CO129-590-22 Situation in enemy occupied Hong Kong 19-1-1943 - 20-11-1943 — Page 54

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W. J. Anderson

Hall

Agt/Supt. Whant

Mr. J. Fraser

Controller of Stores

of Lane Crawford

Hong Kong Police Force

Defence Secretary

A great deal of mystery has surrounded the arrest of these men. Mr. Morris' story is that Mr. Gimson has disclosed to him, in very strict confidence, the following details.

The arrests are in some way connected with arrangements for a mass cscape organised primarily by Scott of the Police. Mr. Gimson and Mr. Ponnofeather-Evans refused to have anything to do with the scheme which they thought hopeless from the start. It entailed receiving messages from Chung King on a secret wireless set in the camp and replying to those messages by means of notes muggled out of the camp by Chinese intermediarios. It involved also the acquisition of largo sums of money. and the smuggling into the camp from the city of such suns, together with arms. It appears that the Japanese intercepted the first outward notes, bribed the inter- nediaries and were accordingly shown copies of all subsequent notes; they waited their chance until the conspiracy was well under way and then, when as many people as possible were implicated, they arrested the lot. Last July those men were removed from the camp for an unknown destination; six or seven weeks later Lir. Pennofcather-Evans and Agt./Supt. Whant were returned to the camp in a weakened and rather strange condition in which, under threat of reprisal from the Japanese, they refused to speak at all of their experiences. They bore no outward marks of violence but had obviously been subjected to a pitiless third-degree. Mr. Waterton was brought back to the camp under guard and at the pistol's point ordered to dig up one of the hidden radio receiving sets. He and it were then removed. Since that · time, that is since last July, nothing more has been seen or heard of these men. So far as is known they are not in any of the prisons. (r. Horris pleaded most carnestly that this account of the arrests should be treated with the highest degree of secrecy;

he says that the lives of several other internees depend entirely on the fact that nothing of this should be divulged.)

CHINESE AND INDIANS

Mr. Morris confirmed that their attitude has changed since the months immediate- ly following the fall of Hong Kong. They are now disposed to be intensely pro- Allied and this has been particularly so since the start of the American raids on the Colony.

Dr. Graham Cumming, who was held outside the camp until last summer to perform certain necessary sanitary duties for the Japanese, returned to Stanley comp in August and confirmed reports of cannibalism in the City.

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