[ { "id": 207409, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 177, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n169\n\nrelease. His nerve was not shaken by his experience, and it was a privilege to have him on the staff.\n\nMajor Charles Boxer had studied the Japanese language in Japan and when hostilities broke out was a staff officer in China Command. Towards the end of the battle on the Island he went out to help the defence in the field and was very seriously wounded. He was taken first to the Queen Mary Hospital and thence to Bowen Road in early January 1942. The Japanese of course knew that he was in Hong Kong and sought him out after our surrender. After the immediate danger of his wound had passed his services as an interpreter were much in demand both by Shackleton and by the Japanese. The surgical problems of our wounded were being brought under better control when on 7 August 1942 Boxer gave me a message from the Japanese that on the following day Simson the A.D.M.S., Shackleton the commanding officer, a named number of officers and other ranks of the staff and 40 patients were to leave Bowen Road and that all women staff were to be transferred away from the hospital 48 hours later. At the time we considered that only twelve patients were fit to go to P.O.W. camp. All except two of the women staff were to be transferred to the Civil Internment Camp on the Stanley Peninsula. The two exceptions, as noted earlier, were released, in Hong Kong. I was promised 30 “first aiders” to replace our nurses but it was much later before 10 Canadian volunteers arrived to help us. The Japanese instruction to me was to take charge of the hospital with Major Gerald Harrison as my deputy. My own position was secure enough for I was much senior to my medical colleagues in the hospital, but Harrison was not the next in seniority in the British army. Before his departure Colonel Simson was good enough to give me a letter in which he “promoted” me to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and to take charge of the hospital. As an interpolation this development did not forward my career in any way and it was not till 16 January 1946 that I was promoted to the substantive rank of Lieutenant Colonel. My pay in this rank began only upon this date though my seniority was slightly ante-dated. By 1946 I had nearly 28 years service, so my forebodings of 1939 and 1940 about my career were justified. This little story shows that it is always unwise to be captured in war; the effect on the career of a regular soldier can be calamitous. It also illustrates the slow rate of promotion thirty years ago. I was however grateful for Colonel Simson’s", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207415, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 183, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n175\n\nat the corners of the mouth and scrotal oedema. During August 1942 only 17 cases of deficiency diseases were admitted as such, but the same signs were common among the dysentery and diphtheria admissions. We began an investigation into all the various manifestations and intensive treatment was started. These patients with deficiency diseases were to form a nearly immovable block in our patient population for a long time because improvement came about extremely slowly. An outstanding symptom was burning pain in the feet which sometimes required morphine for its relief. Many sought to ease the pain by plunging their feet into cold water and one patient had to be confined in a place where water was not available in order to avoid maceration of the skin. Some who had had deficiency diseases improved enough to return to P.O.W. camps. Others remained in hospital up to our release in 1945. These last had balancing problems, numbness of limbs and visual defects.\n\nThe hospital had admitted 1225 patients during 1942 and this figure included all patients transferred to us from all the other civil and service hospitals in the Colony. Of the total, 443 were admitted during the five-month period August-December and at 31 December 341 patients remained. Pressure on our accommodation had been severe, and repeated changes in the usage of wards were needed to isolate infectious patients and provide room for all who needed our care. The Canadian P.O.W. camp at North Point closed in October and the troops moved to Kowloon. Perhaps because of the rearrangements required by this move, but almost certainly reinforced by the well-known Japanese fear of infectious disease, we were not allowed to discharge patients whom we considered would suffer by a move to a camp. The pressure on our space and feeding arrangements was therefore intense and this did not begin to ease until April 1943. By the end of 1942, however, the heaviest burden of the infections had become lighter, though the long haul to cope with the deficiencies as the main load had already begun.\n\nThe year 1942 had weighed heavily on the spirits and energies of patients and staff. The departure of the women nurses cast a gloom over the hospital. The future seemed uncertain, the rations were poor, patients flooded in, deaths were frequent, but food gifts to the hospital from friends in Hong Kong and the arrival of a Red Cross parcel per head, to which I shall refer later, together with a natural resilience as the acute epidemics subsided towards the end of the year brought about some lightening of the clouds.