The trauma suffered by married prisoners in the Far East is a neglected subject, hidden in the pages of diaries and undelivered letters touching on intimate physical details and a gnawing sense of loss. ‘I need somewhere to put down my thoughts and feelings as if you were here to talk to and discuss things with … to make life more liveable,’ scribbled John Soper in a flimsy exercise book; ‘after the capitulation I willed and telepathised you with all the intensity I could muster to let you know I was safe, and I am quite sure I got through to you … Every night I cry to send you, by will power and prayer, strength and encouragement.’53 Alex Cullen cherished a photo of his wife Dorothy in her ‘snappy little hat’. He wrote, I’m very conscious of you … my own to love, my own to hold in my arms again if God is kind … All the days we have had together make a wonderful story … I know you will not fail me … Dearest, whatever happens, you must remember that I did think of you like that.’54 Now and then emotion spilled over, as in this soliloquy of an interned planter to his wife:
How long, how long … mio? This waiting is a wearying business … If, by the remotest chance, it should not go well, then … my dearest, you will know that my heart is full of love for you and that my only wish will be for your well-being … Last night I dreamed of you … such a lovely dream, and today I feel quite happy and confident. We are really very close together. I wonder if you feel the same?55
Dreams helped Tom Kitching to cope with his anguish about his wife’s fate: ‘Nora comes to me in a dream this night. We have a long, intimate talk. I feel sure she is all right.’ He was sustained by mental evocations – Nora in conversational flow, Nora throwing a dinner party, Nora and Tom together on a repatriation ship – although she had died in the Kuala tragedy before his internment.56 Thinking of his wife, John Soper found solace: ‘at the early morning service you seemed to be kneeling next to me at the altar rail’ and at Christmas ‘you came and stood beside me, very real and very near, so distinct that you must have been willing it’.57 Dorothy and Alex Cullen shared a commitment to the Presbyterian Church; his ‘deeply Christian spirit’ – the words of Fr Gerard Bourke, the Redemptorist priest who prayed with him – bolstered his faith in his wife’s courage and devotion.58 Harry Malet found comfort from attending Benediction in camp with his brother-in-law, Hugh Sandeman. He ‘loved this as I could imagine Jo and the kids going to the very same service six hours later’.59 But the Japanese policy of withholding mail increased prisoners’ worries. ‘If only they knew we were safe and well, it would make all the difference,’ Malet grumbled. ‘The uncertainty of everything must be pretty deadly and I know Jo worries herself sick and cannot show it in front of the kids. Please God the Japs will allow us to write or send our casualty lists home to the War Office via a neutral country.’60
As their imprisonment dragged on, many husbands felt the nagging fear of infidelity, as physical weakness destroyed their self-esteem. A diary entry records ‘A long discussion the other night on what attitude we should take if upon return we found that our wives had been unfaithful.’ John Soper pondered: ‘Sometimes I wonder whether it might be better if I don’t come through, then a very much better, idealised me would go on living in your heart, but if I come back to you, disillusionment will come with me.’ His anxiety was transferred to his wife’s state of mind: ‘Spiritually and mentally you must be going through a bad time. It might even be better for your present peace of mind if I were dead and gone … But as it is you must be alternating spells of worrying about me with unfulfilled longings and frantic prayers for the ending of this ghastly war which keeps us apart.’61
Family men speculated as to whether their wives could cope alone with family responsibilities away from home. In his diary of letters, the rubber planter Pat Warin begged his wife, ‘please don’t despair … I fear that it is going to be very difficult … You have a big task to take care of J. and A. and I’m sure you will succeed, and my love will be with you always, always.’62 As if answering her husband (though events prevented her from posting the letter), Dorothy Cullen insisted, ‘Don’t worry about us … for your sake and the children’s I will be strong. I won’t give way to despondency and despair. I’ll try and make a happy home for the children and please God some day we’ll be together again.’63
