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more than a casual call during an afternoon's stroll but I would never have expected such a call to have been made by chance and at the very least they probably wanted to see for themselves the conditions in which we were guarded. When they left the guards and ourselves resumed our normal behaviour, not unlike the chattering of birds, stilled while the hawk is overhead and resumed when the danger has passed.
It is not difficult now to attribute some at least of the searches which took place about this time to the prevailing mood of the Japanese in Hong Kong. Suspicion of foreigners had been fostered assiduously in Japan before the war and xenophobia flourished exceedingly when war began. The turn of the tide against the Axis powers I suppose did nothing to soften this feeling. In Hong Kong Dr. Selwyn-Clarke was arrested in May 1943 to face charges some of which sound grotesque, and I have given a short account of his subsequent experiences. In July 1943 the Japanese gendarmerie arrested a number of men in Sham Shui Po. Under torture the names of others who had sent and received messages from Waichow via Chinese drivers of ration lorries were extracted and Colonel L.A. Newnham late Middlesex Regiment, G.S.O.1 British Troops in Hong Kong, Captain D. Ford 2 Royal Scots and Flight-Lieutenant Gray, R.A.F., were implicated. These three officers were tried by Japanese Court martial in Stanley in December 1943 and shot the same month. They had endured interrogation, a word now thoroughly debased, for many months and their condition at the end was described as deplorable.
Against the background of events outside which I have just described we were in a position of some privilege in Bowen Road, but it seems likely that there was some link between the two situations. It could easily be that the Japanese inspections of some of our medical and electrical equipment was carried out by men capable of detecting apparatus usable for radio communications. Some of the searches certainly seemed aimed at the detection of concealed radio apparatus. We were lucky that nothing on which suspicion could feed was discovered, but my scalp always crawled a little while the searches were in progress.
We had a number of visits from Japanese doctors who wanted to see our patients, principally at this time those partially blinded by the deficiency diseases. My diary records that we found one such doctor, a lieutenant-colonel, to be courteous to our patients.
CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG
231
more than a casual call during an afternoon's stroll but I would never have expected such a call to have been made by chance and at the very least they probably wanted to see for themselves the conditions in which we were guarded. When they left the guards and ourselves resumed our normal behaviour, not unlike the chat- tering of birds, stilled while the hawk is overhead and resumed when the danger has passed.
It is not difficult now to attribute some at least of the searches which took place about this time to the prevailing mood of the Japanese in Hong Kong. Suspicion of foreigners had been fostered assiduously in Japan before the war and xenophobia flourished exceedingly when war began. The turn of the tide against the Axis powers I suppose did nothing to soften this feeling. In Hong Kong Dr. Selwyn-Clarke was arrested in May 1943 to face charges some of which sound grotesque, and I have given a short account of his subsequent experiences. In July 1943 the Japanese gendarmerie arrested a number of men in Sham Shui Po. Under torture the names of others who had sent and received messages from Waichow via Chinese drivers of ration lorries were extracted and Colonel L.A. Newnham late Middlesex Regiment, G.S.O.1 British Troops in Hong Kong, Captain D. Ford 2 Royal Scots and Flight-Lieu- tenant Gray, R.A.F., were implicated. These three officers were tried by Japanese Court martial in Stanley in December 1943 and shot the same month. They had endured interrogation, a word now thoroughly debased, for many months and their condition at the end was described as deplorable.
Against the background of events outside which I have just described we were in a position of some privilege in Bowen Road, but it seems likely that there was some link between the two situa- tions. It could easily be that the Japanese inspections of some of our medical and electrical equipment was carried out by men capable of detecting apparatus usable for radio communications. Some of the searches certainly seemed aimed at the detection of concealed radio apparatus. We were lucky that nothing on which suspicion could feed was discovered, but my scalp always crawled a little while the searches were in progress,
We had a number of visits from Japanese doctors who wanted to see our patients, principally at this time those partially blinded by the deficiency diseases. My diary records that we found one such doctor, a lieutenant-colonel, to be courteous to our patients.
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