by Mark Felton
Everyone stood up, turned, and carrying their varied belongings, or children, surged forward, eager to leave the field and the sun. All, that is, except the Salvation Army bandsmen, who stayed to play their fellows off with cheerful music. Suddenly, with great daring, they played the National Anthem – the fifteen hundred moving internees stopped as one man, dead in their tracks. Gone was boredom, forgotten the heat and the guards, backs were straightened, heads held high, not a muscle moved as they remembered King and Country. Standing to attention they affirmed their loyalty to all that was dear, although hundreds of miles away.7
The reaction of the guards was almost farcical. ‘The Japanese were furious; this was something completely unexpected. They shouted orders to move, no-one even noticed. They jumped up and down with rage – everyone else stayed immobile until the last note of “God Save the King” had died away. The internees then dispersed, but with far lighter hearts and jauntier steps than before.’8
At Santo Tomas camp in Manila, a mutinous sense of humour was maintained by many of the inmates. Jacqueline Honnor, a British child internee, recalled one incident. ‘We had a loudspeaker system for our instructions, and an American circus troupe had managed to keep a radio receiver hidden and would give us the news from this in a way that sounded perfectly innocent.’ The circus folk secretly listened to their radio for any news of the progress of the fighting. ‘When the island of Leyte fell [October 1944], for instance, we were told that we had to do something that day and it was “Better Leyte than never”. But when the Japanese looked at the transcript, it said, “Better late than never”. This roar went up through the camp’9 Morale was maintained until close to the end of the war, through music and song. ‘In the evenings, we would have singalongs and little amateur theatre groups.’10 But no matter what the internees did to try and raise their battered spirits, hunger and disease, exacerbated by the Japanese Army’s refusal to allow them to trade with the locals, meant that the final few months at Santo Tomas would prove to be extremely difficult for all concerned. ‘Daily life, it was a question of surviving and of the children trying to learn,’ said Honnor. The same could be said of any of the internment camps. As their empire imploded, the Japanese became ever more brutal in their treatment of the captives, venting their frustrations at losing the war on the helpless and the sick.
10
The Final Stretch
The trying conditions of life under internment at Batu Lintang camp tested to the limits of the human struggle for survival. Food shortages, diseases and sickness, death, forced labor, harsh treatment, and deplorable living quarters were daily occurrences in camp.
Keat Gin Ooi, 19981
‘Mother became very ill during the final year, suffering from dysentery and beriberi,’ wrote Dutch child internee Hetty at the Tijdeng Ghetto in Java.
Her legs were so swollen from oedema that she could no longer walk. She lay on her bed and every few hours I had to turn her over by holding her by her hip bone – there was only bone to hold like a hand grip – and pull her over to lie on the other side to prevent bed sores. Many mothers died in the camps because they gave much of their rations to their children who were always hungry. My mother did not go along with this saying that she needed to stay alive for her children so my brother and I gave part of our rations to our mother. However she weighed a mere 41 kilograms when liberated!2
The tragedy that befell Hetty’s family was repeated thousands of times throughout the Occupied Territories during the last year of the war. The military situation had radically altered for the Japanese since the heady days of victory in early 1942. The Japanese were fighting a purely defensive war by late 1944, their supply situation was fast becoming extremely perilous in some areas and the anger and shame of being on the losing side was contributing to Japanese indifference to the sufferings of Allied civilians in their charge. Japan’s attempt to invade India had been roundly defeated by British and Empire forces at the twin battles of Imphal and Kohima. The British would, in turn, invade Burma themselves in December 1944 on the back of their overwhelming victories. The Americans continued to dismantle Japan’s Pacific empire, island by bloody island, edging ever closer to the ultimate prize, the Japanese Home Islands. The Allied submarine campaign had totally devastated the Japanese Merchant Marine, vastly complicating the nation’s ability to supply its outlying garrisons and causing shortages of food and raw materials on the home front that seriously limited Japan’s ability to continue the war. About the only aspect of the war that was still in their favour was the continued willingness of Japanese soldiers to lay down their lives for their Emperor. Fanatical and suicidal defence was slowing down the Allied advance, and also seriously worrying Allied commanders, who knew that the capture of every tiny Pacific island would result in huge casualties among the invaders as well. The prospect of taking the war all the way to the beaches of Kyushu in Japan horrified the Allied leaders, as the resultant bloodbath would have dwarfed all of the other campaigns put together. In the West, the war appeared to be entering its final stages. The British, Americans and Canadians had successfully broken out of their Normandy beachheads and recaptured France. The Battle of Monte Casino in Italy raged on, but the U-boat menace was well on the way to being defeated by superior Allied technology and weapons in the Atlantic. Nazi Germany could not last much longer, especially with the Red Army gearing up for another huge offensive on the Eastern Front that would bring its forces within striking distance of Berlin before long.
