Finding Sanity

by Greg de Moore

  The name Changi referred to a large tract of land, a peninsula poking out from the eastern edge of Singapore Island. Its natural features were unprepossessing—low wooded sandy hills, marshes and mangrove swamp. Bounded by the ocean on three sides, it was the ideal location for a prison: no escape was possible via the sea and the fourth and final side was fenced with wire. Even this was somewhat tokenistic. If a desperate soldier made the decision to escape there was frankly nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. A white man was going nowhere in Southeast Asia.

  After the war, Dr Michael Woodruff, a Changi POW, wrote:

  To keep us in place the Japanese initially drew a line on the map, and told us that any prisoner of war (POW) caught west of the line would be beheaded or shot; at the same time they offered a reward of five Japanese dollars to the locals for every prisoner they captured. This proved remarkably effective.

  Within days over 50,000 men straggled into this prison ringed by water and wire. As they were leaving Singapore city and along the way, the soldiers opportunistically grabbed anything they thought might be of value during their imprisonment. They stuffed medicine into backpacks and loaded heavier equipment on to trucks; anything that could be pilfered or packed was brought along. Containers of Marmite and Vegemite—rich sources of B complex vitamins—were stashed into containers and hauled in. Knickknacks and entertainments of all kinds were conveyed: musical instruments, gramophone records, armfuls of books as well, tools of every description; anything in those frantic hours that was thought to be of value was nabbed, snatched or packed and taken.

  Before the war, parts of Changi had been a staging point for British troops. So there were many relatively modern barrack buildings available for the troops to move into.

  Bill Flowers, a private with the 2/9th Field Ambulance, described the location:

  It was a British secondment area where the British had quartered their soldiers before the war. There were many ground, first and second storey buildings . . . It was ideal for the huge number of prisoners the Japanese had taken in Singapore. Of course, when the British surrendered there were almost 40,000 British, almost 20,000 Australians . . . there was this huge number. The Japanese wondered . . . what do we do with these people? . . . Now, we settled into these buildings.

  The Japanese, as puzzled as everyone else as to what might happen next, allowed significant autonomy within the prison camp. As a result, the prisoners were allowed to run their own show to a large extent.

  Almost immediately, tribal instinct took over, and the different nationalities—primarily British, Australian and Dutch—adopted separate areas, which they fenced and policed at the request of the Japanese. Bill Flowers explained: ‘In Changi, the different nationalities tended to stay together. You made mates with some UK, even the Dutch blokes. But each area was relatively self-contained.’ The Australians largely took up a section called Selarang Barracks; the British bunked down at Roberts Barracks. The barracks were close to one another but the Australians and British largely kept to themselves although cooperation did take place.

  There were six ring-locked areas in total. The one next to Roberts Barracks was known as Roberts Hospital. It too was divided up into a British wing of 2000 beds and an Australian wing catering for 1000 patients. In general, AIF patients were treated by Australian doctors in Australian wards, and meticulous medical records were kept. The latter was a key point of difference, as the British were lax in medical record-keeping.

  The pulse of Changi soon settled into a slow rhythm, the men weighed down by heat and hunger. John remembered that it took him about a week ‘to recover from sheer exhaustion’. Most days were drippy sorts of days; and every afternoon the tropical rains fell. At 3 pm, just like a mid-afternoon cocktail at Raffles, the rain—on schedule—came down. So intense was the humidity that even when it stopped raining the wetness never entirely went away, leaving John and his men feeling sticky and unwashed. At night, when all was quiet, the constant tap of water coming from somewhere ticked the night away.

  This strange world was now John’s home. Guards—some Korean, some Indian, some Japanese—all patrolled, but were sometimes not seen for days on end. In response a kind of laissez-faire market economy took root; some of the men took their chances by trading with the local population, bartering and bidding for what they could.

