Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia: National Memories and Forgotten Captivities (Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia)

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Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia

Experiences of captivity in Japanese-occupied Asia varied enormously. Some prisoners of war (POWs) were sent to work in Japan, others to toil on the ‘Death Railway’ between Burma and Thailand. Some camps had death rates below 1 per cent, others of over 20 per cent. While POWs were deployed far and wide as a captive labour force, civilian internees were generally detained locally. This book explores differences in how captivity was experienced between 1941 and 1945, and has been remembered since: differences due to geography and logistics, to policies and personalities, and marked by nationality, age, class, gender and combatant status. Part I has at least one chapter for each ‘National Memory’, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Indian and American. Part II moves on to forgotten captivities. It covers women, children, camp guards, internee experiences upon the end of the war, and local heroines who fought back. In covering these forgotten and marginalised captives, it highlights a wide range of approaches to analysing memory, ranging from examining newspapers, novels, and memoirs, through oral history and the reception of films, to using materials from government archives. By juxtaposing such a wide variety of captivity experiences – differentiated both by category of captive and by approach – this book transcends place, to become a collection about captivity as a category. It will interest scholars working on the Asia-Pacific War, on captivities in general, and on the individual histories of the countries and groups covered. Karl Hack is history lecturer at the Open University, Milton Keynes, England. Kevin Blackburn lectures in history at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia 1 The Police in Occupation Japan Control, corruption and resistance to reform Christopher Aldous 2 Chinese Workers A new history Jackie Sheehan 3 The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya 4 The Australia–Japan Political Alignment 1952 to the present Alan Rix 5 Japan and Singapore in the World Economy Japan's economic advance into Singapore, 1870–1965 Shimizu Hiroshi and Hirakawa Hitoshi 6 The Triads as Business Yiu Kong Chu 7 Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism A-chin Hsiau 8 Religion and Nationalism in India The case of the Punjab Harnik Deol 9 Japanese Industrialisation Historical and cultural perspectives Ian Inkster 10 War and Nationalism in China 1925–1945 Hans J. van de Ven 11 Hong Kong in Transition One country, two systems Edited by Robert Ash, Peter Ferdinand, Brian Hook and Robin Porter 12 Japan's Post-war Economic Recovery and AngloJapanese Relations, 1948–1962 Noriko Yokoi 13 Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–1975 Beatrice Trefalt 14 Ending the Vietnam War The Vietnamese Communists’ perspective Ang Cheng Guan 15 The Development of the Japanese Nursing Profession Adopting and adapting Western influences Aya Takahashi 16 Women’s Suffrage in Asia Gender nationalism and democracy Louise Edwards and Mina Roces 17 The Anglo–Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922 Phillips Payson O’Brien 18 The United States and Cambodia, 1870–1969 From curiosity to confrontation Kenton Clymer 19 Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim Ravi Arvind Palat 20 The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000 A troubled relationship Kenton Clymer 21 British Business in Post-Colonial Malaysia, 1957–70 ‘Neo-colonialism’ or ‘Disengagement’? Nicholas J. White 22 The Rise and Decline of Thai Absolutism Kullada Kesboonchoo Mead 23 Russian Views of Japan, 1792–1913 An anthology of travel writing David N. Wells 24. The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese, 1941–1945 A patchwork of internment Bernice Archer

