Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  The Japanese had landed on east coast beaches in southern Thailand and northern Malaya, and after initially fierce resistance by mainly Indian troops and the airforces of Britain and Australia, they had begun to advance steadily down the Malay Peninsula. Although British and Imperial forces outnumbered the Japanese by more than two to one, the British lost air superiority over the battlefields because their aircraft types were largely obsolescent, and they lacked anything effective to stop tanks. Consequently, the Japanese advance was rapid, involving them bypassing and flanking each British attempt to block them, and resulting in countless British units being cut off and surrounded, or dispersed into the jungle and rubber plantations. Most dangerous of all was a growing sense that the Japanese were unstoppable, which deeply affected Allied morale. The Japanese assault, under the overall command of Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, was to capture Singapore and its vital naval base.

  In Singapore, Robert Brooks, who was six and a half years old in February 1942, found himself swept up in the fighting as the Japanese invaded the island. On 12 February, Brooks, along with his parents and two aunts had abandoned their comfortable home on Bukit Timah Road and moved into the relative safety of Outram Road Jail. Two days later and the Japanese were almost inside the city centre. ‘The noise, the dust, the shooting, the smells were quite foreign to a young mind,’ he recalled. ‘Then the equatorial sky off west Singapore became dark, sinister and smoke-laden as the defending forces had decided to torch the oil storage depots at Pasir Panjang Docks to prevent them falling into Japanese hands.’18 What Brooks was witnessing was the final act of the Allied defence of Singapore. A monumentally mismanaged British effort to hold Singapore was almost at an end, and for children like Brooks, their options were fast narrowing as the Japanese onslaught began to batter its way through the ring of exhausted British, Indian, Australian and Malay battalions protecting the city. For many families, the docks at Keppel Harbour represented their last avenue of escape.

  2

  Evacuation

  At last we sailed and I waved and waved to my father until he became a dot on the horizon. I never saw him again for three and a half years.

  Catherine Munnoch

  Child evacuee, Singapore, 1942

  In Singapore the evacuations gained a new urgency by early February 1942, when it became clear that the Japanese advance on Singapore City was virtually unstoppable. The colony was going to fall to the Japanese – the only question that remained was when? The Allied troops, under the overall command of Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, doggedly held on to a rapidly thinning perimeter around the city, but it was only a matter of time before Japanese tanks breached the defences and were followed by hordes of infantry into the heart of Britain’s most significant colony east of India. The British and their allies still outnumbered the Japanese by two to one, but the Japanese had gained and retained air superiority over Singapore as the RAF had been unable to compete with the latest Japanese fighters (like the renowned Mitsubishi Zero), and had been withdrawn to airfields in Java and Sumatra. The Japanese had tanks; the British had none, and hardly any weapons capable of stopping them. The Allied soldiers continued to fight hard, but they were running out of options and with the air of defeatism and a terrible, debilitating hopelessness permeating the British high command in their bunker at Fort Canning, a shameful surrender was already being seriously considered – regardless of Churchill’s exhortations to fight on to the last man and the last bullet.

  Upwards of one million Chinese, Malay, Indian, British and Australian civilians had crowded into the remaining areas of Singapore City that were still under Allied control, and they were suffering terribly from the incessant Japanese aerial bombing, food shortages, lack of proper medical facilities and the intermittent artillery fire. The docks at Keppel Harbour were crowded with fleeing civilians and demoralized soldiers from shattered units, including inevitably many hundreds of deserters, all fighting to get aboard the remaining ships sitting alongside the quay, barely controlled by irate military policemen. Looting and lawlessness had broken out across the city as the police force had virtually ceased to function and everyone knew the Commonwealth forces would not be able hold out for many more days against the tightening Japanese pressure.

