Will the Freedom of Information Act enable the truth to be known about important political or military matters which hitherto have been kept secret, quite needlessly? Apparently Government departments have been shredding record numbers of official files in the months leading up to the enforcement of the Act, which empowers any member of the public to apply to see secret files. The increase in the destruction rates in one department is 500 per cent. A culture of evasion leads to the destruction of evidence, to avoid coping with an era of openness.
Then there’s another problem: “Up to 10 million pages of vital military secrets have been rendered unusable by exposure to asbestos,” states a report. “The contamination threatens the operation of the Act. The 63,000 files include the official versions of events such as the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982 and the killing of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar by the SAS in 1988.” According to Professor Matthew Jones of Nottingham University, “These files are irreplaceable records of this nation’s defence and foreign policy during the 20th century.”
Incidentally, on the subject of the Belgrano, immediately after the Falklands War a small group, led by an Under Secretary of State, was sent to Australia and New Zealand to lecture the Governments’ Cabinets and senior officers on lessons learnt during the war. We took considerable trouble to clear scripts with the three Services to ensure they were true. Yet we were fed at least one factual error; for example I was astonished to discover years later that the Belgrano had been sailing away from the Falklands exclusion zone, and not towards it as we had said.
I fear that the first book I wrote in 1978 contained some factual errors and wrong inferences, partly because I was then relying on a very elderly and prejudiced veteran’s memory.
* * * * *
In 1942 officers in Hong Kong were inevitably and understandably anxious that their regiments and corps would be shown in the best possible light. Eventual promotion, decorations and certainly their reputations might depend upon it. They had, after all, plenty of time in the POW camps to write and rewrite their accounts. Most if not all the War Diaries, like the ciphers, had been destroyed in the final days before the surrender, to prevent the Japanese capturing them. The memory of some people, exhausted during the fighting, had to form the basis for their memories on “uncertain recollections of those who survived, some assembled during a malevolent captivity, some in the immediate aftermath of war, others long afterwards from memories embittered by injustice, embellished by time, or embroidered by both,” as Brereton Greenhous put it so admirably.1 Japanese records are not much help. Much of their original documentation stored in Tokyo was destroyed by bombing later in the war.
So how accurate is Maltby’s Official Report? “Have finished first draft of story of war in Hong Kong – great labour – much counter checking still to be done though, and gaps filled,” wrote Colonel Newnham, the General’s principal operations officer on 24th March 1942 in tiny writing on tissue paper. By 10th May the Report was finished.
It may seem extraordinary, but Maltby and Newnham had to compile the Report without consulting either of the two Brigade Commanders – Lawson had been killed in action; Wallis had been in Bowen Road Hospital for skin grafts as he was injured while on a forward reconnaissance towards Repulse Bay and the wound would not heal. When discharged from hospital on 11th April to Shamshuipo Camp and then a week later to Argyle Street, Wallis shared a room with both Maltby and Newnham. He felt “that the General and staff felt they knew all that there was worth knowing and that any account I might have was not needed to complete the picture. They also knew I was writing the War Diaries as I had many visits from various Commanding Officers and I told them both what I was doing. I gave my completed diaries to Newnham for perusal and to Maltby for information. I don’t think either read them; Maltby was unprepared to amend his own account.”
The General’s official record of the war was buried in the camp’s grounds to prevent the Japanese finding it. It was recovered after the war.
How reliable were Wallis’s War Diaries? The Canadians had moved to North Point Camp and so he was not able to consult them. Moreover, during the fighting on the Mainland all his dealings with the Royal Scots were by telephone, before he moved from his Headquarters northeast of Kowloon to Devil’s Peak in the southeast.
Wallis carried with him his two War Diaries throughout his imprisonment. They amounted to over 220 pages of manuscript. He hid them in the false bottom of a wooden box which he made for that purpose. He kept “personal clothing (rags?!) on top. I always saw to it that at its apparent bottom, the Japs would find a map, some foreign currency or a tool, or something that I was not supposed to have. Once they spotted any such item, I got them engaged in a big argument and sometimes got my face slapped and they would confiscate the offending item and not search further.”
It is possible that Wallis did not hand his diaries in to the War Office until July 1948. They seem to have attracted some attention then, because the Colonel of the Middlesex Regiment wrote to him asking for evidence of how well his Battalion had done. Maltby’s Report, published in January 1948, did not make any reference to Wallis’s account and so obviously did not mention, to Wallis’s anger, that he had held out at Stanley for 11 hours after the General’s surrender.
In any event, regrettably, no attention seems to have been paid to Wallis’s recommendations for decorations. He had written a citation in the War Diary strongly recommending a Victoria Cross for Major H R Forsyth of the Volunteers, but Forsyth ended up with nothing, not even a posthumous Mention in Despatches.
Long after the war, Wallis was living in Vancouver and wanted Canadian citizenship and so kept a low profile on his highly critical report on the Canadians for fear of not getting both citizenship and a Canadian pension.
Despite doubts on the reliability of both Maltby’s and Wallis’s Reports and Diaries, some references in the latter stand out – particularly Wallis’s writing about shooting the Canadian officers who wished to surrender – clearly indicating his mental instability at that time. Such references have never been quoted before, although 64 years have elapsed in the meantime.
Neither the Royal Scots nor, very clearly, the Canadians trusted his judgement. We should respect their views: their reputations were tragically maligned.
Maltby submitted his Report to the War Office in November 1945 – to be published in the official London Gazette in early 1946. But Canadians protested over its critical comments. Field Marshal Montgomery intervened and had the offending paragraphs removed; the Report, as already stated, was not published until 29th January 1948. Maltby, to do him justice, admitted that “memory is a fickle jade” and his Report could be faulty. Moreover, he had not seen Wallis’s War Diaries or expressed interest in them; nor had he ever seen the Canadians or Royal Scots in action throughout the fighting.
* * * * *
The views of the Canadian author, Carl Vincent, should be briefly examined. In his book No Reason Why he states: “It is a very conservative estimate to say that at least half the Japanese casualties were incurred in battles against Canadian troops… the Royal Rifles executed more counter-attacks at company level or above than the British and Indian battalions combined… Maltby’s staff suffered heavy casualties during the battle, largely because of this incredible lack of caution… ”2
The reader can judge for himself the fairness or otherwise of these statements. Taking his comments in (my) italics, it is not in dispute that the Japanese suffered considerable casualties on the Mainland from Allied artillery, mortars, HMS Thracian and the three forward battalions, in particular the Royal Scots. No Canadian actually participated in the fighting there. When the Royal Rifles were withdrawn to Stanley Fort, at their officers’ request to surrender, the front line was held by others. And so the statement that Canadians caused half the overall Japanese casualties is highly suspect.
Soldiers will find Vincent’s rather contemptuous criticism of British staff officers, who became casualties “through lack of caution”, quite extraordinary. Instead, the 1941 officers concerned should be commended for fighting the enemy so courageously in the front line, rather than keeping safe in the underground Fortress HQ.
Some other authors try to stir up controversy to sell their books – for example, James Rusbridger and Eric Nave claim in their book Betrayal at Pearl Harbour3 that Churchill lured Roosevelt into the Second World War. More recently we have equally ludicrous suggestions that the terrorists’ attack on the Twin Towers in New York was all the work of the CIA.
There are also the deliberately deceitful. In 1977 I came across an academic from Britain who had emigrated to Canada. He deliberately misquoted Captain C M M Man as saying that, on seeing the Canadians arrive in Hong Kong, they looked “… confident …”. The academic was unaware that Man (later a Major General) had copied his reminiscences to others who could see that Man had written “overconfident”. The author altered other more significant material to suit his purpose. I passed the evidence to Brereton Greenhous who ensured the man was sidelined.
* * * * *
Finally, we come to the controversy that only the Middlesex Regiment should have the Battle Honour ‘Hong Kong’, which was denied to the Royal Scots. It is invidious to compare the fighting ability of each Battalion, but I believe a grave injustice was done to the Royal Scots. The best part of a Japanese brigade swept down upon their new, malarial, three-mile front. No unit could have held such an enemy on such unfavourable ground for long. On the Island, the counter-attacks fought by the decimated Royal Scots against two Japanese battalions at the Wong Nei Chong Gap are what legends are made of. Twenty-seven of their 35 officers became casualties, 12 being killed: there was no lack of determined leadership. Although the Regiment has few men alive today who fought in Hong Kong, a campaign should be launched in Scotland to get them the Battle Honour they so definitely deserve.
Shortly after my return from two years’ soldiering in Ottawa, I gave a lecture to the Regiment in Edinburgh before their annual dinner. After showing them the Japanese propaganda 1941 newsreel on the fall of Hong Kong and innumerable slides, I was asked the question: “Why did the Middlesex Regiment get the Battle Honour and not us?” It might have appeared a difficult question for a person from a very different regiment in the face of a distinguished audience, but I simply replied that it was a matter of a clash of personalities – between Wallis and the Battalion – just as, in my judgement, unfair criticism was levelled, again by Wallis, against the Royal Rifles, who did their best to overcome their shocking lack of training, in appalling circumstances.
The truth seems to have been obscured by Wallis and others. As Churchill put it in Volume 5 of The Second World War, “in wartime… truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”.
There are inevitably controversies in war – whether they be politicians claiming in the Spring of 2003 that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, or an unbalanced Rajput Brigadier in Hong Kong suggesting that certain battalions were ineffective. Oscar Wilde’s “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple” may strike a chord.
Notes
1. Greenhous, B, “C” Force to Hong Kong: A Canadian Catastrophe 1941–1945, Canadian War Museum Historical Publication No. 30, 1997, p. 72.
2. Vincent, Carl, No Reason Why: The Canadian Hong Kong Tragedy: an examination, Ontario: Canada’s Wings, 1981, pp. 201–4.
3. Alden, D, Charles R Boxer, Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2001, p. 110, Note 39.
Part 4
HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE
With memories by John R Harris
Edited by Oliver Lindsay
CHAPTER 16
Shamshuipo POW Camp
and the Escapes
John R Harris continues his memoirs
By Christmas Day 1941 we were absolutely exhausted and extremely hungry. The shelling to the east of us intensified.
Unexpectedly at midday a nun dressed in white opened a small door in the high stone wall of her convent near the Dairy Farm. She beckoned a group of us to come in and the nuns gave us Christmas lunch. The dozen of us Sappers ate roast chicken and apple pie. It was our last good meal for nearly four years. The nuns were Italian: and so theoretically they were the enemy! After the war I went back to thank them but they had all gone – to where I could never discover.
The next day, following the surrender, my platoon was ordered to go to Murray Barracks in Victoria. We drove in my Morris car, passing a Japanese soldier directing the traffic. Colonel E H Clifford, the senior Royal Engineer officer, met us there. I was told to join a Royal Army Service Corps officer in breaking bottles of champagne so that the Japanese wouldn’t go berserk with drink and commit more atrocities. The same thing happened in Singapore. I don’t expect to see champagne running down a gutter again.
The Japanese quickly closed in on the barracks and took everything they wanted, including our weapons. That afternoon I took my father’s large binoculars in a leather case and threw them into the harbour; there is now a 60-storey office development on the site! The field glasses had been carried by my father (a Gunner) throughout the First World War: he had given them to me when I left Surrey in July 1940. It gave me some satisfaction that no Japanese would possess them.
I sought out my two closest friends with whom I had done my officer training in Aldershot. I had travelled with them to Hong Kong in the Viceroy of India and then we had shared a flat together on May Road – Dickie Arundell and Micky Holliday. Where were they, I asked? Both had joined Sapper Field Squadrons.
Dickie, I discovered, on Christmas Eve had led a section of Royal Engineers from General Maltby’s battlebox headquarters into the street fighting in the Wanchai, moving from pillar to pillar to prevent the enemy infiltrating through the very last defensive lines towards Victoria. He was shot and lay in agony in the street before being dragged into a house by the Japanese. If the surrender had only taken place some 20 hours earlier, Dickie could have survived the war and been alive today to design many fine buildings. He was a good friend and an excellent engineer. It was a terrible shock to me.
Micky Holliday had become engaged in our flat in November to Brenda Morgan, a charming nurse from Nottingham, a really dear person. Five days previously her Dressing Station in Happy Valley had been bombed, although it had red crosses on it. She, together with some other hospital staff and patients, was killed. This tragedy mentally unhinged Micky: he was last seen brandishing a revolver and charging up the Wong Nei Chong Road with several other Sappers, going to their certain deaths.
* * * * *
The top priority was the burial of the dead, for it was too late to find the wounded still alive. This is because the Allies were not allowed to bring in their dead and wounded until the Japanese funeral rites had been completed. This meant they were lying in the open until 29th December when the enemy gave permission for them to be collected. Armed with picks and shovels, our burial parties eventually fanned out in pairs. The dead bodies were ugly: the faces blue and skin purple, with maggots attacking the open wounds. Private R J Wright of the Middlesex Regiment found the body of one of his officers, Captain West, amidst six others. “He had been among the most popular of officers who had inspired that confidence which binds an officer to his men with unbreakable bonds of loyalty,” Wright remembers. “It angered me to see how ignorant we were that none of us knew the funeral service when we buried them. We eyed each other uncomfortably. Then, in the gathering twilight, a tall, gaunt, bearded soldier quoted those moving lines: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field …’
“We remained with bowed heads long after the last words had been borne away by the breeze. The Japanese sergeant had gathered flowers during the recital and had spread them over the bodies. Then we restored the earth.”