  It was a world where men survived on their wits and scavenged their way through each day; inevitably pockets of ill-discipline flourished in darker corners. Many of the POWs entered Changi feeling betrayed by the ineptitude of their commanders and the uncertainty of the future vanquished the spirit of some. It was not long before dysphoria settled hard over the camp. As spirits sagged, a handful of soldiers turned to looting and pilfering; decency, along with truth, was an early casualty of war. The early dissolute and undisciplined behaviour of some troops needed to be curbed and was curbed. Discipline and routine among the Australian troops would be the long-term cornerstone of their survival. John later wrote that the most important psychiatric lesson he learned from Changi was ‘the life saving value of high morale. As POW[s] we were internally superbly organized and disciplined with a continuation of the tough military hierarchical structure that we were used to . . . It seemed ludicrous at the time, all this spit and polish and saluting among sick and starving men, but it was life saving.’

  John settled into a medical routine, spending a good deal of time working in the hospital, looking after the men in his company. At times relations between the Australian and British hospital staff were tense. David Elder, a chief clerk with the Australians, penned these bitter and heartfelt lines many years afterwards: ‘There was a very big difference between attitudes of the English and Australians regarding medical concerns. No Australian died without someone easing his passing. The British weren’t like that.’

  Difficulties between the two sectors in the hospital mattered more than was anticipated because, at its core, Changi was all about the care of wounded and sick men. All of a sudden, medical officers like John Cade were the most important men in the POW camp. It was the senior medical men, rather than the heads of fighting forces, who forwarded reports to the Japanese about inadequacies in food rations, drinking water, space for latrines, washing facilities and measures to control mosquito and fly breeding. By convincing the Japanese inspection teams that the camp would be decimated by disease without prompt action, senior doctors won major concessions.

  We have snippets of memories of John from the men of the 2/9th Field Ambulance. All point to a quiet man, universally liked and with the gift of discretion; compassionate and stern and fair-minded in just the right mix. Decency was the fulcrum around which John based his POW life.

  Survival in Changi revolved around food. Hunger eclipsed all else. Food is what everyone thought about, dreamt about. John, like everyone else, was preoccupied with ‘the rations’: ‘We were relentlessly starved throughout and nutritional diseases . . . were universal. The food had to be rigorously rationed—weevilly rice, palm oil and stinking fish.’ At times, in a semi-delirium, he fantasised about food, bountiful and ripe, and a future where he might sit at the table of ‘luscious ravenous feasts’.

  Rice was the universal food; disgust the universal response. In the early days of the systematic malnutrition foisted upon them by the Japanese, and before the Australian cooks knew how to cook and embellish it, rice was a gluggy mass plonked upon each POW’s plate. George Aspinall’s secretive series of photos captures one image of the men eating, sitting on their haunches, backs against a wall like a line of roosting pigeons, scooping the soggy rice from their plates into their mouths.

  Unsurprisingly, vitamin deficiencies became apparent in the men from the very start. John suffered a debilitating ‘attack of Vitamin A deficiency’ in the first three months of captivity and developed night blindness. Desperate for vitamin-rich food, as the shadows lengthened he slunk off into the twilight and traded his US Cyma wristwatch with local residents for a bag of raw peanuts and a
nything else that might supplement his diet. It was enough; his sight returned to normal.

  All about, men fell sick with malaria, with diarrhoea, and with dysentery, John included. Vitamin B deficiencies were a scourge—the illnesses of beri-beri and pellagra prominent. Young men, without warning, collapsed and perished. A scratch in a weakened body unable to heal might lead to repulsive and deformed limbs, misshapen by spreading tropical ulcers. The hospital wards bulged. Even there, anything that could bite the men did so: bed bugs infested bunks at night, and scabies of the scrotum and penis led to uncontrollable scratching.