25. The British Empire and Tibet 1900–1922 Wendy Palace 26. Nationalism in Southeast Asia If the people are with us Nicholas Tarling 27. Women, Work and the Japanese Economic Miracle The case of the cotton textile industry, 1945–1975 Helen Macnaughtan 28. A Colonial Economy in Crisis Burma’s rice cultivators and the world depression of the 1930s Ian Brown 29. A Vietnamese Royal Exile in Japan Prince Cuong De (1882–1951) Tran My-Van 30. Corruption and Good Governance in Asia Nicholas Tarling 31. US–China Cold War Collaboration, 1971–1989 S. Mahmud Ali 32. Rural Economic Development in Japan From the nineteenth century to the Pacific War Penelope Francks 33. Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig 34. Intra Asian Trade and the World Market A J H Latham and Heita Kawakatsu 35. Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945 War, diplomacy and public opinion Edited by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich 36. Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China The Chinese maritime customs service, 1854–1949 Donna Brunero 37. Colonial Cambodia’s ‘Bad Frenchmen’ The rise of French rule and the life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–1887 Gregor Muller 38. Japanese-American Civilian Prisoner Exchanges and Detention Camps, 1941–45 Bruce Elleman 39. Regionalism in Southeast Asia Nicholas Tarling 40. Changing Visions of East Asia, 1943–93 Transformations and continuities R.B. Smith (Edited by Chad J. Mitcham) 41. Christian Heretics in Late Imperial China Christian inculturation and state control, 1720–1850 Lars P. Laamann 42. Beijing – A Concise History Stephen G. Haw 43. The Impact of the Russo–Japanese War Edited by Rotem Kowner 44. Business-Government Relations in Pre-war Japan Peter von Staden 45. India’s Princely States People, princes and colonialism Edited by Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati 46. Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality Global perspectives Edited by Debjani Ganguly and John Docker 47. The Quest for Gentility in China Negotiations beyond gender and class Edited by Daria Berg and Chloë Starr 48. Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia Edited by Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn

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Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia

Edited by Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn

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First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Editorial selection and matter, Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn; Individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Forgotten captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn. p. cm. – (Routledge studies in the modern history of Asia; 48) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. World War, 1939–1945 – Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 2. World War, 1939–1945 – Conscript labor – Japan. 3. World War, 1939–1945 – Concentration camps – Asia. 4. World War, 1939–1945 – Pacific Area. 5. Memory. 6. Prisoners of war – Japan. I. Hack, Karl. II. Blackburn, Kevin, 1965– D805.J3F68 2008 940.54!7252095 – dc22 2007026809 ISBN 0-203-93474-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–42635–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93474–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–42635–0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93474–6 (ebk)

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Contents

List of maps List of figures List of tables List of contributors Preface List of abbreviations 1

Japanese-occupied Asia from 1941 to 1945: one occupier, many captivities and memories

vii viii ix x xiii xiv

1

KARL HACK AND KEVIN BLACKBURN

PART I

National memories 2

Beyond slogans: Assessing the experiences and the history of the Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese

21 23

HANK NELSON

3

Monument and ceremony: The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial and the Anzac legend

41

LACHLAN GRANT

4

Memory and the prisoner of war experience: The United Kingdom

57

SIBYLLA JANE FLOWER

5

Indian POWs in the Pacific, 1941–45

73

G. J. DOUDS

6

Dutch memories of captivity in the Pacific War REMCO RABEN

94

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7 In the eye of a hurricane: Americans in Japanese custody during World War II

111

P. SCOTT CORBETT

8 The Canadian experience of the Pacific War: Betrayal and forgotten captivity

125

GREGORY A. JOHNSON

PART II

Forgotten captivities 9 The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat: Protest and ex-prisoner of war memory in Britain and Australia

145 147

KARL HACK AND KEVIN BLACKBURN

10 Japanese guards in film and memory: White Skin, Yellow Commander

172

KAORI MAEKAWA

11 Crime and authority within Dutch communities of internees in Indonesia, 1942–45

193

JACCO VAN DEN HEUVEL

12 Remembering war and forgetting civilians: The place of civilian internees in Australian commemorations of the Pacific War

210

CHRISTINA TWOMEY

13 Internee voices: Women and children’s experience of being Japanese captives

224

BERNICE ARCHER

14 Unlikely heroines: Sybil Kathigasu and Elizabeth Choy

243

P. LIM PUI HUEN

15 ‘Hide and seek’: Children of Japanese–Indisch parents

260

EVELINE BUCHHEIM

16 The Dutch community in Thailand, 1945–46

278

ARNO OOMS

Index

303

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Maps

1.1 1.2 16.1

Japanese-occupied Asia, May 1942 Selected civilian internment camps in the Netherlands East Indies Bangkok in 1945

1 6 288

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Figures

2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 5.1 8.1 9.1 10.1 10.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 14.1 16.1 16.2 16.3

