‘One of them clapped a towel over my eyes while another sprayed water over my body,’ he says. ‘The next thing a searing shock passed through my body as they applied an electrode to my navel and then passed another electrode over my breast, lips, throat, eyes and ears. The agony was terrible and I shrieked with pain.’
The torture went on for days. It included waterboarding in which he was tied down and a wet towel placed across his mouth and water poured over it until he believed he was drowning. When Pringle still refused to confess, the Japanese lost interest in him and moved on to more likely prospects. He was sent to the all-male Haiphong Road camp, which was reserved for Chinese speakers and those likely to be involved in subversion.
On 10 October – China’s National Day commemorating the Double Tenth Revolution in 1911 – the governments of Great Britain and the United States quietly informed the Nationalists in Chungking that they were relinquishing their extraterritorial rights. The unequal treaties that had caused the Chinese such grief expired with barely a whimper after exactly one hundred years.
The next month Brigadier George Walker, the Australian- born officer in charge of the Salvation Army in Shanghai, was separated from his wife Jesse and dragged off to Haiphong Road. The Japanese wanted Walker to broadcast messages to Allied nationals, urging them to reconsider their position on the war. A highly principled man with a strong Christian faith, he refused to co-operate with his captors. Even torture over a long period at Bridge House failed to break his spirit.
Unlike George Walker, John Holland was only too willing to collaborate with the enemy. On 25 July 1942, he wrote to his father in Perth from his home at 47 Rue de Roi Albert:
I have not the space to go into great detail as to why or wherefore, but I belong to an Australian Political Party here which is interested in endeavouring to promote a separate peace with Japan. I broadcast over XGRS, which is a German station, every evening, so if this gets through the Australian Censor you may listen in. Naturally this is a serious statement for me to make, but I am prepared to stand by the results of it, as we people in the Far East have better conception of what the score is than you folks at home. Results of the war to date should bear this out. I am able to hear the ABC Station in Melbourne quite frequently so am well aware of what is going on in Australia. I do hope you will not condemn me until we get the chance to explain things more clearly to each other, after all we are entitled to our own politics.
After broadcasting for the Germans for some months in Shanghai, Holland offered his services to the Japanese, who flew him to Tokyo and put him up in a hotel.12 On 6 December, he gave a talk on Tokyo radio on the eve of the first anniver- sary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘Roosevelt believed that Japan was exhausted through four years of war in China,’ he said.
He thus believed he could adopt a bullying attitude towards the Japanese envoys. It is obvious the USA did not want peace with Japan. While Japan was trying to avert war, the USA was preparing for it. The USA, through Roosevelt, precipitated a crisis which burst on December 8. America thus provoked a war which it has been unable to prosecute.
In the New Year, Roy Fernandez and his family were ordered to report to the ‘civil assembly centre’ at the Public School in Yu Yuen Road to be interned. They arrived at the gates with a Chinese wheelbarrow full of tinned food that Roy had carefully accumulated over the previous months. The internees included almost the entire hierarchy of the Shanghai Municipal Police, Fire Brigade and Municipal Council. The camp representative was Kenneth Bourne, the police commissioner.
Freda Howkins had been working as a secretary at the British Embassy in the Jardine Matheson Building on The Bund. On the day war broke out, she was visiting Hong Kong with an embassy official. Along with thousands of Allied foreigners, she was interned at Stanley Camp but was then shipped back to Shanghai where she was reunited with her parents. As her father worked for the power company, the family remained free until 1943. ‘As I’d already been interned in Hong Kong, I knew what to do,’ Freda says.
