Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  ‘A typical day would be getting up in the morning, having ginger tea and anything we might have to eat – part of a banana, if we were lucky,’ recalled Jacqueline Honnor. ‘Then we had to go on roll-call, and that would consist of us all standing in a line in the sun where we would be counted. The officer would go up and down with his long sword, and we would bow. They were never cruel or nasty to us, to my knowledge. But I do know that people who tried to escape had a bad time.’16 The internees were indeed fortunate that at Santo Tomas the commandant, although strict, was not actually a psychopath like Captain Sonei at the Tjideng Ghetto in Java. Children amused themselves as best they could. ‘We used to play skipping-rope games: two children turning the rope and somebody jumping in. Sometimes one of the guards would jump in and we would deliberately tighten the rope to trip him up and he would go down with a splendid clatter, but he would laugh.’

  The poor provision of food by the Japanese authorities was the single most pressing issue concerning all internees throughout the Occupied Territories, not least at Santo Tomas. ‘A lot of the time the food was very, very tiny salt fish, some sort of protein, and rice.’17 In December 1943, the Japanese commandant issued a single shipment of Red Cross parcels to the prisoners, the only time that this was ever done. Usually the Japanese simply illegally stockpiled Red Cross supplies and pilfered them themselves, or cynically left them to gather dust in warehouses where thousands were discovered after the war. These parcels could have saved countless lives. ‘There was a food kit, medical supplies, clothes and badly needed shoes,’ recalled Lieutenant Rita Palmer, a US Army nurse interned alongside the civilians at Santo Tomas. ‘The next day there were 15 “kit” casualties, as the doctors termed it, from eating the chocolate bars.’18 Jacqueline Honnor also recalled the Red Cross shipment: ‘We had about four food parcels from the Red Cross in total, and that saved our lives. They contained powdered milk, corned beef and stuff like that, all good protein.’19 The internees had made efforts to create a store of canned goods in case the Japanese severely cut the rations, but this proved impossible to maintain because of the very large numbers of prisoners crammed into Santo Tomas. The stored food was all eaten.

  Increased American air activity over Manila, including several air raids, caused the Japanese to close the main gate to the camp permanently in January 1944. No more bartering with the locals was permitted and no more supplies of fresh food could be brought into the camp legally. Thereafter, the prisoners would have to survive on a steadily decreasing ration of rice twice a day. ‘The rice became more and more watery as time went by until it was a teacupful of rice a day, and that was it. We all became obsessed with food, rather like anorexics,’20 said Honnor. The only way to obtain fresh food was through contacts in the Philippine Underground movement or by growing it in the allotments. ‘[When] it seemed as if conditions could be no worse the Japs would take more food from them [the internees] and each one dipped into his supply of stored goods,’ recalled Palmer. ‘Thus when the real emergency arrived nothing was left to eat.’21 Obsession with food affected the camp children as much as the adults. ‘There were a few recipe books in the library and, even at the age of ten, I could copy out recipes,’ recalled Honnor. ‘You were sort of mentally eating.’22

