Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  The Boswells’ lifeboat, along with the other boat containing forty-two people, eventually made landfall on Banka Island. The exhausted survivors, which included a large number of children, struggled ashore and found sanctuary in a native village. In return for jewellery, the locals sold the shipwrecked survivors water, and a little rice and salted fish. They also told the refugees that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, that Banka Island had also been occupied and that they must give themselves up. The next day the survivors of the Giang Bee presented themselves at the town of Muntok, where the Japanese imprisoned them in the local jail. It was for the survivors of the Giang Bee, and several other evacuation ships that had been sunk off the island, the beginning of a nightmare captivity in Muntok Camp, noted by Allied investigators after the war to be among the worst in the entire Japanese prison camp system. As we will see, later in the war the Japanese moved the survivors across the Banka Strait to Palembang in Sumatra, then back to Muntok and finally to Loembok Linggan Camp. The death rate for women and children was an astounding 33 per cent.

  3

  New Masters

  Who were these noisy soldiers wearing strange uniforms, netted steel helmets or cricket-type caps and rubber shoes with cloven toe?

  Robert Brooks, British child internee

  Singapore, 1942–45

  The arrival of the Japanese, either as battle-fatigued and often trigger-happy units fighting their way grimly to victory as in Singapore, or simply marching in without firing a shot, as in Shanghai, spelt only suffering and horror for those who fell under their heel. The children of empire would be no exception, and would pay as heavy a price as their parents for being enemy aliens in lost colonies. They would suffer through the battles and suffer even more through the occupation, tiny victims of a heartless and sadistic new regime that ruled not through the exercise of law, but torture and murder. A new Dark Age had dawned, and those children who survived it to emerge into the sunshine of liberation in September 1945 were forever marked and changed by their experiences. Their childhoods, such as they were, had been ruined by the Japanese.

  In Singapore, young children like six-and-a-half-year-old Robert Brooks, looked apprehensively at the first Japanese soldiers they encountered. Brooks and his family had taken shelter behind the solid walls of Outram Road Jail during the intense fighting around the outskirts to the city. The day after the surrender of the colony, 16 February 1942, the first Japanese soldiers had arrived at the prison. ‘Comments in the prison with regard to the British surrender of 15th February soon became known – except to us kids whose fantasies made our little minds worse than hell,’ recalled Brooks. ‘Who were these noisy soldiers wearing strange uniforms, netted steel helmets or cricket-type caps and rubber shoes with cloven toe?’1

  On 16 February, the Japanese Kempeitai military police ordered the captured British Governor of Malaya, Sir Shenton Thomas, to make a radio address. Sir Shenton was ‘to tell … that all European civilians were to go to the Padang (City Green) and assemble for registration at the Raffles Hotel,’ recalled Brooks. ‘Anyone who had contacts with British subjects or their work had to be registered with the Europeans.’ This was the first stage in a process of internment for Allied civilians in Singapore that was already underway in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. ‘Within a week civilians had been transported to the Seaview Hotel or Katong House in East Coast Road.’ Olga Henderson and her family had not managed to escape Singapore by ship and they were soon interned along with the remaining Britons unlucky enough to have been stranded. The Seaview Hotel and Katong House were turned into rudimentary transit camps while the Japanese decided where to send their civilian prisoners.

  The Japanese had not been prepared to take so many prisoners and dealing with the over 70,000 Allied troops who surrendered in Singapore was a massive logistical headache for the Japanese Army. Some of the instances of neglect and brutality in the early days were the result of the Japanese being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of prisoners, and not knowing how to care for them properly. They were also disgusted by the concept of ‘surrender’ – it was not a part of their military ideology and this reinforced their often brutal attitude towards prisoners. The added pressures of several thousand white civilians only made the burden worse and the administration more inefficient, leading to more neglect by confused and uninterested Japanese authorities. It appeared evident to many of the prisoners that the Japanese had no plan in hand to deal with captives, and were simply making it up as they went along. Brooks said, ‘The Katong House soon became too full and adjacent large houses were commandeered. On arrival, men were separated from women and children.’ At this point most of the fathers disappeared from their children’s lives until liberation in September 1945. For those whose fathers were military personnel many would be shipped out of Singapore and Hong Kong to work as slave labourers in the jungles of Burma and Thailand, or in the mines of Japan and Manchuria. At least one quarter would perish. Depending on which camps they were sent to, some civilian men remained for the duration inside the segregated sections of the internment centre, while others were permitted to see their wives and children during the day but slept separately at night. Others still were permitted to live with their families. All of them were constantly in danger of falling foul of the Kempeitai military police, which on occasion murdered several and severely maltreated many more civilian men whom the authorities suspected of espionage and other ‘anti-Japanese’ activities.

