Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  By daybreak only one grievously injured man was still alive and, near to death, he was discovered and rescued by a small Javanese fishing boat. The crew pulled the man into the boat. The sharks had taken one of his arms and his right foot. Bleeding to death, the man told the Javanese what the Japanese had done, and then he died. The fisherman put his remains back into the sea; not wanting to come ashore with a European body in their boat, for the Japanese would have undoubtedly also killed them to protect the secret of the massacre they had perpetrated. In August 1945 the Javanese reported what had happened to the British occupation authorities, but an investigation was impossible owing to the ‘cleaning’ of Japanese files by naval officers before they were surrendered for inspection to the Allies. Ninety men, women and children were thus erased from history.

  On the island of Borneo in July 1945, the Japanese Army massacred another group of prisoners-of-war and civilian internees, including dozens of children. About 100 members of the Netherlands East Indies Army, who along with their wives and children had been captured in March 1942, had not been imprisoned and had instead been permitted some limited freedom within the town of Samarinda. The Dutch POWs had provided technical assistance to the Japanese occupiers. However, all this came to an end on the morning of 30 July 1945, when the Dutch residents were suddenly rounded up by Japanese troops and taken before a senior officer. Without preamble, the officer declared that the entire Dutch population was forthwith sentenced to death. Families stood together in shock as the realization of their imminent death sank in. Shortly afterwards the hapless Dutch nationals were forced at gunpoint into trucks and driven to a mine at Loa Kulu just outside of the town. The Japanese did not intend to give the Dutch prisoners easy or quick deaths and in fact committed one of the most bestial atrocities of the entire Pacific War. Men and women had their hands tied behind their backs. The men were forced to their knees in a tight group to watch the execution of their wives and children. The Japanese soldiers attacked the women with swords and bayonets, quite literally hacking their victims to pieces in front of their distraught husbands. Then, demonstrating just how morally bankrupt the Imperial Army had become, the younger children and babies were thrown to their deaths down a 600-foot mine shaft by Japanese soldiers. Finally, Japanese officers beheaded each of the men in turn with swords, before the remains of the men and women were pitched unceremoniously down the same mine shaft where the broken bodies of their children lay. It was only several weeks after the war was over when the remains of the bodies were discovered by Australian troops, who had captured Borneo and begun a fruitless search for its missing European residents.5

  The internees at Lunghwa Camp in Shanghai of course knew nothing of Japanese orders to kill prisoners, or of the terrible atrocities that had recently been committed by Japanese troops in the Netherlands East Indies. But they did at least suspect that the Japanese might have plans to kill them all before any surrender was contemplated. References had been made to a large brick factory located down the road from the camp and many of the internees believed that the Japanese would herd them into the factory, murder them, and then dispose of their bodies inside the kilns.

  ‘People were getting really edgy,’ recalled Rachel Bosebury of the last tenko. ‘Its 7 in the morning and nobody came, and then time went by and nobody came and pretty soon people got bold and figured if everybody left the buildings at once they couldn’t kill us all at the same time.’ Gingerly, the hundreds of prisoners at Lunghwa walked cautiously out into the sunshine and discovered that the compound was empty of Japanese. ‘There were no guards out there, and then the internees went and formed a bunch of men who decided to check the guardhouse. Not a soul. The guards had left in the night.’6

  Teenaged internee Heather Burch was also nonplused by the sudden disappearance of the guards at Lunghwa. ‘We knew that was it, but not what to do,’7 she said of the confusion caused among the internees by their sudden freedom after so many years of fearful captivity. ‘Internment was absolutely the reverse of everything that I had ever known,’ wrote the author J.G. Ballard. Although the internees were free, it would take several weeks before the camp was entirely emptied of people. In the main, families and individuals began to drift back into Shanghai without any assistance, looking for friends and relatives, homes and businesses, and trying with varying degrees of success to re-enter their pre-war lives in a city that had been profoundly altered. ‘We had no transport but somehow obtained bikes and made our way back to Shanghai. I remember my first hot bath at a friend’s house after the war.’8

