,
-
BRIDGES OVER THE KWAI
85
gent understanding of the very restricted conditions within which nego–
tiation was possible. He was a very brave man, but he knew that in
any open showdown the Japanese would always win, and so he never
forced the issue in such a way as might make them lose face; instead
he first awed his captors with an impressive display of military swagger;
next, he proceeded to charm them with his ingratiating assumption that
there could be no serious difficulty between honorable people whose
only thought was obviously to do the right thing; and finally, he
pleaded that, for his part, he would do all that could possibly be asked
of him in the way of efficient labor management, if only he were given
a reasonably free hand.
Colonel T---'s successes in dealing with the Japanese, I re–
flected, had actually been achieved by methods quite different from
those Boulle ascribed to Nicholson. For obvious reasons: we had never
been able to bargain because as prisoners we had nothing to offer which
the Japanese couldn't take without asking, and we certainly hadn't had
anything approaching Nicholson's trump card, his capacity to do what
the Japanese had failed to do-build the bridge. For, of course, the
Japanese military engineers had been perfectly capable of planning their
own bridges and forcing us to build them at more or less the rate they
decided. It was true that there had often been a good deal of con–
fusion, and that their methods of work were usually rough and ready;
but given the need to finish the nearly three hundred miles of railway
in less than a year, over a route which a previous survey by Western
engineers had pronounced insuperably difficult, and with fantastically
inadequate material means, the methods of the Japanese were probably
the only ones which could have succeeded.
The only possible basis I could think of for Boulle's main example
of Japanese engineering incompetence was the fact that two bridges had
in fact been built at Tamarkan. Actually, though, the first one hadn't
been a mistake: the Japanese had merely rushed up a temporary wooden
means of getting supplies
acro~s
the river until a stronger and more
permanent bridge of steel and concrete could be finished alongside.
It certainly seemed odd that Boulle should write as though the
West had retained its monopoly of modem technology and organizational
skill, when the Japanese capture of Singapore had so unequivocally pro–
claimed their ability to adapt Western methods to their own purposes;
and I suddenly remembered an incident when this had been vividly
brought home to me personally. After a hard day's work on the em–
bankment, I'd been summoned before a
notoriou~ly
cruel but
cap~ble
Japanese engineer called Lieutenant Taramoto. He had looked up at