Another burial party was approached by two armed Japanese, whose suspicion soon melted. “They showed us pictures of their families,” recalls Sergeant C B J Stewart of 8th Coast Regiment. “We compared weapons, for there were plenty of ours lying about. The Japanese expressed sorrow over our task and indicated that they, too, had many dead whom they were dragging into large fires.”
The Japanese cremated their dead in large funeral pyres amidst much ceremony. The ashes were removed with long steel chopsticks and placed in small white caskets, each bearing a man’s name. All the caskets were sent back to Japan.
There is some disagreement on the casualty figures on both sides. Major General Maltby in his Despatch puts his casualties during the battle at 2,113 killed and missing with 1,332 being seriously wounded. An authoritative estimate of Japanese casualties is 2,654 and some evidence suggests that this figure should be considerably greater, but certainly not as high as the 3,000 killed and 9,000 wounded as claimed by Maltby.1
On 30th December we were told to gather on the square beside the Murray Parade Ground. I was lucky as I still had a kit bag which I had kept at the Dairy Farm. Apart from personal possessions, it contained a small box of watercolours and pencils for drawing, and a little Bartholomew atlas, The Handy Reference Atlas, with which I tried to follow the progress of the war. It survived and is now in the Imperial War Museum. Also in the kit bag were several favourite books and even my army greatcoat which I still have today! We all owed a debt of gratitude to the Japanese who allowed us to take what we could carry into the POW camps. Without my watercolours I would have been unable to reproduce the sketch on this book’s back cover. British POWs in German camps invariably had few, if any, personal possessions when first imprisoned.
Some, including the two Indian Battalions, gathered at the Botanical Gardens close by Murray Barracks. “Jap troops rough and bullying (rifle butts),” recorded a British officer serving with the Punjabis. “Hours just sitting on ground. No food until foraging parties raided former stores. Garden ornamental birds rounded up and eaten. Looted clothing from European houses and Murray Barracks stores.”
We began our march to the dockside in the early afternoon, passing a Japanese band which was playing triumphant military music.2 One sailor asked if the band would play ‘There’ll always be an England’. The ferries were waiting to take us across the harbour to the camp northwest of Kowloon at Shamshuipo. The barracks there had been built for British battalions before the war.
All the familiar sights were there, but instead of the hustle and bustle of ships, junks in full sail criss-crossing the harbour and motorised sampans darting hither and thither, there was a deathly stillness. The massive Victoria Peak, so magnificent on occasions, now seemed to be frowning upon the desolation spread beneath it. As C H Fairclough, a Lieutenant in 5th Anti Aircraft Regiment, put it, “The ferry passed close to sunken ships and it was difficult to keep my heart from sinking with them. We then moved up Nathan Road to Shamshuipo; it was just a shuffle, an orderly shuffle.”
I was not to return to Hong Kong Island for 20 years.
Some apathetic Chinese watched us. Towards the end of our march, I felt faint and dizzy. The world became blurred and my knees felt weak. I knew that it would be a disaster for me if I collapsed and had to abandon my kit bag for I no longer had any other possessions. Alongside our column strode Japanese guards. Extraordinarily, God helped me. Suddenly one of the guards gestured to a Chinese on the pavement, waving him towards me to carry my load for the last half mile. I gave the coolie all the money I had.
Also in my kit bag was a silver flask full of brandy. Later the unlikely request was passed to all POWs, “Does anybody have any brandy for a prisoner who is critically ill?” I gave the doctor my flask that I had kept for two and a half years. Unfortunately the soldier died that night.
Finally, at dusk, we reached Shamshuipo Barracks. I was horrified by the conditions there. Altogether, 5,777 of us were crowded in. Quite apart from being bombed and shelled during the battle on the Mainland, the barracks had been looted of everything portable – doors, windows and their frames, furniture, metal pipes and electrical fittings: most of the huts were just empty shells with concrete floors. There was no food. Only a few weeks before, I had been dining on the veranda of the marvellous Peninsula Hotel in all its glory with Dickie and Micky, overlooking the harbour. Now I had sunk to the bottom of my existence.
I was glad that I had not witnessed the Japanese victory parade which had occurred three days earlier. Over 2,000 men marched through the streets, accompanying Lieutenant General Sano who was on horseback. Europeans were not allowed to watch, while the Chinese were encouraged to line the route and cheer. They were given small flags but they watched with no enthusiasm. The Japanese Imperial Air Force gave a very successful aerobatic display.
* * * * *
On 31st December the survivors from East Brigade at Stanley were marched across the Island to North Point Camp, where conditions were even worse than at Shamshuipo. The camp had originally housed Chinese refugees. During the fighting the Japanese stabled their mules there. The huts had not been cleaned and were swarming with flies. Unburied corpses smelt terrible. At least 200 men were crammed into each hut.
Brigadier Wallis persuaded the Japanese guards to allow him and a few others to take out foraging parties to obtain food, cooking utensils, medical supplies and books. He even obtained a truck to visit a hospital to get news of survivors.
“During the first few days at North Point Camp a small number of Canadian other ranks started saying that now that we were POWs, everyone was equal and that a camp committee should be chosen by them and that officers had nothing more to say,” wrote Brigadier Wallis.3 “But fortunately some measure of discipline was gradually re-established.”
Private Wright, the Company Clerk in the Middlesex Regiment, also described the initial days as a POW: “Discipline had vanished. We encountered our superiors only when it was unavoidable; they had lost the respect and authority conferred by rank and uniform. We scrounged, looted and stole, ignoring the respect we owed to each other. We fought and argued over trivial matters and behaved like untutored and inexperienced children.”
* * * * *
I am afraid that discipline had collapsed in Shamshuipo Camp as well. People almost preferred to lie down and die. We had neither the knowledge of how to cook rice in such quantities, nor the cooking utensils. Fortunately we had a splendid Royal Engineer officer, Caesar Otway. He designed the cookhouse, in which rice could be cooked, out of oil drums and a barrel. The smell and taste of the rice was awful but, even so, the sensible ones ate it.
Otway had been manning searchlights in the front line at Lei Mun when the Japanese had landed on the Island. He had only just escaped from them and turned up at the Dairy Farm in a terrible condition, cut, bruised and nearly blinded. We cleaned him up with a hose. He had lost his trousers crawling through a drain and on barbed wire. Fortunately I had two pairs and so gave him one – he wore those trousers, much patched, until the war’s end.
Seeing the need to maintain discipline, Major General Maltby addressed the POWs from a balcony, giving us all a good ‘pep talk’; he emphasised the need for us to maintain our standards if we were to survive, to try to hold sickness at bay by cleanliness and to respect our neighbours. Things improved gradually thereafter but stealing continued. If you queued up for your rice ration, you had to have a friend to guard your blanket otherwise it would have been stolen.
I have always understood that, during the surrender negotiations, General Maltby put one particular request to the Japanese. He asked if he could remain with his men, rather than be sent elsewhere as was Sir Mark Young; he wanted to share all their privations. His request was granted.
Colonel Newnham, whom I got to know very much better than many other POWs, kept the following diary.
Dec. 30
Up Nathan Road. Chinese population all silent. All concentrated in Shamshuipo. No food.
Dec. 31
45 bags grade 3 rice, broken, given by Japs for 5,777 officers and ORs. No cooking utensils. Late at night 30 small pigs arrived.
Jan. 6
Jap band played in camp. Good.
Jan. 8
‘Stew’ wangled by Boon for evening meal. 17 men run in for looting, i.e. destruction of good buildings for firewood.
Jan. 12
Colonel Royal Artillery to dine with Lt Gen. Kitiyama commanding all troops in HK area.
Jan. 14
Still unburied bodies in Wanchai; oil tanks near Cosmopolitan dock still burning. Weather early Jan. beautiful, gorgeous.
Jan. 17
No news of any identification discs having been collected off our dead.
Jan. 25
Great bitterness of those forced to vacate derelict buildings which they have worked on (and scrounged for) so hard. General morale and discipline of camp is definitely bad. Perhaps better now in future as units all together.
Jan. 26
No news from anywhere. 51 cases of dysentery.
Jan. 29
Degrading sight of British soldiers scrambling in dust for odd cigarettes, thrown by Japs from guardhouse upper veranda onto corner of prison compound.
Feb. 1
Good sermon by Padre Bennett in ‘Chapel Hall’.
Feb. 7
From Jap point of view if POW escapes it is shameful desertion especially by an officer. Difficult to get our views across i.e. our duty to escape.
Feb. 8
Two Chinamen shot by Japs just outside our wire, probably for looting or trying to sell food through wire. Japs gave us a piano, palms in pots, 100 brooms for our mess.
Feb. 10
Conditions in camp hospital still appalling – no medicines, no aspirins, no milk or proper food for convalescents …
* * * * *
Rollcall parades were held daily in Shamshuipo. Some men brought their musical instruments into the camp and so a band was formed, making concerts possible. Some Europeans who had not yet been interned passed food and medicines through the wire to their friends in the camp, as did Chinese. Unfortunately I knew virtually nobody who could bring me such things.
The Japanese guards in the towers around the camp were very cruel. I saw them many times opening fire with machine guns on families, including babies, in sampans who were crossing the harbour collecting food: the rowing stopped, we could hear the cries of the terrified men, women and children, before the sampans drifted lifeless away on the tide. A Chinese man paid with his life when he unwittingly brought a drum of water into the camp when the Commandant was expecting a drum of oil. Every day Japanese sentries would gather some Chinese together, tie tins on their ankles so that they couldn’t move without the tins making a noise on the cobbles, and then line them up at the edge of the harbour, before bayoneting them – just as they had done to the POWs at Repulse Bay. I saw their bodies drifting away in the water and other horrible things and can picture them today, just as I can remember seeing and hearing people in my midst who were dying. If you asked me today what my firm was doing 20 years ago, I would have difficulty telling you, but some of the terrible things I witnessed over 60 years ago will be with me forever. The Japanese were indeed a cruel people.
Shamshuipo was really awful: it was almost the worst part of the war for me. I, like others, thought we would never see our parents again; we despaired of ever returning to our homes.
Inevitably, people’s minds turned to the possibility of escaping. The most fortunate were the surviving crews of the Motor Torpedo Boats, who evaded capture with the one-legged Admiral Chan Chak; he was one of Chiang Kai-shek’s representatives in Hong Kong. After many adventures 62 British reached Kunming before travelling 600 miles to Burma, and on 23rd February 1942 sailing to India, ahead of the rapidly advancing Japanese. The full story is told in Oliver Lindsay’s At the Going Down of the Sun.4
There were a few escapes by very courageous men. All but one took place in the early period of imprisonment when the Japanese were least organised, the POWs’ health had not deteriorated, and Maltby’s policy of not escaping had not been imposed.
The most significant escape took place in January 1942 from Shamshuipo Camp. Lieutenant Colonel L T Ride, who had fought in France in the First World War, held the post of Dean of the Medical Faculty in Hong Kong Hospital and had commanded the Volunteer Field Ambulance during the Japanese invasion.
“All Colonel Ride’s leisure for the past few years had been given freely to public service designed to prepare the Colony against the Japanese attack which he saw as inevitable,” read a British report in May 1942. “He set himself the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism; apathy, wishful-thinking and inefficiency he regarded with bitter and outspoken contempt. If our Colonies were populated with Rides, we would run an Empire which would be the marvel of the age.”5
On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Colonel Ride noticed that the enemy shelled more hospitals than usual for it indicated “that the Japanese fight according to the rules of warfare only as long as it suits them”. On 29th December Ride reported to Maltby that he had found the bodies of over 50 Navy, Army and Air Force who had been murdered in one location alone. A week later he told the General that the POWs would soon fall victim to dysentery and cholera because of the primitive medical facilities, the meagre diet and lack of drugs. “I was convinced,” recalls Colonel Ride, “that to save the POWs’ lives someone must escape and either force the Japanese to alter their policy to look after the prisoners adequately, or to smuggle in medicines into the camps from China. I decided I must escape quickly.”6
Ride escaped by sampan at night on 9th January with three others – two from the HKRN Volunteer Reserve and Ride’s former clerk. They quickly reached China, to start organising help for the POWs with enormous difficulty. General Maltby was unenthusiastic when consulted beforehand on their attempt to escape.
On 10th January the Japanese interrogated Major J N Crawford, the Second in Command of the Field Ambulance: “Where is Ride, the Senior Medical Officer?” they demanded. Crawford replied that he had never heard of such a man and that he, Crawford, was the Senior Medical Officer. The Japanese left thoroughly perplexed: there were no repercussions because they could not establish what had happened.
On 31st January General Maltby sent for Captain A G Hewitt, the Adjutant of the Middlesex Regiment, having heard from his Commanding Officer, H W M Stewart, that he wanted to escape with two others – Captain Douglas Scriven, the Battalion’s medical officer and Pilot Officer D Crossley from New Zealand. Maltby listened to his plans and gave him two letters, written beforehand, for the British Embassy in Chungking. He also arranged for Hewitt to have 800 Hong Kong dollars. “It was most encouraging, but the General did not wish me good luck, nor indicate in any way whether he approved of my attempt to escape. Perhaps he did not wish to become involved,” concluded Hewitt.7 That night they escaped successfully under the wire and on to a waiting sampan. I remember well seeing the sampan arrive on which they escaped.
The following night three others also slipped under the wire from Shamshuipo – Major J H Munro, Flying Officer Moore and Captain I B Trevor of the Volunteers. They swam for 40 minutes pushing a small raft they had made themselves from firewood. On it were ten tins of bully beef from friends’ treasured secret stocks.
Two Royal Scots Privates, J Gallacher and D Hodges, also slipped past the Japanese sentries, reaching the British in China, who arranged for them to be returned to Britain.
