leave. After quitting the Brantasstraat house, they lodged with Jean's relatives, the Haccous, at Bothstraat No. 10. The intervention probably saved Margie's life, but it was not an act of pure altruism. Jean had designs of her own on Anna.

Jean Muller's Japanese ID certificate
Residence listed as Bothstraat (Jalan Both) No. 10
Note the previous addresses crossed out in Section (C)
Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

Jean continued working at the Sugar Association, under the direction of a Japanese supervisor who delighted in menacing and humiliating her. On the wall facing her desk he put up a poster of a scowling Japanese soldier pointing at her, with a single word printed in large letters: "SPY!" Calling her into his office on another occasion, the boss proudly showed Jean a newly sharpened katana sword resting blade-up on his desk. He roughly plucked a hair from her head and laid it across the blade. "Watch this," he ordered. He blew gently on the hair and it was instantly sliced in half. Such was his sense of humor. [10]

Allied air strike on the Surabaya naval base
"Operation Transom" - May 17, 1944

Direct hit on the BPM oil refinery

Grumman F6F Hellcat
Source: www.vfa32.navy.mil

On May 17, 1944 a swarm of new Allied warplanes appeared in the sky above Surabaya: Barracudas, Corsairs, Dauntlesses, Avengers, and Hellcats. They roared in to attack their targets, bombing and strafing. Jean's boss watched in fascination from the office window, but the restricted view did not permit him to satisfy his curiosity. "I'm going up to look," he told her, making for the stairs leading to the roof. For a while he was gone. Then he came scrambling down with a bleeding hand and an astonished expression on his face. "I've been shot," he declared blankly. Jean waited until he ran out of the office before bursting into laughter. [11]

Translated SEAC leaflet
These were air-dropped to Japanese occupation troops at war's end
Britains-smallwars.com

The occupation continued for another fifteen months, formally ending when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. Theoretically the East Indies now came under British authority as part of the territories allotted to South East Asia Command (SEAC), but in fact it would take weeks or months for Allied forces to disarm the Japanese garrisons and establish control. In the interim the Japanese were instructed to keep order without inflicting any further mistreatment on their captives. Jean was able to return to her old house on Koetaistraat, where she settled with Anna and Margie to wait for the British. They were joined by Jean's sister Elly and her children, Hanneke, Marijke, and Peter.

Prewar photo of Jean Muller's house at Koetaistraat 43
Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

The same house photographed in 1992
Photo by Margie Samethini-Bellamy

The women waited in fear. On the heels of Japan's surrender, Indonesian nationalists led by Sukarno had proclaimed independence from Holland and the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia. Generations of pent up resentment against the Dutch, both white and Eurasian, erupted in a deadly revolution that neither asked nor gave quarter. All over Java the Dutch were murdered in the streets and even in the internment camps, where many of them still languished. The revolutionary watchword, Bersiap ("be ready"), became the historical name for this terrible period. Newly arrived British forces were so hard pressed that they employed Japanese troops to fight the Indonesians, an ironic measure by which the late oppressors of the Dutch became their unlikely protectors.

Chinese refugees fleeing revolutionary violence in Surabaya
September, 1945
Bandjir: Een Indische Kroniek 1935-1950

The Argus (Melbourne, Victoria)
October 26, 1945
National Library of Australia

The pemuda (young revolutionary fighters) took over Surabaya in September. Here as elsewhere, they looted and slaughtered, but their larger purpose was to fortify the city and prevent its reversion to European rule. They were joined by more disciplined Republican soldiers, who had received Japanese military training during the occupation. On October 24 the British landed 4,000 troops comprising the 49th Infantry Brigade of the 23rd Indian Division, unaware that they faced well-armed Indonesian forces numbering 20,000 regular soldiers backed by more than 100,000 irregulars. The Indonesians permitted the 49th to take up positions in the city. These posts were stealthily surrounded. When the signal was given, the revolutionaries attacked, overrunning and wiping out a number of Indian detachments. Street fighting raged until the negotiation of a ceasefire six days later.