With hindsight, stress levels among the refugee women from Malaya were probably greater than anyone realized, and anecdotal evidence suggests that a fair number of these women died relatively young. Although emotions were seldom openly discussed, they were privately recorded. ‘I have gone down into the depths …’ wrote Dorothy Cullen, ‘a black darkness where one feels the waters are going to close above one’s head.’64 In addition to worries over husbands captured or posted missing, there were concerns for relatives in war-torn Britain and for brothers and sons fighting at the front. For those in Australia there were also misunderstandings with their hosts over the conduct of the Malayan campaign.65 The British refugees felt vulnerable, facing indefinite separation, possible widowhood and financial constraints. ‘After all, what were we?’ asked one. ‘No home and no country …’66 Mabel Price had a small reserve of £200 in the Bank of New South Wales, but otherwise had to manage on £4 10s (£4.50) a week from the Lord Mayor of London’s Fund. With rent of 30s (£1.50) a week, she was allowed to do ‘menial tasks to augment the allowance’:
I found myself a position as a ‘char lady’ to a lady living in a flat close by … My little charring job went well until I was asked to clean the lavatory pan. That I refused to do, so I started to sew with a machine I had bought cheaply … Then I got another job to clean a flat occupied by American servicemen … This I did, expecting some continuity of work. It was very dirty. As soon as I cleaned up the mess, I was promptly given the sack … I was being used.67
There were many adjustments to be made. Some British refugees found it hard to share cramped accommodation and to do without refrigerators or air conditioning. ‘The dry, burning heat was much more trying than Malaya. There we never had dust or grit and our huge trees were vast and shady, and our houses open to the moist air. I was homesick for Malaya,’ confessed Ursula Holttum. Her Australian neighbours were curious ‘to see what crazy kind of an English woman I could be’.68 In Fremantle Mrs Price felt:
we were received with mixed feelings by the Australians, who only knew us to have servants to work for us, while they had to struggle in the olden times to make a home and find work. I remember on arrival being told ‘Jack was as good as his master in this country’ … A tough lot the Australians, living in a tough country.69
In time the newcomers adjusted to their new environment, and many Malayan children received great kindness and an excellent education in Australian schools.70 Living in close communication, the wives gave each other moral support. ‘My mother and others in her situation in Geelong gave us children a marvellous and rich childhood, concealing what must have been a constant anguish and anxiety about what was happening to their husbands and relatives,’ Gordon Snell of Singapore remembered.71 When the Japanese bombing of Darwin posed a direct threat to Australia, young Malayans accepted it as part of a never-ending adventure. ‘I remember being amused when the Jap invasion panic hit Western Australia in 1942,’ said Derek Allton. ‘We were given picks and shovels and frantically urged to dig zig-zag trenches’ in the school grounds, and ‘we practised air raid drill flat on our faces in the corridors’.72 The threat receded after the American fleet’s two costly victories in the Coral Sea and at the battle of Midway in May and June, which in retrospect marked the turning point in the Pacific War.73 Meanwhile British families listened in to the plaintive tinkling of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as Tokyo Radio broadcast names of prisoners in enemy hands, and rejoiced at the arrival of an occasional postcard via the International Red Cross. The prisoners’ messages were stereotyped and out of date, but there was no denying the thrill when one husband beat the Japanese censor with the curious message ‘Continuing Healthy And Not Getting Ill’, revealing that he was in Cha
ngi.74
By 1943 conditions in Changi were deteriorating. The interminable diet of rice, supplemented by black-market purchases and some camp-grown produce, preyed on minds and bodies (and incidentally reduced the sexual drive). The prisoners became obsessed with the minutiae of their diet and with ‘feasts’ to celebrate birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other occasions. ‘I am loath to admit’, wrote Pat Warin to his wife, ‘that my thoughts were very often, and are, concerned with food, but it is difficult to think otherwise when one is hungry.’75 Stealing became acceptable, as ‘the stomach overrides all morality’.76 Other ranks suffered much more than officers: ‘One sees some ghastly specimens of walking skeletons about the place,’ Harry Malet observed.77 Rations and rumours dominated conversation. Rumours that internees would be repatriated circulated like wildfire, but were always dashed.