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207438, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 206, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "198\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nthat camp. It was at this time that I first proposed that I should be allowed to visit P.O.W. camps in order to discuss the various medical problems with our doctors there and plan the best use of our hospital services for their patients. This suggestion, like so many others, provoked no apparent reaction and though I repeated it at frequent intervals I never got near a P.O.W. camp until I was moving to our new hospital in Kowloon in 1945. Major Harrison was allowed to make one visit to North Point Camp to consult with Canadian medical officers about some problems in which specialist advice was wanted. This was his only visit to a camp and none of our other doctors were ever allowed to visit either.\n\nI had another passage with Saito following an air raid on Hong Kong in October of which I shall write later, but in these critical months in 1942 my approaches to him had to be made in writing or through his N.C.O., Sergeant Seino or the interpreter and any messages from him came back by the same route.\n\nOn 23 November Saito saw all officer patients and though he did not make a physical examination he marked five for discharge. We considered that two of these would improve by a further stay in hospital, though it was not vital for them to do so. The order for discharge however stood. On 21 December we had our second Red Cross inspection, the first during the period I was in charge but Saito did not appear in the suite. A day or two later however he demanded a report on our sufferers from pellagra asking for detailed information about skin, gastro-intestinal and nervous symptoms and the details of treatment and on 16 January 1943 he came to see the patients. We demonstrated these including the eye cases. As our experience in these fields was small we asked his advice and he suggested giving 100 mgm nicotinic acid by intramuscular injection daily for 10 days. As was his usual custom he would not wait to make a detailed inspection and cut his visit short. We delayed him on the stairs long enough for him to use the English words \"B. complex\" when speaking on the causal deficiency. With this exception he had spoken Japanese throughout and whether he had got the information in discussion elsewhere, it agreed with our view that the symptoms were not to be explained by a pure vitamin B1 deficiency. In reply to my question he said that nicotinic acid and suitable diet were the important elements of treatment. He said also that yeast, easy to get before the war, was now hard to obtain. He promised to consult a colleague about", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207439, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 207, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n199\n\nthe eyes. He and I agreed that neither of us had ever seen a case of pellagra before.\n\nOn 22 January 1943, Saito came in again and was handed a copy of our pellagra report which he should have had already from Takeyama, our interpreter, the night before. He now said that in Sham Shui Po patients were being given 10 mgm nicotinic acid by injection daily, a figure which contrasted with his advice given less than a week earlier. This did nothing to increase my confidence in him as a physician.\n\nA day later Saito came in again. We had heard that 1200 men had left P.O.W. camps by ship having been equipped with some warm clothing, a Red Cross parcel and 10 yen each and that they were accompanied by two British and one Canadian doctor. I tried but failed to extract any more information on this subject. Saito told me that Sham Shui Po then held 2000 men of whom 1000 were sick and twice he emphasised that he did not want our hospital to be used as a hotel by men who were fit for camp. I found this rather irksome coming so soon after the tragedies of the closing months of 1942. I acknowledged that we did have some patients who were apparently in good condition physically but who showed serious visual defects which were evident if any examination of them were to be carried out. I complained that the only information we received about an incoming draft of patients was the approximate number and the time they were expected to arrive and even this was not always reliable while the notice was always short. Because our space was limited the only way we could accommodate new patients was to discharge about the same number of our existing ones. It thus came about that I was asking medical officers for the names of patients best fitted to return to camp and whose progress was unlikely to be jeopardised by discharge, rather than those in whose fitness we had confidence. I said that I could not overrule a doctor's decision on the medical condition of a patient only to be told that the same applied in the Japanese army. I was a little surprised at this. My protest had no effect and on our side we continued making room for new patients by discharging the fittest among the old patients. In 1943 this policy was the only one possible. Eighteen months later we did have patients admitted from camp, chosen by Saito, who seemed to us to be in better shape than some that we had to discharge.