by Mark Felton
‘One morning recently I awoke and discovered to my horror that my sight had become very dim,’ said nurse Hilda Bates, a civilian internee at Batu Lintang Camp in Sarawak, Borneo. ‘Later I realised this was due to vitamin deficiency in our poor diet.’31 Thirty-seven small children were housed inside the women’s camp at Batu Lintang and some of the women were literally starving themselves to death in order that the children might eat and survive. In the men’s camp, the mixture of army POWs and civilian men, segregated by nationality in several compounds, were suffering horrific treatment at the hands of the Japanese. Over 600 men perished before the war ended, many of them from assaults perpetrated by the mostly Korean and Formosan guards. Some of the aforementioned children’s fathers were housed close by their wives and families, but they were routinely denied access to them. Hilda Bates recalled how the guards would ‘punish’ male prisoners for infractions of camp rules, or more usually for their own pleasure. ‘Their favourite methods of punishment are either kicking below the waist with their heavy army boots, face slapping or striking the head with a rifle butt.’32
It is interesting to note that the commandant at Batu Lintang, and overall commander of all prison camps on the island of Borneo, Lieutenant Colonel Suga, was recalled by many of the child internees as a kind and jovial figure who distributed sweets and played with the youngsters. In contrast, he permitted his guards to continually assault prisoners, his medical officer, Lieutenant Yamamoto, to withhold life-saving drugs from the hospital, and overall allowed hundreds of men and women to die of starvation and disease. Some have explained this contradiction in the commandant’s behaviour by pointing out that Suga was often absent, touring other camps, and that in his place the second-in-command, Captain Nagata, was the de facto commandant. Be that as it may, Suga was fully aware of what was going on in all the camps under his jurisdiction and must bear command responsibility for the appalling conditions discovered by liberating Australian forces in September 1945. Another prisoner at Batu Lintang recalled how guards would torture internees who had failed to bow to them. ‘A favourite punishment was to make the offender stand in the blazing sun with his arms above his head holding a log of wood,’ said E. R. Pegler. Children regularly witnessed the guards assaulting people. ‘If the prisoner or his arms sagged, he was punched or kicked. This treatment usually lasted until the prisoner completely collapsed.’
The only bright spot for the tortured souls of Batu Lintang was the obviously close proximity of the Allies by early 1945. The first Allied planes that overflew the camp were American Lightnings, on the morning of 25 March 1945. They were on their way to bomb a nearby airfield. Over the following weeks there were several such raids and a lone B-17 Flying Fortress would regularly bomb targets in the nearby city of Kuching. But the initial euphoria of seeing Allied aircraft above the camp soon wore off when no liberation followed in their wake. ‘As the weeks dragged by, the lone planes of the Allies were a daily occurrence and as we had realised very early that they could do nothing to help us, we hardly took any notice of them,’ recalled one internee. The types of aircraft that wheeled over the camp on their way to dealing death and destruction to the local Japanese garrison only had a limited range, so at least the internees could take heart that Allied forces were at most a few hundred miles away. For many, however, a nagging suspicion lurked in their minds that the Japanese would not permit their liberation – that the Japanese would kill them all before the first Allied soldier set foot in the camp. The internees and POWs were quite correct to fear such a thing, for Suga had indeed received clear orders to institute a massacre in the event of the camp’s imminent liberation.
11
The Last Tenko
A Farewell to Stanley! It’s over.
Of Internees there isn’t a sign.
They’ve left for Newhaven & Dover
For Hull and Newcastle-on-Tyne.
No tales where the rumours once started.
The kitchen’s devoid of its queues.
The strategists all have departed
With the lies which they peddled as ‘news’.
No more of the lectures on Drama
On Beavers & Badgers & Boats,
On ‘Backwards through Kent on a Llama’,
And ‘How to raise pedigree goats’.
No more do we carry sea water
And rations are things of the past,
Farewell to the Indian Quarter
For internment is over at last.
A Farewell to Stanley
by C.J. Norman, 1945*
The flash of the atomic explosion over Hiroshima was seen by many Allied prisoners-of-war and civilian internees who were held in Japan. Most did not think much about it and soon returned to the grim business of personal survival. But warfare had changed forever on 6 August 1945: the age of nuclear Armageddon had arrived. The decision to unleash such terrible weapons on the Japanese had not been taken lightly by President Harry S. Truman, and his military advisors. Already, massive fleets of American B-29 bombers had reduced most Japanese cities to smouldering piles of rubble and ash, but the Japanese fought on. Allied submarines had sunk virtually the entire Japanese merchant shipping fleet, causing starvation in Japan and crippling the munitions industry, but still the Japanese fought on. American forces had captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa, virtually on Japan’s doorstep, and threatened to invade Kyushu in the near future, but the Japanese resolutely refused to surrender and continued to fight. Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial Family spent days on end trapped in stuffy air-raid bunkers beneath the burned-out Imperial Palace in Tokyo, like their ally Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker, who three months before had faced total defeat and Allied retribution. Hirohito seemingly lacked the courage or the will to surrender and spare the Japanese people any further suffering. Another A-bomb was dropped on the port city of Nagasaki on 9 August and another 40,000 civilians died, but still there was no movement from the Japanese leadership to make peace. Peace feelers had been extended, secretly, through the Soviet Union, but the talks had always stumbled when America and Britain had demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. Incredibly, it appears from available evidence that the only thing that really concerned the Japanese government was the future status of the Emperor in a post-war Japan, certainly not the millions of soldiers and civilians who had already been killed, or the millions who might have yet perished protecting the Imperial system.
