by Mark Felton
On 2 March 1944, the women, children and all of the civilian men were suddenly ordered to leave Muntok and travel to Palembang Internment Camp. Palembang Camp was located across the Banka Strait from Muntok on the huge island of Sumatra. It housed 250 women and children from Muntok and conditions were just as grim as those they had left behind on Banka Island. ‘The small bungalow where we were to live had been stripped of almost all furniture and there was a barbed wire boundary,’ wrote British Army nurse, Phyllis Briggs. One of the other nurses, Mary Jenkin, had adopted an orphaned three-year-old Russian boy named Mischa, whose parents had perished during the Singapore exodus. ‘Mary, Mischa, and I were ordered to share a bedroom in house number 9 – the bedroom was already occupied by three Missionaries, two British Army wives and a fat Dutch woman with a large smelly dog which she refused to part with,’ recalled Briggs. Conditions were spartan. ‘The only furniture in the room was a cupboard, so we all slept on the floor. The others insisted on the door and windows being shut at night to keep out the mosquitos [sic].’16
Briggs spent most of her time with a group of fellow Britons in the garage of a nearby house, and only slept in no. 9 at night. Mary Jenkin took special care of Mischa, treating him like her own son. ‘She made clothes for him and a little mattress out of sacking.’17 Briggs’ group constructed a fireplace out of stones and mud. ‘The wood for the fire was often damp and we spent hours “fire flapping” using a piece of cardboard to try and bring up a flame.’ The usual twice-daily tenko parades continued at Palembang. The prisoners had to line up beside the road outside their houses and be counted off by the guards. ‘We had to bow to the guards as they came by. If we did not bow low enough we would get a face slap.’18 The starvation diet was occasionally supplemented with a little meat or some duck eggs. The vegetables that the Japanese provided were usually rotten, and the rice was full of grit and weevils, a familiar story throughout the internment camps. ‘The people I felt sorry for were the mothers,’ recalled an Australian Army nurse, Pat Gunther, ‘how do you explain to a three-year-old that there is no food? When we had a sale, a certain amount was skimmed off for the children and, although half the people in our camp died, we only lost one of the children.’19
In October 1944, the Japanese suddenly decided to transfer all the internees at Palembang back again to Muntok Camp on Banka Island. Transfers were terrible ordeals that often led to many unnecessary deaths, as the exhausted and sick were sent on gruelling journeys. Another group of prisoners was also transferred in from a camp at the malarial port of Bencoolen. By this stage of the war all of the internees were suffering badly from malnutrition and tropical diseases. Shortly after their arrival back at Muntok, an illness broke out and swept through the internee ranks. They named it ‘Muntok fever’. With several hundred women and children crammed into a small camp and with many people also seriously ill with dysentery, the latrines were soon overflowing, open sewers that posed a serious health risk to everyone. ‘There was no drainage,’ recalled Briggs, ‘just a large tank that rapidly filled up to almost overflowing, with huge maggots crawling about. One had to crouch on bamboo slats, a foot on each side with the foul tank below. Some of the women volunteered to clean out the tank, using buckets and emptying them outside the camp.’20
Fuel for cooking was a problem at Muntok and eventually the Japanese permitted small groups to forage for logs outside the camp, still under guard. The Japanese also forced the internees to dig graves for those who had died in the camp. ‘Some of the stronger women and young boys became the regular grave diggers.’21 The prisoners’ bodies were literally wasting away, the camp death rate was climbing, and the prisoners’ mental state was also close to collapse as the hopelessness of their situation scratched away daily at their morale.
