'Weary' Dunlop

    "...a lighthouse of sanity in a universe of madness and suffering..."

During the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway by the Japanese in 1942-43, 2710 (out of 13,000) Australian POWs working on the Railway died. Many of the survivors had their health damaged for years, or decades, after by the trauma and Weary Dunloptropical diseases they suffered. Yet the statistics would have been worse, had it not been for the presence of many remarkable medical officers, among them the legendary 'Weary' Dunlop, whose ingenuity and self-sacrifice saved the lives of many.

    These medical officers were given little or no medicine or equipment and often suffered from the same diseases they were treating in others. Weary Dunlop variously suffered malaria, amoebic dysentery and tropical ulcers, yet he continually battled with his captors for medicines, resources and more humane conditions for his patients. One ex-POW remembers:

      "...thousands of us starved, scourged, racked with malaria, dysentery, beri beri, pellagra, and the stinking tropical ulcers that ate a leg to the bone in a matter of days, and always Weary Dunlop and his fellow MOs [medical officers] stood up for us, were beaten, scorned, derided, and beaten again."

    The medical officers and their helpers showed incredible ingenuity. One group produced 92% proof surgical alcohol from waste rice and a yeast found in the jungle in a still made from old condensed milk tins; others made drips for badly dehydrated cholera patients from Japanese beer bottles, doctors' stethoscope tubes and blunted syringe needles.

    Despite his experiences as a POW medical officer, Weary Dunlop was able to forgive his Japanese captors. He wrote the following account of an encounter with some wounded Japanese sent to Thailand from Burma after War's end along the Railway that had cost so many lives.

      "I paused before a man whose wretchedness equalled the plight of one of my own men - one leg had been hacked off at the mid-thigh and the bone stump projected through gangrenous flesh; his eyes were sunken pools of pain in a haggard, toxic face. With indomitable spirit he had hopped...hundreds of suffering miles without care. Some bombs fell and soldiers desperately fought for a place on the moving train. I moved to help him when he was trampled under in the rush, but his hand was limp and dead, and his tortured face was at peace. The memory dwelt with me as a lingering nightmare and I was deeply conscious of the Buddhist belief that all men are equal in the face of suffering and death."

    After the War, Weary Dunlop went on to foster Australian-Asian relations by teaching medicine in India, Sri Lanka and South-East Asia under the Colombo Plan and co-founding the Australian-Asian Association. He used the $200,000 raised from the publication of his personal war diaries to help young Thai surgeons to study in Australia. Weary Dunlop died, aged 86, in 1993.


Battalion Formation and Training | Middle East | Java | POWS
POW School | Burma-Thai Railway | Weary Dunlop | New Guinea
War's End