  The Japanese moved first to deal with the huge numbers of captured Allied military personnel in Singapore. On the morning of 16 February, General Percival and his senior commanders, who had spent the night after the surrender camped inside their former command bunker at Fort Canning, were told that all military prisoners would be relocated to the modern British barracks complex at Changi, on the island’s east coast. Changi Cantonment covered six square miles, and consisted of state-of-the-art three-storey white barrack blocks and smart married quarters bungalows, and had originally been designed for a brigade-sized garrison of 5,500 troops. The Japanese decided to cram in nearly ten times that number of men. The cantonment was sixteen miles from the centre of Singapore City, and to move over 50,000 men and all of their associated kit and rations the Japanese gave the British a grand total of just eighteen trucks and only one day to complete the operation. Thousands of men in a multitude of units began marching towards their new home, filling the roads and filling the air with cheerful First World War marching songs like ‘Tipperary’, ‘Pack up your troubles’, and ‘There’ll always be an England’. Civilians of many races watched the long lines of soldiers trooping past, the once seemingly invincible army of the British Empire disarmed, disorientated and passively taking itself off to prison. Some Indian and Malay spectators jeered and abused the British and Australian soldiers as they marched past, while for the most part the Chinese stood in silence, in dread for their own future under a Japanese occupation force – in previous conflicts the Japanese had murdered thousands of ethnic Chinese everywhere in Asia the moment victory was achieved. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were piped part of the way to Changi, the skirl of the pipes adding to the terrible melancholy of the event.

  At Changi, the British were left to organize the camp themselves, divided and run along the original infantry divisions that had fought and lost the Battle of Malaya. As the troops were being moved they witnessed the fate of the white civilian population in transit. Some 2,300 white men, women and children marched through the blistering heat, loaded down with whatever belongings they could carry, prams piled high with children and possessions, and led by the governor. Sir Shenton Thomas had been deliberately identified by the Japanese as a ‘special case to be humiliated’, and it must have been quite a sight for the Indians, Malays and Chinese lining the road to see the erstwhile governor of one of Britain’s richest and most important colonies at the head of this motley collection of Western men and women who had once commanded such power and prestige. Many of
the Asians wept as the procession trooped past, and some dashed out with bottles of water or a handful of biscuits, risking the irritation of the Japanese guards who escorted the column with rifles and fixed bayonets. In common with Hong Kong’s Governor Sir Mark Young, Sir Shenton ‘had felt that it was his duty to stay, and that by not running away he would help redeem British prestige. In this he was right. Sixty years later, in the heart of Singapore’s thriving financial centre, there is a Shenton Way.’2

  As his party approached Kallang Airport, Captain R. M. Horner of the Royal Army Service Corps recalled that ‘we passed a long and rather tragic procession of civilians – all men and white – on their way to their internment.3 A senior British officer, Brigadier Eric Goodman of the Royal Artillery, described what he saw:

  They were all ages but many around 60 who had obviously been used to many years of comfortable living. Some were pulling suitcases along on homemade carts, some just had haversacks, one even had only a bottle of whisky as far as I could see, and some had the greatest difficulty in just getting themselves along. The Japanese guards with them appeared to be behaving quite correctly.4

