by Loet Velmans
I played an occasional game of chess and also participated in a bridge tournament. Frans was my partner. We made the quarterfinals before being thoroughly beaten by two British sergeants.
I enrolled in a heavily subscribed course given by a Dutch captain who believed in the symbolic significance of the Egyptian pyramids. He was convinced that the geometry of the pyramids predicted the future. He would cover a blackboard with cubes and triangles and all sorts of diagrams that “proved” that Japan would be defeated within the next sixty to ninety days. I lapped it up. I was drawn both by the prognosis and by the man’s charisma. An amiable giant, he presented his case eloquently in a hesitant, high-pitched voice. I had gone to his class originally out of curiosity, for in his younger days he was something of a celebrity, having been an Olympic rowing champion. I had seen his picture in newspapers and magazines: a very tall, thin figure, photographed next to his skiff. He brought so much conviction and enthusiasm to his thesis that he drew more and more listeners as his lecture series went on. Even though I liked to think of myself as a skeptic, I was desperately hoping for one small but convincing clue that my captivity was about to come to an end. My hopes were as irrational as everyone else’s. Anybody on any pulpit or soapbox who promised us our liberty was assured of receiving our grateful and undivided attention.
Deep down I was well aware that we were not only clutching at straws—we were seriously deluding ourselves. For we happened to be in possession of some real facts. A hidden radio in our camp kept us informed about the Allies’ moves. As 1942 drew to a close, the Allies were still on the defensive. We realized that a counteroffensive that could turn the tide was unlikely to happen before the middle of 1943, or even later. This meant that it might be a year or two before the war was over. But where did that leave us? We did not like to think in terms of a two-year time frame. Anything beyond a month was the distant future. That was why the lecture series on the pyramids continued to draw record crowds.
In Singapore the Japanese guards were much less in evidence than they had been on Java. For one, the prison encampment itself was much larger, and there were many more POWs milling around the open spaces between the barracks, kitchens, hospital, and storage sheds. The British command apparently had worked out a modus vivendi with the Japanese commander that left the Westerners more or less in control of our daily lives. But our autonomy had not come about without a heavy price.
Before our group arrived, there had been a rebellion in one of Singapore’s POW work camps. The POWs had each been ordered to sign a declaration that read: “I solemnly swear on my honor that I will not, under any circumstances, attempt to escape.” The order was met with a stubborn and general refusal. The standoff lasted six days. The Japanese made the 15,000 prisoners stand at attention for long stretches of time, squeezed into one small courtyard. They reduced the sparse food rations, allowed only the stingiest supply of water, and made the men dig a wide, deep ditch, ostensibly for a latrine. The implied threat was that in case of further “lack of cooperation,” the ditches would serve as the POWs’ final resting place. To a nervous and demoralized mob, it spelled mass execution. The Japanese turned up the pressure several notches by executing four men who had attempted to escape. All the prisoners had been herded into the congested parade grounds to witness the executions. It was made clear to the British commander that no man would be allowed to leave until every prisoner had signed. He finally decided that there was nothing for it but to comply. Besides, they were signing under duress, so the document’s legitimacy was moot.
A British officer friend told me that it was an officer’s duty to escape. Although not an officer myself, I considered myself an experienced escape artist. I became obsessed with the notion of flight. But as I was enclosed within a vast Asian continent, surrounded by people of different color and size, and separated from friendly forces by at least a thousand miles, all dreams of escape remained a fantasy.
All of us, including the British officers, finally faced the reality: escape was impossible. The British officer corps had been dealt another psychological blow: some of their formerly loyal Sikhs and other Indian regiments had switched their allegiance to the Japanese. As in the case of our native Indonesian soldiers, the Sikhs’ secret, long-suppressed grudges against their white officers, coupled with self-interest, won out over loyalty. Not that any real hope of freedom was ever held out to them; their defection was rewarded only by a policy of reverse racial discrimination. Their new Japanese masters gloated when the bearded and turbaned Sikh soldiers, until a few months earlier the pride of the British Empire, jumped at the chance of tying up a young British officer and giving him a sound beating.
Whenever a POW ran into a Japanese soldier, it was a tense moment. The Japanese insisted on the proper salute—an obsequious reverence that was required of us as the defeated. If you failed to deliver, you risked a blow, a kick, or both. If a POW then failed to put on a suitable show of contrition, a full-scale beating would follow. A young Australian sergeant, after a severe beating by two Japanese soldiers, was thrown into solitary confinement with little water and no food. He was never told anything further about the nature of his offense, and his officers met no success in seeking an explanation. After three days the young Australian was discharged from his private prison and taken to our hospital, where he died. The Japanese treatment of POWs ruled out any recourse under any kind of military law. Protests were useless.
The true heroes in our camp were the radio operators—the men who, once a week in the dead of night, put on their headsets, memorized what they heard, and passed on that information to two or three trusted friends. These, in turn, disseminated the snippets of news, giving us the illusion that we were still in touch with the outside world. The optimistic news picked up from the British station in New Delhi sounded completely reliable to us. It did not occur to anyone that our side might also be engaging in a little wartime propaganda.