The truce did not hold for long. On October 30, the British commander, Brigadier Mallaby, was killed in his car. The British brought up infantry reinforcements and tanks in preparation for a final offensive to take the city. Before launching the attack they evacuated Allied POWs, civilian internees, and as many other Dutch as they could save. [12]

Margie relates:

The British soldiers were very much taken by my mother, a pretty woman. They told her, Elly and Janny [Jean] that they had heard some very bad news about planned massacres of Dutch women and children. They told them to listen for their whistles, and if they should hear them, to leave immediately, no dogs, no baggage, nothing, just the kids (Hanneke and Marijke were with us, Elly was their mother). The whistle would mean bersiap "pelopor" youths would be entering the street. They also hacked a hole on the convent hedge behind the house and told the nuns about our planned escape.

The whistle went off early in the morning. Hanneke remembers how Janny frantically left food for the dogs everywhere. Janny thought Anna had taken the pieces of gold with her (all they had) and Mom [Anna] thought the other way so they had nothing.

We went to the three trucks waiting for us by the convent. The first one was machine gunned, the third was hand grenaded, the middle one, ours, came through unscathed and I remember my mother's body shaking on top of me. When we reached the submarine I looked up and saw many "dolls" floating in the river ending in the harbor. They must have been people killed days before. [13]

Bullet-riddled, burned out British evacuation trucks
The drivers and civilian passengers were massacred
Dutch newsreel "Nieuws uit Indie: Bange dagen in Soerabaja", 1946

Dutch evacuees preparing to board a British warship at the port of Surabaya
November 1945
Bandjir: Een Indische Kroniek 1935-1950

British Indian troops advancing during the Battle of Surabaya
November 1945
Bandjir: Een Indische Kroniek 1935-1950

Motorized column prepares to roll forward
Dutch newsreel "Nieuws uit Indie: Bange dagen in Soerabaja", 1946

House to house fighting in a residential neighborhood
Dutch newsreel "Nieuws uit Indie: Bange dagen in Soerabaja", 1946

A house damaged by artillery fire

Dutch newsreel "Nieuws uit Indie: Bange dagen in Soerabaja", 1946

The British attacked on November 10. Supported by combat aircraft and naval gunfire, they fought house to house against stubborn Indonesian resistance. In six weeks Surabaya was secured at the cost of 600 British and Indian casualties versus approximately 6,000 Republican dead. Many thousands more Indonesians fled the tormented city, now reduced to a shadow of its former colonial splendor. [14]

Dutch women queuing for food at a Singapore refugee camp
Geheugen van Nederland / KITLV Leiden

In the meantime the Royal Navy conveyed Anna, Margie, and Jean to Singapore, where they joined a great multitude of other Dutch evacuees, fellow survivors of the wreck of the Netherlands East Indies. Their new home was a refugee camp. It had its good and bad points. Margie enjoyed never-before-tasted American delicacies: spam and condensed milk. Her very first school lessons were interesting, even though the classroom was just a large bomb crater. But she dreaded having her picture taken. The big camera, mounted on its heavy tripod, looked disturbingly like a machine gun. [15]

_______________________

Footnotes

[1] For details on Japanese taxes and confiscations, see: Annual Report 1942 from the Royal Swedish Consulate in Sourabaya, pp. 10-12. (External link to scanned documents in the Dutch archival web site Beeldbank Nationaal Archief. Page numbers according to the web page, not as printed on the original document. Use arrow buttons at bottom right of the page to navigate through the documents).

[2] The Sky Looked Down, Appendix A: Lisa's Story. See also: Annual Report 1942, p. 53 concerning the seizure of Surabaya hospitals by the Japanese military.

[3] Recalled from a conversation with eyewitness Jeannette Muller von Czernicki, sometime in the early 1990s. Anna's Japanese ID certificate has not been preserved, but she would have been classified as either Belanda (Dutch) or Belanda Indo (Dutch Eurasian). To be registered as a German national, one had to possess a Nazi German passport. See: Annual Report 1942, pp. 40-41. It seems that Emma's comment simply distracted the Kempei inquisitor long enough for his wrath to cool.

As can be seen in this mid-1960s photo, Anna's "traitor eyes" were noticeably green.

Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

[4] Anna Samethini diary: June 3, 1943 entry. Translation by Margie Samethini-Bellamy. Han Samethini Collection.

[5] Ibid., August 7, 1943 entry.

[6] Ibid., September 25, 1943 entry. Ida Bowyes was a friend of Elisabeth's mother.

[7] Ibid., September 28, 1943 entry.

