CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG
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news he had a switch to allow him to broadcast his musical records to patients during the permitted hours. Usually he was careful, but one day when I was visiting a ward I was startled to hear on the ward loud speaker a part of a British bulletin on events on the Russian front. A speeding messenger to his bunk got this stopped and the Japanese showed no awareness of what had happened.
I have often asked myself why I ran this risk. While I was then, and remain now, pretty sure that our own Japanese authorities sought for their own sake if not for ours, to keep all disciplinary problems in the hospital within their own hands and not report any of these to the Kempeitai or gendarmerie they would hardly have dared to suppress evidence of wireless communication between us and the outside world. No explanation by us that this was a simple and harmless gathering of news would have been accepted. Inevitably we would have been accused of operating a transmitter to broadcast to our side information about Japanese military matters. I, as head of the hospital, would have suffered the fate which overtook certain British officer prisoners in Kowloon who had been in communication with mainland China and who were executed after suffering so much that it was reported that they were unable to walk to the place of execution. I knew the risks perfectly well and yet for a long time I did not stir.
I think now that I did not realise that we were getting a broad picture of the way the war was developing from the local paper though the emphasis here of course was on Japanese successes. I suppose I always hoped for some news of special significance to us. Certainly the hospital looked forward to the news and I was unwilling at that time to do anything to interrupt the flow. And so our news bulletins from British sources continued to come in for a very long time.
Eventually a decision was forced from me when certain officer patients represented to me that if found out it would not be only me who would suffer. The whole hospital could easily be closed down and certainly the privileges we enjoyed would be withdrawn. This argument was presented to me formally and I recognised the force of it and ordered the dismantling and destruction of the wireless receiving set.
I did not supervise this personally; it was certainly dismantled but it was whispered that it had been reassembled elsewhere in the hospital and that it continued to be operated. If this was so my ignorance of its existence would not have saved me had it been discovered, but the story may well have been one of the rumours on all subjects