By now the Japanese were seriously concerned at these successful escapes, aware that the POWs who reached China would pass on important information. Moreover the loss of face was intolerable. The Japanese responded by suspending in February the ‘parcel day’ by which large parcels could be delivered openly to the POW camps. A report from the International Red Cross in July states that the ‘parcel days’ were not resumed until later that month, and then stopped again until December 1942 due to more escapes.
In early February they arrested four RAF officers – Wing Commanders H G Sullivan and H T Bennett with Flight Lieutenant H B Gray and F Hennesey. They were thrown into an overcrowded cell in Saigon; it was so full of Japanese defaulters that they could not lie down. Sullivan, the senior RAF officer who had fought in Hong Kong, fell seriously ill with amoebic dysentery and was removed to a Japanese military prison where he was given fruit and illustrated papers by friendly Japanese patients who had been wounded in Malaya. “On 9th February 1942 I was given a banana to celebrate the fall of Singapore and on the Emperor’s birthday we received seaweed as a great treat,” remembers Sullivan. “In July we were returned to Hong Kong in a freighter with a gaping hole in her side where she had been torpedoed.”8 The voyage was remarkable for the kindness of the Japanese crew, soldiers and ‘comfort girls’ who continuously offered the RAF officers sweets, fruit, whisky and coconuts. “The Japanese were a weird crowd,” he concluded.
Major General Maltby had become increasingly concerned that the trickle of POWs who escaped were endangering the lives of the remainder; the health of many was already in serious jeopardy. We have seen how the ‘parcel days’ had been stopped.
In April 1942 there took place the most controversial escape due to Maltby’s policy: the story, well documented, can be told for the first time. It must be remembered that in the British Army, and probably in others, soldiers were encouraged, in principle, to escape: it was their duty to do so.
Three Royal Artillery officers – Captain J D Clague, Lieutenants J L C Pearce and L S White, with Sergeant D I Bosanquet of the Volunteers, had discovered a man-hole giving access to a typhoon drain which ran under the camp for over 50 yards to the sea.
Clague had some reservations on the few escapers who were leaving their families in Hong Kong. He was particularly thinking of Pearce, who had a brother and mother in the Colony; the escapers would have to “bear the consequences and suffer for the remainder of their lives from appalling feelings of personal guilt over what subsequently happened to their loving families,” Clague felt. (Sir Douglas Clague Kt CBE, MC, became a man of immense wealth and influence in post-war Hong Kong.)
Major General Maltby’s policy, by now, was not to permit escapes “by small parties or even individuals… the general standard of health had reached a very low level,” he wrote after the war. “Any escape would have caused severe and immediate repercussions and further privations would have been fatal to many, and further, there was the probability of transfer to Formosa or Japan, from which places there was no escape.”9 Maltby began to consider a mass break-out instead. This extraordinary project will be discussed later.
Clague was told to see Maltby. The General flatly refused to give his assent to Clague’s escape. They “were acting irresponsibly and without consideration”. Duggie Clague was furious. He saw “Maltby again and said ‘we’re going in 45 minutes’ and he still didn’t approve. Duggie was given neither task nor encouragement.”
Their disappearance would be discovered by the guards at the morning roll-call. They would therefore have only a 10-hour head start after they had made landfall at Laichikok before a full-scale search would be made for them. Colonel Newnham, Maltby’s principal operations officer and a key man in the story which will in due course unfold, agreed with Maltby and tried to discourage the escape, but changed his mind and said “if you’ve got a plan, put it into effect”.
Colonel Newnham got up to leave them. “As he reached the door he turned, undid the top button of his battledress and pulled out a carefully folded piece of paper and said, ‘There is a map. I will be back in 20 minutes to collect it,’” wrote David Bosanquet in his memoirs.10 Much of the next 20 minutes were spent poring over the map memorising what they could.
Some four months later, on 20th August, four brave men of the Winnipeg Grenadiers escaped from North Point Camp. Their sampan sank when they were trying to cross to the Mainland. They were picked up by the Japanese Navy, beaten with a baseball bat and then shot without trial. Two Royal Engineer Other Ranks were also executed after an unsuccessful escape attempt.
Meanwhile, led by Clague, the four from Shamshuipo crawled through the typhoon drain. (I, with others, tapped on the ground above the drain with a pole, using a pre-arranged code to indicate the location of the Japanese guards.) The escapers then swam to some boat-building yards, were helped by friendly Chinese, as were all other escapers from Shamshuipo, and boarded a junk which took them beyond danger.
The Japanese counted us at roll-call the next morning as usual and so discovered their absence. In Nazi POW camps, Allied POWs sometimes managed to fool the Germans into thinking no escape had taken place; but after the first few weeks in Hong Kong’s camps, the Japanese roll-calls were very thorough.
On thinking about it now, I feel that Maltby’s policy of discouraging individual or small groups escaping was the most appropriate and realistic one. The Japanese authorities had made it abundantly clear that they had no intention of abiding by the rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war as laid down by the Geneva Convention. Our enemy had also made it plain to Maltby and others that POW escapes, whether successful or not, would be met with severe individual and collective punishment, including the drastic reduction or withdrawal of rations and medical supplies, which were already at a critical level. Many men were already beginning to suffer from deficiency diseases.
I would re-emphasise that I held the General in high regard. Ralph Goodwin, an RNZNVR officer, expressed the opinion of many when he wrote that General Maltby “was in an unfortunate position. Left in command of a weakly defended outpost of the Empire which had no hope of prolonged resistance, he then found himself in internal charge of a prison camp under guards who cared nothing for the Geneva Convention. Time and again he was called upon to protest to the Japanese Commandant against the actions of the guards, and he took great risks of personal injury in pressing his demands.”
It is true that Clague, Ride and some other escapers were to play a significant part in helping the POWs, as this book will relate, but the consequences for some were to prove truly catastrophic.
We must now return to the early days of our imprisonment as Guests of the Emperor, as one ex-POW called his book!
Notes
1. Jason Wordie, in Ruins of War, p. 213, gives lower figures for Japanese casualties.
2. Not all POWs agree the date of the march to Shamshuipo Camp. Perhaps the move was spread over several days.
3. Letter Wallis to OL.
4. Lindsay, Oliver, At the Going Down of the Sun, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981, pp. 5–21.
5. Loose Minute 29.5.42, CO 129 590/25 HN 00152.
6. Interview Sir Lindsay Ride with OL.
7. Interview Colonel A G Hewitt with OL.
8. Letter Sullivan to OL.
9. Goodwin, Ralph, Passport to Eternity, London: Arthur Barker, 1956, p. 5.
10. Bosanquet, David, Escape Through China, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982, p. 68.
CHAPTER 17
Argyle Street Officers’ Camp
In April 1942, most unexpectedly, 336 officers and up to 100 soldiers (ostensibly to act as batmen) were paraded at Shamshuipo. We marched off in an easterly direction, not knowing where we were going. It took six hours to get to the Argyle Street POW camp in Kowloon, after the Japanese had searched and counted us. I was carrying my kit bag.
The camp had been built initially to house Chinese Nationalist troops who had sought refuge in Hong Kong from the Japanese. The enemy used the camp for prisoners of war. Colonel Ride visited it after the surrender and found about 1,200 prisoners there – largely Rajputs and Punjabis. He saw 100 dysentery cases lying on the cold concrete floors. “Pools of blood, mucus and pus lay everywhere, and what was not sucked up by the swarms of eager flies, soaked into the ground,” he recalled. Cholera, which was endemic in Kowloon, would certainly slay those whom dysentery had failed to kill.
The Indians and others had then been moved largely to the Mau Tau Chung Camp nearby. It is visible on the back cover of this book. While Argyle Street was briefly empty, the looters, as at Shamshuipo, had systematically stolen everything movable.
I saw immediately that our camp was completely bare. The Japanese had made no preparations to meet us. There was no rice cooker. The first meal, inevitably of rice, had to be sent in. We had to beg the Japanese for equipment and to pool anything useful.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that the Japanese would separate most of the officers from the soldiers who were left in Shamshuipo. Similar events had happened in Singapore when the officers were moved to Changi. On their 17-mile forced march with little food, the “arrogant and brutal behaviour of the Japanese soldier was apparent. This was manifested by the casual shooting of Chinese or Tamils perceived to be obstructing the column’s progress in any way.”1
The Argyle Street Camp was surrounded by high and electrified wire fencing with up to a half a dozen guard towers which were always manned and contained searchlights.
* * * * *
Just before moving from Shamshuipo we were joined on 11th April by Brigadier Wallis who wrote: “I had been sent to the Bowen Road Hospital as my injury would not heal and was getting worse. The Commanding Officer of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, J L R Sutcliffe, died in the bed opposite me on 6th April.” His death was attributed to beriberi, dysentery and anaemia “but in the opinion of some of his officers he died from dejection and melancholia caused by critical self-evaluation of his own battle performance,” recorded a Canadian historian.2
The Japanese let the Protestant Chaplains, together with a number of Canadian officers, attend Sutcliffe’s funeral. Tokunaga and other Japanese officials were also there, bringing floral tributes for the Canadians and themselves to lay on the grave.
Another officer in Bowen Road Hospital was Major Charles Boxer, whose optimistic reports on the Japanese immediately before the war so misled Major General Maltby. “He had been in charge of intelligence at Fortress HQ,” continues Wallis. “He was a fluent Jap scholar and was given a separate room where he was constantly visited by Jap officers to whom I felt he was inclined to be unnecessarily friendly. He was also visited by a lady who had half Chinese and half American nationality who had not been interned. Boxer made me feel uneasy and suspicious. I was taken aback to see how intimate he was with the Japanese.”3
Another wounded officer who came to know Boxer well in hospital was the one-legged Captain ‘Bill’ Wiseman of the Royal Army Service Corps. He saw Boxer being visited by Japanese officers whom he had come to know during his many visits to the frontier. They brought Boxer presents, Wiseman recalls, including canned fruit and a crate of whisky. Wiseman once awoke to see the Japanese bowing towards him (Wiseman) “and making various appreciative noises”. Afterwards the curious Wiseman asked Boxer why they had been so respectful. Boxer replied that he had told the Japanese that Wiseman had “acquired his wooden leg while extending his foot in an unsuccessful attempt to stop a German tank at Dunkirk”. Some found Boxer’s sense of humour, like his behaviour, puzzling.
Brigadier Wallis, while recovering from his injury, was able to leave Bowen Road Hospital several times “by showing an expired Japanese pass which I was given in North Point; it bore a prominent Jap chop (seal). I calculated correctly that most Jap sentries were probably unable to read. I was thus able to visit American consular friends but my luck ran out. There was a chronic shortage of electric light bulbs; the hospital nurses had theirs stolen when they were on duty. So I spotted an old sofa on the veranda and cut out the back cover (where the Japs could not see it) and I sewed some 20 small bags with a string fastener and the girls could carry these with them to keep their own bulb safe.
“The hospital was full of our sick and wounded and there were frequent deaths,” continues Wallis. “I was distressed to see a British Other Rank exchange his greatcoat (and Winter was upon us) with a Jap guard for a few cigarettes.”
Wallis was sent very briefly to Shamshuipo before moving with Maltby and others to Argyle Street, where he found Maltby “a very distressed and disillusioned man. It took me several months sharing the same room to cheer him up and convince him that, far from our troops not being deserving of honours, as he believed, there often is far greater gallantry in defence than in attack. I eventually got him to see that he was being unfair to many brave men.” (Details on those receiving the principal honours and awards for all the 1941–1945 Hong Kong campaign are in the final chapter.)
* * * * *
Colonel Newnham continued to keep up his diary in tiny writing on rice paper:
Apr. 13
Fleas for last 7 weeks – all off blasted dog of the General’s. 4 months now and still we have not been allowed to send a letter or pc home or even communicate with families in Hong Kong. Against the Geneva Convention. News of Colonel Sutcliffe’s death. Permission refused for GOC and staff to go to funeral.
Apr. 21
We now have 550 all ranks in Camp measuring 180 × 140.
The Japanese started to pay officers but not the soldiers. Virtually all the officers agreed to take only part of their pay, the remainder going into a pool for the men or for the purchase of medical necessities and luxuries such as eggs for the hospital. Unfortunately the yen depreciated so quickly I could barely afford to buy anything.
On 23rd May 1942 the Japanese started to insist that each POW, internee and patient in hospital must sign a form written in English and Japanese stating that he or she would not escape. There is a certificate in the Imperial War Museum: it states “I hereby swear that I shall not make any attempt to escape while I am a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army”, followed by a date and place for a signature. The requirement was sanctioned by Japanese military law. Those who violated it faced death, as had the four Winnipeg Grenadiers, or a long prison sentence.
The very unpleasant Colonel Tokunaga, of whom more later, insisted that since the surrender had been unconditional, everyone must sign it. He told the Canadians at North Point that failure to do so would signify “mutiny for which death was the obvious outcome”.
Among those who refused to sign was a Canadian, Lance Corporal J Porter. A Japanese officer spent several hours begging him to sign the pledge. He was given two helpings of beef stew, cups of tea filled with sugar and invited to help himself from a silver cigarette case. The following day he was taken to an even more senior officer who expressed astonishment that Porter had volunteered for the war. The officer commented on Porter’s bravery in refusing to sign and added that he wished the Japanese behaved in such a way. “I replied that I was not doing it because I was brave, but that I was doing it for my King. The interpreter then slapped my face hard,” recalls Porter.4 He was taken to Stanley Prison with six others; the conditions there were foul. They were shaken awake every hour throughout each night, beaten with truncheons and urged to sign.