After the broadcast, the set would be totally disassembled; some parts were buried in the ground, others hidden in water bottles, sick-bay supplies, and kitchenware. Some of the sets had been constructed from scratch using scavenged parts; others had been imported by the new arrivals from Java and other islands. Later, when the prisoners were dispersed to Burma, Thailand, and Japan, the sets would travel again, accompanying their owner-operators. For the purpose of transportation, some sensitive parts of the human body were put to good use; orifices such as armpit and anus proved useful, as did the Australian wide-brimmed hat and the jockstrap.
I had an Australian mate who kept me informed. One day he seemed chagrined, and although he had always been very circumspect about divulging details of the clandestine radio operation, he now confided in me that the attempt to receive news from an Australian station had failed once again. The New Delhi frequency that relied on the BBC for its news remained our sole, treasured, and relatively clear source of information for all that was happening around the world.
After our morning ablutions, we would try to capture adjoining latrines so that he could whisper to me what had been heard the night before. I never learned who my friend’s source was. I was just one small link that transmitted the news headlines to a larger chain, whose members had been appointed by someone higher up in our hierarchy and whose identity was to be kept secret. My Australian informant instructed me to pass on the news verbally to a Dutch lieutenant. I had the feeling that, in our system of internal transmission, the positive news was embellished bit by bit, while the negative was somewhat discounted.
The Japanese suspected the existence of a radio and carried out frequent unannounced inspections. They made it clear that they knew what we were up to. But neither the set itself nor any of its parts were ever found.
My original contact with the Australian had been through the black market. I became a middleman, operating on the fringes. Upon my arrival in Changi I heard from other POWs that the different camp commanders had followed varying policies regarding their prisoners
’ property. Some allowed their men to rob the POWs blind, leaving the prisoners only the clothes on their back; others had issued strict orders forbidding their subordinates to take any valuables, such as money, watches, and rings, from the prisoners. In the camps I had been in on Java, we had been lucky. We had been allowed to keep our valuables. I proudly wore my Omega watch, with a lizard strap, a seventeenth-birthday present from my parents.
Trading, in the form of barter, had started at the very beginning of our captivity. On Java, the biggest demand had been for cigarettes, followed by candy and Western-type canned foods. Before we were moved from our original barracks, most of us had possessed several pairs of shoes and belts and civilian neckties and shirts. And we all had money. With each move, we shed some of our clothing, trying to sell the best pieces. By the time I arrived in Singapore, I owned only what I wore, plus a spare shirt and a spare set of underwear and socks—and my puttees, an itchy, uncomfortably hot article of ornamental military clothing worn around the legs. I had never learned how to put them on properly; they always sagged below my knees so that I constantly had to pull them up again. Even though I had given up wearing them, they had become part of me; they were my security blanket, and I held on to them for dear life.
When all our cash was gone, we were left with our watches. The Japanese showed an insatiable hunger for famous name brands: Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, and Longines. When our supply of the more expensive fourteen-and eighteen-carat pieces had run out, they offered good prices for simpler watches in silver or steel. They paid cash for the expensive items; more modest purchases were paid for with a basket of leftover change, cigarettes, or canned foods. On those nights when a trustworthy Japanese guard was on duty (i.e., one who was in on the racket), he would look the other way as two POW trade emissaries risked their lives by slipping through a gate and striking deals with the Chinese tradesmen lurking just outside the prison grounds. Before slinking back, they would set a date for the next session. They brought back burlap bags full of cigarettes, condensed milk, corned beef, sardines, jam, and other commodities. I have always been amazed that, as far as I know, no one was ever caught; neither the POWs nor the Chinese black marketeers.
I traded in my own beautiful eighteen-karat Omega, that treasured birthday present from my parents, for a hefty sum and managed to spend it all very quickly. At first I felt depressed and full of self-reproach at having parted with my most precious possession. But once I had accumulated a small stock of cigarettes and luxury goods. I was convinced that with these easily salable items, I had gained some economic security. My dozen cans of corned beef and sardines would bring a good price when traded for bananas and other perishables.
Haggling over the price of my Omega had given me a sense of satisfaction that my stints at Hatton Garden and Borsumij had failed to evoke. I decided to join the black market as a middleman and began to trade in watches. In return for obtaining a good price for a POW’s most precious asset, I received a 5-to-10-percent commission. I would be entrusted with a watch by a friend or a friend of a friend and take the merchandise to a hut at the other side of the camp where Max, one of the camp’s most successful dealers, held court. My consignors trusted me to obtain the best value for them, and I was given carte blanche in my negotiations. Max would make a low first offer for the watch in response to what I considered my own reasonable opening bid. Each transaction lasted an hour or more before we reached an agreement.