  At Stanley Camp in Hong Kong, Katherine Anderson, headmistress of the camp junior school, wrote in her end-of-war report that in her opinion the experience of internment had not been completely negative regarding the children. There had been some compensation. ‘Freedom from the well-meaning but unintelligent attention of amahs should have made them self-reliant and saved them from the necessity of unlearning pidgin English. Also, hardships endured and difficulties overcome may in some ways have been a fitter preparation for life in a post-war world than the somewhat pampered and often over-stimulated life of the Hong Kong child.’9

  At Batu Lintang Camp in Sarawak on 15 August, a group of emaciated male prisoners huddled over a small, hand-built radio receiver inside one of the barrack blocks. Through crackling static, the voice of a radio announcer carefully enunciated the news they had all been waiting to hear for so many years. Radio Chungking in Free China announced the surrender of Japan. Within a few minutes, the joyful news had spread throughout the male sections of the camp by word of mouth and even though most of the prisoners were extremely emaciated and many unable to even stand, broad smiles broke out across the thin faces. The Japanese guards were confused, for they had received no such news of surrender and as far as they were concerned the war would continue. The prisoners gathered together carefully built-up supplies of food and began preparing celebratory dinners. Later that day, the Japanese had scheduled a routine visit for the married men to their families and this was how the women and children discovered that they were at last free. The only problem was the Japanese, who remained in ignorance of their Emperor’s decision to capitulate.

  The reason why many of the prisoners held at Batu Lintang were suspicious of Japanese intentions towards them in the few days leading up to the end of the war was the behaviour of the medical officer, Lieutenant Yamamoto. Throughout the previous three and a half years, Yamamoto had deliberately withheld lifesaving medicines from the camp hospital, refused to feed sick prisoners, and even personally assaulted prisoners who had begged for medicines to be provided. One day shortly before the Japanese surrender, Yamamoto told some prisoners that they were to be moved to a camp ‘equipped with the best medical equipment obtainable … there would be no working parties and food would be plentiful … the sick men would be especially well cared for.’ Considering what the military prisoners and the internees had been through at Batu Lintang, Yamamoto’s fairy tale smacked of a Japanese plot. Lieutenant Colonel Tatsuji Suga, the camp commandant, had received written orders sometime before the surrender instructing him to kill all of the prisoners, including the women and children, on 17 August 1945. Japan surrendered on 15 August, but Suga and his men would remain in control of the camp until Australian troops arrived to take over on 11 September.

  Elsewhere in Borneo at Sandakan, the Japanese murdered nearly 3,000 Australian and British POWs, whom they forced on to three separate death marches, and they were still killing prisoners over a week after the war’s end. If he had so chosen, Suga could have butchered all his charges and still had a two-week head-start on war crimes investigators. Suga’s orders outlined exactly how he was to kill the prisoners. The military prisoners-of-war and all male internees were to be marched to a camp at milestone 21 and then bayoneted to death. The sick men who were unable to walk were to be placed in the camp square at Batu Lintang and bayoneted to death by their guards. Finally, and perhaps even more horrifically, the women and children
were to be locked inside their barrack block and the building set on fire – they were to be burned alive. All three massacres were to be deliberately cruel.

  Later, revised orders were discovered in Suga’s office that ordered the execution date to be changed to 15 September 1945, and the methods to be used were also revised. This time the women and children were to be given poisoned rice. The internee men were to be shot and their bodies burned. The POWs were to be marched into the jungle, shot and then burned, and the sick and those too weak from malnutrition to join the march were to be bayoneted to death in the hospital, following which the entire camp was to be burned down to obliterate all trace of the crimes.

