’They made us turn to face the nullah,’ says Osler Thomas, ‘and at that moment somebody broke ranks. I saw a figure jumping over the nullah and then run down the hill. There was one solitary shot and he fell. After this happened, pandemonium broke out. And my instinct — I don’t know what prompted me — was to fall into the nullah. A few seconds later another body fell on to me. As I lay in the nullah the water was passing under me and began to get more bloody.’ Above him at the side of the nullah the Japanese were bayoneting their prisoners — just as they had at Nanking and in countless other places throughout China — and letting the bodies fall forward into the storm drain. ‘After about ten minutes everything was quiet. And then I heard somebody walking along the edge of the nullah. Apparently he was going around shooting everybody to make sure they were dead and that there were no witnesses. He came over to where I lay. I heard him draw the bolt, I heard him fire the shot, and the body on top of me gave a kick. It was now my turn. Once again I heard the bolt, heard the shot, and the next thing I felt was this severe blow across my face and blood came out of my mouth. I thought that the end had come. I touched my face and it was empty — there was no sensation. There was no sensation in my teeth. Then I thought that my face had been shot away. I knew that my end was coming and I felt absolutely desperate. I felt a sense of hopelessness — absolutely bleak. And at that moment I decided to end my life. The only weapon I had was my pair of glasses. So I took my glasses off, broke one lens and used that glass to cut my wrist. And as I was cutting through the skin I heard someone crawling towards me — it was a British soldier, a corporal, who had a severe gash over his neck where an attempt had been made to behead him with a Japanese sword. I said, “Stay still,” and he said, “No, I can’t take it any longer, I’m moving.” And so he moved further down the nullah. I suppose he saved my life, because after that all desire to end my life disappeared.’
Thomas crawled along the storm drain until he reached a series of steps where the water tumbled downhill. Knowing he would be seen if he attempted to escape downstream in daylight, he hid in the stream, shivering and bleeding, until nightfall. When it was dark he made his way down the slippery steps, frightened as he went that he might come across the body of the corporal who had crawled on ahead of him. When he emerged at the bottom of the hill he saw an old woman standing outside a squatter’s hut and pleaded with her to give him some clothes. Then, stripped of his bloodstained uniform and dressed as a Chinese, he hid in bombed out buildings until he was able to make his way to a friend’s house on the other side of the island. ‘Afterwards,’ he says, ‘you had an intense revulsion for the Japanese — you hated them for a long, long time. We never realized what was going to happen. We thought the Japanese would take over Hong Kong and life would be very much the same — we’d be led away to a prisoner-of-war camp or something like that — but it wasn’t so.’ Of the thirty-two prisoners the Japanese bayoneted by the storm water drain, Osler Thomas was one of only two who survived.
Whilst Thomas hid from the Japanese after the massacre at the Silesian mission, British troops defended Hong Kong island as best they could: ‘We’d had such a blasting of bombing and shelling that I was pretty well battle-happy,’ says Anthony Hewitt, an officer with the Middlesex regiment. ‘I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care whether I was killed or wounded or what would happen, but I just wanted to kill a few Japs. We had a lovely time. We wrote off four Japs who were trying to pull a gun along. Wrote them off. The three of us fired at the same time, and we wrote the whole four off in one burst.’ But by Christmas Day the overall military situation had become desperate for the British. That afternoon, Major General Christopher Maltby, the commanding officer of the Hong Kong garrison, ordered Anthony Hewitt’s commanding officer, Colonel Stewart, to stop fighting, make his way to the Japanese field headquarters and surrender. ‘He [Stewart] went absolutely white with anger,’ recalls Hewitt, ‘because he was the last man of all who would ever have surrendered himself. And I got a pole and a white sheet and tied it to it, but he wouldn’t let me go with him and he set off alone in the fantastic fury of that battle. Hours later the firing stopped and he came back and he was very distressed. He’d been very badly treated, pushed about and abused, but he’d arranged a halt in the firing and a surrender.’
Even though Hong Kong had been effectively defenceless against the Japanese, no one on the British side had thought that the colony would only hold out eighteen days. Irene Drewery, a child of eight at the time, remembers the incredulity with which her family greeted the news of the surrender: ‘A soldier was walking past and shouted up to my mother, “It’s over.” He didn’t say, “It’s over, we’ve won,” or “It’s over, we’ve lost.” It’s just that he said, “It’s over.” So Mother being Mother, thinking that the Japs would never beat the British, started gathering the servants and all the kids and started walking down the hill towards Stanley. She said, “I can’t be bothered to wait for transport to come and take us.”’ For Irene’s mother it was ‘unthinkable’ that the Japanese could have defeated the British in Hong Kong. Incredibly, she had understood the soldier’s remark — “It’s over” — to mean that the British had won the battle. ‘Before war actually broke out, everyone was going round saying the Japanese wouldn’t dare fight us, because they were only little and they were ill equipped and they didn’t know how to fight.’