[8] Translation by Mrs. Linda Santoso. Per Japanese Army regulations, all correspondence with internment camp inmates had to be submitted on postcards, written in Malay, and must express only a positive message. See the Dutch Wikipedia article: Jappenkamp.

[9] The Sky Looked Down, Appendix A: Lisa's Story. Conditions in the NEI camps can be judged from these postwar photos of survivors, posted on the Dutch discussion forum Onze Plek (click on thumbnails to enlarge):

[10] Recalled from a conversation with Jeannette Muller von Czernicki, early 1990s. The former Suikersyndicaat building still stands in Surabaya, on Jalan Rajawali. Below is a photograph of the interior taken in 2010. Click on image to enlarge:

Photo by David Wurangian (August 2010)

[11] These were naval warplanes launched from the aircraft carriers HMS Illustrious and USS Saratoga. The attack was codenamed Operation Transom. See: Operation Cockpit and Operation Transom. Aircraft types deduced from the Wikipedia article: Operation Cockpit. Information on events at the Suikersyndicaat office recalled from a conversation with Jeannette Muller von Czernicki, early 1990s. The name of the Japanese company she worked for seems to have been Togyo Bengo-kai.

[12] Indonesian forces at Surabaya were greatly strengthened through an act of Dutch hubris. In September 1945, the top Dutch commanders in the Indies, Admiral Helfrich and General Van Oyen, permitted a lone naval officer, Captain Huijer, to take the surrender of the Japanese 16th Army in Surabaya. The Japanese dutifully paraded on the airfield and handed over their weapons before marching away to Semarang. This vast stockpile of arms, including tanks and artillery, was promptly seized by a division of Republican troops arriving on the scene. Richard McMillan, The British Occupation of Indonesia, 1945-1946 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 32. Other information gleaned from the Wikipedia article: Battle of Surabaya.

[13] Personal e-mail from Margie Samethini-Bellamy. Pelopor is an Indonesian word meaning "vanguard fighter," i.e., a young revolutionary. It derives from the Dutch voorlooper (advance guard). Margie's account suggests that she and Anna were evacuated in late October, during the first outbreak of fighting. Unlike their overconfident commanders, British soldiers on the streets were keenly aware of anti-Dutch agitation and the growing hostility of the revolutionaries. Thus they were able to give advance warning to the women in the Koetaistraat house.

From an article published on the UK web site Standpoint:

On the afternoon of October 28, the TKR and Pemuda struck all across the city, killing 11 British officers and 44 Indian other ranks in a matter of minutes. Numerous small outposts were overrun, and a lorry convoy with hundreds of Dutch and Eurasian women and children was attacked with great loss of life. Fighting resumed at first light next morning and the situation became desperate, as many detachments were short of ammunition. Survivors recalled the attackers' reckless ferocity. "Death Knell of the British Empire" by Patrick Heren, Standpoint Magazine (November 2010).

[14] Information on the battle drawn from the Wikipedia article: Battle of Surabaya.

[15] The vessel that took Anna and Margie to Singapore was the Talma, an old freighter pressed into British military service. Dutch refugee H. Beers, who was in the same evacuation group, described it as a Gurkha hospital ship.

The Talma
www.photoship.co.uk

The account of Dutch refugee H. Beers
Anna's maiden name is misspelled "Gunthout"
(Click images to enlarge)
Moesson (June 15, 1995)

GO TO NEXT CHAPTER

12. Liberation and Heartbreak (August 1945 - May 1946)

2009-04-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

Prisoner no more!

A jubilant Han Samethini symbolically tramples his POW identification tag
Caricature by J. Chevallier
Han Samethini Collection [1]

As Java plunged into revolutionary chaos in August 1945, Thailand was undergoing an orderly transfer of power. Incoming British troops quickly relieved the Japanese of their posts and weapons, while the RAPWI [2] organization began the formidable task of recovering thousands of Allied prisoners of war. Most of them were moved to large transit camps around Bangkok. Slowly at first, then more rapidly as logistics improved, survivors of the Burma Railway filtered through the city to board transport aircraft for the first stage of their long journey home: Rangoon for the Americans and the British, Singapore for the Australians. The POWs from these nations were repatriated by the end of October. [3]

Disarmed and humbled, Japanese military police and Kempei-tai await
outbound trains in the Bangkok railway station
Australian War Memorial

The 10,871 Dutch ex-POWs would remain in Thailand for a much longer period. Holland lacked the ability to evacuate her servicemen, being economically devastated after five years of Nazi occupation. Nor did she have the political clout to get her merchant vessels in the Pacific released from Allied naval control. But even had the Netherlands possessed the ships and the money to bring the men out of Thailand, home for the great majority of them was in the East Indies. Return there must await British permission. This state of affairs rankled Dutch pride, but worse for the men's morale was news of the massacres on Java and the realization that they could do nothing to protect their families.