Commonwealth war graves at Klagenfurt, Austria Ballarat Ex-POW War Memorial: Concrete sleepers Ballarat Ex-POW War Memorial: Obelisks Ballarat Ex-POW War Memorial: Names in granite Far East Prisoner of War Association, Leeds Branch The original cemetery at Chungkai camp in Thailand, 1945 Indian prisoner of war Canadian prisoners of war The bridge over the river Kwai, 2006 Yamaji Tadashi handing out sweets to children at Kampili Camp Kampili Camp after Allied bombing of 17 July 1945 Australian women internees and Major-General Wootten Australian women and children internees Connie Suverkropp flanked by sisters Ms Elizabeth Choy Sleeping arrangements on an evacuation ship The arrival of Dutch evacuees from Java in Bangkok, 20 December 1945 Members of the Gadjah Merah in Chonburi, 1946

34 42 45 51 63 68 85 136 161 173 174 226 227 237 244 285 292 295

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Tables

1.1 Southeast Asia and Japan’s wartime empire 1.2 POW numbers and deaths in Asia ranked by death rate, 1941–45 1.3 Civilian internee numbers and deaths in Asia, 1941–45 2.1 Surviving Australian prisoners of war, 2004

3 4 5 35

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Contributors

Bernice Archer is author of The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–45 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, May 2004). Other publications include: Bernice Archer and Kent Fedorowich, ‘The Women of Stanley: internment in Hong Kong 1942–45’, Women’s History Review 5, 3 (1996); and ‘A Patchwork of Internment’, History Today 47, 7 (July 1997). Kevin Blackburn lectures in history at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has researched Australian, Malaysian and Singapore history, pursuing the themes of war, memory and the nation. Eveline Buchheim is a researcher at NIOD (Nederlands Instituut vor Oorlogsdocumentatie or Netherlands Institute for War Documentation) in Amsterdam. She is currently working on a project called ‘Married to the Colonial State: European marriages in the Netherlands East Indies 1920s to 1950s’. P. Scott Corbett has been an Instructor of History at Oxnard College since 1996 and an adjunct faculty member at California State University since 2002. Publications include Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians Between the United States and Japan During the Second World War (Kent State University Press, 1987). G. J. Douds is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Worcester where he formerly chaired the Department of History, Sociology and Art. Publications include, ‘ “The Men Who Never Were”: Indian POWs in the Second World War’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 27, 2 (August 2004). Sibylla Jane Flower contributed two chapters on British POWs to The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600–2000 (Macmillan-Palgrave Macmillan, 2000–02, 5 volumes), published under general editors Professors Chihiro Hosoya and Ian Nish. Other publications include: ‘Captors and Captives on The Burma–Thailand Railway’ in Bob Moore

Contributors xi 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and Their Captors (Oxford: Berg, 1996); and ‘British Prisoners of War of the Japanese’ in Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge and Yoichi Kibata (eds), Japanese Prisoners of War (London: Hambledon and London, 2000). Lachlan Grant is a doctoral candidate in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Publications include ‘What Makes a ‘National Memorial’? The Case of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial’, Public History Review (2006). Karl Hack is Lecturer in History at the Open University in the United Kingdom. From 1995 to 2006 he was at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, latterly as Associate Professor. Related publications include: with Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); and with Tobias Rettig (eds), Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2006). Jacco van den Heuvel was with the NIOD at the time of writing, in the programme ‘Indonesia across orders: The reorganisation of Indonesian society’. He is now employed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he works for the Department of International Cooperation and Quality Assurance. Gregory A. Johnson teaches in the Centre for Global and Social Analysis at Athabasca University, Canada. He has written on Canadian foreign policy during the Mackenzie King era, on Canada’s interaction with the Pacific Rim, the evacuation of Japanese Canadians during World War Two, and on northern Canada. P. Lim Pui Huen is an independent scholar. Publications include (edited with Diana Wong) War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: ISEAS, 2000); and Wong Ah Fook: Immigrant, Builder and Entrepreneur (Singapore: Times Editions, 2002). Kaori Maekawa is Assistant Professor at the Department of MultiDisciplinary Studies, National Institute of Japanese Literature, National Institute of Humanities in Tokyo, Japan. Her most recent publication is ‘Forgotten soldiers in the Japanese army: Asian POWs in Papua New Guinea’, in Yukio Toyoda and Hank Nelson (eds), The Pacific War in Papua New Guinea: Memories and Realities (Tokyo: Rikkyo University Centre for Asian Area Studies, 2006). Hank Nelson is Professor Emeritus, Division of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, and Chair of the State Society and Governance in Melanesia Project. Publications include POW: Australians Under Nippon (Sydney: ABC Books, 1985); Chased by the Sun: Courageous Australians in Bomber Command (Sydney: ABC Books, 2002); and (edited