“On 31st May our food and water was stopped. Several of my fellow prisoners were suffering from dysentery; no toilet paper was supplied and the mess in the cells was frightful. Their sufferings became so acute that on 4th June we decided to sign the form,” reported Porter.
The patients in the Bowen Road Hospital were equally reluctant to sign. The senior officers there advised against doing so. On 26th May all ambulatory patients and the hospital staff were crammed into the hospital’s tennis courts and left there under a hot sun. Later in the day an officer from Argyle Street arrived to tell the men that General Maltby felt they should comply; most did so. (Three years later, after the hospital had moved to Kowloon, the staff and patients had to sign the same documents again but with the original date.)
Charles Boxer and two other officers still refused to sign the form in late May 1942, possibly because they believed that they were answerable to the King, not to the Japanese. As a result Boxer’s future wife, Emily Hahn, was not allowed to see him. She had not been interned, thanks to his influence and uncertainty about her nationality because of her previous relationship with the Chinese Sinmay Zau. One day she went to Boxer to discover that he had been moved she knew not where. Nevertheless, according to one source she continued to deliver parcels to the patients, and also to friends interned in Stanley Camp. Together with others, whom she called “the army of basket bringers”, parcels were also taken on a regular basis to Shamshuipo and Argyle Street where she found Boxer once more. She claimed to have spent four days a week on such deliveries, receiving funding probably from Doctor P S Selwyn-Clarke. The International Red Cross, however, reported all ‘parcel days’ had been stopped.
Suddenly the camp was struck by illness, frighteningly similar to cholera. One victim, a Volunteer, had succeeded in concealing the fact that he was completely bald, having hung on to his toupee, his dearest possession. But when he was carried on a stretcher to the hospital it fell off. Several brother officers were horrified – commenting on the gravity of the symptoms which had apparently suddenly deprived him of his hair.
What was not so funny was an “explosive” outbreak of diphtheria. Eighteen critically ill were admitted to Bowen Road Hospital in August 1942 and no fewer than 59 in September. Twelve of them died that month and seven more later. In a number of these cases there was extensive skin ulceration mainly affecting the scrotum and the perineum, while the nose and face were also sometimes affected.5 The Canadians at North Point and Shamshuipo were the worst hit because they had not been inoculated in Canada beforehand. Between June 1942 and February 1943 there were 714 recorded cases, of whom 112 Canadians died. The Japanese chief medical officer, Doctor Saito Shunkichi, was accused of withholding vital serum.
One day at dawn I realised I was seriously ill. We had military doctors in the camp but virtually no medical equipment. We had to make an operating table out of planks: it was a pretty grim affair.
I had a sore throat which gradually produced a film across it. I had diphtheria. At that time there was almost a daily procession from Shamshuipo Camp bearing those who had died of it. A bugler blew the Last Post and all of us stood to attention.
At the 10.00 a.m. roll call parade, I was too weak to get up; the Japanese guard came round to count me, still in bed. I was then taken to a small isolated hut, the ‘hospital’ in the far corner of the camp. There were three others already there, one of whom was Roger Lamble. Although we were very ill, we largely had to look after ourselves. Rice was passed to us through a small hatch.
Suddenly, after a few days, I became much worse. One of the doctors gave me an injection of the vital serum, of which there was a desperate shortage. Two days later he returned again to give me another one. The next night, I remember, I yelled out as a film developed across my throat which I think was the standard diphtheria taking its course. Instead of my losing consciousness and dying, as many did, the film broke and within about ten days I had recovered, although I was still very weak.
After the war I came to hear of the work of Dr P S Selwyn-Clarke, the former Director of Medical Services in Hong Kong. He had persuaded the Japanese, who were themselves very nervous of catching any disease, that he should not be interned. He was allowed only the minimum of staff but, despite Japanese obstruction, he sent medicines into the various camps and looked after the dependants of the Volunteers and families of the other emergency services.
There was another possible source for the serum which saved my life: it could have come from the British Military Hospital at Bowen Road which was run by Dr Donald Bowie, who wrote in his memoirs: “I want to record my personal admiration for the courage of doctors and Royal Army Medical Corps and Royal Army Dental Corps soldiers who nursed these diphtheria cases. Everyone knew of the shortage of serum and of the risks of infection. No one shirked the close contacts involved in the treatment of these patients and this to my mind was an outstanding example of cold and sustained courage in a situation where staff were at risk for at least five months. The work of these men cannot be praised too highly and the story deserves to be cherished in the annals of the Corps.
“Since serum was in such short supply Major G C F Harrison RAMC, after anxious consultation, gave transfusions of blood from patients who had recovered from diphtheria to four patients suffering from the disease in an acute form. Two of these recovered,” concluded Bowie.
* * * * *
The superintendent of all the camps in Hong Kong was Colonel Tokunaga Isao, nicknamed ‘Fat Pig’ because he was so obese. He had been a regular soldier for 30 years and lived in Kowloon with his Chinese mistress. He had a violent temper, and was totally unscrupulous as well as a thief.
We also had to put up with the Japanese interpreters. Nimori Genichiro, nicknamed ‘Panama Pete’, was a smallish Japanese-American who had pointed ears and wore military boots and a khaki cloak. He had spent most of his life in Chicago, was dapper, diminutive and addressed everyone as “Youse guys”. We particularly disliked Inouye Kanao, nicknamed ‘Slap Happy’ or ‘Shat in Pants’. He was swarthy, usually unshaven and had eyes set closely together. He was a Japanese-Canadian whose uniform was so ill-fitting that the seat of his trousers hung in a pendulous kind of bag. He had a grudge against everyone and Canadians in particular.
Kyoshi Watanabe, another interpreter, was quite different. He had been a Lutheran Minister; he certainly succeeded in combining Christian charity with his duties. The other guards became aware of his unobtrusive acts of kindness and so he was transferred elsewhere, to our disappointment. Another helpful interpreter was the stocky, bandy-legged ‘Cardiff Joe’ who was reputed to have money still in Cardiff, to where he seemed anxious to return. Finally there was the lanky, short-sighted tubercular youth named Katayama; he was such a negative character that he was never given a nickname.
Apparently up to 400 Indians, some former soldiers, served in Hong Kong’s camps as sentries and in other jobs. No doubt some of them were pressurised to do so. Formosans (Taiwanese) were also guarding us at times. A few of them were humane and helpful but most were cruel and exploited the prisoners, especially the females at Stanley, I read after the war.
I should emphasise that in 1942 it was almost impossible to discover what was going on in the internment camp at Stanley or in the other POW camps, nor what was happening outside Hong Kong. This was particularly distressing for families who could not learn if their loved ones were alive.
Taking the Royal Scots, for example, all but three of the 43 wives had been evacuated from Hong Kong to Australia in June 1940 on the orders of the Governor. The exceptions were Mrs S E H E White, the Commanding Officer’s wife and ‘Quartermaster’ of the Volunteers Nursing Detachment. Mrs H A W Millar was also a nurse, as was Peggie Scotcher who married Lieutenant T D Hunter, the Battalion’s Intelligence Officer, on Christmas Day, one hour after the surrender, in the hospital where he was lying wounded. It was not possible to find out where they were, or under what circumstances they were living – or indeed if they were still alive – until far too long. In fact, all three endured the same privations as the men in the Stanley Internment Camp and all did survive.
On 3rd July 1942 two representatives of the International Red Cross made their first visit to Hong Kong. They were Rudolf Zindel, a successful Swiss businessman who had lived in Hong Kong before the war, and Edward Egle, an IRC official based in Shanghai. In one day they visited the camps at Argyle Street, North Point and Shamshuipo, together with Bowen Road and St Theresa hospitals.
Their report on our Argyle Street Camp read as follows: “This camp, built on raised ground prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War housed from 600 to 800 interned Chinese soldiers which were forced over the Hong Kong Border during the Sino-Japanese fighting in October 1938. The camp is exceptionally well drained; the barracks are built of wood, log-cabin style, and give a neat impression; open space is somewhat limited, but appears adequate.
“On the day of our visit, the Camp contained the following Prisoners of War:-
474
Officers (including Major General Maltby)
19
N.C. Officers
93
Batmen (Orderlies)
___
TOTAL
586
Officers and men – from Regular Army Units, the Royal Navy and Hong Kong Volunteers
“A ‘bakery’ had only just been started, previous to which ‘dough-cakes’, cooked in water, were served. A ‘Canteen’ was available, which was being supplied with fresh stocks about every ten days, but was usually quickly sold out. No facilities for religious services.
“There was no ‘parcel-service’ in the Camp, since February, but an early resumption is promised. (Note: the ‘parcel service’ actually recommenced middle July 1942 and has been maintained once per week, ever since.)”6
Zindel and Egle made equally reassuring comments about North Point Camp which contained 1,577 Canadians and 28 Dutch Seamen, and Shamshuipo, where 4,404 officers and men of the Royal Navy, Army and Volunteers were housed. Their remarks on Shamshuipo, for example, included the comment: “Food said to be sometimes better, sometimes worse, with meat rare, but, generally speaking, no cause for complaint. The officers consulted assured us that the treatment accorded to them and their men was good.”
Why didn’t Zindel and Egle have the guts to report the truth? They saw that the POWs looked haggard and ill. They heard Captain K M A Barnett say first in French and then in English, “We are dying of hunger.” They saw that he was immediately knocked to the ground.
Zindel met a POW named R Egal, a Free French who had been fighting with the British. “Pretending to know me, he heartily shook hands in the presence of the Japanese,” wrote Zindel. “While doing so, he slipped into my hand a small object which I succeeded in getting into my trouser pocket without arousing suspicion. Later, in my house, I inspected the object which turned out to be a small cutting of a bamboo branch. It had been hollowed out, but stopped at both ends with a little straw. Inside the tube I found a note, written in ink, in exceptionally fine but clear writing, which gave valuable information concerning the Argyle Street and Shamshuipo Camps.”
What explanation had Zindel for sending totally misleading reports which were cheerfully circulated by the International Red Cross in Geneva? “Through a contact which I had in the censor’s office in Hong Kong,” he wrote later, “I learned that all my Delegation mail and cables were strictly censored. My first full reports to Geneva never arrived. At least one was given by a Japanese censor to his girlfriend, who in turn boastfully reported the matter to me. She was able to quote extracts from the report.” One report which eventually passed the Hong Kong censor after satisfactory explanations was returned to Hong Kong by the censor in Tokyo three months later.
“International Red Cross delegates report that the general state of health of the prisoners in Hong Kong is good,” reported The Times on 27th October 1942, “and that they are satisfied with administrative arrangements.” The Commander in Chief India cabled two days later stating that this report was in direct contradiction of the facts, for there were a minimum of three diphtheria deaths daily in Shamshuipo. The Foreign Office and Colonial Office initially sat back and accepted the favourable reports, although there was every likelihood that the contrary reports from Chungking on Japanese brutalities were quite likely to be true.
I saw Zindel’s visit. We were terribly disappointed that he was “whisked past us at twice the speed of light”, as one of my friends put it.
Couldn’t Egle back in Shanghai have sent a true report through his channels? Apparently not. Indeed, according to one author, “he praised their operation so lavishly that the Japanese expressed their gratitude to him by hosting a banquet in his honour at Shanghai’s Cathay Hotel.”7
Zindel headed a staff of 30 to distribute financial aid amounting to £10,000 per month that the British Government regularly dispatched to the civilian internees at Stanley. In 1945 it was learnt that the Japanese government “siphoned off a large part of those funds to exchange for gold in neutral countries so that it could purchase critical war supplies”.8
Behind the scenes, Zindel may have helped us more than we then knew. For example, he arranged for 1,450 books from a library in Victoria to be transferred to us in Argyle Street. At least a third of them were in continuous circulation. Moreover, Zindel sensibly used what remained of the £10,000 to help us POWs, to the dismay of the War Office which believed that “proper care and maintenance of the POWs is the duty of the capturing power”. The monthly allocation, due in part to Canadian pressure, was later increased to £60,000.
Within two years Zindel’s ability to do anything constructive seems to have deteriorated. “Zindel is working under a great mental and nervous strain,” wrote the Red Cross delegate in Chungking to Geneva in August 1944. “His office and flat have been searched by the Jap police who call weekly and look into everything. It is doubtful whether Zindel is allowed or would dare to send you reports stating the true facts.”
* * * * *
Quite unexpectedly we had our hopes raised most dramatically.
On 24th October 1942 China-based aircraft of the American 14th Air Force bombed selected targets, returning the two following days to drop incendiary bombs. This was tangible evidence that the tide was turning. Our morale soared.
The leading American bomber carried B A Proulx, a Canadian who had escaped through a sewer from North Point Camp. He had made contact with General C L Chennault and briefed the American pilots on the location of the POW camps. We did not know that the next raid would not be for another 10 months, after which they averaged almost one a month. We were not allowed to dig air-raid shelters. In Shamshuipo Camp we knew that some oil drums containing high-grade aviation gasoline were stored in pits within the camp’s perimeter. The Japanese optimistically left the drums there, confident that the Allies would not bomb their own men.
The excitement of the bombing raid had not diminished when a small miracle occurred. On 1st November 1942 Red Cross parcels were delivered to the camps. “Oh brother!” wrote G White of the Royal Army Service Corps. “We all went crazy – talk about kids at a Christmas tree, nothing to the way we danced round here.”