  Conditions inside the civilian transit camps at the Seaview Hotel and at the Katong House complex had degenerated rapidly. For white colonists who had enjoyed very comfortable pre-war existences, being evicted from their houses and force-marched into an internment camp was an enormous shock. Added to this was the Japanese policy of initially separating husbands and wives, though as already mentioned this practice was not universal among the hundreds of camps set up throughout Asia. For example, in Shanghai families were permitted to remain together as a unit, and they were sent to special family camps; only single men and women were segregated into gender-specific camps. The camps in Shanghai, though not particularly pleasant places to sit out the war, were nonetheless considered the best of a bad lot in the Occupied Territories and, compared with those in Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere, they were much more humanely run. ‘Singapore, even in February, is still very hot and humid,’ commented Robert Brooks, interned at the age of six and a half. ‘Electric fans had been switched off and the norm of “two baths a day, at least” had become history. After a couple of days personal hygiene left a lot to be desired and the modern saying “as stinky as a wino’s dog” could almost have been assimilated to many of these internees-to-be and their children, and clothes.’5

  By early March 1942, the two transit camps in Singapore were overflowing with people and the facilities were overloaded. ‘Sewerage was failing and the first bore-hole latrines were dug in the garden,’ wrote Robert Brooks. ‘Sweat and dust, dirt and irritation and hunger became the modi operandi.’6 The Japanese moved quite quickly to sort out the situation, perhaps fearing a dysentery or cholera epidemic that could easily have spread to their troops. On Sunday, 8 March the ‘quiet morning was ended at Katong Transit Camp after 10.00 am by Japanese soldiers ordering the women to line up with their baggage. The heavy baggage went by lorry, the women walked.’ The destination for the women and children was Changi Internment Camp, formerly Changi Prison, a building constructed by the British in 1936 beside the new military cantonment. ‘It was a walk of eleven miles to the infamous Changi Jail,’ recalled Brooks. ‘Only the very elderly, frail and children were transported by lorries – all standing up in the back for the native inhabitants to see.’7

  The march to Changi began under a hot, cloudless sky at 11.00 am. By that stage the macadam road surface was so hot that most people walked along the grass verges. ‘Being British, the British spirit was maintained,’ said Brooks. ‘Walk properly, orderly manner, organised and cheerful. We children left about 1.00 pm and passed the marchers at Bedok Road. There was no loud shouting or waving from the lorry passengers or the marchers. Not surprising really. Would anyone dare do that with an irritable Japanese sentry with a bayonet-fixed rifle?’8 Like the soldiers who had marched to Changi, the women used songs to try and keep up their spirits during the long trek. ‘I was told later by my mother, who had been on the march, that among the songs sung by the women en route was: “There’ll always be an England” and “England shall be free” etc. Many of these women did not live to see England again.’9

  Olga Henderson recalled some of the horrors witnessed by even young children on the long, hot march to Changi. ‘On the way, we marched over a bridge. There were ten severed heads on spikes on the side of the bridge, as an example of what might happen if we didn’t behave.’10 Brigadier Ivan Simson, General Percival’s chief engineering officer, recalled similar horrific sights that he witnessed in Singapore City shortly after the surrender. He was approached by two young Japanese officers. They took him for a drive around the conquered city, Simson sitting on the back seat between them. For two hours the car trundled along roads littered with bodies, rubble, burnt-out vehicles and assorted detritus, not to mention Allied soldiers wandering about looting army stores and fighting with one another, and huddled civilians wandering the streets in confusion and fear. As the car approached the docks, where only days before frantic escape attempts had been played out, Simson spotted groups of armed Japanese soldiers who were herding local civilians along the smoke-blackened quayside at gunpoint. The brigadier ‘saw about fifteen coolies, their arms cruelly trussed behind their backs with barbed wire. They had been caught in the act of looting. Eight were Chinese, who, as the horrified brigadier watched, were pushed forward.’11

  A Japanese officer drew his samurai sword, and with a guttural bellow he sliced off the first coolie’s head, a great gush of arterial blood pumping from the crumpled corpse as the detached head rolled across the litter-strewn pavement. The officer moved down the line, decapitating each coolie in succession as the Japanese guards watched in evident admiration. Simson turned away from the scene of what he later called ‘medieval culture’, sickened and horrified. The other captives, who were Indians and Malays, were released with a stern warning, for the Japanese had made it clear that they had come to ‘liberate’ the oppressed colonial peoples of Asia. The Chinese were killed because they were considered the blood enemies of the Japanese, and worthy only of enslavement, not liberation. The warning was as much for the benefit of Brigadier Simson and the British prisoners. The new masters had direct methods for dealing with those who disobeyed them, and the punishment was usually terminal.