I said to mother, ‘We must take in a side of bacon.’ She looked at me with horror. I had managed to buy a bicycle and cycled to the market and came back with a side of bacon. It worked – it lasted quite a while. We filled a big trunk full of tinned food and a silver wedding cake for my parents because their anniversary was coming up in two months’ time.13
Just as Bill Donald was starting to believe he might survive in Santo Tomas, his old enemy T. V. Soong almost put a noose around his neck. Having been appointed China’s foreign minister, Soong was on a visit to London in August 1943 when he announced to the press that ‘the Australian W. H. Donald, a former personal adviser to General Chiang Kai-shek, is a prisoner of the Japanese in Manila’. The story was published around the world that Donald had been trapped on the Philippines en route to China when the Japanese attacked and was now their prisoner.14
The Kempeitai heard the story and sent a detachment to Santo Tomas to find him. Donald was repairing books in the library with Ansie Lee and was unaware of the danger as the commandant thumbed through the camp register. When he reached Donald’s entry, he shook his head. ‘No, there is no W. H. Donald of China here,’ he said. ‘We only have William Donald of Scotland and he’s 68 years of age.’ The Kempeitai had been led to believe that ‘Donald of China’ was a much younger man and left without asking to see him. Donald’s luck had held but soon afterwards he volunteered to transfer to a new internment camp being set up in an agricultural college at Los Banos on the southern tip of the Philippines’ largest lake, Laguna de Bay. It would be safer there and there might be more to eat . . .
Back in Shanghai, the Australian Independence Party collapsed after half a dozen meetings. Nevertheless, Alan Raymond and his cronies were allowed to stay in comfort at the Astor House Hotel and Broadway Mansions. Raymond said in his postwar statement, ‘Personally I was able to engage in tea trading and as a broker on the Chinese stock exchange owing to my fluent knowledge of Chinese and my many Chinese connections, and so support myself and my Mother whom I had been able to rescue from an internment camp in Hong Kong.’
Such privileges were unheard of among expatriates during the Japanese occupation. While Raymond claimed after the war that he had never been in Japanese pay, he was not interned and his own statement makes clear that he benefitted financially from his collaboration.
As it became known that Japan was losing the war, there were visible signs of stress among the Sons of Nippon. They began squabbling among themselves in front of the internees whose meagre rations were cut even further in an attempt to kill off as many witnesses to their vile regime as possible. For thousands of prisoners, it was now a daily battle for survival against hunger and disease. There were also signs of friction in the collaborators’ camp. Wynette McDonald physically attacked Alan Raymond after a furious argument. As a result, she was dismissed from the radio station and in April 1943 found herself interned at Lunghwa camp, which had just opened outside Shanghai.
Lunghwa was a township in itself, with large barrack rooms, a school, hospital, churches, clubs and even beautiful gardens. It was home to some 2000 internees, including Empire of the Sun author J. G. Ballard and his parents. ‘The majority worked hard with little food, doing menial and dirty jobs throughout the boiling hot summers and bitter cold wet winters,’ says one of the camp’s former internees, Irene Kilpatrick. ‘There were grumblers, but the British always grumble; it is their safety valve and keeps people calm.’15
The camp commandant was McDonald’s friend Tomohiko Hayashi. According to Ruby Taylor, her former employer at the Peter Pan School who was also an inmate, she became a constant visitor to the quarters of Japanese officers. McDonald, however, claimed after the war that she was anxious to escape and on New Year’s night 1944 dyed her skin with iodine and walnut oil to appear Chinese and slipped past the guards in the company of two young Chinese men. She said she was recaptured
and placed in solitary confinement. Other internees, however, claimed her ‘escape’ was a ruse organised by Hayashi and that she lived out the war in a furnished apartment where she entertained her Japanese friends and lovers.16
McDonald’s entry in the camp’s nominal roll – published in Greg Leck’s voluminous record of internment, Captives of Empire – contains the note ‘failed escape’ after her name and adds that she was transferred to Ward Road Jail in December 1943, an entry that could easily have been manufactured by Hayashi or one of her other Japanese friends among the guards.17
Meanwhile, John Powell had developed a form of gangrene in his feet due to starvation and neglect. Despite many attempts by the Swiss consul to locate him, the Japanese denied all knowledge of his whereabouts and then forced him to sign a statement saying he was ‘all right and satisfied with his treatment’. By the time he was given medical aid, it was too late. He was taken to hospital where both feet were amputated. The Japanese dropped the trumped-up charges against him and he was repatriated to the United States.