  Fortunately for the prisoners, they harboured only ill-formed suspicions of Japanese intentions towards them, unaware of the full dastardly truth. On 16 August, three Beaufighters of the Royal Australian Air Force roared over the camp and dropped leaflets whose headline ran ‘JAPAN HAS SURRENDERED’ in bold type. On 19 August, more leaflets fluttered down over the camp, announcing that troops of the Australian 9th Division were close by. On 24 August, Suga finally admitted that the war was over when he formally announced that Japan had indeed surrendered. He clearly also had no intention of carrying out the execution orders that he had received, for he ordered that all work parties cease operations and that his guards immediately stop beating prisoners. Suddenly, extra food was made available, and the hospital received bed chairs and mosquito nets as well as large amounts of medicine. Whether these gestures were some eleventh-hour attempt to curry favour with the prisoners and the rapidly approaching Australians is not known, but to his credit Suga remained at his post and did not scarper into the jungle as many Japanese officers did when their day of reckoning was upon them.

  On 29 August, letters were dropped on the camp instructing Suga to make contact with the Australians using a code based on panel signs laid out on the ground, and the commandant readily agreed. Suga permitted the Australians to drop supplies to the camp, which came parachuting down in huge silver canisters known as ‘storpedoes’ because of their resemblance to naval torpedoes. The first storpedoes floated down on Batu Lintang Camp on 30 August. ‘Today a plane dropped twenty parachutes with packages attached,’ recalled Hilda Bates, a British civilian nurse internee. ‘One fell outside our hut and was labelled “bread”. Others contained flour, tinned rabbit, and other meat. The goods were collected by the Japs under the supervision of Australian Officers [POWs] who distributed them to the groups of internees. All sorts of what we had thought of as luxuries arrived; such as sugar, sweets, milk, bundles of clothing, and even fashion books.’10 Daily drops were made until the arrival of elements of Brigadier Thomas Eastick’s Kuching Force, part of the 9th Australian Division, on 11 September.

  Eastick had first taken the surrender of Major General Hiyoe Yamamura’s Japanese garrison aboard the Australian warship HMAS Kapunda, which was moored in Kuching harbour on the morning of 11 September. Later that day occupation forces landed, accompanied by a few US Navy officers. The 9th Division troops arrived at Batu Lintang Camp in the afternoon. At 5.00 pm the entire camp was assembled on the central square, where they witnessed Colonel Suga surrender his sword to Brigadier Eastick. Immediately after the ceremony, a group of prisoners that included Australian civil servant Ivan Quartermaine, approached the liberating troops and demanded weapons. They wanted to kill those guards who had abused and murdered their fellow prisoners. The Australian soldiers reluctantly refused this request.

  Colonel Suga, Captain Nagata, Lieutenant Yamamoto and many other Japanese personnel from the several camps located on Borneo were detained and transported to Labuan Island, where they would await trial as war criminals. Suga circumvented his just punishment for the Sandakan Death March, and for all the death and suffering that had occurred in the camps under his control, by cutting his own throat with a razor. His batman finished him off by beating him to death with a water canteen half filled with sand. Many now believe that Suga had deliberately disobeyed his orders to kill the prisoners and destroy the camp and had therefore saved the lives of the internees and the remaining POWs. But Suga had also done nothing to alleviate the suffering inflicted throughout the war on the POWs, male and female internees, and on the children held at Batu Lintang by his subordinate officers and men. For that reason, Suga chose suicide rather than the hangman’s rope. His second-in-command Captain Nagata and the homicidal medical officer Yamamoto were placed before an Australian Military Tribunal at Labuan. Found guilty of war crimes, both officers were later hanged. Around 70 of the 120 guards at Batu Lintang were convicted of lesser offences against the prisoners and many of them served time in jail.

  The freed internees and military prisoners at Batu Lintang began to leave the camp on 12 September. The most seriously ill were taken to the Kuching Civil Hospital for treatment. Those up to the journey were transported by Dakota or by ship to the 2/1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station on Labuan Island, and thence home.