  In the single-sex camps in the Netherlands East Indies, many young children could barely recall having seen a Western man. Young boys were bereft of male role-models, and instead hero-worshipped any of the women in the camp who demonstrated grit, determination and bravery before the Japanese. Ernest Hillen recalled Mrs Crone, who was ‘built like a tree’, standing up to a fearsome beating from a Japanese guard. ‘I’d seen worse,’ said Hillen. ‘I felt no pity, just pride.’ On the rare occasions when Western men entered his camp, Hillen was very disappointed. Once, a group of male prisoners arrived to help the women repair fences. They looked cowed and beaten. ‘Mrs Crone called them the bruised ones. I thought they just looked sorry for themselves, not the way men should. After the second day I didn’t bother going to watch them again.’ Hillen was later transferred to Kampong Makassar Camp. By this time, even though still a young boy, he was as inured to pain and suffering as any battle-hardened soldier. ‘I could walk down our barrack past women and children with broken teeth and bleeding gums, hair growing in tufts and faces and stomachs bloated with hunger oedema and beriberi, boils as big as ping pong balls and oozing tropical ulcers and not let myself see them: pain was pain.’23 Violence had also become so commonplace that Hillen hardly took any notice. ‘I saw many women and older children slapped and kicked sometimes until they fell down, that after a while I didn’t bother telling my mother about it any more.’24 The boys at Ambarawa 8 were similarly becoming emotionally remote from pain, suffering and death. ‘We carried twenty or thirty bodies of the old men a day … It was very hot so you could not leave them more than twelve hours. We carried these dead bodies outside the camp, we didn’t mind that. So many things were happening. You were so, how do you call it … numb.’25 The piles of corpses represented only work for the young boys detailed to dispose of them. ‘Dozens of corpses were carried out the gate daily. The men died of exhaustion, dysentery, hunger and oedema. The dead were placed on big straw baskets attached to bamboo sticks left and right. Friends or strangers picked up the baskets and carried them out of camp … It was a horrible sight especially those who died from hunger oedema, water burst through the baskets.’ But, no matter how unpleasant the task may have been, the boys soon became hardened. ‘Every day we saw the same sight. We got used to it.’26

  Much younger children were also affected by what they witnessed. At Los Banos Camp in the Philippines, one young mother noted that her ‘two children Robin and Larry, no longer played soldier. Now their game was funeral – imitating what their childish eyes saw every day.’27 Elizabeth Gale, who kept a secret diary, observed the play of her young daughter and friend at Pootung Camp in Shanghai. ‘The little girls spend hours playing happily with their dolls house. Today they pile all the furniture into one room because it is bomb day, they say. Last week they took the dolls’ beds and the bath tubs out and shook them vigorously because it was de-bugging day.’28

  At Batu Lintang Camp in Kuching in Sarawak, the joint POW and civilian internment centre, conditions for the prisoners deteriorated at an alarming rate. The Japanese, short of fresh food themselves, ordered that all of the women internees should work as agricultural labourers and grow vegetables for the guards’ consumption. The male POWs and civilians in the camp also laboured, and collectively they named themselves ‘white coolies’. Such was the severity of the regime at Batu Lintang that out of 395 male civilian internees in the camp in August 1945, only 30 were fit enough to report for work. The rest were too ill or had already died. In the women’s camp, where 37 young children also lived, the women their sacrificed their own health in order to save these young lives. The biggest threats remained starvation and disease, the handmaidens of Japanese prison camp policy.

  Women and children internees at Batu Lintang received the same rations as the male prisoners. At the beginning of the camp’s operation, that consisted of rice and local vegetables. Every ten days or so, the Japanese provided a little meat to the prisoners. Usually this was pork, and it was normally found to be of very poor quality. Typically, the prisoners’ meat ration would consist of a pig’s head or some offal. The daily rice ration in late 1943 was 11 ounces per person, including children. By 1945 this ration, already inadequate to sustain life, had been reduced by the Japanese to only 4 ounces a day. The children also received 1.5 ounces of milk each day. People were reduced to using the black market to obtain fresh food, and even resorting to eating the kinds of animals not normally seen on a European menu, such as snakes, snails, frogs, dogs and cats. On special occasions the Japanese would show some largesse to their prisoners – though their generosity was extremely limited. Christmas was an important time for the internees, and the women would go out of their way to provide the children with presents
and a little yuletide cheer.

