Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  The male and female civilian internees’ compounds were each headed by a ‘camp master’ or ‘camp mistress’ who was chosen from among the prisoners by the Japanese. Each barrack block housed between thirty and one hundred people and had its own ‘barrack master’ or ‘barrack mistress’, who was appointed personally by Lieutenant Colonel Suga and who was ultimately responsible for the conduct and behaviour of the prisoners. As elsewhere in the Japanese slave empire, a prisoner who agreed to take on a position of responsibility constantly ran the risk of being punished for the actions of those he/she represented. The camp and barrack masters and mistresses were extremely brave people who thought it their duty to try and set an example to their fellow inmates and to act as a kind of buffer between the Japanese camp administrators and the general prisoner population.

  The Japanese policy of removing young boys from their mothers at around the age of ten years was rigorously enforced at Batu Lintang. The lads were shifted into the men’s civilian compound where many were reunited with their fathers. Some fathers had managed to keep their young sons with them in the men’s compound since their arrival at the camp. Don Tuxford, a Briton who had married a local girl, was in the men’s civilian compound with his eight-year-old son in 1942. His daughter Julia was interned in the women’s compound with Tuxford’s mother and sister. Because Tuxford’s wife was not British, she had remained free outside of the wire, but her Eurasian children had been forcibly interned as enemy aliens.

  Most of the children at Batu Lintang were to be found inside the female camp, which was positioned slightly away from the male compounds that held British, Australian, Dutch and Indian POWs, male civilian internees, and religious personnel. Nearly all of the women internees were either British or Dutch. There were a handful of Eurasian and Chinese women, and four Americans, including the famous writer Agnes Keith, who later wrote a book about her experiences in Batu Lintang that was made into a Hollywood film.

  One male internee described the accommodation inside the women’s camp as ‘new and fair’, and commented that in his opinion the women ‘had a reasonable area for cultivation’. The wooden barrack block was very small, and each prisoner was allotted a personal space for sleeping and storing property that measured just six feet by four feet (1.8 m × 1.2 m). The first camp mistress was a British nun called Mother Bernadine, but after she became ill another Briton, Mrs Dorie Adams, took over. Adams was the wife of the camp master in the civilian men’s compound. The number of women and children in the camp fluctuated because of disease. In March 1944 the women’s camp comprised 279 people, divided into 160 nuns, 85 secular women and 34 children.

  By September 1944 the camp population had dropped to 271 and at liberation in September 1945, to 237.

  Of the 34 children in the camp, the oldest had been only seven when Batu Lintang first opened in early 1942. Women often went without food to make sure that the children survived, and it is thanks to their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the little ones, that not one single child died in Batu Lintang during the war. As well as fighting against starvation, the women prisoners struggled with disease, forced labour, harsh treatment, and deplorable living quarters every day of their imprisonment. The Japanese later forced all the women to work for them, primarily repairing uniforms, for which they were paid some ‘camp dollars’, printed paper currency that was introduced by the administration. The prisoners jokingly referred to camp dollars as ‘banana money’ because of the banana trees that appeared on the ten dollar note.

  Batu Lintang, in common with the other camps in the Netherlands East Indies, became a place where inmates were ground down through a combination of disease, starvation and vicious maltreatment by the guards. Harsher than camps in Shanghai, Hong Kong and elsewhere, at Batu Lintang women and children internees were forced to slave alongside Allied military prisoners under an unremittingly hostile regime and, by the end of the war, an average of two prisoners died there every day. As time went on, the women and children internees were so hungry that ‘I can quite truthfully say that our mouths water, and that we “slaver” as dogs do before meals,’ recalled Hilda Bates, a British prisoner. In this camp 60 per cent of the guards would later have one or more crime against the prisoners ascribed to them, when Australian investigators began to unravel the truth after the war.

  5

  City of Terror

  Adults were beaten up all the time and we got quite blase´ about seeing this and it ceased to mean anything.