  Nutrient deficiencies cut down even the strongest of the youths about John. And when brittle-boned boys dropped dead before his eyes, he slit them open at autopsy, quickly, before they putrefied under a tropical sun. It was a singular memory that revolted him in later life—not for the fact that he cut them open, because as a doctor this was expected of him, but because he was slicing into the bodies of severely malnourished boys. John Cade was not squeamish, but opening these young men up nearly broke him: ‘All you found were great big fat livers and intestines that looked like sodden tissue paper.’ John horrified himself when—mid-autopsy—he cracked a joke about lamb’s fry for breakfast. Repulsed by his own insensitive words, he recoiled immediately. But it, nonetheless, tells us that in this cruel prison camp, even this most even-tempered of men could fantasise in the most twisted of ways.

  Although John was never posted as a psychiatrist, this being ‘incidental to my general . . . medical responsibilities’, within six months of captivity he was assigned to take ‘care of the small 10–12 bed psychiatric ward in Changi plus the occasional consultation over the odd psychiatric case’ in the general wards. As a result of this appointment, he soon attracted the affectionate moniker of the ‘mad major’. The so-called Mental Ward that John ran was one of the few joint Australian–British wards in the hospital. That he was able to earn the respect of both forces, given the tensions between them, says a great deal about John’s ability and diplomacy, especially given the suspicion psychiatry still attracted from some quarters. Psychiatrists in war, an unimpressed Winston Churchill suggested, could do the most damage of all to the morale of the fighting man:

  it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen, who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry. The tightest hand should be kept over them and they should not be allowed to quarter themselves upon the Fighting services at the public expense. There are, no doubt, easily recognisable cases which may benefit from treatment of this kind, but it is very wrong to disturb large numbers of healthy, normal men and women by asking the kind of odd questions in which the psychiatrists specialise. There are quite enough hangers-on and camp followers already.

  Churchill’s view of psychiatry was hardly sophisticated, even if he had a rough-edged point to make. It is unlikely that John ever read Churchill’s critique; he might have taken offence but it is unlikely. Because, like Churchill, John thought some psychiatry was an abominable mix of fanciful theories and little practical value. If he had ever met someone like John Cade, Churchill might have had cause to shift his hefty frame and view psychiatry from a more generous perspective.

  The ‘mental cases’, as the psychiatrically unwell were unceremoniously dubbed, were first accommodated in a room on the ground floor of the Roberts Hospital. Matters stepped up when a British orderly, Private Morrison, ‘was savagely attacked by a patient with a hatchet’ and gravely injured, after which ‘the Mental Cases were removed to a more commodious room’ some distance away from the main body of patients. Presumably this increased everyone else’s peace of mind, but it is a separation of care which continues to bedevil the treatment of the mentally ill to this day. A Private Nicholson who worked on the ‘mental ward’ remained wary:

  Eight at night to eight in the morning, twelve hour shifts. You sort of had to sit and face the ward . . . and the row of beds each . . . containing patients of varying degrees of insanity or mental condition . . . You had to be very careful of what you stored; what could represent a weapon of some sort because they could use anything.

  From the start there were men who were depressed and despondent. Suicide was reported to be rare, but John did note ‘a few suicides of despair’ early in captivity.

  Occasionally a psychiatrically ill soldier might resist all efforts to be fed. Commanded by an unseen hand, he kept his mouth sealed and resisted any attempt to open it. Starvation, already at every soldier’s door, was welcomed by these mentally damaged men—the depressed and the deluded—as a means to death.

  Private Nicholson remembered lengthy attempts to get some of these soldiers to eat. The rigidly closed mouths of some had eventually to be prised open with a rough-hewn tool so they could be force-fed. And so, like a crowbar wedging open a locked window, the mouths of the mentally ill were jemmied open just enough for life-sustaining food to pour in.

  Surrounded by the invalids of war—whether in the ‘Mental Ward’ or elsewhere—John’s undeviating focus was on all the men in his care. He tended his fellow soldiers, coaxing life into broken bodies and sanity into mad minds. The truth is that this was a virtuoso performance by John and the other men who nursed and doctored these demoralised and disfigured men, done without any hint of applause. As malnourished soldiers in the general hospital piled up in their hundreds, John ploughed on. Ultimately, these men depended upon the quality of their medical care more than anything else in Changi. And sometimes it was just a thimbleful of care a man needed—a look or a touch—to hold on and live.

