by Mark Felton
The close proximity of male and female children and teenagers led to some of the older children experimenting with sexual activity. Children spied on adult couples, and, as Hilary Hamson recalled at Stanley, boys and girls ‘investigated all the nice parts of each others’ bodies.’ They also frequently defied their parents, and even the Japanese guards, by climbing out on the roofs of their barracks at night to talk into the early hours. ‘It was these sorts of things that we would never, never have done in normal life,’ said Hamson.18
American citizens suffered equally cruel imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese, when the Philippines finally capitulated after the epic battles of Bataan and Corregidor Island. Many of the Allied civilians captured at the fall of the Philippines in spring 1942 were herded into the campus of the University of Santo Tomas, located on the outskirts of the capital, Manila. It was a venerable institution, established by the Spanish in 1611. About 4,000 American, British and other Allied men, women and children, along with a few Germans and Italians, were imprisoned in the makeshift internment camp, initially under Japanese Consular Service officials rather than the military. The inmates represented all of pre-war white society in the Philippines, and most of the internees were middle-class professionals or foreign expert workers who had been wrenched from well-paid pre-war jobs and cast into the camp.
[The internees] included bank presidents, missionaries, teachers, company vice presidents and their wives, teenagers from private schools, veterans from the Spanish-American War, newspaper editors and reporters, doctors, military nurses, housewives, children, musicians, writers, prostitutes, engineers, chemists, plumbers, electricians, administrators, society belles and Rotarians, college professors, clergymen, nuns and priests, and even professional entertainers.19
The diversity of the internees’ working backgrounds at Santo Tomas was equalled at Baguio Camp, another major internment centre established in the Philippines. In January 1945, it was noted that there were among the prisoners four engineers, eight doctors, ten nurses, thirteen teachers, forty-three miners and at least one geologist, chemist, pharmacist, dentist, translator, and journalist.20
Jacqueline Honnor was a British child internee in Santo Tomas. The reason why so many British ended up incarcerated there was because of the government evacuation scheme in Hong Kong that had seen hundreds of women and children needlessly shipped to Manila before the Japanese invasion. Two ships, the SS Anhui and the SS Harrison had left Hong Kong each with over 300 British women and children on board and headed straight for the Philippines. The unfortunate evacuees subsequently found themselves trapped by the Japanese assault on the Philippines and were then swept into the internment camps alongside the mainly American colonial population, when Manila fell to the Japanese on 2 January 1942. As in Hong Kong, the thousands of new internees were held in temporary accommodation while their captors tried to organize proper camps for them. It was a period of great uncertainty for the adults, and this stressful atmosphere was picked up by the children. ‘The convent was already crowded with women and children and while our mothers waited in hushed anxiety we children uproariously trampled over the flower beds and gardens,’ recalled child internee Robin Prising. ‘The delirious rampages of Hide and Seek were not part of an ordinary game, for by our hysterical screams and laughter we were expressing the suppressed, nerve-taut shock of our terrified, whispering parents.’21
Jacqueline Honnor remembered her first view of Santo Tomas Camp: ‘It was a large stone building with little towers and gargoyles and various outbuildings, surrounded by a cement wall, so it was an ideal place for us to be.’ The Japanese initially segregated the prison accommodation. ‘Women with children under ten … were put into the annexe, women with children over ten in the main building; boys from the age of twelve and men went into another building.’22 Robin Prising gives his first impressions of Santo Tomas, when he was herded into the men’s section of the camp. ‘The gym, the largest dormitory in Santo Tomas, resembled an emergency hospital thrown together in the midst of a typhoid epidemic. About three hundred men slept here, the stench in the cavernous gym was heavy and sickly sweet – I gagged when I first was ushered there. Even when I was out of the building the odour still clung to my body.’23
Conditions were quite spartan in the beginning, as both the Japanese and the internees needed time to organize the camp. ‘We slept on the floor for quite a while,’ recalled Honnor. ‘Our cook was able in due time to push some mattresses over the wall for us, we already had our pillows, and we all slept on floors and tables.’ The Japanese refused the prisoners many of the basics that they had taken for granted before the war, a situation that greatly exacerbated their suffering. ‘We had no mosquito nets or anything like that, and very, very poor washing facilities. So, rather an unpleasant time …’ Not only the Japanese, but also Mother Nature, appeared to be conspiring against the internees at Santo Tomas. ‘Almost immediately we had an earthquake – all we needed!’ remembered Honnor. ‘I remember the room sort of dancing around as I tried to hang on to the top of the table.’24
The Japanese authorities at Santo Tomas soon realized that keeping families separated within the grounds of the large campus was ludicrous, and also a huge waste of effort, and they soon permitted the men to rejoin their wives and children. It was a rare humanitarian gesture on the part of the Japanese that was not followed in many of the other internment camps, particularly those located in the Netherlands East Indies. ‘We were suddenly allowed to live as a family,’ recalled Honnor. ‘So we started off under a mango tree.’ Because of the overcrowding a sort of shanty settlement rapidly grew up on the campus, the main university buildings being already full to capacity. ‘My parents made the mangoes into jam and sold it,’ remembered Honnor, ‘and we slowly got money together and my father built us a shack – literally a shack. It had to be on stilts because of the flooding, and the roof was a special kind of palm leaf. We were not allowed walls, as the Japanese had to see into the place, so we had an overhanging roof. Father made four bunks and he built a table with a bench either side of it. Then we had a punka – a sort of fan, which you pulled with bits of string and it brought air in. This sounds extraordinary, but seen from the angle of a child: here we were in this shack and life was very primitive – but it did not bother us one little bit. My brother and I were not a bit put out that one day we had a lot, and the next we had nothing. We were perfectly comfortable with it.’25