Perceiving early that the men would need more than material provisions to stave off boredom and demoralization, the Dutch command in Bangkok commissioned Han Samethini to organize entertainments. He started as soon as he was released from Tamuang, working alongside the best talent of the Railway camps, including the Tamarkan concert party and Postma's show group from Chungkai.

Combined Concert Party of ex-POWs in Bangkok, September 1945.
Composed of Australians and Dutch from the Tamarkan and Chungkai groups.
Photo taken on the steps of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce building.
Joop Postma (dark suit) stands in the second row from the top, far left.
Conductor Han Samethini (white jacket) stands at bottom left.
See Footnotes for photo credit [4]

There was much to do, and few resources with which to do it. Saxophonist Lou Bloemhard recalls the origins and early work of the Samethini Band:

Immediately after the capitulation Lt. Colonel Mantel in Bangkok engaged Han Samethini to form an orchestra for the entertainment of the ex-POWs. This was the very first postwar band playing in Bangkok. The band featured mainly English and Dutch players, with a few Australians and Indians. The English and the Australians went home quite soon while the Dutch did not. Their departure greatly reduced Samethini's orchestra. He therefore asked and received Mantel's permission to tour the various camps to find additional musicians.

Aloysius "Lou" Bloemhard

Han Samethini Collection

In this way Sam, as we called him, came to Tamuan camp where I was bivouacked. He invited me to Bangkok and I, together with other musicians, drove there by truck the next morning. We were lodged in the buildings of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce on Sathorn Road. Thus the Dutch Samethini band was created, the first show and dance orchestra with mostly Dutch Indo guys. Together with the drama troupe of Joop Postma we were given the task of organizing cabaret and dance evenings for the army troops and ex-POWs in Bangkok, who would later be joined by the women and children evacuated from the Indies. For most people this meant reunions with the family.

But there were also outlying camps without any opportunity to get entertainment, and we had to travel there as well. The task finally became too large for just one orchestra and we needed help. Help came from up-country camps in the form of the Atomic Boys, led by the very popular prewar band leader Piet Bruyn van Rozenburg, a dance band led by Hofstede and also a trio consisting of Frans de Haan, Hans van Leeuwen and Jaap Schaap [in Dutch these surnames mean Rooster, Lion, and Sheep], nicknamed The Zoo.

The Samethini Band at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce
(Click on the smaller images to see the names of the musicians)
Han Samethini Collection

The Atomic Boys
Photo courtesy of Arno Ooms, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

Our headquarters in Bangkok had leased a dance hall (a bankrupt Siamese establishment) and created a place for dancing and amusement for the Allied armed forces. Every POW returning from Siam to the Indies had to stay in Bangkok for a few days until transportation (usually by plane) became available. Every ex-POW in Bangkok came to know the Holland Club, where one of the above bands would play every evening. [5] [6]

From Nakhon Pathom arrived one of the brightest stars among Dutch POW entertainers, the famed cabaretier Wim Kan. Before the war he had been touring the Indies with his wife, Corry Vonk, and their ABC Cabaret. The fall of Holland made return to the mother country impossible, and when the Japanese conquered the Indies the couple was imprisoned. Corry was packed off to a women's camp on Java. Kan was sent to the Burma Railway. Towards the end of the war he became gravely ill, but he had recovered and was now in fine fettle. In November he produced and headlined "Mystery in Budapest" at the Garrison Theater, a combination stage play and variety show where the Samethini Band provided much of the musical accompaniment. [7]

Poster for "Mystery in Budapest" (November 1945)
Produced by Wim Kan
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Review of "Mystery in Budapest"
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

The work of Kan, Samethini, and their fellow ex-POW entertainers revolutionized Bangkok's night life. It was part of a larger, if ephemeral, transformation of the Thai capital into a virtual Dutch enclave, as great numbers of white and Eurasian refugees arrived from the East Indies in late 1945. This development was described in glowing terms by the Singapore-based Dutch language biweekly Oranje:

Netherlanders in Bangkok

Here follows a report from someone who has recently returned from Siam, where he visited all camps where Dutch ex-prisoners of war are quartered.