  Moira Chisholm, British child internee

  Shanghai, 1943

  The time it took for the Japanese to intern Allied civilians differed from place to place. Sometimes they moved incredibly quickly to gather up and throw into camps enemy aliens, but in other places the Japanese seemed content to allow Allied civilians limited freedom of movement for many months after assuming power. In Hong Kong, internment had occurred within a couple of weeks of General Malby’s surrender on 25 December 1941, an event the local Chinese had christened ‘Black Christmas’. Elsewhere, the process was convoluted. In October 1942, Allied nationals living in Shanghai were required to purchase red armbands from the Japanese, who were quick to realize that they could make some money out of the new regulations. Allied civilians had to wear the armbands whenever they left their houses, as degrading a symbol as the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to display on their clothing throughout German-occupied Europe.

  Allied civilians in Shanghai had been living under an increasingly invasive Japanese occupation authority since the takeover of the International Settlement on 8 December 1941, but they had still been theoretically ‘free’ in many aspects of their lives. People could still go out and meet friends, dine in restaurants and attend the cinema. Children had continued to attend school. Also, at this stage, most of the Allied civilians were still living in their own homes, though many were under constant surveillance by the Kempeitai, Japan’s dreaded military police. They could be subject to arrest, interrogation and detention at one of a number of torture centres that had been set up throughout the city.

  The new red armbands were each printed with a letter denoting the wearer’s nationality (‘B’ for British, ‘A’ for American, ‘N’ for Netherlands and so on) and an individual identification number below the letter. Local Germans, allies of the Japanese, took to wearing Nazi swastika armbands so that they would not be interfered with by Japanese sentries, who were extremely suspicious and wary of all Westerners in the city. At the same time that Allied civilians were being forced to buy armbands, the Kempeitai also issued new rules concerning the behaviour of Westerners. The Japanese had been content to permit Allied civilians to run occupied Shanghai for them until they were in a position to replace the multitude of Western managers, technical personnel and foreign experts who kept the city functioning. The Shanghai Municipal Police officer corps still primarily consisted of British and American men, the public utilities were still run by foreign engineers, and the banking houses and great businesses of Shanghai like Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and British-American Tobacco continued to function under their pre-war managers.

  However, although the Japanese decided they would have to tolerate whites running the city’s utilities for a time, they did decide to ban Westerners from the social life of Shanghai. They gave orders that Allied nationals were forbidden from entering theatres, cinemas, dance halls, nightclubs, the Canidrome in the French Concession or the Race Course (which now forms People’s Square in modern Shanghai). In addition, all Allied nationals were ordered to surrender their radios, cameras and telescopes to the Kempeitai. Failure to do so would lead to individuals being tortured as suspected spies. Such measures heightened the atmosphere of fear and insecurity that gripped the foreign population of occupied Shanghai. Fathers feared a knock on the door in the middle of the night, wives feared being separated from their husbands, and children were confused by the sudden changes to routine and much-diminished socia
l standing. ‘The honeymoon period was over,’ wrote North-China Daily News reporter Ralph Shaw, who was himself later interned. ‘The Japanese were showing their teeth and, from their record of cruelty on China, we knew that many of us were going to suffer indescribable illtreatment.’1

  One British boy decided at this stage to leave Shanghai and to embark on a hare-brained adventure through Japanese-occupied China. ‘When I ran away from home, I was a child of eleven, and had the silly notion to go to the next large city, which was Nanking, some 300 miles away,’ recalled Norman Shaw. ‘I just followed the railway tracks far out into the countryside, where there was nothing for miles and miles.’2 After Shaw had walked for several hours through the night he was stopped by a Japanese railway worker who was manning some signalling equipment. ‘He searched me, found my identity card with the red band on it – the sign of an enemy national. He then made me take off my woollen sweater, which he kept, and told me to go on my way.’ Shaw trekked on until he came to a small village. ‘It was a cluster of bungalows built on stilts, about twelve in all, which housed Japanese troops!’ Undeterred, Shaw approached the dwellings in the darkness. ‘As I got up to one … I saw a man on the porch, so I dived under the bungalow but he saw me, shone a torch and fished me out. I was terrified as it was a Japanese officer with his huge samurai sword.’3 Encounters between Allied children and the Japanese were often very different from the experiences of their internee parents with the occupiers, and very often rather surreal. ‘He searched me, got my identity card out and saw I was British, so he practised his English on me, with a few questions. He took me inside and gave me something to eat and a cup of tea. Then he got some English children’s books out and got me to teach him to read. He was quite kind to me and told me to go back home.’4