The separation of 173 internees from their wives was a hardship never shared by Japanese nationals imprisoned in India. (But, with ingenuity, the internees found a way for them to meet each other once every six or seven weeks, to exchange a glance and a hurriedly whispered word over a bin of garbage.) More culpable was the Japanese strategy of raiding Red Cross supplies, depriving prisoners and internees of essential medicines, so that hundreds – diabetics, for example – died untreated. ‘The Nipponese are a curious mixture of savagery and elements of decency,’ wrote Tom Kitching: the result was total unpredictability.78 The first Camp Commandant, Major Kita, was, in Harold Cheeseman’s words, ‘a beast of a man whose appearance was a reflection of his bestial brutality’.79 Even Lieutenant Asahi – a moderate man, reputedly a Christian – could not prevent face-slapping and punching. But in April 1943 a new and sinister figure, Tominaga, took charge of discipline. He imposed a regime of calculated deprivation and ill-treatment. Touring the camp one evening, a Japanese officer indulged in a mass assault on twenty-two men and four women.80
In September 1942 there was a major confrontation. The Japanese required all military prisoners of war to sign a form undertaking never to attempt escape. They met with mass refusal. In retaliation, the prisoners were marched to Selerang Barracks, where over 15,000 were crammed into an area built for 2,000. That same day four British soldiers who had escaped and been recaptured were executed by firing squad before the British area commander. After three days without proper food, shelter and sanitation, amid a growing threat of epidemics, the senior officer accepted the ‘order’ to sign, taking personal responsibility for his men. The British saw it as a moral victory. ‘The spirit of the troops throughout, though it sounds hackeneyed, was magnificent,’ said one participant.81
For the internees the testing time came a year later. This crisis was triggered by a daring Allied commando raid on Japanese shipping in Singapore harbour. On 10 October 1943 the Kempeitai descended on the gaol to seize individuals they believed had conveyed vital intelligence to the commandos. From dawn to dusk the internees were kept outside in the sun without food or drink while an intense search went on for a radio transmitter and other damning evidence. Starting that day of the notorious Double Tenth and continuing through 1944, some fifty-seven civilians were arrested and taken to various interrogation centres in Singapore. They were held in cramped cages under barbarous conditions, deprived of food, sleep, movement, speech, privacy and medicine, and underwent mental and physical torture. Many of the men were middle-aged or prominent figures such as Leonard Wilson, Bishop of Singapore, Hugh Fraser, Acting Colonial Secretary, and Robert Scott, Director of Information and survivor from the Chiang Bee. Three women were also seized – an American-born journalist, Mrs Freddy Bloom, her friend, Dr Cecily Williams, a gifted and dedicated doctor, and the latter’s successor as Commandant in the Women’s Camp, Mrs Dorothy Dixon. Although they were spared the physical inquisition, they were subject to gross humiliation and mental torture. Fifteen men died; one, J. S. Long, Assistant Commissioner of Police, was executed.82 In the meantime all remaining privileges in Changi were cancelled, the diet was drastically reduced, and draconian orders were constantly issued. ‘So the war goes on,’ wrote Tom Kitching cryptically. But his health was fast deteriorating. The last entry in his diary, on 1 April 1944, records, ‘We thought the “Double Tenth” inquisition was over, but today they take three more, I am told, including Rendle and Ker.’83 The third was Penseler, once Manager of the Raub gold mine in Pahang. All of them, and Tom Kitching himself, died in Japanese hands in the course of that year.
Throughout 1942 news of atrocities against the Singapore Chinese and of deaths and executions upcountry were brought by prisoners’ working parties or those transferred from other gaols, such as Penang Gaol and Pudu Gaol, Kuala Lumpur. Reports also percolated into Changi of failed escapes, and the disastrous events at sea around Black Friday emerged from prisoners transferred from camps in the Dutch East Indies. Scraps of news were seized on eagerly, kindling hopes that loved ones might be free; twenty-seven husbands in Changi awaited news of their wives aboard the Kuala. Dozens of evacuees, including a few of the Kuala’s passengers (G. J. O’Grady was one), did make it by the only viable routes along Sumatra’s Indragiri or Djambi rivers and over the highlands to the west coast. Most of the parties who arrived at Padang-Emmahaven before 6 March, including l,600 British soldiers, eventually reached Colombo by boat. Safety eluded hundreds more, however. The Penang lawyer Charles Samuel, who had been on the Kuala, reached Padang on 7 March but waited in vain for a passage to safety. Cunyngham-Brown, volunteer Naval Reservist and former Labour Controller in Johore, arrived too late and was eventually captured, as were his colleagues Lieutenant Robin Henman, and Sub Lieutenant Stuart Sim, the erstwhile customs officer at Lamut. The Dutch ship Rooseboom, which had left Padang on 26 February with over 500 people on board, was well on course to Ceylon when she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean. All but four passengers went down with the ship or suffered a lingering death adrift in a single lifeboat. The dead included Brigadier Paris, commander of the 11th Indian Division, Major Nunn, head of the Public Works Department, and his wife, and Mrs Savage-Bailey, mother of the actress Dulcie Gray.