  The presents were normally small stuffed toys made from old clothes and rags – the stuffing very often sand. The Japanese contribution to the prisoners’ Christmas was practically an insult. At Christmas 1943, the commandant gave the women’s camp a single turkey – for 271 women and children. The 1,000 British soldiers held in one of the POW compounds received only 58 chickens for their Christmas dinner in 1942. At Christmas 1944, no chickens or turkeys were forthcoming from the Japanese, but each woman and child did get a single egg. The precarious nature of the food situation at Batu Lintang could have been alleviated to some extent if the Japanese had seen fit to issue the Red Cross parcels, which continued to arrive from the day the camp opened until its liberation by Australian troops in September 1945. In cynical fashion the Japanese simply hoarded the life-saving parcels and, as at Santo Tomas, only once during the entire war did they make an issue of parcels, in March 1944. On that occasion, each of the prisoners ended up with one-sixth of a Red Cross parcel, equating to a single tin of food. The story was similar in most of the other camps, with the noted exception of the internment centres in Shanghai, which did receive a constant stream of Red Cross parcels and visits from the local Swiss Consul-General.

  A camp hospital had been created at Batu Lintang Camp by the Japanese medical officer, Lieutenant Yamamoto. Prisoners tried to avoid this building as much as possible, for it was filthy and resembled more a morgue than a treatment centre. Yamamoto was a strange sort of doctor, inclined to beat any patients who boldly and unwisely asked for medicines. Indeed he was so slovenly and incompetent that apart from issuing orders that stated that sick prisoners would receive no rations, Yamamoto left the actual medical duties to several prisoner doctors, including Dr Gibson, who ministered to the needs of the women and children. Yamamoto’s attitude to sick prisoners was summed up by one prisoner doctor as ‘live and let die.’ The prisoners clubbed together and tried to produce a stock of food and drugs with which to help those who were sick, but the death rate was such that special re-useable hinged coffins were required due to shortage of wood – burials occurred virtually every single day of the war. The death rate among the British POWs and male internees was appalling, with two thirds, around 600, of these men dead by the time of liberation. But tropical diseases and disorders stalked all the prisoners, regardless of their gender or age. Tropical ulcers would turn septic without treatment and could kill, dysentery was rife due to the poor sanitation in the camp, and malaria, beriberi, dengue fever, scabies, and septic bites and sores killed hundreds of others.

  Malnutrition remained the chief cause of death at Batu Lintang. The basic diet distributed by the Japanese, and deemed by them suitable for all the prisoners, contained only a daily allowance of one and a half ounces of protein, equating to only 1,600 calories. This diet was a slow death by starvation, and even when supplemented with a little meat or vegetables, it was still completely inadequate. The women and children prisoners were so emaciated after a few months of this, that even moving around had become challenging. ‘Some of us find it advisable to rise slowly after laying down,’ recalled Hilda Bates, who had formerly been a civilian nurse in Jesselton, ‘as due to malnutrition, any rapid movement is apt to cause dizziness or even a black-out.’

  The Japanese policy of segregating married couples in the East Indies was especially keenly felt at Batu Lintang, as families were here separated by only a few dozen yards of dusty ground and barbed wire. Unlike in so many Japanese internment camps, where husbands had been sent away to outlying camps or even on ships to different countries, at Batu Lintang the husbands were often in the adjoining compound. In Shanghai, where a similar situation existed, the Japanese had initially attempted to segregate married couples, but had realized that this was ridiculous, and in Shanghai, Hong Kong and at Santo Tomas Camp in Manila, families had been reunited for the duration. Not so at Batu Lintang. Here, the Japanese permitted very irregular meetings between married couples, and they also displayed unnecessary mental cruelty to add to the physical cruelties inflicted daily upon the internees. At the first Christmas that the prisoners spent in Batu Lintang in 1942, the Japanese even refused to allow the men to see their wives and children for a few hours on the 25 December.

  8

  Comfort Girls

  We were given flower names and they were pinned to our doors. They started to drag us away one by one. And I could hear all the screaming coming from the bedrooms, you know, and you just wait for your turn.