11,000 men are waiting anxiously in Thailand for the moment when they can return to Java and Sumatra. They have been quartered in the city of Bangkok and the surrounding areas.

Thanks to the good care of Rapwi, these guys are in very good health and all of them should be able to return to their prewar careers. Their condition compares favorably with the English troops in Bangkok.

(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Also their morale is excellent. It seems as if Bangkok has been taken over by the Dutch. It even looks Dutch. The language heard in the streets is mostly Dutch, and everywhere one sees the uniforms of our POWs. Night life and Bangkok entertainment are mostly in their hands, thanks especially to Wim Kan and the band leader Samethini, who have managed with very limited resources to give an extraordinarily successful show which draws full audiences night after night.... [8]

Review of a Samethini Band charity concert given at the Chalerm Krung Theater
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

The Chalerm Krung Royal Theater today

Chatriumhotels.net

Review of "Eastward Ho"
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Chinese Chamber of Commerce auditorium

The Samethini Band also received favorable mention in the English language press. Articles clipped from an unknown source, probably the SEAC Services Newspaper, praise shows given at the Chalerm Krung Royal Theater and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. "Eastward Ho," performed at the CCC, was a reworking of the 1944 Chungkai POW musical "Zijn Groote Reis" (His Big Trip). No review has been found for "The Black Cat," an obscure Samethini production evidenced by a single surviving poster.

Poster for "The Black Cat" (November 1945)
Artwork by Piet van Velthuysen
Han Samethini Collection

String section of the Samethini Band
L-R: Johnny Ockerse, Harry Reinders, Bram Koot,
Fons Ockerse, Lex Koot, Tjalie Wagenaar
Han Samethini Collection

Hugo "Alie" Brinkman

Han Samethini Collection

Between performances, the band's skill and finesse were honed by diligent rehearsing. Saxophonist Alie Brinkman recalled these sessions vividly when he spoke of the Bangkok days with his son, Hugh:

For years and years afterwards my father liked to reminisce on the happy "Samethini time", as he used to call it. Han apparently had the gift, as my father frequently said, to meld the band in such a way together to be able to produce a specific full and rich sound! And that resulted in a very close comradeship of the band members. They were quite well known in Bangkok during that time. Plans to make a sound recording in Bangkok were made but unfortunately it never came off. [9]

The men of the Samethini Band shared qualities deeper than technical competence and enthusiasm for music. Theirs was a camaraderie forged in the terrible furnace of Japanese captivity, a unique bond shared and understood only by Allied ex-POWs of the Pacific War. They also had a common homesickness and longing for their beloved East Indies - a sentiment too intense for words and expressible, if it all, only in melody.

Han was not among those fortunate enough to be reunited with his family in Bangkok. Dutch women and children arriving at the Thailand refugee camps told of the horrors they had seen on Java. This and newspaper reports of the bloodbath in Surabaya led him to fear the worst. He'd received no letters from his wife, nor did Anna's and Margie's names appear on the Red Cross refugee lists that he searched daily. By late November he had given them up for dead. As he walked dejectedly down the street one day, he noticed a windblown sheet of paper in his path. He picked it up and saw that it was another Red Cross list. There were the names: Samethini, Anna C. and Samethini, Margareth J. They were alive, quartered in a refugee camp in Singapore!

Letter from the Red Cross thanking Samethini for
his work at the Alliance Francais dance hall in Bangkok
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Taking leave of Bangkok and his bandmates in December, Han hurried to Singapore. His mind must have been a whirl of mixed emotions: gratitude, anticipation, and perhaps fear that the war might have changed Anna and her feelings towards him. He knew only too well the harm the Japanese Army could inflict on the bodies and souls of its subjects. Then there was Margie. He would be a stranger to her. Would she show affection for him? Would she even accept him?