  For all Churchill’s belligerent prose, most of the defenders of Singapore were determined to live, especially the civilians trying to board the last handful of evacuation ships. Heartrending scenes were played out on the burning docks, as men placed their wives and children on the ships and then returned to the fighting. Many of the children would not see their fathers again for over three years; in some cases it would be the last time. Catherine Munnoch’s father, an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander, had been fighting on Singapore’s defence perimeter. He had been wounded and sent to the Alexandra Hospital, the main British Army medical facility in Singapore, but discharged himself to make sure that his wife and family got safely aboard an evacuation ship before the end came. ‘We left the house unlocked, packed a small wooden box with items of clothing (my mother panicked and packed garden party frocks, hats, evening dresses – none of which were ever used again!)’ recalled Munnoch.1

  The journey to the docks was hellish. Japanese aircraft constantly milled about overhead, bombing and strafing any large group of people that the pilots spotted moving around in the open. In scenes reminiscent of the Stuka attacks made on columns of fleeing refugees in France in 1940, Japanese aircraft were successfully used to terrorize non-combatants and block the roads, sowing confusion and delay in the enemy rear. As the planes dived down to attack, the hundreds of retreating troops and civilians were forced to take cover in open sewers, nicknamed ‘Singapore ditches’, that ran beside the roads. Each time the danger passed everyone would emerge, soaked and stinking, to resume their harrowing journey towards the port. Even with the signposts taken down the way to the port was clearly marked by the tall columns of black smoke that reached hundreds of feet into the air and by the detonation of bombs in the distance. Olga Henderson, the ten-year-old daughter of a British builder working in Singapore, recalled that the ditches were awash with human blood when she and her mother had jumped in to take cover.

  Catherine Munnoch arrived at the docks early in the morning, but heavy Japanese bombing meant that their ship was unable to leave until about 2 pm. ‘The Japs bombed the ship in front and behind. Every time they flew over dropping bombs we would all go below,’ recalled Munnoch. ‘My father, however, stayed put on the dockside waiting for us to leave. He was very weak but remained standing all the time we were on the deck.’2 The ships slowly pulled away from the quayside and the families were parted, wives not knowing if they would see their husbands again, and husbands fearful that their wives and children might not even make it out of the harbour alive as the relentless aerial assault continued. ‘At last we sailed and I waved and waved to him,’ recalled Munnoch of her father, ‘until he became a dot on the horizon. I never saw him again for three and a half years.’3 Munnoch and her family eventually arrived safely in Fremantle, Australia, after a perilous journey during which their ship risked being captured or sunk by Japanese aircraft, or by the warships that moved quickly to try to block the escape routes south and southeast towards the Netherlands East Indies and Australia. Munnoch was among the lucky ones, for huge numbers of evacuation transports were sunk, and many hundreds of women and children were drowned, or were washed ashore on tropical islands and imprisoned by the Japanese in appalling circumstances.

  There were few places available on the evacuation ships for couples in mixed-race marriages, or for their children. The wives were local women, either Chinese or Malay, and most did not want to leave their extended families in Malaya and Singapore. The husbands were very often police officers, prison guards, or in other lower status positions filled by working class men from Britain, who had come out East before the war in search of better lives. Many were veterans of the First World War, lured to the Far East by new uniformed care
ers as the functionaries of Empire, where they would receive a better salary and living conditions than in Britain – nor would they be at the bottom of the social ladder, for their skin colour meant that they became supervisors of native labour rather than labour themselves. The products of unions between Western men and Asian women were known as Eurasians, and some families went back several generations and were well-established in the Far East. The story of Eurasian people in the War has been overlooked in many accounts of the conflict, but many of their experiences were as painful as those of white colonists. They were individuals who were stuck quite literally between East and West, with loyalties in both hemispheres and lives shared between or on the margins of disparate cultures. One such was British Eurasian Eileen Harris, who was eleven years old when General Percival surrendered Singapore on 15 February 1942. Her father Tom was British, a prison warder at Outram Road Jail, a place later notorious as a Japanese torture centre and prison camp run by the Kempeitai military police during the occupation. Her mother Clara was Malay. Her father faced internment as an enemy alien, but he tried to prevent his wife and mixed-race children from suffering the same terrible fate. ‘Shortly before the Japanese arrived in our house, my father told my mother to leave the house and take the children and pretend to be local people.’ Harris’s mother, who was pregnant and expecting her eighth child at the time, did as her husband suggested, ‘and in the beginning we were mostly ignored for we had inherited our mother’s dark eyes and black hair and easily passed as Singaporeans.’4 But their liberty was to be cruelly cut short when poverty and desperation forced them to return to their former house searching for possessions and food. The price was denunciation by other locals and swift arrest by the Kempeitai and a long imprisonment alongside the white settlers.