  The British children and the elderly aboard the trucks were the first to arrive at Changi Jail. They were greeted by a forbidding sight. ‘The lorries turned into the vast concrete-built prison and its narrow drive at approximately 2.00 pm, through the high porte cochère with open steel gates,’ recalled Robert Brooks. The women arrived much later, footsore and sunburned. ‘We welcomed the 400 tired, hot and dirty women into the main courtyard about 4.00 pm, after their march from Katong, watched by Japanese sentries and the male internees who had already arrived and been incarcerated two or three days before.’12 Once the prison gates were slammed shut, few of the internees would leave the complex again for three and a half years. For the children, their childhood, their path to adulthood, was the ‘camp’, and their education was to be heavily influenced by starvation, beatings, and disease.

  4

  Internment

  This sounds extraordinary, but seen from the angle of a child: here we were in this shack and life was very primitive – but it did not bother us one little bit. My brother and I were not a bit put out that one day we had a lot, and the next we had nothing. We were perfectly comfortable with it.

  Jacqueline Honnor, British child internee

  Santo Tomas Camp, Manila

  Nearly 40,000 Western children, of all ages from babes-in-arms to sixteen-year-olds, were interned by the Japanese. The greatest number were in the Netherlands East Indies, where a complete failure to initiate an evacuation plan before it was too late resulted in 29,000 children ending up in camps on Java, and a further 4,700 on the big island of Sumatra. Some 1,500 Western children were interned in mainland China and a further 315 in Hong Kong,
330 in Singapore and 1,300 in the Philippines.

  Olga Henderson, along with her mother, was imprisoned inside E Block at Changi Prison in Singapore, the women and children’s section, while her father and two brothers went into the men’s section. E Block eventually housed 330 children and 1,000 women prisoners. They were put to work, the Japanese believing that all children from eleven upwards should carry out hard physical labour. Henderson said, ‘We were given pieces of land to cultivate but we weren’t allowed to keep the food we grew – that went to the Japanese.’ Food was to play a central role in all the prisoners’ lives from now on, for there was never enough, and finding more became an all-consuming obsession.

  Life soon became a struggle for survival as the Japanese endeavoured not only to arrest and imprison white civilians, but also Eurasian people who held British or other Allied nationalities. The Japanese considered Eurasians ‘enemy aliens’, and therefore a potential security threat that could best be neutralized by casting them into the internment camps alongside the Westerners. The Harris family, a white British father, Malay mother and Eurasian children, could no longer reside in their house as the Kempeitai military police had noted that the address was a British residence. To remain in situ would have invited immediate arrest. Eileen Harris’s father Tom, a prison warder at Outram Road Jail, had already been interned, but his heavily pregnant wife Clara and their children had attempted to pass themselves off as locals in an attempt to avoid the same fate. ‘Two or three times my mother crept back into our house,’ recalled Harris, ‘now thoroughly wrecked and pilfered and managed to find some of our clothing which she threw into the middle of a table and made a bundle. Food was very scarce and we were always foraging for food.’1 Clara Harris gave birth to her eighth child in these appalling circumstances; the baby died shortly afterwards. That same day the family were identified as British, arrested by the Japanese and thrown into Changi Prison. Tom Harris was also interned in Changi Prison, but was kept separate from his wife and family in the men’s section. ‘The chain of events around that time had a very detrimental effect upon my mother who was never to recover to her normal self,’2 wrote Eileen Harris. The following three and a half years of Japanese imprisonment destroyed the family and left emotional scars in the surviving children that remain open to this day.