212
DONALD C. BOWIE
which swept through the hospital from time to time. If any instrument did survive it was not taken to Kowloon when the hospital moved there in March 1945. Placed in a similar position in a hospital today I would never run such a risk again.
The foregoing account shows a remarkable naivete on my part. The guilelessness of some of our men was quite as remarkable. I recall examining the diary of a soldier who died in Bowen Road before handing his belongings over to someone authorised to receive them. The diary had many references to world events which had clearly been obtained by wireless. I thought it wise to destroy these references at once, for if discovered they would have led directly back to an illicit receiver as the source which I judged to have been sited in a P.O.W. camp.
The Japanese allowed us to receive and read copies of an English language paper called the Hongkong News, which was published in the Colony. My notes show that we began to receive three or four copies of this paper daily from October 1942. I circulated these copies to each ward in the hospital and to all staff, but I am sorry I did not preserve any in my own records. The news in the paper was, I recall, quite accurate in describing places where events of importance in the war were taking place. I cannot say whether all events were recorded in this fashion. The treatment of the stories in the paper was, of course, wholly from the Japanese angle, and the result was to create in us prisoners a mounting sense of the victories they were achieving. We could and did discount many of the stories, and we had in the hospital a number of school-type atlases which were never taken away from us, and from the place names we could at least trace where events were taking place in the war as they happened. At first, this local paper was issued to us free, and from time to time supplies were stopped when it was not difficult to deduce that the issues that had been withheld contained news unfavourable to the Japanese.
AUGUST
DECEMBER 1942
These five months were for the hospital the worst period of our imprisonment. On 1 August 1942 there were 245 patients attended by twelve officers on the staff, not all of whom were medical, sixty-five other ranks including six Royal Engineers plus one civil engineer, seventeen nursing sisters Q.A.I.N.M.S. and Canadian