Anna Samethini, 1946
Passport photo taken in Singapore
Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

When he arrived at the entrance to the Nee Soon Hospital Camp, Anna met him at the gate. Jean stood beside her. Margie was nowhere in sight. Then the announcement, cold and curt: She had decided to spend her life with Jean. She wanted a divorce. Han was devastated. Probably he tried to persuade Anna to reconsider, and it seems incredible that he would not have demanded at least to see his daughter. Many years later he would say, vaguely yet with great vehemence and anguish, that he tried hard to put his family back together. Whatever the reason, Margie does not remember any visits from her father while she was in Singapore. On March 16, 1946 she and her mother left for Holland aboard the liner Nieuw Amsterdam. [10] [11]

Margie, 1946
Courtesy of Margie Samethini-Bellamy

Han in MP uniform
Han Samethini Collection

Han remained in Singapore, where he'd been assigned to the 2nd Military Police Brigade in Wilhelmina Camp. He was not long confined to the mundane duties of a sentry. This city, like Bangkok, hosted a sizable Dutch military and refugee community that was eager for amusements:

Together with their families, and other civilian support staff (for the Dutch merchant navy), the Dutch lived in two camps in the Katong district in the eastern part of Singapore. To make living more pleasant, the Dutch had organized their own newspaper, news service, a radio station, postal unit, and even entertainment outlets like cinemas and an orchestra. [12]

Samethini with fellow army musicians in Singapore, 1946
The female singer is Oetje Nol. The bass player has not been identified.
The guitarist has been tentatively identified as Jimmy van Lingen [13]
Visible just above the sock line on Samethini's right leg is a tropical ulcer scar.
Han Samethini Collection

Samethini threw himself into this new project, driven by his love of music-making and the need to bury his pain under a mountain of work. The Singapore period is one of the briefest and most mysterious of his career, attested only by a photograph of him posing with an army entertainment troupe. He also seems to have directed an orchestra, a natural role given his training and experience. Of the orchestra we have only a fanciful illustration, drawn by a friend of Han's who was not a witness to the events. It contains references to different themed performances (French Evening, Spanish Evening, Dutch Evening), and lyrics from one of his original compositions, "Sweet Muchachabelle of Spain." Most striking are the depictions of the alluring Spanish maiden in roseate costume, the golden-haired chanteuse in white evening gown, and the bobbing and swaying jazz players in their immaculate tuxedos. They seem to express the refugees' longing for the glamor of the prewar days in the Indies, the carefree evenings of dance and song whose spirit was epitomized in the popular Hollywood musicals shown at the cinemas. The merry strains of Samethini and his band brought back those happy memories, allowing audiences a few hours' escape from the drabness of the present and uncertainty of the future.

Whimsical drawing of Han Samethini's orchestra in Singapore
(Names of the people in the Volendammer costume photo unknown)
Artwork by Mieke Dusseldorp
Han Samethini Collection

But Singapore was more to the Dutch than a refugee settlement. It was the staging area for the return of colonial government and military forces to the East Indies. Already, in February, the British-trained Gadja Merah (Red Elephant) brigade, composed of the fittest Dutch survivors of the Burma Railway, had passed through the city. They wore different uniforms and carried better weapons than they'd shouldered in 1942, but they were still proud fighting men of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army. On March 2 the Gadja Merah landed on Bali and disarmed the Japanese garrison. On the 8th other units secured the Lesser Sundas, and the next day three Dutch battalions arrived in Batavia. The British were beginning their withdrawal from the Indies, glad to extricate themselves from a colonial war they had no intention of fighting. The last British troops would leave in November. It would be up to the Dutch either to defeat the Indonesian nationalists or come to terms with them.

In May 1946, Han himself received orders for transfer to Batavia. The colonial army's Welfare Service needed musicians to entertain the troops, and no man was better qualified for the job. Packing his faithful accordion, Samethini boarded the trooper Tegelberg and sailed for Java. He had left the Indies as a wretched POW crammed in the hold of a Japanese slave ship. He was coming back as a soldier aboard a worthy Dutch vessel. Yet in another way he was returning as he had departed: outwardly surrounded by throngs, inwardly alone.