‘Whatever role people had in civilian life they took it there,’ remembered British child internee Jacqueline Honnor of Santo Tomas Camp in Manila. ‘We had doctors, nurses, but very little medicine, and as the war progressed, the doctors were being required to sign death certificates for people who had clearly died of malnutrition, but [they] were not allowed to put that on.’22 By early 1945 the thousands of men, women and children being held at Santo Tomas were suffering very badly from disease and lack of food. The chance of surviving the war seemed to be slipping further out of their reach with each passing day. Unbeknown to the inmates at Santo Tomas, their camp would actually be among the first Japanese internment centres to be liberated by the advancing Allies. But Honnor’s health appeared to be fading. ‘Eventually I started to faint all the time, and it was discovered I had a heart murmur caused by malnutrition.’ For parents, the agony of watching their children wither away was matched by the fear of dying themselves and leaving their children as orphans. ‘A lot of people got beri-beri, and my parents got desperately, desperately thin, but you can be sure they gave us more food than they had,’ said Honnor. Several diseases periodically went through the camp population. ‘There was a lot of dengue fever,’ recalled Honnor. ‘We all got it, you just ache screamingly all over and get a very high fever. The desperate worry was any sort of infection. People also got TB, and there was a lot of dysentery because the conditions were really so primitive.’23 Many people died, and it seemed to the survivors that most of the deaths were from a demographic most would assume would actually have had the best chance to survive. ‘There were a lot of single people in the camp, most of them under thirty-five or forty. They died because they had nothing to live for. Not a single parent died in the camp because they couldn’t. Their big worry was “What if we die? How do the children get back to their homeland and families?” ’24
Members of an American circus troupe imprisoned at Santo Tomas Camp had built a radio receiver earlier in the war, and then carefully concealed it from the periodic Japanese searches for contraband. It was through this illicit source that the internees first heard the news everyone had been waiting since May 1942 to hear, that American forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur had invaded the Philippines. MacArthur, true to his promise of ‘I shall return’ made during the dark days of American defeat at Bataan and Corregidor had returned, in overwhelming force. Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s US 6th Army had come ashore at Lingayen Gulf on 9 January 1945 with unprecedented firepower and determination. The capital city of Manila was MacArthur’s priority target, and if Manila fell, Santo Tomas would be liberated. Fortunately for MacArthur’s troops, the Japanese had done very little to erect proper defences, and this allowed American forces to advance rapidly upon the city. The American columns fanned out from the beachheads and found only intact bridges and shallow rivers that proved easy to ford. Japanese resistance in the countryside was sporadic and light, but the Japanese were prepared to make the Americans fight for every inch of Manila. Manila would become the Stalingrad of the war in Asia, and the desperate fighting would threaten the lives of all of the internees at Santo Tomas who had waited so long for liberation. The hour of release from bondage could also spell their deaths, for as well as the fighting to contend with, no one knew what orders the Japanese commandant might have received from the Kempeitai concerning what to do with his prisoners in the event that their liberation appeared imminent.
On 3 February, elements of the US 1st Cavalry Division, under the command of Major General Verne D. Mudge, entered the northern suburbs of Manila. The 1st Cavalry rapidly seized a vital bridge across the Tuliahan River, the main water feature that separated American forces from Manila city proper. Japanese defences had been laid out to cover both sectors of the city, a demarcation line established along the Pasig River that runs through the heart of Manila. The Imperial Japanese Navy had been ordered to defend the city to the last man and the last bullet, while Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita had withdrawn most of the Imperial Army troops from the city and retreated into the mountains, where he hoped to make a strong defence from prepared positions and high ground. Under the command of Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, 20,000 Japanese sailors a
nd some army men dug in around the city and prepared to contest every street and building with the Americans. Iwabuchi deployed 4,500 of his men north of the Pasig River and 5,000 south of it, with a further 5,000 in place to defend Fort McKinley and Nichols Field Airfield. A few thousand more naval troops were deployed on partially sunken ships in Manila Bay, and east of the city towards the main army troops under General Yamashita, maintaining a link with those Japanese dug-in in the mountains.
The Battle of Manila was one of the great street-fighting epics of the Second World War, rivalling Berlin in its ferocity and destruction. Manila, a city so beautiful that it was described as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, was three hundred years old. At its centre stood the Intramuros, a collection of churches and religious buildings forming a mini-Vatican City. By the time the fighting was over, Manila was a burning ruin. Although much of the city was reconstructed after the war, many of the original buildings are gone forever. It is no longer a beautiful city. The American drive to liberate Manila and the fierce Japanese resistance also resulted in a human tragedy on an appallingly massive scale, marked by wholesale brutality. As they began to lose the battle, the Japanese defenders took out their frustrations on the local civilian population, in an orgy of rape and murder as monstrous as that perpetrated in Nanking in 1937. Japanese troops deliberately tortured and murdered as many innocent Filipinos as they could lay their hands on. It was Manila’s Gotterdammerung and the Japanese Navy’s darkest hour of the war.