  In many ways, those women and children who were swept up by the advancing Japanese and interned were better off than those who had tried to escape the net that had fallen over Singapore in early February 1942. The evacuation of British women and children was begun too late by the generals; consequently families like the Munnochs had to run the gauntlet of fire and death in order to reach the last few ships in Keppel Harbour. The figures make sobering reading. In the last few days before General Percival capitulated, forty-four evacuation ships of many sizes and types cast off from the colony heading south to the Netherlands East Indies, and then southeast to Australia. All of these vessels were overloaded with civilians, including thousands of women and children, government employees, the elderly, and the administrators of empire, as well as large numbers of military deserters, many of them armed. The ships formed a loose, and very long convoy. Out of the forty-four vessels, only four made it to safety. The Japanese sank or captured all of the rest, and in the process a horrible bloodbath occurred in the seas south of Singapore that took the lives of hundreds of innocent children. The experiences of the Boswell family are one example of the utter turmoil and distress when modern warfare is made upon civilians.

  Drina Boswell was sixteen when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Her father managed a rubber processing plant in the Malay capital, Kuala Lumpur. By January 1942, Japanese forces were fast approaching the city, and Boswell’s father was ordered to set fire to the processing plant in order to prevent its use by the Japanese; after completing this task he evacuated his wife and children south to Singapore. By 10 February the Boswell family was to be found sheltering from the incessant bombardment of Singapore City in a rat-infested cellar close to the harbour, as they desperately waited for places on one of the evacuation ships. In the event, places were found for them, but Boswell’s father was separated from his family and put aboard the Mata Hari, while Drina Boswell, her mother, three sisters, younger brother and three half-brothers, went aboard HMS Giang Bee.5

  The Giang Bee was a Chinese-owned 1,646-ton coastal steamer that had been built in Rotterdam in 1908, and had been requisitioned by the British in 1941 for use as a patrol vessel. The Malay crew had been put ashore and replaced by a small contingent of personnel from the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, later assisted by some male civilian evacuees. Under the command of Captain Lancaster, the Giang Bee sailed at 10.00 pm on 12 February, loaded down with civilians. Lancaster had initially refused to take women and children aboard the vessel, believing that they would be exposed to unnecessary dangers because the ship was a military vessel. But such was the shortage of available craft that he was forced to accept 300 refugees. As well as a large contingent of women and children, including Eurasians, the passengers included YWCA personnel from Malaya and Singapore, jockeys and trainers from the Singapore Turf Club and other racing venues, employees of the Ministry of Information and Malayan Broadcasting Corporation, journalists, solicitors, rubber planters and miners.

  As the ship headed out into the open sea under the cover of darkness, Captain Lancaster knew that the odds were not stacked in his favour. Japanese warships were cutting across the British line of retreat through the Banka Strait to the Netherlands East Indies and Australia, and they were sinking any vessel that they encountered. From the air, Japanese war planes dive-bombed or strafed British vessels with impunity, the surviving planes of the RAF having long been evacuated to safer airfields on Sumatra (where they would nevertheless all be destroyed during the next Japanese amphibious invasion). When the sun rose like a burning ball the next morning, the Giang Bee was 170 miles south of Singapore, and steaming through the Banka Strait en route for Sumatra. It was not long before dots appeared in the sky in the far distance, slowly resolving themselves into Japanese aircraft. The enemy aircraft repeatedly attacked the vessel, causing some damage, but the Giang Bee was still seaworthy and piling on the coal in an attempt to outrun the Japanese blockade. Suddenly, lookouts reported an ominous sight on the horizon – two Japanese destroyers. For the women and children huddled below, already terrified out of their wits by the incessant air attacks, this was a grim new development. Most expected the worst.