The one event that galvanized the Emperor and his government into seeking surrender terms had nothing to do with America or Britain. As far as most Japanese generals were concerned, they were happy to let the Allies try to land on the beaches of Kyushu. The resultant bloodbath, with the Americans predicting their own casualties to be in the region of one million men killed and wounded, would mean that the Allies would soon lose their stomach for the fight and would come to some sort of negotiated settlement with the Japanese government. In the end, the event that made the Japanese leaders sit up and take real notice was the sudden Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Korea that began on 8 August 1945. The weakened Japanese Kwantung Army garrisoning China was incapable of fending off the massive armoured thrusts of the Soviets, with thousands of T-34 tanks sweeping across the Manchurian steppe. Only three months before those self-same Red Army soldiers and tanks had battled their way towards the ruined Reichstag building in Berlin. The Japanese High Command had kept a weather eye on the Soviets since 1939, but the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact that they had signed with Stalin in 1941 appeared to have bought the Japanese peace and security to pursue their war with America and Britain unhindered by the Russian Bear. But now Stalin, ever the gambler, saw an opportunity to snatch huge swathes of the Far East for the Soviet Union, just as his forces now controlled half of Europe following Germany’s defeat. The appropriately named Operation ‘Autumn Storm’ allowed the Soviet leader to claim an equal share in the spoils of Far Eastern victory by steaming in at the very end of the last act with overwhelming force and brutality. Stalin�
��s intention was to invade Japan from the north and the Japanese had nearly all of their defences facing the Americans in the south. The outcome would have been the Soviet occupation of the Japanese Home Islands and the imposition of a communist government on the country. The Emperor and the governing class would be destroyed. Autumn Storm galvanized Hirohito and the peace faction of the Japanese government into accepting Truman and Churchill’s terms, and they somewhat hastily ended hostilities on 15 August 1945, just as Soviet troops were preparing to launch amphibious assaults on the northernmost Japanese Home Island of Hokkaido. The Americans at least had assured Japan that they could keep their Emperor. Japanese troops, expecting the promised fight to the death with American soldiers, were confused, shocked and demoralized by Hirohito’s exhortation to them to ‘bear the unbearable’ and lay down their arms. Most had expected a glorious death in battle, not the ignominy of defeat. For their prisoners, military and civilian, the most dangerous time was the few days either side of the surrender, when the Japanese were at their most unpredictable.
The incredible, and to many unbelievable, news that the Japanese had surrendered on 15 August filtered slowly through to the many civilian internment camps throughout Asia. In Shanghai, Rachel Bosebury and her family could plainly see that the war was almost over in the days between the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August and the final capitulation six days later. Silver P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft wheeled over Lunghwa Internment Camp, their engines shrieking and the sun glinting off their sleek fuselages as they shot over the buildings. ‘American planes came over and did a wiggle, over our camp,’ recalled Bosebury. ‘It was really funny because the Japanese kept us inside our building and we weren’t supposed to look out but we did.’1 The Japanese and Korean guards ran around the camp’s compound, impotently loosing off potshots at the American fighters with their rifles. Bosebury remembered how Japanese fighter aircraft vainly tried to take on the Mustangs. ‘We saw some dogfights. There was some fighting that we watched over Lunghwa Airport. That was towards the last few days of the war.’2
On 14 August, during the daily tenko, the Japanese camp commandant had stood before the assembled prisoners and in a loud harangue had announced that Japan would fight on and would never surrender. He had then ordered that the internees should remain in their rooms, and not socialize between the different blocks. On the following morning, the prisoners obediently stood outside their rooms ready for counting, as they had nearly a thousand times before. The internees were by now so thoroughly institutionalized that assembling for tenko no longer required any orders from the Japanese. But on this morning, the guards did not appear. Some took it as an ominous sign, because for several days previously, some of the adults in the camp had been heard discussing what the Japanese planned to do with them if the war ended. The consensus was that the Japanese might very well kill all of the internees before laying down their arms. This fear was not groundless, for the Japanese had formulated plans to murder Allied prisoners-of-war and civilian internees and in some instances actually did so.