The fate of the Straits Steamship-Mansfield’s party captured off Banka Island on 16 February was decided at Muntok. Les Froggatt recounted:
Members of the Services, civilian men, women and children – about 1,500 in all – were herded together in the Jail and in the coolie quarters of the Tin Mining. Co. at Muntok, the men being sent on working parties to the aerodromes and seaplane anchorage almost immediately. A little badly cooked rice and extremely weak tea was all the food available for the first five days and on Saturday morning various members of the crews were ordered on board to take the captured ships back to Singapore where they arrived at the Naval Base on Friday, 27 February, the escort comprising 32 Japanese men o’war, including battleships and heavy cruisers … Those who remained behind at Muntok were later transferred to camps near Palembang in Sumatra where food conditions were appalling, and the death rate extremely high.84
Starvation, malnutrition and disease would be the common experience of all the civilians who fled from Malaya only to be caught in Sumatran waters. Interned in various camps around Palembang, Padang, Lobok Linggau or Banka Island, they faced worse conditions than their compatriots in Changi, where there were at least permanent buildings, water and sanitation.85 Those past their prime had little hope of survival: Charles Samuel, aged sixty-one, who fought against aching worries about his wife’s fate aboard the Tanjong Pinang, died of pellagra in Padang Gaol in December 1944. He had fought hard; his diary entry for the 233rd day of internment noted, ‘I must not let myself go “down hill”.’86 Conditions at Banka – known as ‘Dead Man’s Island’, because of the prevalence of the severe, recurrent Banka Fever – took a progressive death toll among young women, including nursing sisters, in their twenties and thirties. Almost a third of British women and around a half of the men died in Palembang and Muntok camps, many, tragically, towards the end of their internment.
Even
so, these civilians fared better than the Malayan Volunteers, who, although military prisoners of war, found themselves drafted as slave labour to various parts of Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere. Few of those transferred to Borneo were to survive. Captains Chamberlin and Baddeley, captured off Banka Island, were sent to Japan for interrogation as suspected naval intelligence officers. After a spell in Ofuna, a special Kempeitai camp, during deepest winter, they spent two years labouring in the Mitsubishi shipyards and Honshu steel mills. Others were drafted into Japan’s carbide factories or to Formosa or Korea. Cunyngham-Brown and his companions, following a series of bizarre and poignant adventures redolent of fiction, were sent as lumberjacks to the Manchurian Railway Company at Pekan Baru on the east coast of Sumatra, where they met up with Katharine Sim’s husband, Stuart, among the dwindling band of slaves. Only those at the peak of their physical stamina and with experience of living in the East had a hope of survival. Driven beyond endurance, starved, disease-ridden and dehumanized, three-quarters of these in Pekan Baru died in eighteen months – almost 3,000 out of a workforce of 3,800.
By comparison, Leslie Froggatt’s group, repatriated from Muntok to Singapore, were fortunate. ‘During the next 14 months we were engaged in work at the Naval Base, operating from there to Johore, Penggarang and Keppel Harbour, at the end of which time native crews were employed and the P.O.W.s were all congregated on a depot ship which was moored off the main pier at the Naval Base.’ Some also worked as coolies at the nearby Seletar airfield, which had suffered in the Japanese shelling of Singapore. It was gruelling labour for middle-aged Britons:
There were about 100 in all and daily working parties were sent ashore to undertake all kinds of jobs varying from digging drains, cleaning latrines, salvaging and breaking up boats which had been sunk or scuttled during the attack on Singapore, making roads and every kind of arduous, humiliating and objectionable task that could be found. Food was scarce and beatings frequent. One by one our members fell sick, no medical facilities were available, and when we reached an extremely low state of health, we were transferred to the British Camp Hospital at Selerang, Changi.87
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