In all of the Japanese internment camps, parents realized that they must either make an effort to continue with their children’s’ education or let their children suffer the consequences in later life. This was successfully tackled, as we have seen, in Stanley Camp in Hong Kong and at Changi Camp in Singapore. Providing education at Santo Tomas soon involved the many teachers and professors who had been interned, though the Japanese did not make things easy. Education represented an attempt at some semblance of normality and of taking a stand against a Japanese policy that would rob the children of not just their health, but also their future should they survive the ordeal of the camps. ‘They started up a school in the camp, with American-style education,’ recalled Honnor. ‘We had no books, no writing materials, but we had a lot of people who had been teachers before the camp; we had blackboards from the university, and we had some books, a library of English books. We had school every day from about nine until twelve and we had different grades, according to our ages.’26 The education provided at Santo Tomas witnessed 85 children at ‘High School’, of whom 40 completed either the first, second or third year, and 20 finished the fourth year and graduated. ‘I look back with awe and respect for those amazing teachers, so challenged, so inspired and so brilliant, who, with so little, taught us so much,’ said former child internee Karen Lewis.27
As the British had discovered in Hong Kong and Singapore, getting organized was the key to survival in the camps, and would help in the maintenance of a basic standard of existence. The British were as enthusiastic in the American-d
ominated Santo Tomas Camp as in the camps where they predominated elsewhere in Asia, creating committees and taking responsibility alongside the Americans. ‘My mother, being English, was given the class of twelve-to thirteen-year-old boys, who were running very wild,’ recalled Honnor. ‘We had a tremendous mix of nationalities, some well behaved, some not … They really did their best at school, but of course everything had to be learnt by rote.’28 It was a tribute to the dedicated teachers and parents who kept education classes running under such conditions that so many interned children did not miss out on too much of their elementary education during the war.
At Santo Tomas and the other internment camps outside of the Netherlands East Indies, older children were assigned work duties by the Japanese. The adults looked to the children to perform many of the menial tasks that had formerly been assigned to their servants – for example, washing clothes, tending vegetables in the small allotments, collecting food from the kitchens, and gathering fuel for heating. At Santo Tomas, the commandant ordered all children who were aged twelve and above to be assigned toilet duties, which in the main meant handing out carefully rationed sheets of toilet paper and cleaning the toilets and bathrooms.
Robin Prising, who entered Santo Tomas with his sick and elderly father, worked hard. ‘I did all my father’s duties for him, swept beneath our beds, cleaned the passage and corridors when our turn comes up and washed our clothes. He was too ill and old to do such things himself … Before the war we both had pos under our bed which Alfred [the servant] used to empty each morning. Now my turn had come.’29
In the Netherlands East Indies, today’s Indonesia, tens of thousands of white colonists fell into Japanese hands with the surrender of British and Dutch forces on Java in March 1942. The East Indies Dutch were treated with utter contempt by the Japanese and were subject to a particularly harsh regime inside the civilian internment camps that were established on the numerous islands of the Indonesian archipelago. These camps ranked at the very bottom of the pile in terms of food, disease and brutality, when compared with those for British and American civilians. As to why the Japanese were more brutal towards Dutch civilians than British or American internees – one may speculate that this stemmed from pre-war Japanese views of the different white nationalities. Britain had a long history of cooperation with Japan and was responsible, along with the United States and France, for helping to bring the Japanese out of a feudal state and into the industrialized world after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Japan had assiduously followed Britain’s lead ever since, from creating a carbon-copy of the Royal Navy, to its empire building activities in Asia. Britain was the world’s biggest imperial power at the start of the war and the United States the greatest economic power. Holland, on the other hand, was already a defeated nation under the control of Germany, and its colonists had been notorious for their harsh treatment of Indonesian natives. They were roundly detested by those they ruled and the East Indies were already a hot-bed of nationalist sentiment and outright rebellion, before a single Japanese soldier stepped off a landing barge. Perhaps in an effort to appease the Indonesians and engender collaboration with their new regime, the Japanese deliberately treated Dutch civilians with disdain and cruelty. If so they succeeded, for considerable collaboration did indeed occur in the Netherlands East Indies. The Japanese fostered anti-imperialist and nationalist parties and even raised armed forces as part of their great propagandist lie: that Japan had conquered Asia to free its oppressed peoples from white colonial rule. They even had a name for this state-sponsored fantasy – the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.