Carl and Shelley Mydans were also repatriated. In September 1943, they sailed in the Teia Maru to the neutral port of Goa in Portuguese India, where they were transferred to the Swedish American liner Gripsholm for the trip to New York. Carl went back to work as a war photographer for Life in the Battle for Europe and after VE day moved to the Pacific theatre.18
In Tokyo, the West Australian collaborator John Holland had fallen out with his Japanese masters. He had been writing a daily commentary on the Pacific War for a program called ‘Asia’s Views on the News’. When he was asked to do more work, he demanded higher pay. The Japanese turned him down. When he threatened to walk out, he was told he would be unable to earn a living if he did so. Regardless of the consequences, Holland quit his job and on 24 April 1943 he was arrested.19
Holland was secretly tried on charges of ‘attempting to disturb the morale of the Japanese people and disturbing the public peace and safety’. He spent 30 months behind bars during which he lost six stone in weight and developed beri beri through malnutrition. He was forced to sit cross-legged on the floor for 14 hours a day winding pieces of string into balls. When he grew tired, the guards threw water over him. He was made to stand for hours on end and at other times beaten unconscious.20 He had learned the hard way that Japanese militarists were hard taskmasters and even more ruthless enemies.
At dusk on 3 February 1945 Carl Mydans was with Company B of the United States 44th Tank Battalion when it liberated Santo Tomas camp after a firefight with Japanese guards. ‘Carl Mydans walked in the big door of the Main Building in his fatigues with his camera over his shoulder,’ one of the internees, Catherine ‘Kay’ Cotterman, recalls. ‘Betty Wellburn, who had been a good friend of his, called out, “My God, it’s Carl Mydans!” Everybody just cheered. When I saw Carl Mydans there, I knew it was all over.’21
Then at dawn on 23 February the liberating forces moved in on Los Banos camp when two columns of phosphorus smoke rose near the camp to guide American paratroopers to their drop zone. Shortly afterwards, two more columns of smoke rose from the beach of Laguna de Bay as markers for 59 Amtracs (amphibious tractors) that would carry the internees to safety. At the same time, other troops linked up with Filipino guerrillas and started killing Japanese sentries.
The Japanese commandant and most of his officers and men were doing their daily exercises when they were attacked from all sides. As they scrambled for their weapons, paratroopers hit the jump area and Amtracs thundered into camp from the lake. ‘I was sitting on the roadside waiting for rollcall when I saw the planes tip out the paratroopers,’ Donald recalled. ‘Then guerrillas began shooting and in no time the Japs were dead. We were loaded on to “alligators” which rode us to the lake and took us to the other side. We left all we had in the camp and it was burning before we got out.’
Jack Percival, who had been released from Santo Tomas earlier that month and was working as a war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, greeted Donald as he crossed Laguna de Bay in one of the Amtracs. He was shocked to see that Donald was now ‘a walking skeleton’, the result of malnutrition and lack of medical care for a chronic lung condition. ‘The first question he asked,’ Percival recalled, ‘was, “Where’s Madame Chiang?” I told him she was in New York.’ The internees were taken to Bilibid Prison in Manila for medical treatment and to start the process of building up their strength.
Donald was furious to discover that in mid-February an Associated Press reporter in Manila had filed a story that he had been released from one of Manila’s prison camps. ‘I escaped by good fortune and by virtue of the stupidity of the Japanese,’ he wrote to Muriel.
But at no time was the risk raised until American troops dropped on Los Banos camp from parachutes and rescued us. That was on February 23, though newspapermen had reported that I had escaped from Santo Tomas camp. The war correspondent who first reported this said that he was putting up a smoke screen. But had the Japanese seen this notice in the newspapers (especially Time) they had plenty of time to pick me up and dispose of me.22
Through sheer stamina and luck Donald had outlived the Empire of the Sun. He was also mightily relieved to discover that Ansie Lee had survived 37 months’ detention in Santo Tomas. She had fallen in love with another internee, Henry ‘Hank’ Sperry, an American banker, and was engaged to be married.
But it was in many ways a pyrrhic victory. Donald’s own life was in ruins. He had lost all his possessions and his health was broken. ‘This war has now relieved me of everything that I possessed,’ he said. ‘I ought to get to China to try to rescue something.’