With a bridge secured over the Tuliahan River, the first American unit into the city of Manila was a squadron of Brigadier General William Chase’s 8th Cavalry Brigade and they drove straight into the Santo Tomas internment camp. An American P-38 Lightning fighter-bomber had overflown the camp only a few hours before and the pilot had dropped a message to the inmates which read: ‘Roll out the barrel. There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.’ For the internees, who had been living on the edge of their nerves for three years, the sounds of fighting rapidly approaching the camp would have been almost unbearable.
General Chase’s men broke into the camp at 9.00 pm having fought the guards at the main gate, a Sherman tank pushing the wrought-iron gates aside as it nosed into the main courtyard with its searchlight blazing. Rapid automatic fire had cut down those Japanese who were foolish enough to try to resist the Americans. The commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Toshio Hayashi, retreated with forty-six surviving guards and a large contingent of internees, to the Education Building, where they holed up. Some Japanese were separated from Hayashi’s group. The prisoners began streaming out of the buildings and shanties as American infantrymen fanned out inside the perimeter, their weapons at the ready. ‘We all walked out,’ recalled Lieutenant Madeleine Ullom, a US Army nurse who had been captured on Corregidor in 1942. ‘The captain of the Japanese guards came out, too. He reached in his shirt pocket for a grenade. He was going to kill us all. They shot him right in the neck.’25 Ullom may be referring to a Japanese officer who rushed out in front of the American tank brandishing a drawn sword and a pistol. He had been shot down immediately and wounded in the stomach. ‘Groaning and writhing on the ground, he was seized by the legs and dragged to the main building clinic, internees kicking and spitting at him, one or two men even slashing at him with knives, and some of the women burning him with cigarettes as he was pulled past them.’26 The Japanese officer died later in the camp infirmary, but not before receiving medical treatment from American soldiers.
And then the worst possible thing happened. With thousands of men, women and children milling around the compound, shaking American soldiers’ hands, crying with thanks, or asking for food, local Japanese forces turned their guns on the camp. It was an distinctive target. Artillery fire rained down for several minutes, huge detonations scattering prisoners and liberators alike as shrapnel and debris scythed through the air. The Japanese barrage tragically killed 22 unfortunate internees at the point of their liberation, and wounded a further 39. When the firing ceased the Americans soon realized that Lieutenant Colonel Hayashi and his remaining guards still retained control of the Education Building and that they were holding hostages. Demanding that he and his men be allowed safe passage to join Japanese troops in the south of the city, to die in the defence of the city, Hayashi threatened to slaughter his hostages unless the Americans agreed to his terms. Left with no alternative, on 5 February the American commander very reluctantly agreed to Hayashi’s terms and the hostages were freed. After exchanging salutes, the Japanese troops were escorted out of the main gate and through a phalanx of stony-faced American soldiers. Hayashi and his men did not last long. They went to the area around the Malacanang Palace in central Manila, which was already largely occupied by American forces, and in the resultant fighting Hayashi and many of his men were killed. The rest ended up back at Santo Tomas as prisonersof-war themselves.
As for the freed internees at Santo Tomas, they could begin to rebuild their lives now that the worst was over. Since the camp had opened in mid-1942, a little over 10 per cent of the internee population had died, mostly from tropical diseases and malnutrition, both deliberately exacerbated by the indifferent Japanese. Total deaths were 466 men, women and children out of 4,255 prisoners. Although conditions for the prisoners were considerably better than the horrific conditions suffered by military prisonersof-war taken by the Japanese, it must be remembered that the internees in Santo Tomas and in the hundreds of other camps across Asia were civilians, whose only crime was to have been living in the Far East when the Japanese invaded, and to have been citizens of nations that were at war with Japan or Nazi Germany. The Japanese treated all of them, even the smallest children, as if they were military prisoners-of-war, and ran their internment camps according to military law and military discipline that resulted in such high death rates.