As another POW put it in November: “We were amazed to receive the shipment of foodstuffs. Bully beef, cigarettes, jam, meat and vegetable rations, cocoa, dried fruit, sugar and clothing. This changed the whole picture. We now had reason to hope that these shipments might be repeated and that we stood a good chance of surviving. We did not allow our optimism to govern our judgement and we doled out the foodstuffs very carefully, enough to bring the calorific value up to about 2,800 calories, with a protein content from all sources of about 70 grammes. In this way we managed to spin out this supply of food for some 15 months. It was just as well that we did for never again did we get such a shipment.”
According to Captain J L Flynn, working parties were very occasionally provided with a lorry enabling the POWs to loot warehouses and the private houses formerly occupied by Europeans.
As Christmas 1942 and the first anniversary of our imprisonment approached, it would be silly to pretend we had anything other than deep forebodings as to the future. The Japanese had told us of endless British and American defeats: the loss of the bases in the Far East, nasty setbacks in the Middle East including North Africa and the fall of Tobruk, the Mediterranean largely closed to us, the Germans having the Russians on the run – naturally we didn’t know what to believe.
We undoubtedly had traitors in our midst. Maltby and Wallis discussed what to do with one suspect who was believed to be informing the Japanese on us. “We considered whether I should walk round the camp with him on the exercise circuit and accidentally see to it that he fell into the live wires,” wrote Brigadier Wallis. A doctor planned a more sinister death for the traitor. “We decided against any such action, feeling that in the end God would bring him to his just deserts.”9
Lieutenant Tanaka Hitoshi, a guard at Shamshuipo, received a message from a POW that a certain hut should be watched as a particular officer was planning to escape. The message had been attached to a slate and hung in the guard’s office. The Japanese watched the hut before accusing Lieutenant Hyland of being the potential escaper; he admitted that this had been the case and agreed not to do so. This incident was related at the trial of Colonel Tokunaga in January 1947.
Suddenly the Japanese started sending shiploads of us to Japan to work, we assumed correctly, as slave labour in conditions which were doubtless even worse than those which were killing some of us in Hong Kong.
Notes
1. Interview Lt Col. P K Betty/Brig. C Bullock, 11.3.04, quoted in The Simouree, Winter 2004/5, p. 48.
2. Greenhous, B, “C” Force to Hong Kong: A Canadian Catastrophe 1941–1945, Canadian War Museum Historical Publication No. 30, 1997, p. 122.
3. Letter Wallis to OL.
4. Townsville Sun, November 1976.
5. Bowie, D C, ‘Captive Surgeon in Hong Kong’, Journal of the HK Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, March 1977, Vol. 15, p. 173.
6. FO 9/6 761 HN 00649.
7. The Hong Kong News, 15.7.42, 4.9.42 and 28.10.42.
8. South China Morning Post, 17.9.45, interview with C D W Man.
9. Letter Wallis to OL.
CHAPTER 18
The Sinking of the
Lisbon Maru
“In September 1942 Japanese soldiers arrived in Shamshuipo Camp, leant their rifles against a wall, donned white coats and medically examined us,” recalls Lance Corporal A J Taylor of the Hong Kong Signal Company. “They wanted to be sure that no disease should be carried to the graceful land of the rising sun. Each POW was inoculated and his anus probed with a glass tube. It was rumoured that the inoculations were to sterilise one, and so some avoided the draft, leaving others who were less fit to make up the numbers.”1
The first draft of 700 POWs left for Japan in early September. On 25th September POWs were paraded in Shamshuipo and Argyle Street to be selected or otherwise for the second draft. Men on my immediate left and right were called forward. Why wasn’t I chosen, I wondered? Perhaps because I looked a bit weedy in those days? The Japanese would give no indication of the draft’s destination; there was just a vague promise that the climate would be better.
Two days later 1,816 British POWs left Hong Kong in a 7,000-ton freighter, the Lisbon Maru. Lieutenant Colonel H W M Stewart OBE MC, the Commanding Officer of 1st Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, commanded the POWs despite being sick with pellagra and malnutrition. His batman carried a wooden box-like stool. Rumour had it that a wireless set was in the box, which was the only object never searched.
The Royal Navy POWs were squeezed into hold No. 1 nearest the bows, the Middlesex and Royal Scots in the middle hold No. 2, and the Royal Artillery in the stern in No 3. The ship also carried 800 Japanese troops. She had only four lifeboats and six life rafts, two of which were for the POWs. Half the POWs had life jackets.
Food was good by Shamshuipo standards, from where most of the POWs had been chosen. The sun shone and the nights were warm. Prisoners were sometimes allowed on deck for fresh air and exercise; those who resembled prematurely old men began to get a touch of colour in their cheeks. But the filth and slime in the holds from those who were too weak to get up and wash themselves was terrible.
Dr Selwyn-Clarke had warned the British Consul in Macao that POWs were on the Lisbon Maru, which carried no markings indicating that they were on board. Almost 12 weeks earlier, on 1st July 1942, the American submarine USS Sturgeon had sunk the Japanese Montevideo Maru. Of the 1,053 Australian soldiers and 200 civilians battened down below decks, none survived.
At 7.04 a.m. on 1st October USS Grouper of the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force began her approach off the coast of Shanghai to the Lisbon Maru. Her first three torpedoes, fired at 3,200 yards, missed. The fourth led to a loud explosion. There were no casualties on the ship and some POWs assumed there had been an internal explosion in the engine room. Grouper was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Rob Roy McGregor. The submarine came under fire: “Sharp explosions all around us,” noted the Commanding Officer, whose last two torpedoes, fired at 1,000 yards, also missed.2 The American torpedoes early in the war malfunctioned; the heavier operational warheads ran well below the depth of the training heads. The faults were not fully recognised for a further year.
The POWs listened to the explosion of depth charges and a Japanese light bomber patrolling overhead. It was the beginning of a long and increasingly anxious day because the ship was slowly listing. The Japanese pulled heavy tarpaulins over the hatches, thereby sealing the POWs down and preventing fresh air reaching them.
Colonel Stewart shouted to everyone in his middle hold to be quiet. He told them what he thought had happened and asked for silence so he could appeal to the Japanese. The stench of those who could no longer use the wooden latrines on deck was asphyxiating.
Tapping on the bulkhead from No. 1 hold indicated that two diphtheria patients had died and there was no way of escaping. Meanwhile the sea was entering the third hold. Gunners working on the pumps quickly lost consciousness owing to the heat and lack of air. At 5.00 p.m. the Japanese destroyer Kure took off the 800 Japanese troops, leaving only the crew and 25 guards under Lieutenant Wada, and the ship’s Captain, Kyoda Shigeru, who pointed out that the POWs were likely to drown. Wada replied that the Master of the ship had no authority to interfere. At 9.00 p.m. the heavy hatches were closed over the holds. Attempts were made to tow the Lisbon Maru towards Shanghai but the towline was heard to snap.
The heat in the holds was terrific. The night was made more hideous by the curses and the moans of the sick, some of whom were calling for the padre. Everyone was told to lie quietly, stop talking and try to sleep to conserve air and strength.
By 9.00 a.m. on 2nd October, over 24 hours after the torpedoing, the air in the holds was dangerously foul; it was obvious that the men could not survive much longer. Captain Kyoda Shigeru knew that the ship was in imminent danger of sinking. All the Japanese, less five guards, were taken off leaving the POWs to drown.
Colonel Stewart ordered Lieutenant W M Howell, Royal Army Service Corps, to make a second attempt to make a hole in the hatch covers, using a long butcher’s knife which Private Speight HKVDC had smuggled into the ship.3 With a great effort, he forced his knife between the baulks of timber, slit the tarpaulin, forced up one of the timbers and climbed through the gap. He and Lieutenant Potter who followed him saw POWs from No. 3 hold struggling to get out through the portholes on the well deck. Howell opened the bulkhead to release them.
The Japanese guards on the bridge opened fire at the hole in the hatch, killing one man who was just emerging. Potter was also killed.
The Lisbon Maru suddenly gave a fearful lurch; water gushed in through the first opening in the hatch. “Wild panic ensued,” remembers Lance Corporal Taylor. “Within seconds the ladders to the second deck were a mass of writhing, struggling bodies.” Order was quickly restored and the men formed up into long queues at the stairway and ladders. Water poured into No. 2 hold; there seemed little hope of getting out in time. In the dim light which filtered through, Captain N H Cuthbertson, Adjutant of the Royal Scots, carefully put on his glengarry: he said that he preferred to meet his God properly dressed.
The ship went down by the stern but by good fortune the water was shallow and the stern rested on a sandbank while the bows remained clear of the water. Many of those in No. 3 hold drowned before they could get out.4
Hundreds of men took to the sea; a swift current was running westwards towards some islands four miles away; they looked rocky and dangerous. Four Japanese auxiliary transport boats were slowly circling the Lisbon Maru shooting at the POWs in the water. Taylor, still on deck, made two rafts from ammunition boxes and planks for the non-swimmers. Just as he was wondering how to launch them, there was a muffled explosion and the ship sank instantly, sucking many down with her.
The Japanese at last started to pick up survivors, possibly because some POWs were seen to have reached the Islands and might live to say what had happened. Indeed Howell was among the first to do so. The Sing Pang Islands are in the Chusan Archipelago off the Chekiang province. Howell spoke a Shanghai dialect and explained to the villagers that the numerous heads in the water were British prisoners and not Japanese, whose fate the Chinese villagers had been cheerfully contemplating. The villagers immediately set off in junks and sampans and rescued about 200. Many other POWs were unable to obtain a footing and were swept past the Islands before drowning.
The Chinese fed and clothed the POWs before the Japanese landed on the Islands the following morning. The Chinese males then put on their militia uniforms of the Wang Chai Wan, Japan’s puppet leader in the territory conquered by Japan.
Japanese Marines rounded up the POWs, making them return most of the clothing given to them by the villagers. On board one of the Japanese ships, the body of a POW who died was tossed overboard without a hint of humanity, while on another ship Company Sergeant Major E J Soden of the Middlesex remembers that they were treated very well. “The Japanese said that they had been trained by our Navy and fed us well, giving full military honours to those who died.”5
The survivors of the Lisbon Maru reached Shanghai on 5th October. Out of 1,816 POWs, 843 had been shot in the water or drowned. Two weeks later the Japan Times Weekly claimed the Japanese had done their utmost to save the POWs following the sinking of the ship by the Americans.
The dependants in Britain and Australia of those who had died quickly received a lower scale of allowance as their husbands were missing. The internees at Stanley learnt of the “atrocities by Americans” but had no information for 18 months about who had died.
Fortunately, thanks to the villagers of Woo Tung-Ling on the Sing Pang Islands, a civilian called A J W Evans, Warrant Officer J C Fallace and W C Johnstone (both of HKRNVR) survived. They were led to Free China by guerrillas from neighbouring islands; their statements reached the Foreign Office in January 1943.6 The Swiss Government was asked to communicate the true facts to the Japanese, based on the first-hand evidence of the three escapees. “The treatment of the prisoners amounts to flagrant violation of the customs and usage of war…” read the British Government demand for a full investigation. In November 1943 the Japanese replied that the British should be grateful for 900 prisoners being rescued.
The responsible officers were brought to trial in Hong Kong in 1947, as will be related. However for many POWs it was too late; they were so weakened by their treatment that 244 died during their first year in Japan. Among the dead was Lieutenant Colonel Stewart. Thus, of the original 1,816 POWs only 724 survived.
* * * * *
A further 2,000 POWs including 1,184 Canadians were sent from Hong Kong in 1943. The Japanese split up the British, American, Australian, Dutch and Canadian POWs in Japan among 120 camps, making them work in shipyards, docks, mines, quarries and factories. There were 250 more POW camps in Burma, Malaya, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Thailand, Indo-China, the Philippines and Hong Kong.
Conditions in the camps varied considerably. Some POWs were treated as slave labour, just as the Germans treated some of their captives in Nazi Germany in 1941–1945.
The POWs who worked in semi-darkness in mines faced a constant danger of being entombed by landslides. The more fortunate worked in the docks; they suffered less, partly thanks to their ingenuity in stealing food.
CSM E J Soden was sent to Kobe near Osaka, where many died through lack of proper medical treatment – so many that the bodies were squeezed into an apple barrel before they were cremated. “I still get a lump in my throat when I hear the song Roll out the Barrel. After a few months I was sent in groups of 20 to work in the docks,” he wrote. “It was of paramount importance to steal food, particularly for the sick. When I was unloading from a cold-storage depot, one of the lads hid a large frozen fish between his legs; it was held in place by string. This caused much amusement among the guards who searched him. Feeling the fish, they mistook it for his penis, shouting ‘Oki Jimpo’, meaning ‘big cock.’” On another occasion the POWs there noticed a Japanese making a hot bran and oat mash for his horse. He left it to cook, and on his return found the container full of water. His bewilderment was watched at a discreet distance by well-satisfied POWs.
The POWs became increasingly vulnerable to American bombers; some were near both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At Camp 17 the Japanese displayed a regulation which read:
It is forbid to plot to kill the Commandant.
(Penalty: Shoot-ted to death and life imprison.)
It shall be forbid to steal of Japanese Army.
(Penalty: The heavy punish, life not assured.)
All prisoners shall take care of their health.
* * * * *
Naturally those of us left in Hong Kong had no knowledge of the utter despair faced by some of the POWs sent to Japan. The physical exhaustion from 11 hours per day breaking up pig iron, for example, was a terrible challenge. “But not all the Japanese were cruel and unjust,” remembers Corporal H F Linge of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps who recalls seeing at a station near Osaka the strange sight of Japanese women and children dressed in brightly coloured kimonos and wooden clogs watching the prisoners. They showed no animosity.