  The following morning the kindly Japanese officer placed Shaw on a train back to Shanghai, not realizing that the English schoolboy was not yet done with his hair-brained scheme. ‘I got off at the next stop and carried on my adventure on foot,’ said Shaw. ‘I kept walking and it was soon dark again and you had to watch your footing otherwise you would be in the paddy fields. As I kept going I heard voices in the distance where there was a convoy of Chinese farmers all carrying sacks of rice and grain – men, women and children. I joined them on their journey to Shanghai city, they were smuggling goods to the black market.’ This was incredibly dangerous work as the Japanese normally bayoneted smugglers to death on the spot if they were apprehended by army patrols. On his return to Shanghai, Shaw stayed with a friend’s family. ‘As a runaway from home and school, the school informed everybody to notify them or my parents of my whereabouts if seen or contacted. Later I found out that my father was in deep trouble with the Japanese for not producing his family for internment. He told them he could not find me so they thought he was stalling confinement.’5 Shaw was eventually reunited with his parents and spent the rest of the war in internment camps in Shanghai.

  Many British and American fathers and husbands did suddenly disappear from their families in Shanghai on the night of 5/6 November 1942, when the Japanese launched a huge raid on addresses across the city. The aim was to arrest all Allied men that they considered a threat to security, or who were seen as potential troublemakers. A total of 243 Britons, with 65 Americans, 20 Dutchmen and an assortment of Greeks, Canadians and other Allied nationals making in all 350 men, were taken into custody by the Japanese. Labelled by the Japanese as ‘Prominent Citizens’, they were bundled into army trucks and driven to a rudimentary internment camp set up at Haiphong Road in former US Marine Corps accommodation. Shortly after these arrests, the final internment of an estimated 7,600 Allied men, women and children living in Shanghai was put into effect by the Japanese. In achieving the internment of all of these people the Japanese forced the British Residents’ Association to collaborate with them in drawing up lists and deciding who went into which camp. It was probably better for everyone that the British organized this themselves, and the Japanese in Shanghai and Hong Kong recognized the organizational abilities of the British and by and large let them get on with it.

  Between January and July 1943, Allied civilians were rounded up and told that they could bring into the camps whatever they could carry. Their homes and the remainder of their possessions now belonged to the Emperor. Entire lives carefully constructed in the Far East were wiped out at a stroke. Schools were closed, education for white children was now officially at an end and the process of segregation enforced. The whites were force-marched through downtown Shanghai by Japanese soldiers toting long rifles and fixed bayonets, the new masters of the city trying hard to humble the Caucasians by parading them before huge crowds of mostly silent Chinese onlookers. Moira Chisholm was nine years old in 1943 and recalled the round-up: ‘The Japanese came and collected us in trucks and took us to a football pitch to sort everyone out in alphabetical order.’6 Single men were sent over the Huangpu River to Pudong (then called Pootung) and interned in a dilapidated old three-storey godown, or warehouse, belonging to British-American Tobacco (the site today occupied by the Pearl Oriental TV Tower, the symbol of ‘New Shanghai’), while the rest went into six other camps in the city or at Lunghwa (immortalized in J.G. Ballard’s book and Steven Spielberg’s film Empire of the Sun) just south of the metropolis (today’s Longhua district). Fortunately for the internees, only the Haiphong Road Camp was run by the Japanese Army, and the other seven camps came under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Consul-General and his Consular Police. Food was always short, there was severe congestion, minimal washing facilities and sporadic bouts of brutality, but on the whole disease claimed a greater number of lives than Japanese beatings or firing squads. ‘Almost everyone who had diabetes died,’ recalled Ronald Calder, who as a child was imprisoned in Lunghwa Camp, ‘because of the poor quality of insulin.’7 Dysentery was also rife among the internees. ‘Every time you got an illness it spread and there was never a chance to get well again.’8