S.S. Tegelberg
blog.seniorennet.be

_______________________

Footnotes

[1] The towers in Chevallier's caricature are probably the prangs of the Wat Arun Temple, a major Bangkok landmark. Compare also his drawing of the POW ID card with the third image below:

(Click images to enlarge)
Australian War Memorial

[2] RAPWI stands for Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees. This was the organization dedicated to the welfare and repatriation of ex-POWs and civilian internees in SEAC-administered areas of the former Japanese Empire.

[3] See the newspaper article below:

Canberra Times (October 29, 1945)
(Click image to enlarge)
National Library of Australia

[4] Photo credit: CU Nixon Combined Concert Party, Ted A. Weller Private Collection, courtesy of Sears Eldredge. Professor Eldredge is writing a book on the Burma Railway POW entertainments, which promises to be a unique and valuable contribution to the history of the Pacific War. His advice has been of great help in writing this biography.

The same photograph was used in a feature story in the Australian magazine PIX (February 9, 1946). The caption gives the names of the Australian musicians:

(Click image to enlarge)

PIX Magazine / Han Samethini Collection

[5] Dutch magazine article "Samethini's Dans- en Showorkest", by A. Bloemhard, (Moesson No. 2, August 15, 1989). Translated by Margie Samethini-Bellamy. The article concludes:

"Later on everyone connected to O & O [Ontwikkeling & Ontspanning / Rest & Recreation] was moved to Transit Camp, together with the by-then arrived families. We stayed there until September 1946, when we sailed home to the Indies on the liner Nieuw Holland. Upon arrival in Surabaya, those choosing to stay in the Indies left the ship, and the rest were repatriated to Holland."

[6] Lt. Colonel P.G. Mantel was the highest ranking Dutch officer in Thailand. He had been a KNIL staff officer, and was present at the signing of the formal surrender of the Netherlands East Indies to the Japanese in March 1942. Here is a prewar photo of Mantel in Bandung, Java:

Lt. Colonel P.G. Mantel (center)
(Click image to enlarge)
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

[6] The Australian musicians of the Combined Concert Party left for home in early October. Samethini attended a farewell dinner in their honor given at the Ratanakosin Hotel. The Dutch and Australians passed around menus to collect autographs. A scan of Samethini's menu appears below. Among the most prominent signatures are those of Ron Wells and Joop Postma. Wells was the producer of the Combined Concert Party show.

Ratanakosin Hotel, Bangkok
Circa 1946
(Click image to enlarge)

Front of the Ratanakosin Hotel menu with ex-POW autographs
Samethini's and Postma's signatures visible above.
(Click image to enlarge)
October 1, 1945
Han Samethini Collection

Reverse side of the Ratanakosin Hotel menu
Autograph of Ron Wells appears near the top.
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

[7] Wim Kan's diary of his POW ordeal and postwar performances in Bangkok has been published in the Netherlands under the title Burma Dagboek.

Wim Kan
Sketch by Jack Chalker
(click image to enlarge)
Australian War Memorial

[8] The press clipping is not dated, but probably the article appeared in a November issue. The only clue to the source is a line of text on the reverse side: "Printed at the Straits Times." Oranje was printed at the Straits Times Press Pte Ltd, as was the English language SEAC newspaper. The article concludes: "Even in outlying camps entertainments are being given. Our reporter witnessed a performance by Mary Honri at Pratchai camp. "

Mary Honri (1910-1988) was a British music hall entertainer. A Honri-Samethini accordian duet would have been quite a show, but there is no evidence that they worked together. Below are two photos of the Pratchai performance:

British accordionist Mary Honri entertains
Dutch ex-POWs at Pratchai Camp
(Click images to enlarge)
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

[9] Personal e-mail from Hugh Brinkman (son of Alie Brinkman), November 23, 2009.

[10] The Nieuw Amsterdam arrived in Holland on April 10, 1946 at the port of Rotterdam. Below is a page of the passenger list, showing the names of Anna and Margie:

(Click image to enlarge)
Courtesy of Jeroen Kemperman
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

[11] Exactly one month before she left Singapore, Anna took part in a music and dance recital presented by Nee Soon Hospital. It was given in Sembawang, a northern area of the city. The program credits her as choreographer for "Arabian Nights". Anna stands at far left in the photograph below:

(Click image to enlarge)
Courtesy of Marge Samethini-Bellamy

(Click image to enlarge)

Courtesy of Marge Samethini-Bellamy

[12] Yong Mun Cheong, The Indonesian Revolution and the Singapore Connection, 1945-1949 (Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2003), p. 58.

