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ordered to do so, unwounded. However this may be, there we were, available to relieve them of the responsibility of caring for our casualties.
The next point of importance is the Japanese decision to behave like other belligerents and abide by the terms of the Geneva Convention though they had not been signatories. As a result, they recognised and accepted representation in Hong Kong and some, at least of the activities of the International Red Cross Society.
As a possible third consequence they allowed the hospital to remain in its buildings and concentrated there all allied wounded from other hospitals in the Colony. They used it also to receive some, but not all sick from the P.O.W. camps.
All of these actions conferred clear benefits on the Japanese, as well as upon us.
Any drugs or dressings removed by them from the hospital were in such small quantities as to be unimportant to us. Even when an electricity generator was taken, we still had another left. Except when some unacceptable decisions to admit too late, or discharge too early, sick prisoners were made by the Japanese the clinical freedom of our doctors was not challenged.
The hospital was given staple food and fuel rations and clothing and boot repair materials on a scale which may have been based on a standard used for Japanese troops who of course were known to live in part off the country in which they were operating. International agreements of course required only this scale to be observed. I think that our guards fared rather better than we did on their basic rations, especially in fish, but I have recorded earlier the anxiety shown by guards when their rations, like ours were late in arriving. I recall here the public statement to us in 1944 by a supplies officer that there were shortages on the Japanese side but that they would try to keep the hospital properly supplied. This was an appeal to us to understand their position, an appeal which fitted ill with much of the Japanese bearing towards prisoners. Their plight then, in Japan itself as well as in Hong Kong and no doubt elsewhere was extremely grave and their desperate resistance for another year is surprising. It was however hard, even impossible for prisoners to take then the detached view that we can today.
While the Japanese haul of booty in the form of drugs and medical supplies in Hong Kong must have been enormous the quantities that reached the hospital were negligible and we were