Notes
1. Interview Taylor with OL.
2. Hamilton, G C, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, Hong Kong: Green Pagoda Press, 1966.
3. Article in The Thistle (Regimental Journal of the Royal Scots), April 1946.
4. RN Archives Adm 199 1286 HN 00493, p. 188.
5. Letter CSM Soden to OL.
6. Report 29.12.42, British Embassy Kukong to Foreign Office, CO 980 67 HN 00649.
CHAPTER 19
Operations Most Secret
In March 1943 I was a member of a working party in Argyle Street POW camp unloading firewood from an old lorry which came into the camp on a regular basis. I was in Hut No. 3 and it was our hut’s turn to be on duty to empty it. Suddenly the Chinese driver gave a cough and tossed over his shoulder a crumpled, empty cigarette packet on to the vehicle’s floor, immediately behind the driving seat. I swept the packet up with the bark chippings out of the back of the lorry. I had to be very careful as a Jap sentry was only four feet at most from the driver.
Six guards were turned out whenever a supply lorry came into the camp. On one occasion the truck was not promptly unloaded by the POWs and so it immediately drove out again amidst laughter from the Japanese guards. Therefore we had to be on duty awaiting the vehicle’s arrival.
After the lorry had left I picked up the cigarette packet very excitedly and took it to the latrines. Behind a screen there, I unfolded the paper but found it blank. I immediately took it to Colonel Newnham, Maltby’s principal operations officer. I knew him well. Indeed, I regarded him as a good friend although I was very junior; we regularly played chess together. Newnham was clearly delighted by this unexpected development. We went together to the cookhouse. He held up the paper from the cigarette packet in front of a charcoal fire. We saw a message appear. Colonel Newnham showed no emotion. Apparently he had been waiting for over a year for these messages to reach him in Argyle Street. I did not know that messages had already reached the camp in Shamshuipo.
We were in touch with the world!
Colonel Newnham told me later of the significance of this event. He decided to bring in another Royal Engineer officer – also an architect and a very good friend of mine – Captain Godfrey V Bird from Hut No. 10. He was one of the Colonel’s staff officers from the battlebox. Godfrey had been badly wounded, like others, when he had left the Headquarters to fight the Japanese.
Newnham told the two of us to maintain this contact. And so started an extraordinary chain of events, the key parts of which can be told in full for the first time here. The Colonel stressed the acute dangers involved – not only for us, but also for the Chinese agents who were “an unknown quantity”. Both Godfrey and I assured him we would help in any way we could. Newnham had probably chosen Godfrey because they had worked together during the fighting. I appreciated the great danger that I was running into.
I was asked if I would recognise the Chinese driver if he came in again. I said I could not be certain but on the next visit I would try to deliver an outgoing message. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds because the vehicle was watched by the Japanese sentry, the guard house 40 feet away and the Japs in the tall watchtowers around the camp. Newnham insisted that my delivery of the note was of secondary importance; security must be the guiding factor at all times, he said.
The next time the lorry came in I waited for the Japanese guard, who sat alongside the Chinese driver, to get out. Then I dropped in the reply note behind the driver under a piece of bark. A few days later I picked up another note which had been delivered in the same way as the first. That was the very beginning of the two-way traffic in messages. I was the first to be involved in this activity in Argyle Street, but I didn’t know where it would all lead to, nor what was in the messages. This was kept from me by Newnham in case I was caught. (The actual vehicle delivering the supplies varied somewhat as time went on.)
People were beginning to get suspicious of both Godfrey Bird and me; men in each hut had previously taken it in turns to unload the trucks. There was a roster on who was assigned to this task. Yet Godfrey and I were now always there as well. Others guessed that something strange was happening; a few seemed afraid that they might be implicated. “Why is Harris here again?” people asked. “There’s something funny going on.”
This disturbing development was overcome by an officer in each hut’s working party being made responsible for calling out their men on the arrival of the ration lorry. It was also their job to ensure that outgoing messages were planted and the driver’s attention attracted to them. Newnham therefore selected seven others in addition to Godfrey and me. He explained the procedure, emphasised the danger, gave them an opportunity to think it over and to withdraw their names if they thought the risks too great. No one did pull out and the work proceeded with the newcomers. They were Captain J A Lomax RA, Lieutenant G P Ferguson HKVDC, J Redman HKVDC, J C McDouall HKRNVR, R B Goodwin RNZNVR, Sub-Lieutenant J R Haddock HKRNVR and Flight Lieutenant D S Hill RAF.
In addition, Chris D’Almada and Lieutenant Ian Tamworth HKVDC watched the drivers to receive any messages offered by them by hand and to pass messages when direct hand-to-hand delivery seemed safest.
A vital go-between was now chosen by Newnham – Captain (later Major) J R Flynn. He was one of the seven British regular officers serving with the 2/14 Punjabis and had been commissioned from the Royal Military College Sandhurst in the 1930s.
Beyond the Argyle Street officers’ camp and the road which ran between Kai Tak airport and Kowloon was a large vegetable garden which contained in one corner a chicken farm. To the east of it was the cemetery. Beyond lay the Indian POW camp of Mau Tau Chung (spelt Matauchung in some accounts).
Newnham asked Flynn to obtain military intelligence from the Rajput and Punjabi POWs, many of whom were ‘employed’ over much of Hong Kong and adjacent ports including Swatow, Canton and Hainan, providing escorts, manning police and sentry posts on roads, railways and the airfield, usually under Japanese command. Some Indians also worked in Japanese offices as clerks. In his reminiscences of 153 pages1 Flynn wrote, “The POWs were in a position to observe and get information from Chinese, Koreans, Formosans and third nationals (e.g. Portuguese, and Indians serving in the Hong Kong police).” Newnham wanted information “on enemy strengths, guns, and number of ships in the harbour etc. He told me he was passing it on. I alone made daily contact (verbal, thrown messages, signals, hidden messages, messages passed by Korean guards and Chinese civilians). I alone, except for Maj. G E Grey 2/14, Capt. Hamta Prasad 2/14, Maj. Browne 5/7, was completely bilingual in Hindustani and Punjabi (and some Pushtu). These others were never in contact with the Indians. No Indian ever betrayed me even though I and many of them were interrogated (brutally at times). I suffered a lot of criticism for talking to guards.”
Flynn attended classes learning French with General Maltby, who arranged for Flynn to have regular appointments with Newnham to pass on the information, after Flynn had translated the messages when necessary.
Flynn remembers “one particular incident. I got a very long and detailed report from Subedar Major Haider Rehinan Khan 2/14 who was a most honourable, dignified, intelligent and much loved officer, the finest example of the Senior Viceroy Commissioned Officer upon whom the honour of a battalion depends – a tower of strength to the prisoners. He subsequently spent much time in solitary imprisonment for his adamant loyalty to the Crown.
“His report covered accurate (later proven) news of Allied progress in Europe, names of traitors in the Indian camp and Jap enquiries about an Allied ‘listening post’ some great distance from HK. I discussed it with my CO (Grey) and we agreed only Maltby was to see it because of the danger Newnham might be in. Grey came with me. Brigadier Wallis was there. I objected. (I and my contacts were at risk too.) Wallis maintained he was my Brigade Commander. (2/14 and 5/7 were only brigaded under Wallis’s command on the Mainland on the Canadians’ arrival; actually Wallis was the senior Indian Army officer as distinct from a British Army Brigade appointment.) I was adamant that Wallis should not be present. Maltby supported me and asked Wallis to withdraw. He did. Livid.”
The above report is important for it indicates that Maltby knew precisely what was going on in the smuggling of top secret information on Japanese activities to the British in China. His life was at risk, just as were the rest of us who were most intimately involved. (Flynn had no respect for Wallis, describing him as “plausible, self-inflated; he exercised no brigade control and direction and training; he only ordered withdrawals; he was despised by 2/14…”) Flynn, like others, had his prejudices.
Flynn accompanied officer ‘working parties’ which tended the vegetable garden. “Messages and parcels would be left for me in holes in the ground, marked in various ways (e.g. potato peel, eggshell, stick, dead flower) or thrown over the Indian fences when guards distracted, and, remarkably, at Muslim call to prayer five times daily. A group of Muslims would be near the garden fence and their ‘prayers’ would be in Hindustani and Pushtu. I had four main contacts, men like Haider Rehinan. They in turn chose suitable Indians to help.”
* * * * *
I had no idea of Captain Flynn’s involvement because he dealt only with Maltby, Newnham and Grey. Everything was on a very strict ‘need to know’ basis, nobody being given a single scrap of information on the intelligence set up unless they were vital go-betweens.
Nor did I know to whom in China the messages were being passed, or that Captain Douglas Ford, the former Royal Scots Signals Officer in Shamshuipo Camp, had been gathering information, like Flynn. In October 1942, six months earlier, Chinese POWs from the Volunteers had surreptitiously been given messages while working at Kai Tak airport. Knowledge of this link was initially confined to Captain Ford, Dr R K Valentine HKVDC, D L Prophet, Flight Lieutenant H B Gray RAF and two NCOs – Sergeant R J Hardy and Corporal Bond.
The former Canadian Second in Command of the Royal Rifles was transferred from Argyle Street to Shamshuipo in February 1943. He was John N Price who had now become a Lieutenant Colonel. He was briefed on the secret operations.
Under Newnham’s driving force, the smuggling of secret messages rapidly increased to both Shamshuipo and Argyle Street. Drugs, maps, compasses and news items were smuggled in. It all seemed rather too easy. Work proceeded smoothly and patients in the camp hospitals soon felt the benefit of increased supplies of drugs. But passing the messages through the drivers had its dangers. Moreover, the Japanese were becoming more inquisitive; their searches became more frequent. Understandably, Newnham seemed to feel the pressure more than any of us; he lived in a state of nervous tension.
In May 1943 it became apparent that a Japanese officer was watching us through binoculars from a hilltop half a mile to the north. All operations were cancelled. Lieutenant R B Goodwin RNZNVR thought up a new system of passing messages; a note was sent to the outside contacts telling them to fix three nails in a precise position in a dark corner under the floor of the truck, between which messages could be held by rubber bands. He made a small wooden model on which we practised despatching and receiving messages until we were all confident. It took only seconds to move the message between the nails. Goodwin also made a hollow bolt out of wood and this was fitted in the supply lorry. Messages and drugs could be hidden inside the false bolt.
The information being passed, I learnt after the war, was very important to the war effort. To give but one example, operational intelligence was passed to the United States Air Force’s 68th Composite Wing Headquarters at Kweilin, which had no intelligence sources of its own at that time.
* * * * *
What would have happened, one might speculate, if a similar intelligence organisation had been working in a German POW camp in, say, the Portsmouth area where the POWs could gather intelligence from outside working parties – perhaps through Italian POWs who were employed on farms in the countryside? As in Hong Kong, there could easily have been hidden wireless sets in the POW camps. It might also have been possible to construct them so they could transmit to the Germans in France.
The Germans parachuted spies into Britain with wireless sets. Most were ‘turned’ to work for the Allies, while others were executed. But had one spy established himself or herself in a ‘safe house’ in the Portsmouth neighbourhood, he or she could have assembled intelligence, just as we in Hong Kong were doing, on ships, aircraft, weapons, troop movements or whatever. The repercussions resulting from such spying activity, particularly in the dark days of 1940 or before the D Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, could have been horrendous.
Fortunately neither the Germans nor the Italians achieved anything similar to what we were up to, but the above scenario serves to emphasise the value the British, American, Chinese and other Allies attached to our intelligence reports.
* * * * *
News began to filter down to a few of us that, with Maltby’s blessing, an extraordinarily ambitious plan was being considered for a mass breakout from the POW camps.
“In all three camps the general standard of health had reached a very low level, and any escape would have caused severe and immediate repercussions and further privations that would have been fatal to many,” wrote Maltby in 1956. “Therefore our aim, which unfortunately was never to materialise, was that a collection of food, arms and ammunition should be established in the nearby hills, a large diversion should be made by the guerrillas accompanied perhaps by an air raid, and under cover of these there should be simultaneous break-outs from all three camps. One-third of our numbers, owing to their physical state, would have had to be abandoned. Another third we reckon would probably have fallen in the subsequent fighting, but the remainder, we hoped, would be able to make their way to freedom and so continue to participate in the war. Ambitious, perhaps, but that was our aim.”2
I found it difficult to take such a plan seriously. The guerrillas to whom Maltby refers had helped a few escapers in early 1942, but there seems no chance that they could have set up arms caches near the POW camps. To lose one third of our number – several thousand men – is clearly a price absurdly high. Japan, in 1943, still controlled the land, air and sea in and around Hong Kong and the neighbourhood. Above all, as he says, our health had so deteriorated, we would never have made it over the mountains to the north, and the vast distances thereafter, on foot. Such a plan might look good on paper but, unlike Maltby, I am glad that it did not materialise.
This should not be regarded as criticism of him. Wars are not won by endless defensive measures. He always stood up for us most bravely against the Japanese. As Captain Flynn, who saw him so closely involved in the passing of the most secret intelligence, put it: “Maltby was in a class of his own in dealing with the Japanese and keeping the camps orderly and controlled.”
* * * * *
Suddenly disaster struck. In mid June 1943 an SOS came from Lee Hung Hoi. He was one of the very courageous Chinese truck drivers. Naturally we closed the operations down immediately, but it was too late.
