166
DONALD C. BOWIE
letter to our commanding officer, Colonel Shackleton, which he at once passed to the Japanese. In the letter we said that the progress to recovery of our wounded and sick patients was being impeded by a diet low in protein, vitamin and total calorie value and also by the difficulty of overcoming chronic sepsis on a deficient diet. We quoted League of Nations standards, well aware of the fact that Japan had left the League after her Manchurian adventure in 1933. We suggested a diet more suited to our habits and needs. Looking at this letter today I believe that we put our requests on a very moderate level.
Some time in 1942, well before August, the Japanese began to pay commissioned officers both staff and patients. Our nurses were not paid nor were any of our working staff. We were paid in “military” yen, which at first I think had the same value as the yen, and Shackleton set up a patients' Comforts Fund and an Extra Diets Fund to which officers made contributions on a scale which at first lacked regularity. On 3 August 1942 Harrison and I wrote again expressing our disquiet about the whole patients and staff situation and advised that all efforts to improve conditions should be financed through a Central Hospital Fund supported by all officers. We identified the needs under four heads; those of patients for special diets during and after dysentery, surgery etc., those of staff upon whom the work fell, the need of every person for improved food value in the rations and variation in the monotony of diet, and lastly the need of our whole community for electric bulbs, sewing cotton, soap etc. We quoted our basic average diet for the months of April, May and June and July 1942 (see Appendix “A”, Table 1). Perhaps a clearer idea of the position is conveyed by the fact that in the week 23 July to 1 August 1942 we had fish twice, meat once and a sweet rice pudding once, the last being the only dish for mid-day dinner, while all other dinners consisted of boiled rice and boiled vegetables only. Breakfast and suppers were rice or bread and sugar, syrup or vegetables, the whole diet being ill calculated to appeal to a sick man. Many so-called well men ate only as a duty to themselves and certainly not as a pleasurable activity.
The hospital had narrowly escaped a further disaster during hostilities for a large shell, a four-inch I think, had pitched at the junction of the road above the hospital leading to the sisters' mess and the lower wall of the reservoir. Had it exploded the reservoir