All the good news of Allied advances and victories meant little to the families that were being systematically starved and abused inside the Japanese internment camps. The piles of corpses grew ever larger as month followed month and no liberation arrived. During the last six months of the war ‘about six or seven people a day died in our camp,’3 recalled one survivor, and this was not an unusual figure. In some camps the figures topped twenty people a day. Parents struggled on simply to protect their children, for if the parents died of illness or starvation, their children would have been doomed as well. The potential fate of children ignited a grim spark of determination in parents to endure what was yet to come with fortitude. All were determined to survive the war and to keep their families intact.
In Shanghai, Rachel Bosebury, a child prisoner in Lunghwa Camp, recalled how her parents’ health deteriorated as they sought to protect their children. ‘My mother was quite ill with something glandular, and there was a doctor in Shanghai that could have operated on her. He wasn’t part of the nations that were interned, but the Japanese wouldn’t let her get that operation.’ Bosebury recalled the bitterness of internment, and how it affected her parents. ‘I’m sure my parents were a lot more angry, a lot more unforgiving, a lot more hating of the Japanese, even long after the war.’4
In the Netherlands East Indies, Paget Eames, a British child internee at Bangkinang Camp in Sumatra, recalled the deteriorating food situation in the last year of the conflict. ‘Hunger was the main thing. We didn’t get any Red Cross parcels. During the day we had a can of cooked rice for the adults, half for the children and virtually anything that you could grab hold of.’ Formerly honest children were soon being encouraged by their parents to become thieves. ‘Towards the end you were picking grass,’ recalled Eames. ‘When I went to work for the Japanese, tending their gardens, Mum would say, “Okay, you can steal.” So I used to take back in my knickers anything that was green.’ Mrs Eames worked hard to keep her children fed. ‘By this time Mum was quite resourceful: she would take eggshells from the Japanese dustbins and put them on the coal fires and powder them down to make calcium for me and make me swallow it, whether I liked it or not.’5
The behaviour of the Japanese, Korean and Formosan guards remained fairly unpredictable, but sometimes they were kind towards the internees, particularly the little children. ‘They could give you the odd sweetmeat and sometimes show you pictures of their families,’ recalled Eames. ‘They were especially understanding to children. Sometimes we
got the impression that they were, in the main, not happy with what they were doing but had to do what they did.’6 Kindness was not the sole preserve of the occasional guard, for the entire experience would have been utterly intolerable without the kindnesses of fellow internees. ‘There was a great deal of kindness among the prisoners there,’ recalled Eames of Bangkinang. ‘There was very little ratting on people. You needed each other and therefore you stayed with each other. We just kept very busy. I can remember – this is very vivid – running across the camp yard just before sunset and looking at this whole camp, so much space, and very few people around. It was at that moment, in complete isolation, that I wondered, What am I doing here? What’s happening? You grew up very quickly. You learnt to fight your battles very quickly. You learnt to steal and lie. You had to. You had to.’7