  8

  Changi was a world of constant tedium and occasional brutality. Bill Schmitt, an auctioneer in Adelaide before the war, tells of one such occasion when, for some unknown reason, he incurred the wrath of a Japanese guard:

  Jap brutality . . . yeah, of course, they treated me bloody badly. Knocked me unconscious. I’d had malaria and then a bout of dysentery, one or the other, I can’t remember which come first and I hadn’t been out to work for a month or six weeks. Then I had to go to make up the numbers . . . I was shovelling the bloody sand and this Jap wasn’t happy . . . I was so bloody weak and he grabbed me shoulder . . . and I don’t know if I laughed at him or what but I did something that upset him and he bashed me. The next thing I know . . . I think he broke some ribs. He made a hell of a mess. Mouth and lips. Hit me with his fists 3 or 4 times and broke my nose.

  This paroxysm of sadistic fury was not a commonplace act according to many POWs. For the most part, the men were left on their own by the guards. But not always.

  In late August of 1942, the Japanese requested that all POWs sign a declaration not to attempt to escape from Changi. The Allied soldiers, in unison, refused to sign. As punishment, nearly 16,000 of them were ordered to mass in Selarang Square; they would be made to suffer beneath the Singapore sun until, spirits snapped, they signed the document.

  A quota of the wounded and sick from the nearby Roberts Hospital also mustered in the square. Some patients were wheeled there on trolleys, some limped; others were carried. Many still bore injuries from bomb blasts or bullets; there were amputees with freshly hewn limbs recovering from surgery. Many were suffering from dysentery, malaria and vitamin deficiencies. This was absurdly cruel. It was not as if the prisoners were going anywhere. This was an act to visibly humiliate and crush the prisoners’ spirit as much as any attempt to thwart escape from Changi.

  As their circumstances grew more precarious, the thousands of men in the square neared breaking point. Still they refused to sign. On the third day, when the POWs apparent unpardonable act of refusal to sign persisted, the Japanese raised the stakes.

  At about 4 pm, four men were summarily executed by firing squad on nearby Changi Beach. All four men—two Australians and two Englishmen—had previously tried to escape.

  When news filtered back to the men in the square, it rippled in all directions like a whispered secret passe
d around a classroom. It was evident to everyone that there was little use in holding out. The miserable documents were signed by the troops, even though they held no weight—moral or material. For some time the stunned soldiers loitered a little before drifting to their barracks. The latrines and the refuse of 16,000 men were buried; soon all was normal again. To look at the tidied-up square several days later one would think nothing ever happened; certainly nothing criminally inhuman.

  Somewhere in the midst of this barbaric farce John Cade was still, presumably, tending his patients. We know that when John reflected on this deeply repugnant moment, his hatred of the Japanese burned and left him ‘under no illusions as to what our hosts were or were not capable of’.

  When John looked at his worldly belongings they didn’t amount to much. Years after the war he glowed with pride remembering how he’d kept his three precious razor blades sharp for years ‘with the help of an old Marmite jar’. Tobacco, a rare pleasure for John, was hard to come by in Changi. The troops, inventive and entrepreneurial, concocted some smelly varieties known as ‘Sikh’s beard’ and ‘Granny’s snatch’. John often scanned the ground for half-smoked cigarette butts, collecting them in the hollow of his cupped hands before mashing the titbits into a single smokeable fag. Jean disapproved of smoking, especially by pregnant women and by anyone inside a house, but in post-war years she took great pleasure in relaying some of John’s POW stories. ‘He was a big smoker, most of his life. He told me how they started tearing up and using Shakespeare and then the Bible.’ John always knew when Red Cross parcels arrived in Changi: he saw the butts of American cigarette brands littered around the camp, and he knew the Japanese had ransacked and smoked the Red Cross packets for themselves.