There was no chance of that, so Donald left Manila in the Holland America Line’s SS Noordam bound for San Francisco where he was reunited with his daughter, Muriel, who was living in California. His estranged wife, Mary, had worked as a nurse but had fallen ill and Muriel supported her on her wages as a newscaster on a TV and radio station. Donald had no wish to see his wife. ‘Your mother seems to think I have a lot of wealth,’ he told Muriel. ‘I came out of the camp without anything, either clothes or coin, and unless the house stands in Peking I have lost everything in China.’
He stayed with his friend H. Scott Martin at 2907 College Avenue, Berkeley, the university suburb across San Francisco Bay. He told reporters that Stalin would declare war on Japan as soon as he had ‘tied up the knots in Europe’. He had no plans ‘except to go to New York and visit Madame Chiang’.23 Mayling had been in the United States so long there was talk of a rift between her and the Generalissimo. ‘There is much speculation as to whether Donald will be able to reconcile the Chiangs,’ Creighton Burns wrote in The Argus.24
By coincidence, the largest gathering of foreign ministers in history was meeting in San Francisco to draft the World Organisation Charter of the United Nations. Publicly, Australia’s representatives, Foreign Minister Dr Bert Evatt and Deputy Prime Minister Frank Forde, were in accord that the new body should concentrate on economic and social issues rather than global peacekeeping. Privately, Evatt and Forde were at daggers drawn over who was in charge of the delegation. Someone spread the story that Forde had rung room service at his hotel and said, ‘This is the Honourable Francis Michael Forde speaking, Deputy Prime Minister of the Australian Government and Leader of the Australian Delegation to the Conference of the United Nations. Send me up a hamburger.’25
‘I have seen the Australian delegates, and they want me to go back to Australia,’ Donald wrote to Muriel. ‘“Come and be the Far Eastern Adviser” to the Government, they say. And I say, “What do I know of the Far East that you people do not know, since you turned down all my advice prior to the war?” They retort, “That was another government.” It was.’26
Donald was more concerned about having his teeth fixed before he set off across country on 20 June in the ‘City of California’ express for New York via Chicago. ‘I am still unable to chew and am in p
ain and uncomfortable,’ he told Muriel.
On the 19th he wrote to Muriel again. ‘I have said goodbye to most of the conference people whom I know and today called and said hail and farewell to the Premier of New Zealand, Mr Peter Fraser. Everyone seemed glad to see me alive and well and one lady presented me with a typewriter. She had heard my Baby Hermes had been burned in camp and insisted on giving me another one.’
Just before the train left on 20 June a dentist filed down Donald’s upstanding molars ‘without mercy’, and he was able to chew food properly for the first time in years.
Donald reached New York in early July. In a prophetic interview with David McNicoll of The Argus, he said the Japanese people would continue fighting as long as their emperor told them they were invincible. ‘The Japanese have thrown off the veil of civilisation and have returned to the Samurai era,’ he said. ‘We must kill them off to beat them. They will not surrender.’ He said he doubted that bombing would bring them to their knees, adding, ‘The final battles against the Japanese will be fought in Manchuria.’27
Donald was reunited with Mayling at her Manhattan hotel. They hadn’t seen each other for five years and it was an emotional moment. Mayling’s standing in the world had risen to great heights with the help of Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, but had then fallen dramatically after she made a number of political gaffes. No one knows for sure what transpired between them, although Donald later indicated she wished him to resume his former role at her side. ‘Madame Chiang expects me to return to China, so does her brother T. V.,’ he wrote to Lieutenant Bob Tierney of the United States Army who had escorted him across the Pacific. ‘I may or may not go there. Though I am now recovering my strength I still feel against returning and have a lurking wish to go back to New Zealand.’28
As well as spending a couple of weeks in New York, Donald stayed with Harold Hochschild at his country home, ‘Eagle Nest’, at Blue Water Lake in the Adirondacks, and with a Chinese friend, K. C. Li, on Long Island. To his regret, he never found time to see Radio City Music Hall, the great entertainment palace in the Rockefeller Center.
Shanghai Fury Page 42