The inability of Irene Drewery’s mother to accept the possibility of a Japanese victory was to have tragic consequences for her and her family. ‘Probably about halfway down the hill,’ says Irene, ‘we were confronted by six Japanese soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets.’They took Irene’s mother away and then ordered Irene, her nanny, her twelve-year-old brother and two small girls who were staying with the family to wait in a hut at the side of the road. ‘We were sitting in this hut and I started to get really agitated because we’d never been treated like that. I used to go down to the village all the time and the Chinese people there were lovely — we made lots of friends. I got beyond upset, I got angry, and I said to Nanny, “I want to go over and get Mummy,” and she said, “You can’t go, you’ve got to stay here, the Japanese won’t like it.” And I said, “Well, you can’t stop me, I’m going to get my mummy.” And my brother said, “Well, you’re not going to go alone.”’ Irene, her brother and the two other girls left the hut and started banging on the door of the nearby garage where Mrs Drewery was being held. ‘The door opened and they dragged us inside. And when I first went in my mother was sort of half lying up against the wall. She didn’t look like my mother looked. My mother was always beautiful and her hair was always well done and her clothes were always neat and she just didn’t look like my mum. That’s the only way I can explain it — she didn’t look neat and tidy any more.’ Only years later did Irene understand exactly what had happened to her mother — she had been raped.
As Irene stood looking down at her mother she felt cold steel on the back of her neck: ‘I thought to myself he’s going to chop my head off. And I just saw this sword go up. I didn’t even know if it was a sword — it could have been a bayonet.’ At that moment, the Drewerys were the beneficiaries of an extraordinary piece of luck. ‘The next thing the door opened, there was a bang and the soldier fell down, and we were being pushed outside. And a man with a Japanese-American accent said, “Stay here!”’ A Japanese officer had arrived — a member of the Imperial Army who would not tolerate the rape of women or the murder of children. He went back into the garage where Mrs Drewery had been raped ‘and there was a hell of a lot more noise and then he came back outside and said, “Those soldiers will never hurt another living person” or something like that. And he told us he wasn’t going to fight women and children and that he’d been in New York and he was called back and sent to fight. Then he stopped a truck that was coming along from the direction of the village and it was driven by one of our soldiers and the Japanese officer asked them to take us back up.’
On the same day as
Irene Drewery’s ordeal, Christmas Day 1941, Connie Sully too had her first encounter with soldiers of the Imperial Army. At seven o’clock in the morning about fifty Japanese soldiers came down from the hills and burst into the makeshift hospital at the jockey club. ‘We felt a bit scared,’ says Connie. ‘But we’d all been told just to sit down and do things. We made dressings, we rolled bandages, unrolled them, rolled them up again.’ One of the Japanese (Connie suspected he was drunk) came in and threatened the twenty or so nurses who sat preparing bandages. After a few terrifying moments the nurses realized that he only wanted one of the nurses to remove her tin hat. ‘And when she took it off and threw it away, he just nodded and walked off. The Japanese had arrived so quickly that nobody had a chance to clear the booths upstairs of alcohol. And of course they made their way up there first. And once they got into that there was no stopping them.’ When it was dark the Japanese soldiers confronted the nurses once again. ‘Someone came and shone their torch round and they went looking round and picked out the youngest.’ The soldiers took Connie and two young Chinese upstairs. ‘And unfortunately for us, we were all raped. Wasn’t very nice. But if you’d tried to do anything you’d have got a bullet. So that was the only way — you had to grin and bear it. I think I valued my life too much to take a bullet. And then when they’d finished they marched us back downstairs again.’To Connie the rape came as the most brutal shock. ‘I don’t think I’d even had a boyfriend,’ she says. ‘But we knew what they wanted and we were told “Don’t resist” because they don’t think twice — they just either stab or shoot you. I didn’t really feel anything. I sort of kept my body closed off from anything.’ In an extraordinary display of bravery and stoicism, the next morning Connie was back on duty as a nurse: ‘We didn’t put up a show,’ she says. ‘It was finished. What could we do? It was the way you were brought up. You didn’t run away. That wasn’t our upbringing at all. It was just something that happened that you tried to forget, but you never did. Stays with you for ever.’
Appalling as the experience of these British residents of Hong Kong was at the hands of the Japanese, it was, from the first, the Chinese community that suffered most. As Anthony Hewitt was marched through the streets as a prisoner of war he ‘saw dead bodies everywhere. I’d watched them, the Japanese, kill people on a cricket ground along the Queens Road. They were just hitting the Chinese all over the place. Knocking them down with rifle butts, shooting people for no reason, robbing them. It was quite ghastly. I felt terrible. Here we were marching towards imprisonment, and we were the people who were meant to look after the Chinese of Hong Kong and should have defended them, and now we’d left them at the mercy of these ghastly people.’
Demonstrably, the behaviour of the Japanese soldiers who descended upon Hong Kong in December 1941 did not gradually become more brutal as the campaign wore on. As the first-hand testimony demonstrates, from the outset these troops acted in the most appalling way. But the behaviour of the Imperial Army in Hong Kong is explained by conditioning, not by genetics. The soldiers of the Imperial Army’s 38th division who invaded Hong Kong had fought in some 400 actions since being posted to south China more than two years before. And the Imperial Army as a whole had been engaged for the previous ten years in a struggle on the Asian mainland against a people who, they were told, were ‘below human’. That Japanese soldiers did not exempt Westerners from brutal treatment is, in the circumstances, understandable. Unlike the men of the Imperial Army, German soldiers who fought ‘without rules’ on the Eastern Front and then relatively chivalrously in the West were able to put thousands of physical miles between their different mental states.