On 1st July the lorry drove into the camp as usual, but the driver was now acting under Japanese orders. He suddenly tossed out a piece of paper. I count my blessings that it was not my turn to be on duty that morning. I was there at the beginning. I didn’t want to be there at the end! Sub-Lieutenant J R Haddock, by chance, happened to be on duty. He picked up the paper when he felt it was safe to do so and hid it on top of a lavatory cistern before strolling nonchalantly to his hut. Ten minutes later he was sent for by the guards and arrested. Captain Bird retrieved the paper and applied iodine to reveal the secret writing: it was blank. “This made me suspicious that it was a plant,” he wrote later. “But I could not connect the plant with Haddock’s arrest because I was told that no Japanese had seen him pick it up. I put the paper back on the cistern, and on checking later it had mysteriously been removed.”
In Shamshuipo that same morning “during a softball game between the Canadians and the Portuguese prisoners in camp, I noticed Matsuda and two sentries coming in through the main gate,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel J N Price, who now commanded the Royal Rifles following Home adopting the rank of Colonel. “I saw them re-emerge with Sergeant R J Ruttledge Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. Realising that our key man had been caught, I remained helplessly watching the game. An hour later Matsuda took away Flight Lieutenant Gray and Sergeant Hardy. This made it certain that our work had been discovered.
“Ford had gone at once to his room and removed as much incriminating evidence as he could. He then went to Gray’s room where the old football hung on the wall; it contained maps, war bulletins, and compasses. He was too late! The guards were already searching there. By this time we were well schooled in nonchalance and in a sort of fatalism which helped us to control all emotional expressions. The guards continued searching the room and went out eventually without even glancing at the football. For some days Ford, I and others lived under a terrible strain and anxiety. On 10th July Captain Ford was taken out. I made disposition of my effects as it seemed certain that I would be the next victim,” concluded Price.3
On that same day “I saw Colonel Newnham being taken away,” remembers Captain Bird, “and I went to the underground hiding place outside the window in which a precis of all messages was kept. General Maltby decided to burn them together with the maps. I kept only six front collar studs; they concealed compasses which had been sent to us”.4
The last few messages sent from Argyle Street could not have been more incriminating if intercepted by the Japanese, as they probably were. They had dealt with the possibility of a guerrilla raid on the perimeter fence to free the POWs.
About two weeks after Colonel Newnham had been arrested, Major Charles Boxer summoned those of us who were left. He told me and the other ‘operators’ nothing about what was happening but said it was just possible the messages would start again using the ration lorry. He wanted only volunteers as the work would be extremely dangerous. We agreed to continue as before, but, on resuming unloading the vehicles, nothing was ever passed to us.
Boxer had ended the meeting with us by saying: “If any of you get through alive, I will see your name is put forward at the end of the war.” This never happened, certainly in my case. I was sad the others and I never received any recognition. I am now the only one still alive!
Although they were constantly in my thoughts, I did not learn of the fate of Colonel Newnham and some of the others until the Japanese surrender. We knew that they would be tortured most dreadfully, going through the most appalling experiences. For 25 months I had to live with the possibility that I might be arrested. General Maltby, too, must have had a very stressful time waiting to see if he would be incriminated. He had protested strongly at the arrests, but, as usual, the Japanese refused to tell him anything. Instead, Maltby, Wallis and 13 other senior British officers were put in a special inner perimeter within Argyle Street; on 4th August they were sent to Formosa.
Prior to the mass arrests, Lieutenant H C Dixon, a young New Zealander in the RNZNVR, had found pieces of a wireless set in a bombed house while on a working party. He was a radio technician and when in July 1943 some valves were stolen from a Japanese set, key POWs were able to listen to broadcasts for about four days a week from London, San Francisco, New Delhi, Sydney and Chungking. The wireless also picked up a considerable amount of operational transmissions from American China-based aircraft, thereby enabling those listening to become familiar with their wave-lengths and methods of operating.
The four most involved were Dixon, Commander R S Young RN, formerly head of the Stonecutter Island Radio Intercept Station, Commander D H S Craven RN, a survivor of the ill-fated Norwegian operation at Narvik, and Major Boxer who mixed the wireless news items with local newspaper reports for the Camp’s daily war bulletins.
The wireless set was potentially of the utmost importance, for Dixon had constructed it so that it could transmit to report on, for example, Japanese troop movement, aircraft and shipping. Argyle Street was close to both Kai Tak airport and the harbour where we could see occasional activity, “I could never feel happy about the set,” wrote Craven “and I only hoped that we should not be betrayed.”5 The wireless was hidden in a biscuit box, which was usually buried.
The blow fell on 21st September 1943. During an extended four-hour morning parade, the Japanese Military Police went without hesitation to the spot where the set was hidden.
“At 7.00 p.m. Young was arrested, which confirmed in my mind that we had been given away. I was arrested at 10.00 p.m. and Dixon an hour later,” wrote Craven. Boxer was apprehended six days later, joining nine in all who were being held. Two of them had nothing to do with the wireless but had beds on each side of Dixon.
The interrogators said they knew all about Colonel Newnham’s case and claimed that the wireless could transmit, which was vigorously denied. Each of the prisoners was beaten, starved and deprived of water for many hours. Craven described the constant questioning as “devastatingly unnerving”.
“The Japanese system of justice is that all possible information is extracted from POWs; severe and intolerable torture is resorted to as necessary. Prisoners frequently die and are sometimes deliberately killed in a most brutal manner as a punishment for withholding the truth; the Gestapo treated their prisoners in a similar fashion.
“When the information has been wrung out of all those implicated, it is pooled, and out of the pool are produced ‘statements’ alleged to have been made by each prisoner. Though this is instantly recognised as not being one’s own work, it contains the true picture. After this, the court martial which follows months later is mere formality. There is no question of pleading guilty or not guilty, and there is no defence; the prosecutor demands a specific sentence from the President of the Court, and the proceedings are closed,” recalls a POW.
On 21st October Boxer, Young, Dixon and Craven were charged at the Military Police Headquarters with constructing a short-wave radio, using it to obtain enemy broadcasts and publishing this as news to POWs. “We all pleaded guilty and were then transferred to Stanley Prison,” wrote Craven. “I had developed beriberi, the vitamin deficiency disease, and become completely paralysed. I being helpless had to be carried. We anticipated a few weeks’ imprisonment, but we were told by an NCO that we were going to have our heads chopped off.”
Boxer was able to conduct several whispered conversations with Colonel Newnham and Captain Ford during exercise periods at the prison. He learned how they had protected those of us who had planted and received the secret information from the ration trucks, despite the most strenuous efforts of the Japanese to get them to divulge our identities.
Boxer in a cell nearby reported that “Ford gave nothing and nobody away, although subject to severe physical torture. Ford took all the responsibility on himself, and maintained that no senior officers were involved, thereby saving the lives of General Maltby and Colonel Price of the Royal Rifles of Canada. Ford gave an outstanding example of cheerful and courageous fortitude which was an inspiration to all those who were imprisoned with him and which aroused the respect and admiration even of the Japanese.”6
The trial was presided over by Major General Ashidate. Evidence was given that Ford, Gray, Ruttledge and Hardy had received in Shamshuipo, over a period of three months, six messages from the British Army Aid Group operating in China, after which they had compiled several reports on conditions in Shamshuipo. The Court was told that Newnham and Haddock had received and sent out 15 messages from Argyle Street. The prosecution did not try to prove that the information was of any military significance.
The Japanese were clearly unaware of our activities, which were much greater than the evidence suggested.
In the evening, after the trial was completed, Commander Craven was “mortified to see Newnham, Gray and Ford put in the condemned cell. The remaining three were fortunate to receive 15 years’ imprisonment. Newnham and Gray were very sick, but behaved most gallantly during their 18 days under sentence of death. Ford was fit, and his good spirits were an example we shall never forget.”
On the morning set for their execution, Lieutenant H C Dixon, the New Zealander, crept up the prison corridor while ostensibly washing the floor. When he was near their cell, he asked if there were any messages he could take. Newnham requested that his love should be sent to his family; Gray asked that his remains and silver watch should be sent home. A warder then hustled Dixon away. Ford later said that he hoped his remains could be re-buried one day in Edinburgh.
On 18th December the three officers were removed from their cells. Neither Newnham nor Gray could walk unaided. Ford half carried them to a waiting truck. They were shot on the beach at Shek-o.
Notes
1. Reminiscences of Maj. J R Flynn, written for OL.
2. Goodwin, Ralph, Passport to Eternity, London: Arthur Barker, 1956, p. 6.
3. Garneau, G S, Royal Rifles of Canada, Bishop’s University, 1971, p. 297.
4. Interview Bird with OL.
5. Report to Admiralty, 1945, RN Historical Branch.
6. Report by Maj. C R Boxer, 26.8.45.
CHAPTER 20
The British Army Aid Group
and Fresh Disasters
In Argyle Street POW Camp a few of us in late 1943 wondered what organisation in China had been responsible for sending us medicines, communications and encouraging us to escape, very much endangering us in the process. To what use had the British officers there put the intelligence we had sent them? We knew we had lost from Argyle Street alone Newnham, Haddock, Boxer, Dixon, Young and Craven, but we did not know what had happened to them. Nor did we appreciate the horrifying slaughter which had occurred in the Stanley Internment Camp. Rumours reached us that Ford and several others had been taken from Shamshuipo, as had an Indian officer named Captain M A Ansari from Mau Tau Chung POW Camp across the road from us. To what extent would they reveal, under torture, details about us? It was not until after the war that I discovered the horrifying answers to these questions: they certainly preyed on my mind.
* * * * *
In January 1942 Lieutenant Colonel L T Ride, who had commanded the Volunteer Field Ambulance so ably during the fighting, had escaped from Shamshuipo. He persuaded Major General L E Dennys, the British Military Attache in China, that an organisation be established to arrange the escape of POWs and internees from Hong Kong. Dennys was sympathetic, but said he could spare no vehicle, weapon or wireless set. As far as manpower was concerned, Ride could only use any escapers who reached him. As a cover, the organisation was to be called ‘The British Army Aid Group’; it should claim to be helping Chinese refugees. General Chiang Kai-shek agreed to the proposals and gave orders that the Chinese should support it.
Ride’s first recruit was Captain R D Scriven, Indian Medical Service, who had escaped from Shamshuipo with Captain A G Hewitt. Scriven was an excellent choice for he knew Hong Kong well and spoke Cantonese fluently. “Ride told me I should do anything I could to find out what was happening in the Colony and to contact guerrillas who might be helpful in guiding further escapers,” recalls Scriven. “I was able to ingratiate myself with General Cheung who was commanding the forces in Waichow. And so I set off with a good supply of medical stores and a Chinese, Henry Chan, who had been a tour guide in Hong Kong. How long my mission would last, I had no idea. We reached Waichow hidden under sacks after passing Japanese patrols.”1
At Waichow, Scriven, among the most charismatic and delightful of men, struck up a useful friendship with General Cheung over an alcoholic dinner. Cheung told him that three other escapers from Hong Kong were two days’ march away. They were the group led by Captain J D Clague Royal Artillery. Cheung accompanied Scriven back to the Italian Medical Mission for a nightcap. “The drinks finished, I bade a courteous goodnight to the General and fell senseless to the floor, smashing an oil lamp and the table in my descent. An admirable Chinese priest, Father Ma, put me to bed and assured me I had acquired much face.”
In June 1942 Clague replaced Scriven because the Indian Medical Service in New Delhi had become restless that one of their officers should be employed in duties other than medical.
Clague, now promoted to Major and, like Hewitt and Scriven, wearing a Military Cross for their daring escape, established his advance post which consisted of five British officers and ten Chinese. “You are appointed M19 representative in China …” read his directive which told him he had to rescue any Allied POWs; he must confide in the Chinese military authorities; give all the credit for any success to the Chinese and gather intelligence. Permission was not given for him to use ciphers.
The role of the BAAG was made most difficult owing to local politics, personalities, intrigue and the growing unwillingness of the Chinese nationalists and Communists to work together. BAAG never formed an integral part of any Chinese military body. Its existence was usually recognised by both the Americans and Chinese; its presence was tolerated and its help accepted; but officially it was ignored. Ride found that the biggest stumbling block was that Britain’s prestige in China had reached an all-time low. “If the defeated British were considered to be a world power, why not the undefeated Chinese?” was an occasional comment.
China’s contribution to the total war effort has not been adequately recognised. When the Pacific War began in December 1941, China was engaging 22 Japanese divisions, plus 20 brigades, compared with ten divisions and three brigades which Japan used on its offensives in Malaya, Burma, Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies. By August 1945 over a million Japanese troops were in China. Almost 400,000 of them were killed there, which belies the later charge that China did not really fight.2
“A special reconnaissance for an escape operation on Argyle Street POW camp was carried out in August 1942,” read one of the first reports submitted by BAAG to the War Office.3 “The first step in our plans was to obtain a complete set of maps of the underground drainage system of Kowloon. These were stolen from the Japanese. Three British officers and two Chinese were sent into the New Territories to investigate the possibility of a large-scale rescue of prisoners through the underground drainage system.”
According to the report, many interned Chinese soldiers had escaped from Argyle Street before the war through these drains, which passed under our camp into Kowloon Bay.
To the best of my knowledge this part of the report may be misleading. There was certainly no escape from Argyle Street throughout the time we were there. Had we found underground nullahs or drains, there would have been escapes, as there were at Shamshuipo in early 1942.
In September 1942, as already related, BAAG’s Chinese agents made contact with the Volunteer POWs from Shamshuipo who were working at Kai Tak, and escape equipment was smuggled to them. By 1st May 1943 BAAG had grown to 13 officers and four men. They were divided between the Headquarters at Kweilin and outposts at Chungking, Waichow, Macao and Dunming. A further 35 British and Chinese staff served at the HQ as clerks, accountants, medical staff and messengers.
