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DONALD C. BOWIE
of electricity and water supplies and firewood, increasingly frequent air attacks and I suppose the general problems faced by the Japanese in retaining a small unit isolated from other P.O.W. camps which they had to supply and guard.
The fifteen months which remained to us in occupation of Bowen Road proved to be a long drawn-out test of our endurance. We knew from the local newspaper about the Normandy landing by the allies and thereafter we traced on our school atlases subsequent progress in Europe. We gauged progress on the Russian front from the place names, while the names that appeared in the accounts of the Pacific war betrayed the progress being made there against the Japanese even though they always emphasised the staggering losses claimed to have been inflicted on their enemy in all their encounters.
Progress was more rapid than I for one had thought possible, but our own existence in Bowen Road became increasingly circumscribed as the boundary wire was brought even closer to the main hospital building. In January 1944 our staff were removed from their barrack block to occupy the fair-sized Ward 3 on the top floor of the hospital. Gates in the wire allowed our men to get to their own gardens for a few hours by day; by November the wire was brought even closer so that all buildings were excluded from us except for the cookhouse and the mortuary,
During January 1944 we had to cut the rice ration from 383 to 354 in order to conserve stocks, and by now rice was being weighed out at the steward's store into the utensils of each ward and mess. All staff under commissioned rank began to receive Japanese pay, 25 sen for a warrant officer, 15 for a sergeant or corporals and 10 for a lance corporal or private, so it had taken three years before our captors allowed this trivial right. Pay for commissioned officers arrived pretty regularly and in June all received their Japanese banking accounts to check. All contributed fixed proportions of their pay to the Central Hospital Fund from which small monthly payments of five or six yen were made to staff and N.C.O.'s in charge of wards. Disbursements continued to be made from the fund to provide extras for patients in need, supplements to improve the general diet and cigarettes or cash instead to all except commissioned officers. Small purchases of various stores needed in the hospital were also made. In April 1944 the contributions to our fund which had been coming from our officers in P.O.W. camp in