246
DONALD C. BOWIE
All of Mr. Campbell's records of receipts of Japanese rations were removed by Saito on 17 February in order, he said, that they could be examined by Japanese checkers. We never got them back.
On 19 March 24 lorry loads of beds (100) and mattresses and medical equipment left the hospital. On 21 March 109 patients with four doctors and 5 nursing orderlies were transferred to huts in Sham Shui Po leaving four officers and 56 staff with 15 so-called strong patients. I left with these on 23 March for Sham Shui Po. This was the only time I had been in a P.O.W. camp and by then the prisoners, like ourselves in the hospital, had become adjusted to the conditions. The hospital equipment had gone to the Central British School in Kowloon. We had stripped Bowen Road of every single article and structure we thought might be useful to us on our new site. In this, the Japanese seemed to encourage us.
THE REASONS FOR THE RETENTION OF
THE HOSPITAL IN 1942 AND ITS REMOVAL IN 1945
In the conditions following our surrender, it is not hard to understand the Japanese decision to leave a British Military hospital, which they found as a going concern, to care for Allied sick and wounded. Such a decision enabled them to conform with the provisions of the Geneva Convention, a political decision, while at the same time using an immediately practical alternative to involving their own medical services. Our hospital must have been a showpiece to their own inspecting officers and to the Red Cross representatives, both International and Japanese, and illustrated how they were conforming with the provisions of the Convention. They clearly succeeded in creating a good impression, as shown by the spontaneous remark to me of Mr. Engelbacher (I am not certain of the name) of the International Red Cross at the inspection on 21 December 1942 by Mr. Zindel and himself. He declared that we were better off than patients in a Japanese military hospital. This might have been true, but at that time, I was oppressed by the deaths of the last few months and the condition of large numbers of our patients, and I received the information with some coldness.
The arrangement under which we continued to occupy our own hospital must have provided quite serious administrative inconveniences for the Japanese. So far as I know, we provided the only concentration of British P.O.W. on the Island, though the Stanley Internment Camp, some miles away, held civilian internees and was