One document discovered after the Japanese surrender that pertains to plans to murder POWs and internees has provided written proof that there were elements within the Japanese government and military establishment who were prepared to commit such crimes. The document was discovered among papers inside the journal of the Taiwan prison camps’ headquarters in Taipei. It was a reply from the War Ministry in Tokyo, dated 1 August 1944, to an earlier question sent by an army officer in Taiwan concerning disposing of prisoners-of-war and the reply was addressed to the general officer commanding the Kempeitai military police on the island. Ultimate responsibility for this illegal order lay with the Army Minister of State in August 1944, Field Marshal Hajime Sugiyama. The document is chilling proof of a diabolical plan hatched in the highest echelons of the military in Tokyo to murder tens of thousands of helpless soldiers and civilians. It sets out in plain language both the circumstances under which camp commandants could kill their prisoners, and, alarmingly, even suggested methods that could have been used to achieve the desired results. ‘Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders,’ reads the document, ‘individual disposition [disposal of prisoners] may be made in the following circumstances: (a) When an uprising of large numbers cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms. (b) When escapees from the camp may turn to a hostile Fighting force.’3 Both of these scenarios were very remote by August 1945, as the prisoners literally lacked the physical strength to resist the Japanese. The ‘circumstances’ listed in the order were merely an excuse to murder. A commandant could claim that his prisoners were trying to escape and then kill them all under the terms of this order. The order also states that although Tokyo would prefer commandants to ‘act under superior orders’, a huge degree of latitude has been granted, and ‘individual disposition may be made …’ In other words, if an officer ordered a massacre, he was unlikely to face any disciplinary hearings based on his decision, because he was acting on authority granted to him by higher command. As to the methods to be employed, the War Ministry order was emphatic about the results required: ‘(a) Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates. (b) In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not leave any traces [author’s italics].’4
One case where the above order appears to have been carried out to the letter concerns what happened to ninety mainly Dutch civilians, who were last seen alive boarding a Japanese submarine at the northern Javanese port of Cheribon in July 1945. Due to missing documents, the submarine concerned has never been properly identified, but one Javanese-speaking Dutch colonist managed to live long enough to explain what had occurred to his civilian internees far out at sea. The 90 men, women and children were internees from one of the many camps the Japanese had set up throughout the Netherlands East Indies and quite why they were killed so close to the end of hostilities has never been established. No paper trail exists, any relevant documents were probably destroyed by the Japanese themselves around the time of their surrender, and no Japanese service personnel were ever placed for trial for this war crime. We can probably surmise, however, that a good reason to kill the internees was the perceived waste of precious resources and guards in looking after the civilians. The military situation was so bad that it could have led to the Japanese rationalizing such a move. Of course, such an explanation does not explain why then, if things were so bad on Java for the Japanese, did they not murder all of their civilian internees? It may be that the massacre was simply the act of a single Japanese officer who was not acting under higher orders. Java was one of several places that were threatened with invasion, and the Japanese had orders to kill prisoners if it appeared that their liberation was imminent. A general order to this effect had been issued by Vice-Minister of War Shibayama on 11 March 1945. Shibayama’s order read: ‘The handling of prisoners of war in these times when the state of things is becoming more and more pressing and the evils of war extend to the Imperial Dominion, Manchuria and other places, is in the enclosed summary.’ The summary stated: ‘The Policy: With the greatest efforts prevent the prisoners of war falling into the hands of the enemy.’ Preventing prisoners and internees from falling into Allied hands by killing them was the interpretation many army and navy commanders placed on Shibayama’s rather vague order.
The internees boarded the submarine and were forced, due to their large numbers, to stand on the fore-and aft-decks where sailors armed with light machine guns guarded them. The submarine cast off at dusk and headed out into the open ocean for several miles. Probably fearing that they were going to be killed by gunfire from the conning tower, the prisoners, including several children, helpless and tormented by not knowing what was to become of them, stood and waited. Suddenly, the guards disappeared inside the submarine, hatches clanged shut, and without warning the ba
llast tanks blew and the submarine slid below the surface, pitching all 90 terrified Westerners into the dark ocean.
Many of the internees undoubtedly perished in those first horrible minutes, drowning in the black sea. The stronger swimmers gathered together and tried to help one another, for they had no lifejackets or any way of staying afloat once their strength was exhausted. Now began a slow death. Some people tired and drowned, but a far greater menace quickly appeared on the scene, attracted by the noise and splashing of the panic-stricken men, women and children. Within perhaps half an hour of the submarine submerging, sharks began to gather at the site, first devouring the bodies of the drowned, but soon moving on to the living. As the Japanese had intended, the sharks would finish the massacre begun by the navy. Over the next few hours hundreds of sharks congregated at the scene and the still night was rent by the screaming and crying of helpless civilians being eaten alive in the inky blackness.