  For those internees released from the camps in Shanghai, their pre-war world had been seriously shaken up. The International Settlement and the French Concession in Shanghai were no longer foreign enclaves – a deal had been struck with the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in 1943 that had dissolved the separate foreign parts of Shanghai and the foreigners had lost their special legal protection. Shanghai was now a fully Chinese city and everyone in it was subject to Chinese law. But it was not a stable nation, for no sooner had Japan surrendered than Chiang’s Nationalists and Communist forces led by Mao Zedong had begun a bloody civil war, struggling for control of the nation. Those Westerners who tried to take up their old lives would discover that only heartache lay ahead, as the clock inexorably ran down on the foreign enterprise in mainland China. Hong Kong would be a destination for some before the Communists seized power completely in October 1949, while many former internees elected instead for repatriation to an austere post-war Britain. For many of the internee children, it would be their first experience of their motherland.

  At Ambarawa 8 Camp in central Java, Johan Rijkee and his mother and sister had no knowledge of the atomic bombing of Japan. ‘We did not know what was happening in the world,’ Johan recalled. An inkling that something was afoot began in mid-August 1945 when the ‘food situation suddenly improved and my mother pulled through.’ On 22 August, the commandant addressed the camp, and gave a speech in Indonesian. ‘He told us that the Emperor of Japan had pleasure in telling us that he had decided to end the war. When the gate was opened there was a crowd of Indonesian people to welcome us. I was adopted by an Indonesian couple. They gave me extra food and I could have a shower every day.’11 Johan was also reunited with his father, an engineer working for Royal Dutch Shell who had been interned for the duration of the war in another camp on Java.

  Until British troops arrived to secure the Netherlands East Indies and disarm the Japanese occupation forces, a dangerous power vacuum existed. Into this gap stepped militant Muslim Indonesian groups who were keen to exterminate the remaining Western colonists still inside the internment camps and to declare Indonesia an independent Muslim state. ‘They were forcing the Indonesian population to stop helping us,’ recalled Johan Rijkee. ‘The nationalist groups all had their own agenda and sometimes were fighting each other. It became very dangerous to leave the camp. Many people who did were kidnapped and murdered.’12 The British had managed to parachute a few individual officers into the camps to take over from the Japanese, but until substantial British forces were landed on Java the situation remained extremely perilous. The solution was to order the Japanese guards to protect the camps from attack. Thus, in a strange role reversal, the internees now relied on the hated Japanese to protect them from the rebels and the Japanese actually performed this task very well, earning high praise from the British military for their efforts (one Japanese officer was even awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his bravery whilst leading his men alongside British troops in battle).

&nb
sp; The Indonesian rebels organized themselves and launched concerted attacks on seven Japanese civilian internment camps around the town of Ambarawa. Even though British forces had begun to land on Java, they were unable to supply food by road to the camps that were still packed full of desperate and starving people, because the rebels had closed down the internal transport system. The British solution was to air drop supplies by Dakota until armoured spearheads could break through the rebels and relieve the camps. On 22 November a large band of rebels managed to break into Rijkee’s camp. They ‘herded the camp inmates with their arms above their heads, to the central area where they started shooting and throwing hand grenades into the crowd. A lot of people were killed or wounded but miraculously my family and I survived this attack without a scratch.’13 The inmates were saved by the sudden arrival of a British armoured column led by Gurkhas of the British Indian Army. Fierce fighting raged for two days around the camp, and Major Kido, the Japanese guard commander, and his men, fought side-by-side with the British forces. ‘The British caught one attacker [who had taken part in] the atrocity. He was placed in the middle of the field with bound hands and feet, where he was kicked by the camp inmates,’ wrote Rijkee. ‘For days on end heavy fighting went on all around us. Next to our building a British 25-pounder gun was continually firing.’ The Indonesian rebels fired back with mortars and captured Dutch 75mm field guns. ‘One day we had a direct hit,’ recalled Rijkee. ‘The roof caved in and you could see the blue sky. Again we were lucky and were only slightly wounded.’14 In December, the British managed to open the road to the coast and the internees were evacuated in a heavily armoured convoy to Semarang. One of the enduring memories Rijkee recounted was a wonderful Christmas party that the British and Gurkha troops organized for all the internee children, many of whom were now orphans. ‘I was given a Meccano set No. 1 which was overwhelming after years of suffering,’ remembered Rijkee.15