One of the most deplorable episodes concerning the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Netherlands East Indies was the raping of Dutch women. It has been revealed that Dutch women and young girls were sexually assaulted at Tarakan, Menado, Bandoeng, Padang and Flores Island in during 1942. Sexual assaults on British and American females by Japanese troops were rare, but in the East Indies they appear to have adopted a different attitude. For example, at the town of Blora, close to Semarang in Java, twenty European women and girls were imprisoned in two houses beside a main road by Japanese troops. Over a period of three weeks, as Japanese units passed by these houses, the women and their daughters were brutally and repeatedly raped. The older women protested in vain to passing Japanese officers, who more often than not simply laughed in their faces, until one day a senior Japanese officer happened by the houses and witnessed what the Emperor’s soldiers were doing. He immediately ordered the assaults to cease and the women were released and sent to the relative safety of an internment camp. However, the assaults were condoned by Japanese military authorities, and no soldiers were ever punished for these crimes. After all, over 80,000 Chinese women had been raped after the fall of Nanking in 1937 and no one was ever punished for that, so when a handful of whites suffered the same fate the Japanese authorities barely registered the fact. The Blora rapes highlighted the deplorable state of discipline that existed in the Japanese Army regarding the treatment of non-combatants, and the often casual sadism and brutality of the average soldier. The Blora assaults and the other rapes that occurred in the Netherlands East Indies during the invasion could be dismissed as excesses committed by young soldiers who had recently been in combat, but later efforts were made by the Japanese to recruit young women and girls from the internment camps for use as sex slaves in army brothels, and this clearly cannot be explained or excused as the ‘spoils of war’. Clearly, for Dutch children, a period of darkness and suffering awaited them all as their ordered colonial world was suddenly split asunder.
Borneo, a large island lying at the eastern end of the Netherlands East Indies archipelago, was captured by Japanese forces in January 1942. The island had been divided between Britain and Holland, the British controlling the north and northeast, which was itself divided into the colonies of North Borneo, Brunei, Sarawak and the offshore Straits Settlements island of Labuan. The rest of the island was known as Dutch Borneo and formed part of the Netherlands East Indies. Unusually, the Japanese established a joint Prisoner-of-War and Civilian Internment Camp in the town of Kuching in Sarawak, in March 1942. A British Indian Army barracks consisting of long wooden barrack blocks and associated buildings covering fifty acres were surrounded by five miles of barbed wire fence and named Batu Lintang Camp. It held a maximum population of around 3,000 British, Dutch and Australian soldiers, as well as Dutch Catholic priests and nuns, British civilians, including several dozen children, and British nuns. The civilians were separated from the POWs by internal fences, the entire complex falling under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Tatsuji Suga.
The short and rotund Suga was overall commandant of not only Batu Lintang Camp, but also all the other military and civilian camps on Borneo. The Japanese created camps at Jesselton, Sandakan and, briefly, on Labuan Island. The commander at Batu Lintang during Suga’s frequent absences was the deputy commandant, Captain Nagata. The guards were mainly Koreans, interspersed with some Formosans from Taiwan. Suga was an interesting study, a man somewhat different from the formal stereotype of the Japanese officer. For example, his beliefs placed him alongside the people that he ruled. ‘During our time in the internment camp, Colonel Suga had often come into church services in the women’s section and sat near the back,’ recalled Hudson Southwell, an Australian missionary internee. ‘Once he told Winsome [Southwell’s wife] directly, “I’m a Christian.” This was a startling admission for a Japanese officer to make to a prisoner during wartime.’30 Suga had been heavily influenced in his belief by his brother, who was a devout Roman Catholic.
Suga was already retired from a long career in the army when the war started, and volunteered to work in the prison camp system, where he felt that his language skills would be of good use. A devoted father and husband, Suga appears to have had some sympathy for the people he was in charge of guarding, particularly the small children at Batu Lintang. ‘I suppose the thing that really sticks in my mind is Colonel Suga
coming through the gates in his car and we would sneak into it and hide,’ recalled Rosemary Beatty, who was a young Australian child internee in the camp. ‘Then he would drive off and find we were there. He’d take us up to his residence and serve us coffee, fruit and show us magazines … He’d even give us lollies to bring back to camp.’31 However benevolent Suga may have been to the child internees, he nevertheless held command responsibility for a network of camps in which thousands of people died through disease, starvation and outright murder. Some historians suspect that although Suga appeared to be a fundamentally decent man, he could do little to restrain officers under his command, such as Captain Nagata, from abusing and killing prisoners, nor could he improve conditions inside the camps because he himself came under the control of the Kempeitai military police, who continually interfered in camp administration from their lofty and untouchable position as the real power on Borneo.
For the purposes of this account, only the civilian areas of the camp will be referred to, but it should be noted that the military POWs had either formed part of the original British Indian Army garrison for Sarawak, or they were British and Australian soldiers who had been shipped in from Malaya, Java or elsewhere in Borneo. The civilian internees were primarily British and Dutch people who had been living and working in Borneo when the war began, including, as mentioned, large numbers of Roman Catholic religious personnel who had been ministering to the native population.