xii Contributors 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

with Gavan MacCormack), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993). Arno Ooms graduated from the Department of Cultural Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam in 1996 and works as a Researcher at the NIOD in Amsterdam. Remco Raben is Researcher at the NIOD in Amsterdam and teaches history at Utrecht University. Publications include: Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia (Amsterdam: NIOD, 1999); and Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies: A History of Creolization and Empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2007). Christina Twomey is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is author of Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War II (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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Preface

We thank the people and organisations who have supported our efforts, including two events we organised in Singapore in September 2005 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War, namely: a conference; and a forum with the Wartime Generation. We therefore thank the Singapore History Museum and Director Lee Chor Lin and her staff, who were superb hosts; and the Lee and Shaw Foundations for their financial support. We also thank our host institutions for their support, namely, the Humanities and Social Studies Academic Group, of the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and the Open University, United Kingdom. Beyond NIE and its librarians, our research has been assisted by the National Archives of Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom, the library of the National University of Singapore, and the library and archives sections of the Imperial War Museum, London. Essential research assistance was provided by Glenda Lynch. Another institution has played an important supporting role through the efforts of its staff and associates: namely the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). It allowed or supported several of its staff in joining us in September 2005, and many of them contribute chapters below, which add vital Dutch, Eurasian, Japanese and post-war perspectives. We are also grateful to it for permission to use several photographs. Finally, we thank our contributors, and all who helped with, talked at, and commented upon, the September 2005 conference and Forum, such as Kwa Chong Guan, Wang Gungwu, Jean Louis Margolin, and Brian Farrell, who gave up valuable time to give papers or act as chairs of sessions. Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn 1 May 2007

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Abbreviations

ABCIFER AIF Anzac AWM COFEPOW FEPOW INA IWM JIN JLCSA KNIL LAC MCP MPAJA NAA NEI NFFCA NIBEG NIOD PPAJA POW RAPWI SEAC SWPA TNA WO

Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region Australian Imperial Force Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (1914–18) Australian War Memorial Children and Families of Far East Prisoners of War Far East Prisoners of War Indian National Army Imperial War Museum Association of Japanese–Indisch Descendants Japanese Labour Camp Survivors’ Association Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands East Indies Army) Library and Archives Canada Malayan Communist Party Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army National Archives of Australia Netherlands East Indies National Federation of Far Eastern Prisoners of War Clubs and Associations Nederlands-Indisch Bond van Ex-Krijgsgevangeren en-Geïnterneerden (Netherlands-Indies Association of Ex-prisoners of War and Internees) Nederlands Institut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation) Perak People’s Anti-Japanese Army prisoner of war Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees South East Asia Command South West Pacific Area The National Archives, United Kingdom War Office

1

Japanese-occupied Asia from 1941 to 1945 One occupier, many captivities and memories Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn

U

S

S

R

M O N G O LIA MANCHURIA

Peking

C

H

I

N

A

KOREA

TIBET

J A P A N Tokyo

Shanghai

INDIA

OKINAWA MACAO

BURMA

THAILAND Bangkok

FRENCH INDO-CHINA

M A L AYA

Manila

C

I

F

I

C

E

A

N

C

WAKE ISLAND

PHILIPPINES

GUAM ISLAND

BRUNEI

SINGAPORE BORNEO

Batavia

A O

HAINAN ISLAND

Rangoon

P

IWO JIMA

FORMOSA

HONG KONG

Hanol

TRUK ISLAND

SULAWESI

RA AT M SU

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NEW GUINEA

SOLOMON ISLANDS

NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES JAVA

TIMOR

Port Moresby FIJI

A U S T R A L I A

Map 1.1 Japanese-occupied Asia, May 1942 Source: Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn.