  Child internee Moira Chisholm later recalled that in her camp there were numerous beatings handed out to adult internees by the Japanese guards. ‘Adults were beaten up all the time and we got quite blase´ about seeing this and it ceased to mean anything.’9 Children were quickly desensitized by the cruelty and meanness of their everyday lives inside the camps. At least, unlike in the Netherlands East Indies, in the China camps families remained together for the duration of the war. Chisholm’s father had been a prison officer in Shanghai before internment. ‘We got a family room for my Mum and Dad and sister, who was four at the time’, remembered Chisholm.10 The Chisholm family was probably sent initially to Chapei Camp in Shanghai, in today’s Zhabei district. The camp was the former Great China University Campus, and the accommodation consisted of two three-storey blocks and a chemical factory on a fifteen-acre site that had been badly damaged by fighting during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 – the remaining buildings were in a state of disrepair. The camp housed 1,536 internees at its height.

  Conditions in the Shanghai internment camps were generally good when compared to the hell-holes run for civilians in the Netherlands East Indies, such as the infamous Tijdeng Ghetto discussed in the following chapter. Everyone mucked-in, families lived together, and the prisoners took to organizing the camps themselves. ‘The camp-dwellers were at least able to obtain basic levels of food and shelter and, with notable exceptions, were not subjected to the kind of barbaric cruelty routinely inflicted on Allied servicemen in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.’11

  The internment camps in Shanghai make an interesting study of how the Japanese dispersed the large Allied civilian population after initially concentrating them for sorting and recording. The Japanese method of creating internment camps was brutally simple and economic – requisition some buildings, throw a barbed wire cordon around the area and establish a small guard detachment. None of the camps in Shanghai were purpose built. Children went with their parents into one of several ‘family camps’ located in and around the city. Chape
i Camp has already been mentioned, but others of comparable size were Ash Camp on Great Western Road, Columbia Country Club Camp, Lunghwa Camp and Yu Yuan Road Camp.

  Ash Camp was a former British Army barracks complex that gained its name because of the ash that had been used during the construction of the foundations for the buildings and pathways. Before the withdrawal of the British North China Command in 1940, it had served as barracks for a famous Scottish regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The eastern half of the former barracks complex was still in use as a military base in March 1943, when the internment camp opened. These blocks housed Chinese troops loyal to the Wang Ching-wei puppet regime that was created by the Japanese to try to give the impression that the Chinese had some say in governing the city. The western half of the camp was used to house Allied nationals, a majority of whom were former employees of the Shanghai Municipal Council, along with their families. The wooden barrack blocks were partitioned into family rooms. Older teens and unmarried inmates lived in six-or seven-bed dormitories. Just over 500 internees were held in the camp, which suffered from frequent flooding when it rained heavily in Shanghai.

  The former Columbia Country Club, once an American expatriate social centre with tennis courts and beautifully manicured lawns, was also turned into a family camp by the Japanese. From the autumn of 1942 until the end of the winter it was used to house enemy nationals from the so-called ‘Outports’, who were awaiting repatriation. The Outports were smaller foreign concessions that had been established in Chinese towns and cities, particularly along the Yangtze River. In May 1943, the Columbia Country Club became a standard internment camp. It consisted of just the two-storey clubhouse building that was set in five acres of grounds. Fewer than 400 internees were held at the camp during the war.