Another Dutch child, Rose, had been imprisoned at a camp in Bandoeng on Java for two years before she and her family were transferred to the infinitely worse surroundings of Kampong Makassar Camp for the last few months of hostilities. Her enduring memory is of the journey to the camp. ‘I got a seat on the train because I could hardly walk any more,’ she recalled, her health was wrecked after two years of subsisting on starvation rations at Bandoeng. ‘You could not look out of the windows, but I managed to find a chink and watched violent storms accompanying the train, a whirlwind black and threatening, coming closer and closer.’8 The storm was almost an omen for what was to follow. ‘When we arrived at the camp, we had to leave our suitcases on a large field. That night a tropical storm drenched the field and the cases. In the morning the sun twinkled in the broken pieces of a red goblet. All the suitcases lay open, the contents all but destroyed.’ Herded into rows of wooden huts with grass roofs, constructed upon dark red earth, the children had nothing to play with because the Japanese had ordered them to leave all of their toys behind at the other camp. But being industrious and monumentally bored, the children soon began to make toys, including ‘stilts’, built out of old cans with string to hold them to one’s feet, and castanets made from bits of wood. The Japanese shortly after banned these harmless activities as well. At the previous camp the girls had amused themselves indoors. ‘While we still had paper and crayons, we made paper dolls which were cut out and then dressed in paper clothes,’ recalled Rose. ‘We even made board-games, using shells or pebbles to mark our positions.’9 All this stopped at Kampong Makassar, where the Japanese instead put the children to work catching flies. The camp was filthy, the inmates largely diseased wrecks of human beings, and legions of flies were multiplying at a prodigious rate. Fly catching would come back to haunt Rose in her later life, as well as memories of the camp’s appalling sanitary arrangements. ‘Going to the latrines took all your energy, especially since the whole camp seemed to be down with dysentery.’ The Japanese enforced their will at Kampong Makassar as severely with the children as with the adults. ‘The object-lesson of the girl who was hanged by her wrists between two trees because she had forgotten to wear her number taught us once and for all that the Japs were to be obeyed.’10
Nel Halberstadt, who had given birth to a daughter whilst interned at Camp Kares-e in West Java in 1942, was another Dutch civilian transferred to Kampong Makassar, which was under the command of a Japanese lieutenant named Tanaka. In total, 3,500 women and children ended up inside the camp, where conditions were actually considered to be slightly better than at the infamous Tjideng Ghetto in Batavia. The prisoners occupied 19 wooden barracks, and each adult was allotted 60 centimetres of space, and each child only 45 centimetres. At the conclusion of the morning and evening tenko parades, all of the women and children were required to face in the direction of Tokyo and bow deeply to the Emperor, known as performing a keirei. ‘If you did not bow correctly, even a centimeter too high or too low, you would be beaten,’ remembered Halberstadt. On one occasion, she failed to perform a keirei correctly. A Japanese guard immediately attacked the young woman. ‘I fell to the ground when he hit me and he started to kick me in the stomach with his big, heavy boots.’11 This assault resulted in Halberstadt being hospitalized with internal bleeding and left her with permanent damage to her stomach muscles. Kampong Makassar was a work camp. ‘Everybody had to work,’ recalled Halberstadt, ‘outside in the fields, inside in the pigsties, kitchens, hospital or was put to work in the building group who maintained and built the barracks.’12 Older women, such as Halberstadt’s mother, were given the task of looking after the young children, while all the young women and the teenaged children were assessed for work by the Japanese. Most were declared to be fit and sent to work.