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Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn

Between 1941 and 1945 there was no generic experience of captivity in Japanese-occupied Asia. Some prisoners of war (POWs) were sent to work in Japan and Taiwan, others to labour on the ‘Death Railway’ between Thailand and Burma. Some camps had death rates of below 1 per cent, others of over 20 per cent. Some camp guards compounded bad conditions with personal brutality; others acted with restraint. Civilian internees, meanwhile, usually remained in the area where they were detained, in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, China or the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), only to suffer increasing shortages as the war wore on. This chapter, and this book, highlight the dangers of reducing these varied experiences, and their place in memory, to one monochrome stereotype. They expose major differences in how captivity was experienced at the time, and has been remembered since: differences due to geography and logistics as often as to policies, and differences marked by nationality, age, class, gender and combatant status. Part I has at least one chapter for each ‘national memory’: Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Indian and American. For Australians, for instance, captivity was integrated into mainstream post-war narratives about national character. Defeat could be blamed on the British, rather than on their own officers and men. By contrast, Jane Flower’s Chapter 4 shows how British prisoners had to cope with the knowledge that the Fall of Singapore had been one of Britain’s worst ever defeats, and that their role in that was not above question.1 For Indian POWs, the picture was even more nuanced, since some fought on both sides, with the British, and then alongside the Japanese in the Indian National Army (INA), whose motto was Chalo Delhi: ‘On to Delhi’. Likewise, P. Scott Corbett’s Chapter 7 on American prisoners and Gregory Johnson’s Chapter 8 on Canadians show how national memory and narratives could affect the memory of particular groups. For instance, Canada’s exeastern-POWs long found their suffering overshadowed by public concern for Japanese Canadians who had been interned in Canada itself. Part I of this book thus deals mainly with those captivities that have been remembered and so have become part of larger national memories, sometimes at the cost of marginalising other groups. Part II then moves on to those marginalised in the national memory: to ‘forgotten’ or relatively neglected captivities.2 It covers women, children, camp guards, internee experiences upon the end of the war, local heroines who fought back, and the reception of post-war films. In covering these, the book also highlights a wide range of approaches, ranging from examining newspapers, novels, and memoirs, through oral history and the reception of films, to using materials from government archives. In short, by juxtaposing a wide variety of captivity experiences – differentiated both by category of captive and by approach – this book transcends place, to become a collection about captivity as a category, and a launching pad for comparative study by other scholars. It is also distinctive in covering both history as event, and its memory, and in doing so over a vast space, if a slightly more containable time. Within this period, 1941 to 1945,

Japanese-occupied Asia from 1941 to 1945 3 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

and place, Japanese-conquered Asia, it tries to capture a wide range of ‘captivity’ experiences. In themselves, however, individual chapters are not enough to fulfil our intention, which is to encourage readers to take a comparative view, to ask what is place and time specific, and what more general to the ‘captivity’ experience. We want the reader to be able to contextualise the smaller sketches as scenes on a bigger canvas. For this to happen, we need to define that broader canvas, giving an idea of numbers and dimensions. This chapter provides this broader contextualisation. In the 6 months from December 1941 to May 1942, Japanese military forces swept across East Asia and the Pacific conquering the colonial empires of the Europeans and the Americans. Japan, which already dominated more than 270 million people in Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo and China, added an additional 146 million colonial subjects to its domain within a few months of campaigning (Table 1.1). Table 1.1 Southeast Asia and Japan’s wartime empire Date

Population

Japan

1940

71,114,308

Original colonies Korea Taiwan Karafuto Kwantung territories Nanyø (Pacific Islands) Total

1940 1940 1940 1940 1940

22,899,000 5,212,000 332,000 1,134,000 113,000 29,690.000

Second tier territories Manchukuo Occupied China

1940

Total Southeast Asia Borneo Netherlands East Indies Burma Philippines French Indochina Timor Thailand Malaya (including the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore) Total

