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.Many women were raped and murdered as you know and it's all true. The atrocities you heard of arẻ àll true and it : has all been a terrible mess and a rotten show.....Mrs. Black * was killed along with her husband during the raping there." He gives no details at all as to food and conditions in the camp, and no specific reference to any other incident of rape etc.
Their
The compiler of these notes met two old friends who had escaped on 9.2.42 and arrived in Calcutta early in March. account confirmed most of the above. They had been confined in the P. 0. W. camp at Shamshuipo on the mainland where the diet was two bowls of polished rice daily and they had been rapidly losing strength. They made no mention of supplements. No medicine was supplied for the sick. They were given plenty of water. They had not been ill-treated in any way and were not even searched on entering the camp. This camp is one of our own military cantonments, consisting mostly of ordinary army huts. They said that as far as they knew all the European women, except the French and neutrals who were free, were lodged on Stanley peninsula, on the south side of the island, in the civil prison and the school. They could not give any information ‹` about conditions in the civilian camps
It is noticeable that none of these first-hand repórters refers at all to mass rape or atrocities on Europeans. The two escaped men when questioned on this point, said they had neither seen nor heard of mass rape etc. As far as they knew the greater number of European woten had been nursing in the Queen Mary Hospital on the west side of the island away from the fighting and there no bombs or shells had fallen so that anyone there was likely to be unhurt. They believed that all these women had merely been interned. Rape and violence had taken place to their knowledge in two places. One was the Auxiliary Hospital in Happy Valley on the town side of Wongneichong Gap near the landing place where there had been bombs, shelling and heavy fighting, and it was feared there were no survivors. The other was a small Auxiliary Hospital at Stanley which is very cut off el and on the side of the Gap held by the Japanese. A small group of nurses there, English and native, had been assaulted and killed. Dr. Black who had tried to defend them was shot. The informants could not absolutely guarantee that the other women were safe, but they strongly believed it to be fact.
There are four writers in the second category: second-hand information with source stated. REX RAY of the Baptist Mission, Wuchow, S. China, writes on 6.2.42: "All the British nurses in the hospitals were raped, some six or eight times each by those hellish Japanese soldiers..........A Chinese lady dentist who escaped from Hong Kong in a sampan brought us this news last week." One :3 is, perhaps unjustly, inclined to discount missionary rumours as from their way of life they are often very nervy people, and in touch with every breath of Chinese gossip, and cut off from British people and sources of news, especially in these provincial towns.
The second writer in this class, Prof. SHIH TSAI CHEN of the Central Political Institute, South Hot Springs, Chungking, writes on 7.3.42 that a fri nd of his had just come through from Hong Kong after its fall. "It was terrible. Hundreds and thousands of people were killed by the Japanese with bayonets because the Japs wanted to save their bullets. Numerous women, particularly white women, have been attacked, insulted or killed. This report is very indefinite. "Numerous women" might refer to the Happy Valley and Stanley causes, and the vague and exaggerated "hundreds and thousands" sounds like scaremongering.
The same writer in another letter written on 17.3.42 repeats that thousands had been killed by bayonets to save bullets.
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