Changi Gaol

Changi Gaol is both a way station in the movement of Australian prisoners of war toward forced labour in Siam and a postwar prison where condemned former guards await execution. The contrast between the two periods gives the place a double history: during the war, it is a crowded transfer point within a larger system of captivity; afterward, its cells and execution facilities hold men whose fates are shaped by military courts and uneven reckonings with wartime responsibility.

A transfer point for Evans’ J Force

After six months in Java, a thousand Australian prisoners were sent by ship toward Singapore and marched to Changi Gaol before being assigned to a new project in Siam. Their arrival set them apart from the established Australian POWs at Changi. The camp had white two-storey barracks, lawns, gardens, and a view over the Johor Strait; its soldiers appeared well dressed and comparatively fit. By contrast, the incoming men wore a mixture of Australian and Dutch uniforms, were emaciated, and in many cases had no shoes. Their commander, Brigadier Crowbar Callaghan, called them Java Scum.

Dorrigo Evans pressed Callaghan to provide clothing, boots, and provisions from the camp stores. Callaghan refused, and attempted unsuccessfully to remove Dorrigo as commander because of his insubordination in demanding supplies. The episode makes Changi a point of institutional division as well as transit: the POWs arriving from Java encountered not simply another camp, but a sharp disparity in condition and access to resources within the Australian prisoner population.

The newcomers played a football match against Changi’s leading side and lost by eight goals. At three-quarter time, Sheephead Morton delivered an address whose opening became immortal among the men, though its effect depended on an unfinished joke rather than a conventional speech. The match and its remembered address briefly gave the group a shared camp occasion before the next transfer. Two weeks after their arrival, the prisoners left in the same rags. They were formally designated Evans’ J Force, and Wat Cooney, whose proposed escape plan had come to nothing, went with them.

Departure toward the railway

The departure from Changi began a journey in sealed, cramped rice wagons. Twenty-seven men were packed into each small steel carriage, with too little room even to sit. The train carried them through Singapore and onward through the tropics, with glimpses of rubber plantations, jungle, and people working the fields beyond the partly open door. The prisoners travelled for five days without food; three men died before they were taken off the train at Ban Pong, forty miles from Bangkok.

Changi therefore stands at the threshold between one form of confinement and another. The transfer did not provide relief from captivity: it moved Evans’ J Force from Java through Singapore toward the labour system that would exhaust the prisoners on the railway. In this sequence, the railway wagons extend the conditions of imprisonment beyond the gaol itself, carrying the men away from the camp while keeping them under forced movement and control.

Postwar confinement in P Hall

After his conviction, Choi Sang-min was transferred to P Hall at Changi, where condemned men of Japanese, Korean, and Formosan backgrounds lived together as equals. He was issued a dirt-brown uniform marked with the letters CD, which identified him as condemned to die. The prison’s routine was organized around waiting: in the mornings, prisoners left their cells to wash; they then spent the day in the gallery, playing go or shogi, rereading the few books and magazines, or sitting alone.

Every few weeks, an Indian captain brought a notice of execution. The prisoners waited silently to learn who would be taken, and the relief of not being named was bound up with the knowledge that another man had been. On the third such visit, Choi understood that he was to die, although he could not connect the piece of paper in his hand with his own life. The scene narrows the scale of the postwar sentence to the routines of P Hall: a notice, a shared gallery, and the long interval before the prison’s decision becomes immediate.

Choi’s conviction followed a two-day Australian military trial. The charge concerning the murder of Australian Imperial Force Sergeant Frank Gardiner was dismissed because of contradictions in written testimony, while the court upheld the charge that Choi ordered the murder of Wat Cooney, along with lesser charges relating to ill-treatment and the withholding of food and medical supplies. Choi disputed the allegation about Cooney, pointing out that Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order was supposedly given; confused and incomplete camp records did not establish that claim. Colonel Kota’s interrogation evidence had been used against Choi, while Choi had heard that Kota was later released without charge. The account thus places Choi’s imprisonment in the broader aftermath of the railway camps without suggesting that all those implicated faced the same outcome.

The execution grounds and the meaning of the site

On execution days, condemned prisoners whose dates had not been set remained inside the hall. From there they could hear the condemned man walk to the scaffold and speak his final words. The gallows stood behind the gallery, and the movement from the hall to the scaffold made the prison’s arrangement part of the punishment: the waiting men were kept close to the event and could not know when they themselves would be called.

Choi’s final passage from P Hall led across the courtyard and up the scaffold ramp. Before his execution, he was asked whether he wished to say anything, but he could form no concluding statement. His attention returned instead to the monthly pay he had once received as a member of the Japanese military: fifty yen, an amount that had become an absurd focus for the injustice and uncertainty he could not otherwise resolve. The prison ends his story not with a settled account of guilt or belonging, but with the sentence carried out and the unresolved question of what his life had meant.

Across the book’s chronology, Changi Gaol changes function without losing its connection to institutional power. It first holds Australian prisoners briefly before they are transferred into railway labour; after the war, it confines former guards under sentence and organizes the final waiting of condemned men. Its barracks, P Hall, gallery, and execution grounds mark distinct stages in those histories, linking wartime captivity to postwar punishment while leaving visible the unequal treatment and incomplete records that shape both.