\n\nA Colonel Watanabe of the Japanese medical service visited us", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207452, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 220, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "212\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nwhich swept through the hospital from time to time. If any instrument did survive it was not taken to Kowloon when the hospital moved there in March 1945. Placed in a similar position in a hospital today I would never run such a risk again.\n\nThe foregoing account shows a remarkable naivete on my part. The guilelessness of some of our men was quite as remarkable. I recall examining the diary of a soldier who died in Bowen Road before handing his belongings over to someone authorised to receive them. The diary had many references to world events which had clearly been obtained by wireless. I thought it wise to destroy these references at once, for if discovered they would have led directly back to an illicit receiver as the source which I judged to have been sited in a P.O.W. camp.\n\nThe Japanese allowed us to receive and read copies of an English language paper called the Hongkong News, which was published in the Colony. My notes show that we began to receive three or four copies of this paper daily from October 1942. I circulated these copies to each ward in the hospital and to all staff, but I am sorry I did not preserve any in my own records. The news in the paper was, I recall, quite accurate in describing places where events of importance in the war were taking place. I cannot say whether all events were recorded in this fashion. The treatment of the stories in the paper was, of course, wholly from the Japanese angle, and the result was to create in us prisoners a mounting sense of the victories they were achieving. We could and did discount many of the stories, and we had in the hospital a number of school-type atlases which were never taken away from us, and from the place names we could at least trace where events were taking place in the war as they happened. At first, this local paper was issued to us free, and from time to time supplies were stopped when it was not difficult to deduce that the issues that had been withheld contained news unfavourable to the Japanese.\n\nAUGUST\n\nDECEMBER 1942\n\nThese five months were for the hospital the worst period of our imprisonment. On 1 August 1942 there were 245 patients attended by twelve officers on the staff, not all of whom were medical, sixty-five other ranks including six Royal Engineers plus one civil engineer, seventeen nursing sisters Q.A.I.N.M.S. and Canadian", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207453, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 221, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n213\n\nservice, thirty-two women members of the Nursing Detachment of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps and two women nursing auxiliaries. By December 31 we had 341 patients, slightly over half of whom were Canadians, attended by six medical officers including myself, one dental officer, one Church of England chaplain, one quartermaster R.A.M.C., 81 other ranks including seven engineers and nine Canadian combatant soldiers who served as orderlies. In these five months we admitted 546 patients of whom 42 died, 31 of these were Canadians.\n\nUp to about 19 December 1941 we had buried our dead in Happy Valley, but when this site became unapproachable we used large bomb and shell craters close to Bowen Road immediately below the hospital to form common graves. When this site was full we prepared another cemetery by the main gate of the hospital. In August 1942 we had to prepare a new cemetery within our wired perimeter on the bank to the north of the hospital and between the hospital and Bowen Road. We had, of course, no coffins and at first we used sheets as shrouds. The mounting number of deaths compelled us to substitute well-worn blankets as shrouds and this practice continued up to the end of 1942. Our funerals were dignified affairs and I attended in every case. We usually had a few patients and staff as well and at first, remarkably enough, the Japanese were always represented by Sergeant Seino or others and they came bearing wreaths and sheaves of beautiful flowers. They did not keep up this practice very long and I think they had ceased to attend well before we had buried the last of our 42 men before the end of the year. Funeral parties were always guarded.\n\nIn August 1942 we began to give thiamine by injection regularly to staff while all in hospital received yeast drinks. Each member of the staff received two yen from the Central Hospital Fund and I was given a copy of the Japanese \"Rules for P.O.W. Camps\", and I was told that though these were not wholly applicable to a hospital, we were required to conform to the rules in a general sense. I have no idea now what these rules were, but I do know that they did not introduce any new feature into our daily life.\n\nAbout this time all in the hospital were required to complete a form showing their previous experience especially as car drivers, members of the medical profession, those experienced in manufacturing processes and mining, communications experts, agriculture etc. One splendid question was \"In what occupation you want to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207458, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 226, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "218\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nattacks on defences which were hardly dented. The areas in which fighting was taking place were still thousands of miles away from us and the newspaper constantly asked the subtle question as to whether the American losses were worth incurring.