  Jan O’Herne, Dutch teenaged internee

  Ambarawa 8 Camp, Java

  One aspect of the internment of Allied civilians has not often been addressed, and that was the enforced sexual slavery of teenaged girls. Not only were the girls in the camps subjected to starvation and disease and witnesses to bestial acts, they increasingly had to fear sexual abuse as well. On many occasions the Japanese came looking for sex slaves from among their female internees and teenaged girls were especially prized. The fact of white women being forced to become ‘Comfort Women’ as the Japanese called them, was not really spoken about until many decades after the war. A high degree of shame was attached to the experience, but now in old age many of the women who suffered this final indignity under Japanese rule have started to come forward to tell their stories. It makes for sober and disturbing reading.

  Japanese soldiers treated the native women of the Occupied Territories with a contempt that is difficult to comprehend over sixty years later. In the Japanese military mind women appeared to serve one purpose – to provide entertainment for their soldiers, and whether they provided that entertainment freely or through duress did not matter, both were equally acceptable. Japanese soldiers were able to obtain sex whilst on campaign in two ways. Firstly, through rape. Wherever Japanese soldiers went, women could expect to be raped. They famously raped British Army nurses at the fall of Hong Kong and female Dutch colonists in the Netherlands East Indies. The taking of sex by force was often not an individual pursuit, but a group exercise encouraged by senior officers. The second way was to visit prostitutes, or ‘Comfort Women’. Entire battalions of young native girls and women were attached to Japanese divisions in the field and the supply was regularly replenished. Most of these women were not prostitutes, for the term implies some form of financial reward in return for sexual favours; they are better described as sex slaves – young women forced to give their bodies, often on pain of death.

  The Japanese set about the procurement of women for their brothels with a remarkable degree of organization. The abuse of women was institutionalized and condoned at the highest levels of command. The women came from a variety of different nationalities and found themselves involved in this sex trade through a variety of different paths. One of the responsibilities of the Kempeitai military police was to procure the ‘prostitutes’ for Japanese units, to establish and run brothels in the occupied territories, and to control the unfortunate women who were imprisoned within them. Between 1941 and 1945 anywhere between 60,000 and 200,000 young women of many creeds, colours and nationalities were forced into military brothels by the Kempeitai, including at least 300 white women and teenage girls. Initially, the Japanese relied on recruiting real prostitutes from Japan and Korea, but once this supply of bodies dried up they turned with alacrity to deceiving women into becoming sex slaves or simply coercing them into cooperation by various despicable methods. The Kempeitai used all of its nefarious talents for intimidation and violence. What occurred in the occupied Netherlands East Indies went even further, with the Kempeitai targeting white women for the first time.

  ‘One day the Japanese came into our camp to choose comfort girls to take away with them. We had some very pretty girls,’1 remembered Paget Eames, who was a child internee at Bangkinang Camp in Sumatra. On the neighbouring island of Java the Japanese were particularly industrious in trying to recruit young white women. Java was under occupation by the Japanese 16th Army, itself under command of 7th Army Headquarters in Singa
pore. The organization of army brothels was not centralized. Instead, local 16th Army officers ordered the local field Kempeitai to begin establishing ‘Comfort Houses’ for the garrison. The commissariat officer of the 16th Army was ordered by the chief-of-staff to issue licences to brothels. A licence would only be issued if the ‘prostitutes’ had signed a document that stated they were working voluntarily for the army as sex workers. The Japanese always had a weather eye on any future criminal proceedings that could have arisen from evidence of coercion. The Kempeitai did use coercion and sometimes violence to obtain the necessary signatures on their forms, and then these were then forwarded to 16th Army Headquarters in Batavia (now Jakarta).

  The women who staffed the comfort houses were from several national groups. Some were Japanese or Koreans who had been legitimately recruited and shipped in to service the troops and were actually being paid. Others were Indonesian women recruited locally, who had often been deceived into becoming sex workers by Japanese procurers. A smaller number were European women who had been in the internment camps and some were European women who, because of their nationality, had remained at liberty outside the camps when the Japanese occupation began. Up to mid-1943 native and non-interned European women were mainly recruited to act as housekeepers for individual Japanese officers or civilians. When Japanese troops wanted sex they usually went to local brothels or to individual European or native prostitutes.