The food supplies at Kampong Makassar were as inadequate as most of the other internment camps in the Netherlands East Indies. Halberstadt, and a group of other women from her barrack, decided to ask for more food from the commandant, Lieutenant Tanaka, many of them having to feed young children as well as themselves. The reaction of Tanaka was predictably unpleasant, for he believed that his regime was essentially correct and that he was therefore infallible. ‘When sixteen of us from our hut rebelled and asked for more and better quality rations,’ recalled Halberstadt, ‘we had our heads shaved as a humiliation and were thrown into a very small, windowless punishment hut. The following day all the food for that day was gathered up and taken to the big tenko field. We had to dig a large pit and throw our food in and cover it with earth.’ Not satisfied with just punishing this particular barrack block, Tanaka then punished the entire camp, including all the young children and babies. ‘The whole camp then was denied food for two days. The Japs also switched off the water supply where they could, ‘recalled Halberstadt.13
Dutch child prisoner Hetty and her mother were prisoners at the Tjideng Ghetto in Batavia, ruled for the final year of the war by its lunatic commandant, Captain Kenichi Sonei. ‘There was much more overcrowding and maltreatment during the last year of the war when the camp was under the brutal regime of Sonei,’ remembered Hetty. ‘If women refused to bow to the Japanese they were hit to the ground and often had their hair shaved off.’14 Many of the internees who survived Tjideng recalled that Sonei’s behaviour became steadily worse as the months passed, and that the moon continued to affect his mood. ‘At full moon Sonei would order the whole camp – including the sick – to attend roll call where he made everyone stand at attention for him. He would then make the women and children bow down to him time upon time again. If he was not satisfied he would cut the food rations. He was a sadist …’ But, under such circumstances, even a mentally deranged commandant had to be obeyed. There was no recourse for frightened and disgruntled prisoners to complain; the Japanese granted full authority to prison camp commanders. The only interference in this command would be by the local field Kempeitai military police, and their behaviour was even more sinister than the camp guards.
At Muntok Camp on Banka Island, located south of Singapore, men, women and children from several different nationalities had been starved and cruelly treated since March 1942, when most of them had washed ashore on the island’s beautiful palm-fringed beaches, shipwrecked victims of the huge exodus from Singapore during the final desperate days of British resistance. The camp was segregated by gender, and the men were mainly military prisoners-of-war. The Japanese often deliberately blurred the legal boundaries between military camps and those intended only for civilians, another good example being Batu Lintang Camp in Sarawak discussed earlier. The internees at Muntok were mainly British, Dutch, Chinese and Eurasians, and they had been joined by a party of Australian Army nursing sisters, who, like the many British civilians, were captured after their evacuation ships had been sunk. The death rate for this camp was extremely high, even by Japanese standards. A total of 33 per cent of women and children interned at Muntok perished, with the death rate for men an alarmingly high 55 per cent.
Drina Boswell had entered Muntok as a sixteen-year-old survivor of the sinking of HMS Giang Bee, a British evacuation ship from Singapore that had been blown out of the water by Japanese dest
royers off Banka Island in February 1942. Boswell’s mother was ill for most of the internment period and, as she was the eldest surviving child in the family, Drina took over responsibility for her two younger sisters and little brother. The Japanese forced her to work, so she dug and helped to fill graves, dug and helped to clean out latrines, chopped wood, tended vegetable allotments, and worked in the camp ‘kitchen’. Providing food was an especially difficult and disheartening job, for as in every Japanese camp, the raw materials supplied at Muntok were almost a joke. Rice commonly contained sand and even fragments of glass, while meat, if it was distributed at all, was normally rotten. On one occasion, when the prisoners had asked the Japanese for some fresh meat, the guards had responded by throwing a live monkey into the kitchen. What vegetables that the prisoners managed to grow were for the Japanese guards only and any internee who was caught taking a few green leaves was severely punished. Drina, and her younger sister Joan, did little jobs for some of the Dutch internees who wanted to avoid work and they used the small sums of money they made to buy extra food on the thriving black market. The youngest Boswell child, Maisie, attended a rudimentary school run by Dutch nuns in the camp, but at other times she just sat by her mother’s bed, too frightened to leave. Drina’s younger brother Kenny was forcibly removed from the women’s section when he reached the age of eleven, and was sent to the men’s camp. As in so many of the camps, the Japanese authorities in Muntok appeared to take a sick delight in forcing the prisoners to endure extremely long tenko roll-call parades twice a day, where the emaciated and ill women and children were forced to stand for hours under a blazing tropical sun. If anyone passed out, they were revived and then beaten by the guards. Drina Boswell recalled two occasions when she herself was physically assaulted by Japanese guards, once for defying one, and on another occasion for failing to bow to a guard.15