Max, lording it over a network of middlemen like myself, seemed to like me. His approval meant a lot to me. He made me feel triumphant each time I made a sale. He looked like the stereotyped caricature of a successful and well-fed businessman: heavyset, with bulging eyes shaded by black eyebrows, always chewing on a big cigar. Before the war he had been a junior trader at Internatio, the largest trading company in the Dutch East Indies. Welcoming me as a fledgling colleague from the rival Borsumij, Max took me under his wing. He impressed on me that my former employer was a lowly number-two Avis compared to his Hertz. There was a price to be paid for being in his company: I had to listen to long-winded monologues on the incestuous relationships among competitors in our colonial economy. Max was at least five years older than I was and claimed to have studied economics. I became one of his hangers-on, with whom he shared his opulent supply of cigarettes, cigars, and foodstuffs. For all his bluster and self-importance, I soon learned that Max himself was merely a junior partner in the whole risky enterprise of watch disposal. He loved to give the impression that he was at the top of a POW hierarchy that inspected and evaluated every watch brought to market: the final price, however, was determined by a Scottish sergeant-major who closed the deals with a Japanese counterpart.
Meanwhile, we had moved again and I was now in the main Changi prison building. Seven days a week, work parties left Changi to unload ships in the harbor or to help with the construction of new runways at the airport. My own Java contingent was mysteriously excused from hard labor. Our boring task was to clean up the courtyard and the prison corridors. During the day we were joined by other POWs who had not been picked for work detail that day, and who milled around aimlessly. At night, the place was packed: a prison built by the British to hold 600 inmates now housed close to 12,000.
For all the crowding here, we lived an almost autonomous existence under a near-benign regime—a marked contrast to our previous camps on Java. I was eager to learn as much as I could. I ran from a seminar on the bright future of the British Empire to an Australian captain’s objective analysis of the Japanese strategy in overrunning the Malay peninsula, then on to a private tutorial in conversational French. I was also an active participant in our POW theatrics. On any given evening I could be found rehearsing for one of the cabaret shows we put on. Some members of the cast were semiprofessionals or experienced amateurs who not only acted but wrote and composed sketches and songs. The bulk of the material was nostalgic and very British, since a major proportion of the POWs in Changi belonged to British units that had arrived just before the Japanese onslaught. There was plenty of Noel Coward and an abundance of Vera Lynn. Original texts by amateur writers like myself contained a profusion of sexual innuendo. I felt very proud when a silly skit I wrote about a husband, his wife, and a seductive maid was put on; I got to play the small role of the husband in it. My ten-minute piece received a lukewarm response. The hit of the show was a star turn by a slender, effeminate Dutch Eurasian who starred as a female impersonator. He/she also played the maid in my piece as well as every other female role. He brought the house down every time: the audience would roar its approval at each wiggle.
The programs changed every four to six weeks. The Japanese officers would attend at least one performance of each new show. Seated in the front rows, they would leave immediately after the last number before the intermission: the slot reserved for our sexy star’s hula dance. After the Japanese had gone and we had the place to ourselves, a team of Cockney comedians would recite a litany of wickedly broad and scatological jokes about our captors. They would sprinkle their dialogue with a liberal application of four-letter words. Our audience went wild, cheering on the two men on the stage, who were able to express so eloquently our collective feelings of resentment and frustration.
Frans was my closest friend in Changi Gaol. He was a cheerful man bubbling over with joie de vivre. That is what attracted me to him. Together we were a clown act—laughing at our own jokes and making other prisoners laugh too.
Before the war, Frans had flunked out of medical school. In 1939, he had worked as a steward on the Holland America Line. He had made just one round-trip transatlantic crossing from Rotterdam to Hoboken before the war broke out. Then his ship, converted to a troop transport, participated in the British evacuation of Crete. German planes set fire to his ship; Frans jumped overboard and was rescued and set ashore in Alexandria. After an adventurous journey through India, he arrived on Java just in time to be drafted into our army.
Women had apparently found this tall,
wiry, blond Dutch kid with his big ears, athletic build, and constant wide smile irresistible. Frans often entertained us with his tales of seduction. He claimed to be unsuccessful in warding off the advances women made to him. He had us in stitches with his tales of playing the reluctant lover. His exploits featured Dutch students and waitresses; a middle-aged widow aboard his ocean liner who, clad only in a pearl necklace, had invited him into her first-class cabin; and a whole string of Egyptians, Indians, and other exotic types. It was a 1940s version of The Decameron. Others chimed in with descriptions of their own sexual adventures. We gobbled it all up eagerly.
But Frans’s wide grin, which had helped him seduce so many girls and women, also began to attract the attention of the Japanese guards. Frans’s radiant personality was his undoing. It was as if he provoked, and he was regularly beaten up. Japanese patrols circulated throughout the camp at irregular intervals, and although all his friends warned him to stay out of their way, Frans preferred to live dangerously. We began to suspect that it was not only his smile but also his size—he was a very big man—that made him a target for their abuse. My friends and I concluded that the Japanese had a special antipathy toward tall Westerners; they disliked them even more than short soldiers like me. For a Japanese guard, a tall man was a challenge—harder to slap in the face, yet offering the pleasurable alternative of punching him below the belt.
In the months that followed, Frans became a routine target. Without bothering to find a pretext, the Japanese would attack him for no reason at all. One night I heard the big man quietly sobbing. Frans was my slaapie, a term used in the military for bedfellow, the fellow who bunked next to you. I put my hand on his arm. The sobbing stopped. Frans climbed into my bunk and lay next to me. We fell asleep, back to back, comforted by the warmth of each other’s bodies.