Ride’s and Clague’s plans for the mass breakout of POWs never materialised, but they were very successful in infiltrating BAAG agents into the commercial dockyards in Hong Kong. Allied submarines could be deployed to sink Japanese vessels when they left port, particularly if good intelligence was available. The Allies therefore tried to establish ‘coast watchers’ near ports in Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and China. By 1944 the cumulative losses to Japanese merchant shipping were considerable. BAAG was also successful in persuading skilled labour in the Hong Kong dockyards to leave the Colony. They also helped escapers and those evading captivity.
One outstanding success was achieved. The Japanese Governor held a military parade on the cricket field in Victoria near the Law Courts to read out the annual rescript from the Emperor. There was a stand for spectators and a high vertical railing around the cricket field to restrict entry. At 10.00 a.m. I heard the drone of planes. Without warning, through the scattered cloud covering the Peak, American aircraft dived upon the pitch machine-gunning the parade. There was no escape; the death toll must have been very high.
We were kept short of rations for a week. Our undercover work was, I felt, achieving results.
BAAG gained a good reputation with GHQ India for gathering naval intelligence. The organisation accurately tracked the arrival of the Lisbon Maru into Hong Kong, “but despite this early warning, one of the worst maritime tragedies of the Pacific war resulted from miscommunication on the part of the Americans after they had received knowledge of the ship’s whereabouts and function.” Selwyn-Clarke’s report to Macao on the Lisbon Maru’s POW role had also been tragically mishandled, as we have seen.
Captain Flynn in Argyle Street and Ford in Shamshuipo meanwhile gathered intelligence via the Indian and Chinese Volunteer POWs respectively. The information was embodied into a weekly Waichow intelligence summary which went to the Military Attache in Chunking and the Director of Military Intelligence, India. By 1943 these reports were passed by wireless, taking four days.4 The Americans received copies of everything worthwhile.
I have described how the spying organisation affecting the POWs collapsed in July 1943 with the arrest of Newnham and others, but not what happened at Stanley Internment Camp. There were resistance groups there, and among British bankers in Victoria who had not been interned because they were still useful to the Japanese.
Dr Talbot, being returned to Stanley after undergoing an operation in Victoria, was thoroughly searched at a police post at the Wong Nei Chong Gap. The Japanese found beneath his bandages 4,000 Yen and messages. Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, head of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation, who had refused to escape when BAAG contacted him earlier, bravely went to the Japanese Chief of the Foreign Affairs Department. Grayburn told him that he had asked Talbot to take the money to Stanley as it was partly for the nursing staff at the camp’s hospital. He was arrested two weeks later and died of ill-treatment in prison.
Tragically, many more arrests followed when the Japanese established a link between BAAG and the internees. A radio engineer was forced to dig in a bank where a wireless set was hidden. Another set was voluntarily surrendered. Those arrested were accused of spying or of inciting or assisting espionage, although most messages passed from Stanley concerned trivial matters such as the health of prisoners.
On 19th October 1943 27 British internees were tried by five Japanese officers. In addition, a most courageous Indian Army officer was unexpectedly added to the civilian group.
Captain M A Ansari 5/7 Rajputs had been a POW in the Mau Tau Chung POW camp. He was related to the ruler of a large Indian state and, thanks to his influence, the Japanese were determined to persuade him to support the extensive anti-British movement. Ansari was a strong character; before the war Wallis, then commanding the Rajput Battalion, had to discipline him frequently for fighting Royal Scots officers in the Hong Kong Hotel.5
The Japanese had kept him in Stanley Prison between May and September 1942, so starving and ill-treating him that Ansari had become unable to walk. After some time in the camp hospital, he returned to the Indian other ranks POW camp, which contained no British officer. He was involved with BAAG in helping escapers but was entrapped by agents provocateurs and arrested again in May 1943 to be starved and brutally tortured for several months.
The trial was presided over by Lieutenant Colonel Fujimoto, a tired, wizened old man. The Japanese regarded J A Fraser, the former Hong Kong Government Defence Secretary, as the ringleader. Major Kozi, the prosecutor, made a speech which lasted most of the morning. The Chinese interpreter translated so infrequently and so badly that the prisoners were scarcely aware of what was being said. Fujimoto at one stage put his arms on the table, rested his head on his arms and for half an hour seemed to be asleep. On awakening, he went to the lavatory to smoke a cigarette while the trial continued. At 2.00 p.m. Kozi mopped his brow, bowed and sat down amidst much Japanese applause. The interpreter, after a confused discussion in Japanese, translated: “In the eyes of the law, you are all guilty of High Treason, and the prosecution has demanded the death penalty.” Fujimoto, after fumbling with a book, announced, “All are sentenced to death. The Court is adjourned.”
On 29th October, after ten days in solitary confinement, 32 men and one woman were led out to be executed. A group of children from the internment camp who were passing the prison saw the van drive out. As it went by, English voices shouted out, “Goodbye, boys.”
“I was in the prison garden when I saw the prisoners leave on their last earthly journey,” noted W J Anderson. “I was told that some had asked to be granted the services of a minister, but that this was refused. They were allowed to mix and talk to each other for five minutes before being tied up preparatory to their death march. Captain Ansari, I was told, gave them a ‘pep talk’ which greatly cheered them.
“Warders who were present at the execution said that it was a cruel and bloody affair. All were decapitated, though the executions in their near final stage were said to be so bad that some lives were ended by shooting.”6 The dead were heaped together in a common grave making later identification impossible.
* * * * *
On 23rd December it was the turn of Boxer, Craven, Dixon and Young to be sentenced, following the finding of the wireless set in Argyle Street. After the execution of Newnham, Ford and Gray, and now Ansari with the 33 others, Boxer did not expect to survive. Moreover, his Japanese guards had three times taken him outside the barracks, telling him he would soon be executed. Boxer met Dixon in the latrine and warned him they were for the ‘high jump’. It was therefore to their considerable relief that the four were provisionally sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. They waited in an anti room for the sentence to be confirmed. Boxer warned them that a heavier penalty might be imposed. He was wrong; the sentence was reduced to five years.
Had Boxer saved himself and the three others because over the last few years the Japanese had “recognised his competence in the language of the samurai class; his skill as a kendo fencer; and his extensive scholarly interest in Japanese history? No other British officer in occupied Hong Kong could match those qualifications.”7
It is unlikely that Boxer’s Japanese friends, who made such a fuss of him in Bowen Road Hospital almost a year before, could have helped him. There were no more crates of whisky in the pipeline. This is because within weeks of the Colony’s surrender the regiments, despite being seriously weakened from casualties incurred in Hong Kong, were despatched towards Timor, Java and Sumatra.
* * * * *
As Christmas Day 1943 approached we POWs still despaired of our survival. Fortunately the Japanese had resumed allowing POWs to receive food parcels from contacts in Hong Kong because no escape had taken place for many months. Maltby’s policy of no individual or small group escapes was paying dividends, although he himself had been sent to Formosa and criticised in some circles for his policy.
The parcels were pooled; most of us had something extra to eat on Christmas Day, although we didn’t do so well as some in Shamshuipo, judging by one POW who wrote in his diary: “We really spread ourselves: we had a special meal for the men with Red Cross tins. The orchestra played, and the officers gave each man a packet of fags. Afterwards we had a guitar player and a singsong,” wrote Captain G White of the Winnipeg Grenadiers. “A wonderful day – hope we are home next Christmas.”
Sergeant A J Alsey, a Musician in the Royal Scots, had a rather different Christmas: “Carol singing lasts for an hour. Three buns and a third of a tin of bully for Xmas dinner. Bed at 8.30 p.m. but up at 2.00 a.m. and made a really good cup of tea at 4.30. My scabies are terrible and I scratch for hours, and my feet are aching like hell.”
One source of profit was gold teeth. Most of those with a gold filling had it removed and sold through the wire to buy food.
The Japanese suddenly told us in Argyle Street that we were going to have a sort of psychological proforma to fill up – the names of our relatives, jobs, schooling, ages, our sex, and so on. The last question was, “In what capacity/job will you be willing to serve the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere? My friend Dudley put down Public Hangman; another put Grave Digger; while a third put Overseas Representative,” recalls Captain Flynn.
“On quite a different form, those with musical experience were asked to put their names down for their musical instrument,” remembers Major A R Colquhoun, a former Battery Commander in the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery. “I put mine down for the saxophone, not because I had ever played one, but it was probably easy to carry and interesting to look at. Months later enough instruments for a complete orchestra arrived. The camp lay back, anticipating long Summer evenings with the limpid strains of the violins. Unfortunately most players couldn’t read a note and the Japs wouldn’t allow any practice or rehearsal.
“We were ordered to play in the canteen. Twenty of us assembled – army officers, naval ratings, legal and government officials and former schoolmasters – all united under the baton of Lieutenant Commander Stanley Swetland RN who was elderly, caustic, sardonic, morose and completely imperturbable.
“The entire camp including the Japanese guards assembled. We sounded rather professional as we tuned up – so much so that the guards applauded under the impression that this was the first item in our repertoire. Stan Swetland, with fingers like a bunch of sausages, could coax real music out of anything from a tiny mandolin upwards. He tapped twice with his baton for silence, raised his arms and collected us with a baleful glare over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses. ‘Black Diamond Overture,’ he gravely announced. ‘Letter A. Count of three. Come in on the down beat… ’
“We did. The resulting discord of sounds was excruciating. Stan Swetland blanched. It was generally agreed that, throughout the war years, this was the only occasion he was ever seen to betray any sign of emotion. We cowered behind our music stands, facing an audience which was convinced it had been conned by a bunch of impostors.
“When the Japanese decided that we should do mass PT before breakfast, the ‘Worst Orchestra in the World’ was resuscitated to lighten the burden. Stan orchestrated some rousing marches and simple waltzes to which the POWs could jump and wave their arms. The only advantage of being a ‘musician’ was that we didn’t have to join in these capers, which were not popular. Fortunately we had two superb players – Len Corrigan and Noel Bardel, both Canadians.”
Occasional concerts in Hong Kong’s POW camps were an immense success for they enabled the POWs to forget their miserable surroundings.
“The improvising in the play last night was really amazing,” wrote Captain E L Hurd on 21st May 1943. “Wigs were made from the string of rice sacks, evening dresses from mosquito nets and the ‘chorus girls’’ wings from wooden frames.” A Portuguese, ‘Sonny’ Castro, invariably played the leading lady with such success that some POWs to this day are unsure of his sex. More than one ex-POW was rumoured to have a sex-change operation in Singapore long after the war.
The Japanese enjoyed the shows as much as everyone else, and they provided the chalk for makeup. They sat in the front row and roared with laughter, although they had only one interpreter among them and so could have understood very little. The lyrics had to be changed when they were in the audience. Plays produced included Journey’s End, You’re No Lady and The Merchant of Venice. John Trapman brought the house down as a ‘black Mammy’.
Afternoon lectures were popular. In one month alone they included, ‘Scents and Perfumes’, ‘A Holiday in a Lunatic Asylum’, ‘Game-keeping’, ‘Murder and Armed Robbery in Shanghai’, ‘Communism’, ‘Hollywood’, ‘A Cruise in Swedish Waters’, ‘Ten Years in Destroyers’, ‘Training of a Minister of the Church of Scotland’ and ‘Life of a London Taxi Driver’, which I particularly remember. I also recall Lord Merthyr speaking on ‘The House of Lords and Democracy’.
The camp magazines were professional and enabled us to amuse ourselves. Godfrey Bird and I took a leading part in producing them.
The camp cobbler’s shop was run by an Etonian, Harrovian and Wykehamist which prompted the following:
Though your boots were made by Maxwell
And your shoes designed by Lobb,
Aren’t you still a social climber
Aren’t you candidly a snob?
Are you suited – we’ll go further
Are you booted by Lord Merthyr?
With a coronet on every heel to mark the finished job?
Need we prove our gentle breeding,
Need we show our pedigrees?
Eton, Winchester and Harrow – aren’t they always guarantees:
One and all we pull together,
Put the ‘polish’ into leather,
Won’t you let us be your ‘sole’-mates, fit you with our family trees?
I wasn’t the Harrovian in question! Instead I had the job of repairing the roof of the huts and such other chores.
Lord Merthyr, who had nearly had me removed from the ship en route to Hong Kong, took a leading role in cobbling, using a last made out of a piece of steel and a log of wood. His aim was to create a pair of shoes for each prisoner. With this in mind he collected nails that had fallen out of shoes around the camp. He wanted everyone in the camp to have shoes in case there was an opportunity to escape. Usually we went barefoot.
Lord Merthyr became a confirmed pessimist and told his friends the war would last ten years. He kept spare tins of food unopened. “When asked why,” one POW recalls, “he replied, though in more dignified phraseology, that when the crunch came and we were starving, he would be laughing. He was extraordinarily unselfish, often undertaking the most unpopular jobs in the camp. He was later Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords.” One of his great objects in life was to fix a date for Easter.
Despite the magazines, few of us could divert our minds from food for long, as the following poem suggests:
A Prisoner’s Prayer
You know, Lord, how one must strive
At Shamshuipo to keep alive.
And how there isn’t much to eat –
Just rice and greens at Argyle Street.
It’s not much, God, when dinner comes
To find it’s just chrysanthemums.
Nor can I stick at any price
Those soft white maggots in the rice.
Nor yet those little, hard black weevils,
The lumps of grit and other evils.
I know, Lord, I shouldn’t grumble
And please don’t think that I’m not humble
When I most thankfully recall
My luck to be alive at all.
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