These early days of the Pacific War were days of triumph for the Japanese Imperial Army. The battle plan of the High Command called for a serious of ambitious attacks across seven different time zones — from Pearl Harbor in the east to Burma in the west. And in each of their attacks the Japanese demonstrated a level of military skill that left their opponents reeling. In the Gulf of Siam the Japanese navy sank the pride of the British navy, the battleships HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales (one deck officer on the Repulse had said, on being told the Imperial Navy was nearby, ‘Oh, but they’re Japanese. There’s nothing to worry about’ — the next day the Japanese sank his ship).17 In one air attack on the Philippines, ten hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese destroyed 103 US planes.18 In Malaya Japanese forces landed unopposed and moved forward so swiftly as to threaten to encircle thousands of British troops.
But the biggest disaster for the Allies occurred two months into the war when the Japanese, having advanced down the Malayan peninsula, reached the British garrison at Singapore. Nothing illustrates the complacency of the British army more clearly than the fall of Singapore — an event that Churchill described as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.’19 Singapore was an island of vital strategic importance — essential sea lanes lay either side of it — but all the gun emplacements faced out to sea. To the north of Singapore lay jungle that was thought impassable. The only problem was, by February 1942 the Japanese had marched through it. Thirty-five thousand Japanese troops confronted a defending force of twice that number under the command of Lieutenant General Arthur Percival. The Japanese were tough, confident and resourceful. The British and their allies were inexperienced, confused and uncertain. Even though the defenders massively outnumbered the attackers, the British and their allies were spread so thinly around the entire coastline of the island that when the Japanese concentrated their attack on one spot they punched through into the interior. After having been forced back to Singapore town itself, Percival finally surrendered on IS February and more than 70,000 British and Allied soldiers fell into Japanese hands. In the course of their attack the Japanese had suffered just 3000 casualties. It was their most outstanding victory of the war. Viscount Kido, one of the emperor’s closest advisers, recorded that Hirohito was ‘very cheerful’ when he heard of the fall of Singapore. ‘My dear Kido,’ the emperor apparently said, ‘I know I harp on this all the time, but as I’ve said before and will say again, it all shows the importance of advance planning. None of this would have been possible without careful preparation.’ 20
In the first three months of the war the Japanese had, much to their own surprise, captured more than 100,000 Allied prisoners. They now faced a profound dilemma — just how should they treat their captives?
PRISONERS OF THE JAPANESE
Appalling as the mistreatment of Westerners in Hong Kong was in the first hours of the war, such cruelty did not represent Japanese policy, but random acts of brutality by individual soldiers and units. Once Japanese authority had been established over the occupied areas there was a search for a systematic approach to the treatment of POWs and civilian internees. In those initial months that policy was influenced by two factors; first, Japan had never ratified the Geneva Convention which laid down humane conditions under which prisoners of war should be treated, and second, the Japanese had never expected to take such huge numbers of POWs so quickly and thus had made little provision for them.
The detailed experience of every POW held by the Japanese is, of course, unique, but the story of what happened to Anthony Hewitt in his first days of captivity in Hong Kong is, in many respects, typical. In common with the vast majority of Allied soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese, he and his men saw nothing dishonourable in having surrendered. ‘I said to them, “You fought wonderfully and you fought with valour, and you have reason to remain proud of that and to retain your pride.” And I noticed that they had all shaved and a lot of them had had their hair cut. They’d cleaned their uniforms and they looked incredibly marvellous. And I thought: “They are still men.”’
This belief that it was possible to surrender and still retain ‘honour’ was anathema to the Japanese. Their military code of conduct stated explicitly that no Japanese soldier could ever surrender. Interestingly, the ancient warrior code of Japan had been contradictory
on this point — on the one hand the warrior was obliged not to allow himself to be captured but on the other he was supposed to treat those who surrendered to him with kindness. This contradiction meant that when, in the course of conflict on the Asian mainland during the 1890s, General Aritomo Yamagata announced that soldiers of the Imperial Army should commit suicide sooner than surrender, his instruction still did not prevent Japanese soldiers taking enemy prisoners and treating them with relative humanity. But this inherent contradiction always existed and when the Japanese were faced with huge numbers of Allied POWs it was easy for them to extrapolate from this one aspect of their military code — that surrender for the Japanese soldier was dishonourable — the belief that for the enemy to give themselves up in such large numbers meant they were not worthy of respect. This belief that their Western adversaries lacked courage was compounded by the sheer size of the Allied POWs, the vast majority of whom towered over the soldiers of the Imperial Army. ‘I think we were all rather shocked and taken aback to see the size of them,’ confirms Toyoshige Karashima, one of those charged with guarding Allied POWs. ‘We thought: “How on earth are we going to look after people of this size?”’
Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II Page 8