[13] Identification made by British ex-POW Fergus Anckorn: "I think the guitarist in your picture is Jimmy Van Lingen, whom I knew quite well. He was a phenomenal jazz and classical guitarist." Anckorn also recalled meeting Samethini on the Burma Railway: "...I recognize Sammy very well but I left Chunkai shortly after so I did not have anything to do with him. I believe that he was in Nong Pladuk camp when I was there too." (Personal e-mail to author, December 19, 2006)

14. In the Oil (January 1947 - May 1948)

2009-04-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

[Under Construction]

15. "Margie, It's Your Father!" (1948-1950)

2009-04-15T18:37:00.001-07:00

[Under Construction]

16. Clowning (1950-1954)

2009-04-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

[Under Construction]

17. New Start in South Africa (1954-1969)

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[Under Construction]

18. Blaze Away (1969-1974)

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[Under Construction]

19. Old Comrades (1974-1982)

2009-04-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

[Under Construction]

20. With Barely a Sound (1982-1985)

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[Under Construction]

21. Visit to a "Bloody Big Country" (1985)

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[Under Construction]

22. Uneasy Retirement (1985-1988)

2009-04-15T18:29:00.000-07:00

23. Veertje (1988-1992)

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[Under Construction]

24. The Song is Ended (1992)

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[Under Construction]

Epilogue: "Always remember him..."

2009-04-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

[Under Construction]

Appendix A: "Chunkai P.O.W. Camp Theatre" by Walter L. Davis

2009-01-24T12:57:00.000-08:00

Title Page

(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Sometime during the 1970s, Wally Davis sent Han Samethini a draft copy of an article he was composing on the Chungkai Theater. Rosy depictions of POW camp life, published to promote the River Kwai tourist trade in Thailand, provoked him into setting the record straight with an account of his own experiences. The time and place of publication are unknown. Possibly a copy of the finished article might be found among Davis' papers, which are preserved at the Imperial War Museum in London.

The Davis account is notable for its information on the two successive locations of the theater, which had to be rebuilt following the monsoon flood of October 1944. Also valuable is his drawing of scratch-built POW musical instruments with brief remarks on their construction.

(Note: The closing remark "Blijven Lachen" is a Dutch expression. It means "Keep Laughing.")

Page 1
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 2A

(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 2B
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 3A
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 3B
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 4
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Layout of Chungkai POW Camp (not to scale)
Illustration by Wally Davis

(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Scratch-built POW musical instruments at Tamuang camp (1945)
Illustration and notes by Wally Davis

(Click images to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Appendix B: "The Exiles," a Bolero by Norman Smith

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Sheet music for "The Exiles." This is the bolero composed at Chungkai POW Camp by Norman Smith, and arranged by Han Samethini:

Page 1
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 2
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 3
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 4
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 5
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Page 6
(Click image to enlarge)
Han Samethini Collection

Han Samethini Remembered

Contents

Introduction

1. The Stick and the Piano (1916-1934)

2. The Jazz Man of East Java (1935-1939)

3. Anna (1939-1940)

4. Waiting for War (January-December 1941)

5. The Onslaught (December 1941 - March 1942)

6. Into the Inferno (March - December 1942)

7. Hell Ship to Singapore (January 1943)

8. Changi (January 1943)

9. The Death Railway (January - December 1943)

10. Prison Camp Musician (January 1944 - August 1945)

11. The Shadow Under the Sun (March 1942 - November 1945)

12. Liberation and Heartbreak (August 1945 - May 1946)

14. In the Oil (January 1947 - May 1948)

15. "Margie, It's Your Father!" (1948-1950)

16. Clowning (1950-1954)

17. New Start in South Africa (1954-1969)

18. Blaze Away (1969-1974)

19. Old Comrades (1974-1982)

20. With Barely a Sound (1982-1985)

21. Visit to a "Bloody Big Country" (1985)

22. Uneasy Retirement (1985-1988)

23. Veertje (1988-1992)

24. The Song is Ended (1992)

Epilogue: "Always remember him..."

Appendix A: "Chunkai P.O.W. Camp Theatre" by Walter L. Davis

Appendix B: "The Exiles," a Bolero by Norman Smith