  The two destroyers advanced at high speed towards the Giang Bee, one signalling incomprehensible Morse code, until both vessels stopped half a mile away, their guns pointing ominously towards the helpless evacuation ship. Lancaster reacted by ordering the White Ensign lowered, and the women and children up to the deck so that the Japanese could see that the Giang Bee was not a threat, or a viable military target. A launch set out from one of the destroyers, but when the small boat had almost reached the Giang Bee, an RAF or Dutch bomber suddenly roared overhead and began circling the area. The Japanese destroyers both opened fire with their anti-aircraft guns, and the bomber flew off, chased by black puffs as flak shells studded the sky. The Japanese launch retreated back to its mother ship, and an ominous waiting period ensued.

  As darkness fell the Japanese switched on powerful searchlights, trained on the Giang Bee. Suddenly, at 7.30 pm the Japanese ordered Lancaster and his passengers to abandon the Giang Bee. The vessel had four lifeboats, each with a maximum capacity of thirty-two people. Lancaster crammed fifty women and children into each. The men were left to fend for themselves, and many passengers remained behind on the vessel, some staying with wounded or sick relatives or friends. The evacuation of the ship was a disaster. The aerial attacks had left two of the lifeboats damaged. When one of them was being lowered, a rope parted company with the davits and the women and children aboard were pitched into the dark sea. ‘I shall never forget that as long as I live,’ recalled survivor J.V. Miller. ‘The sound of little children calling out for their mothers will be forever in my ears, it was simply heartrending.’6 A second lifeboat was full of holes from bomb fragments, and when it was launched full of passengers it simply sank, leaving the women and children thrashing around in the ocean, a strong tidal current sweeping them behind the stern of the Giang Bee. ‘When I got into our lifeboat the screams for help were appalling,’ recalled another survivor of the sinking of the Giang Bee, Gordon Preis. ‘Mostly women’s voices – obviously from the damaged lifeboats and now struggling in the sea.’ Nothing could be do
ne for the unfortunates already in the sea, and nearly all of them drowned. The Japanese ships stood by and did not attempt to help, even when Captain Lancaster sent messages to them asking for assistance. The destroyers pulled further off when a dinghy from the Giang Bee containing ship’s officers was rowed towards them.

  At 9.30 pm, while there were still over 100 people aboard the Giang Bee, the Japanese suddenly opened fire, slamming six armour-piercing shells into the steamer. A fire broke out aboard. ‘Terrified figures could be seen jumping from the target’s deck, soon ablaze from end to end,’7 recalled a witness. The Giang Bee sank shortly afterwards, killing many more refugees. Drina Boswell, her mother, little brother and two of her sisters had made it into one of the two lifeboats that were seaworthy. It contained fifty-six people, and only one small barrel of drinking water that was strictly rationed. Drina and some of the others took to drinking seawater in a futile effort to quench their terrible thirst, but this only made them thirstier, and gave them mouth ulcers. The small children in the lifeboat cried incessantly, as they could not understand why they could not drink. Throughout the two days that Drina Boswell and her family were adrift in the lifeboat, Japanese aircraft constantly prowled the skies above and often dived down to pass over the heads of the terrified occupants of the open boat, who fully expected to be machine-gunned in the water.8 Boswell’s mother was also tortured by uncertainty over the fate of one of her daughters and three of her sons – they had sadly all perished in the sinking.