\n\nIn the hospital 1943 was a drab year for us; the number of patients dropped from 341 on 1 January to 234 on 31 December. Drafts of patients for admission from P.O.W. camps came on ten out of the twelve months and on each occasion patients were discharged. The condition of incoming patients showed a distinct improvement as the year went on though many patients and staff had an additional affliction to endure, that of intestinal worms. Suspicion fell upon a number of food items including vegetables and Chinese brown sugar as the vehicle of infection, but we never established that any one substance was the culprit.\n\nOn three separate occasions I was handed sums of military yen by the Japanese in cash, the donors being the Red Cross Societies. One such gift came from the Canadian Society and was marked for Canadian troops only and was so distributed. Apart from this all other gifts had no limitations placed upon them. On each occasion the available cash was divided and paid equally to all except commissioned officers. Each man thus received 40 yen over the year while Canadians had an extra 30 yen, and in all cases I gained a few yen for my Commanding Officer's Fund from small surpluses. The Central Hospital Fund also benefited from money contributed by officer prisoners in camp in Kowloon which was transmitted to us by the Japanese. The signatures of some patients on the receipt sheets were indecipherable scrawls, because they were quite unable to coordinate their movements.\n\nThirty patients died during the year, and by the end of October 104 of our men were buried in cemeteries in and around the hospital. In April we were given a tin of black paint by the Japanese at our request to allow us to paint the names of the dead on the very well made wooden crosses constructed by us to mark their graves. In December a Japanese interpreter appeared saying that it was his job to see to it that graves were properly prepared and marked and that plans of these existed. I was very proud of the work that our men put in, and the graves of those who had died were properly prepared, identified and maintained. Usually each grave held only one body; occasionally two shared a grave, and on one occasion three men were buried together when they had died", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207462, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 230, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "222\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nFour times during the year the Japanese gave us supplies of soles, heels, nails, hobs etc. for repairing boots and three times we got issues of khaki and white cloth, thread etc. for mending clothes. As an example of quantities, on 19 June we received 15 yards khaki cloth, 11 yards white cloth, 5 packets sewing needles, 2 sewing machine needles, 3 reels white cotton, 3 large reels white thread and 13 large reels of khaki thread, one of these being extra large, 50 sets half-soles, 476 pieces heels, 9 lb hob-nails, 74 lb protectors and 5 lb nails.\n\nReligious services were held in the recreation room twice each Sunday and were conducted by Mr. Squires. The form of service was such that men who belonged to churches other than the Church of England could attend and the turn-out to morning service was usually good, resembling in a way a village congregation at home. Mr. Squires was hard put to it to produce wine for communion but kept up his supply by a variety of bought or ingeniously concocted liquors. In March we managed a Roman Catholic service conducted by Father Deloughry, a Canadian who was a patient at the time, but this represented nearly our only success for members of this church.\n\nEver since hostilities we had had a number of patients who had been blinded or had suffered amputations while others who were over the age of 60 were likewise unfit for further service. In the latter cases I recall that if being over 60 barred a man from fighting, then one of the bravest and most stubborn resistances of our little war, carried out by senior members of the Hong Kong Volunteers would never have happened. So in April 1943 twenty-eight of our patients in the classes named were discharged to P.O.W. camps and I think that all left us quite ready for a change to new surroundings.\n\nTowards the end of the year we were examining how we could discharge to P.O.W. camps, without risk to themselves, those patients whose eyesight had been seriously affected by deficiency diseases. We decided that if these patients were in satisfactory physical state otherwise, and if we could ensure that they would get 8 mgm thiamine by injections every second day in camp, we could retain specialist control if we could get them returned to us at regular intervals for assessment of their progress. We were encouraged to believe that this was a realisable objective because three officers from Kowloon had been sent over earlier in the year for ophthalmic examination and one of these was admitted at", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 } ]