Dutch jungle doctor saved the lives of hundreds of American prisoners of war

Doctor Hekking among American war veterans (Photo: The Indo Project)

In many places, including Thailand, this period commemorates the 76th anniversary of the end of World War II with the capitulation of the Japanese armed forces. Today I would like to take a moment to reflect on the Dutch doctor Henri Hekking, who was honored as a hero in the United States, but hardly gained fame in the Netherlands, and this completely unjustly.

Henri H. Hekking was born on February 13, 1903 in Surabaya on the Indonesian island of Java, then one of the jewels of the Dutch colonial empire. His interest in medicinal herbs and plants was aroused at a very young age. This was thanks to his grandmother, the Zeeland grandma Vogel, who lived in Lawang, a mountain town on the edge of the jungle above Surabaya, and who had a solid reputation as a herbalist. Henri was sent to her when he had malaria and after his recovery he went out with his grandmother when she went looking for medicinal plants in the jungle or bought them at the markets in the surrounding area. Twice a week she passed by the kampongs to help the native sick with her medicinal preparations. Perhaps the knowledge he gained first-hand encouraged him to study medicine later on.

In 1922 he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Leiden with a grant he had received from the Ministry of Defence. After graduating in 1929, the brand new doctor was allowed to choose a career in Suriname or the Dutch East Indies. It became, without hesitation, his homeland. After all, as compensation for the fact that his studies were paid for by the army, he was contractually obliged to serve ten years as an army doctor in the ranks of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL). Initially he was stationed in Batavia. But due to the rotation system for military doctors used by the KNIL, he changed his station every two years and then ended up in Malang and later in the garrisons of Celebes and Soerabaja.

The young doctor not only trained himself in combating tropical diseases, but also deepened his knowledge of the beneficial plants and herbs. The latter was somewhat mockingly dismissed as quackery by some of his more conservative colleagues, but this criticism left Hekking cold. Life 'in the Eastapparently he liked it and when his contract was up he resigned. Instead of going on a well-deserved long leave to the Netherlands, Hekking went to study surgery in Italy. In September 1939 his studies were abruptly interrupted by the suddenly very real threat of war and the mobilization of the Dutch army. In the beginning of 1940 we find captain-medical second class Henri Hekking with his wife and two children in his new station on the western, Dutch part of the island of Timor.

On February 19, 1942, the Japanese Imperial Forces attacked Timor in full force. The allied troops, a mix of British, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, Americans and of course the Dutch from the KNIL, could hardly hold their ground and capitulated on 23 February. Doctor Hekking was taken prisoner of war and transferred to the barracks of the 10^e battalion cyclists in Batavia. His family was interned in a civilian camp on Java.

When the Japanese plans for a railway between Thailand and Burma became more and more concrete, Hekking was shipped to the immense Changi prison in Singapore, along with several thousand fellow sufferers. He reached Singapore unscathed and left in August 1942, by train, in a crammed animal wagon, to the base camp at Nong Pladuk where he was given kitchen chores.

Nearly a thousand American prisoners of war were used by the Japanese during World War II for the construction and maintenance of the Thai-Burma railway. The lion's share of this contingent were marines, crew members of the USS Houston, an American heavy cruiser, sunk on 28 February 1942 during the Battle of the Java Sea. These men, mostly Texans, had been sent from the assembly camp in Changi (Signapore) to Thailand where they had to work on the railway from October 1942. In the huge Japanese base camp near Kanchanaburi, they had become acquainted with the now transferred doctor Hekking, who, despite the manifest lack of conventional medicines, had helped a number of their patients very quickly and above all efficiently with medicinal plants. A few weeks later the Americans were marched towards the wharves at Hintok.

There were a few British doctors in the camps near Hintok, but they had a knack for preventively amputating injured or infected body parts. The Americans had little faith in them modus operandi and managed to bribe one of the Japanese officers of the Railway Corps with two expensive wristwatches. They got him to transfer Doctor Hekking to their camp. Hekking used his intimate knowledge of the plants that grew literally a few feet from the camp to successfully combat disease and strengthen the weakened men. The Americans soon realized that they had done a golden thing by bringing in Hekking.

The Dutch camp doctor, who quickly nicknamed 'Jungle Doctor' became gifted, excelled in improvisation and innovation. With patiently sharpened spoons – without anesthesia – the festering tropical ulcers were scraped out, leeches diligently collected in jars to be used in due time and shirts torn into strips were boiled over and over again to serve as bandages. Very occasionally, Hekking even managed to steal medicines from the Japanese pantries, at the risk of being caught if caught…. It should not be forgotten in this context that the doctors in the labor camps, like all other prisoners of war, were not exempted from chores to perform their job. In other words, like their peers, they had to participate every day in the construction of the Thai-Burmese Railway of Death. Practicing medicine was only possible in their 'spare time' after working hours. A job that Doc Hekking managed to successfully complete thanks to his great expertise and knowledge. While in other camps the prisoners died like flies, of the approximately 700 men under his responsibility, 13 succumbed. Not one of these American prisoners had to undergo an amputation while Hekking was their camp doctor….

Hekking was a hero to the American war veterans. From 1956, when the USS Houston CA-30 Survivors Association was founded, he was their guest of honor at the Dallas reunions many times. In November 1983, he was officially honored in the United States Congress, the House of Commons. In the official US Congressional Record stated Otto Schwarz, one of his former patients:…He is not a mere physician. his practice of medicine under the worst conditions was not restricted to the attempt to heal the physical body; it also brought out his ability as a psychologist, to somehow treat the mind, spirit and soul of those prisoners of war who had little or no reason to be confident about the future…”. In 1989 the Dutch received Jungle Doctor a personal letter of thanks from US President Ronald Reagan. Reserve Major Hekking was even given the honorary rank of Vice Admiral of the Texan Fleet, part of the United States Merchant Marines. His important role in the labor camps is highlighted in at least five American books. Gavan Daws described in Prisoners of the Japanese (1994) Doc Hekking as “the master treater of mind and body”.

However, Doctor Hekking was not a sant in his own country. In the post-war Netherlands, steeped in sobriety, you could – the national credo “just act normal “mindful – but better not stick your head above the mowing field. Apart from a few newspaper articles and one mention in the standard work Workers on the Burma Railway van Leffelaar and Van Witsen from 1985, there is no trace of this more than deserving doctor in Dutch war historiography. And he was by no means the only war doctor to receive this stepmotherly treatment. Ten doctors who had served in the KNIL were nominated for a ribbon in the Order of Orange-Nassau for their exceptional services during the war. In the end, only one of them, namely Henri Hekking, would actually be awarded it, according to the testimony of his friend and colleague doctor A. Borstlap, who had been in a camp on Celebes, this happened “because they had no choice because the Americans had already given him a medal….”

In an interview conducted on November 11, 1995 in Trouw appeared, his daughter said that her father hardly spoke about his camp years at home “Only if there was reason to. Then you always got to hear very colored stories, humorous, but too positive, never the real misery. He told the highs, he skipped the lows. He didn't want to talk about that…” Doc Hekking died in The Hague on January 28, 1994, barely two weeks before his 91^e birthday. He had survived the hell of the Thai-Burma Railway for just under half a century…