Liberation may have come to the internees held in Santo Tomas Camp in Manila, but for the vast majority of Allied civilians held prisoner by the Japanese liberation was still many months away, as Japan continued to resist and their camps remained deep behind enemy lines. Only the complete capitulation of Japan would bring about the release of most civilian internees, and no one could predict how long that might take. The Allied leaders were even planning for the eventual invasion of Japan itself, and many predicted that the war in Asia would probably drag on well into 1946 before the fanatical Japanese were finally forced to submit. If the war lasted that long not many of the civilian internees would still be alive, as their food rations continued to be cut by the increasingly desperate Japanese, and disease thinned their ranks day by day. Parents continued to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children, but how long that situation could last was anyone’s guess.
In occupied China, the internees were very far behind the front-lines, deep in Japanese-controlled territory. They would be among the last to be freed. In February or March 1945, the Chisholm family was moved to Yu Yuen Road Camp in Shanghai. ‘There were no toilets and trenches were dug in the ground,’ recalled Moira Chisholm, who was eleven at that time and had been a prisoner since early 1942. ‘We were fed on rice and cracked wheat. One time we got pork and I remember being very ill.’27 Chisholm’s father had been a prison officer before internment and he stood out among the camp’s inmates. ‘My father showed he was a good leader and was given the position by the other internees as a leader and had to make decisions about food distribution and other things.’28 As with all camps throughout the Japanese system, education was not compulsory and indeed was often actively suppressed by the authorities. ‘There was no schooling organized at first but later we had lessons in the morning and afternoon,’ recalled Chisholm. ‘The teaching was all oral as there were no books and we had to just remember things.’29
The internees in Shanghai were, however, much better off than their compatriots at Muntok Camp on Banka Island. In April 1945, the Japanese decided to move the prisoners yet again. By this stage, nearly all of the internees were literally on their last legs. The
y were to be shipped back across the Banka Strait to a camp in Sumatra, located at Loebok Linggan. The Japanese herded the emaciated prisoners on to a small cargo ship. ‘We were so crowded that we could hardly move, all packed close to one another on the open deck,’ recalled one internee. ‘Fortunately it did not rain and we remained like this all night. We sailed at dawn and sat on the hard deck in the blazing sun with aching backs. Once more across the sea and up that wretched river.’30 A twenty-six hour journey by ship and train proved the undoing of many of the internees.
The journey killed eight people and many others died at the new camp soon afterwards, their health finally destroyed by the constant moves.
It was not only the internees at Muntok who were moved so close to the end of hostilities. The Japanese continued to herd internees around their crumbling empire virtually to the end of the war. Johan Rijkee, along with his mother and sister, had been interned at various camps on Java since March 1942. In May 1945, they were forced to walk to a new camp, Ambarawa 8, located in central Java. There they were put to work making rope. ‘However the situation became so bad food wise that not many people were able to work,’ wrote Johan. ‘My mother became seriously ill and had given up. My sister and I had to fend for ourselves.’ In the camps on Java, the food situation became so desperate as the end of the war approached that the internees had to break camp rules just to survive. The Japanese tolerated the prisoners’ illicit trading with local people, and often took part in it themselves, on an individual basis. At Macassar Kampong Camp, most of the prisoners and some of the guards were eking out an existence from the gedek trade, as the illicit black market was called, where fresh rations such as eggs and fat were traded through holes in the camp’s perimeter fence. However, if a newcomer arrived, or if one of the Japanese wanted to cross another guard, a ‘discovery’ would be made and the unfortunate prisoners who were caught at the fence immediately arrested. On the night of 25 June 1945, two Dutch women were caught trading. The punishment was extensive. Firstly, the women were placed in a detention cell that measured only 2 square metres. The Japanese beat the women severely with bamboo canes and then shaved off their hair. They were forced to sleep on the bare earth without a cover or a mosquito net, even though the camp was cold at night and in the early morning hours. During tenko the women were paraded past the assembled prisoners, dressed only in their underwear. The Japanese then forced the women to stand next to the Indonesian guards at the entrance to the vegetable gardens where the prisoners laboured each day, wearing signs around their necks that proclaimed their ‘crime’. Their rations were stopped and the women were not allowed to wash. This extraordinary ‘punishment’ would perhaps better be described as sadistic cruelty and it lasted for an astounding seven days. After being returned to the prisoner population, they and their families were forbidden to work on any of the extra duties, thereby preventing them from obtaining more food with which to survive.