1939 1939 1939 1940 1938 1937

43,234,000 200,000,000–250,000,000 (estimate) 243,000,000–293,234,000

Territory (km2)

220,769 35,961 36,090 3,461 2,149

1,303,143 Unknown

783,000 69,435,000 16,119,000 16,356,000 23,500,000 461,000 14,464,000

32,258 1,904,346 605,000 296,295 740,400 7,330 513,447

5,333,000 146,451,000

132,027

Source: Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (eds), Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 64, chart adapted from Peter Duus, ‘Japan’s Wartime Empire: Problems and Issues’, in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (New Jersey, CT: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. xiii.

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Table 1.2 POW numbers and deaths in Asia ranked by death rate, 1941–45 Country Australia United States New Zealand United Kingdom Dutch Canada Totals

Prisoners

Total deaths

Death rate (%)

21,726 21,580 121 50,016 37,000 1,691

7,412 7,107 33 12,433 8,500 273

34 33 26 25 23 16

132,134

35,756

27

Source: Adapted from Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson, The Burma–Thailand Railway Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 164, which uses figures from R. J. Pritchard and S. Zaide (eds), The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (London: Garland, 1981), vol. 16, p. 40,537, stating overall and relative numbers are ‘reasonably accurate’ (p. 163).

According to Tokyo War Crimes Trial records, the Japanese imperial forces also captured 132,134 American, British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Dutch POWs (called in Japanese Senso Horyo or Senso Furyo), most within these first 6 months of the Pacific War (Table 1.2).3 The first point, then, is that at less than one POW per additional 1,000 subjects, the POWs (especially the European POWs) were, relatively speaking, a side-issue for the Japanese, compared with how they would pacify and rule local populations. Many of the national figures were later revised up. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial’s total figure of 132,134 also needs to be revised upwards slightly. Recent figures for the Australians are 22,376 POWs not 21,706 and 8,031 not 7,412 deaths,giving a slightly higher mortality rate of 36 per cent. The American total including the entire Pacific goes up from 21,580 to 25,600’ with 10,650 dead.4 The Dutch total goes up from 37,000 to 42,233, although total deaths remain roughly the same.5 Canadian figures have been revised slightly down. Gregory Johnson in his chapter of this volume indicates that for Canadian POWs the figures are 267 dead out of 1,684 taken prisoner. The adjustments suggest the Tokyo War Crimes Trial figures should not be seen as precise, but rather as giving a rough indication of the scale of events, and of relative numbers, where European prisoners are concerned. For instance, they show the largest single category of Western POWs were by far the 50,000 plus British, then Dutch, then Australians.6 Perhaps their major limitation, as we discuss further below, is their inadequacy in dealing with Asian POWs. The most significant of this category alone, the Indians who fought alongside the British, would add 60,000 or more. Van Waterford in his statistical compilation of captivity under the Japanese estimates that, in addition, over 130,000 European men, women and children became civilian internees, ‘hostile aliens’ or Tekisei Gaikoku Jin.7 Table 1.3 shows how these were distributed among the various Western nationalities.


Although the POW experience has eclipsed the public memory of civilian internees, the number of Western internees is thus surprisingly similar to the number of Western POWs: at just over 130,000 each. Some of these internees also felt that they lost more than many POW survivors, as the war took not just their health and time, but also property, jobs and even the chance to return to the place they regarded as home. At the same time, internee death rates, ranging from less than 3 per cent to nearly 13 per cent for each country, were a fraction of those for POWs, which ranged from 16 per cent for Canadians to 36 per cent for Australians. The main reason for this was the use of POWs on heavy, forced labour, often on war-related industries and sometimes in distant or under-developed areas, whereas internees were more likely to be engaged on lighter, camp-based work such as clothes or food production. This edited collection, by including chapters on civilian internees alongside chapters on POWs, restores the balance of study. In fact for the Dutch in particular, as Remco Raben reminds us in Chapter 6 below, ‘Dutch memories of captivity in the Pacific War’, there were more than 100,000 civilian internees in the NEI, far more than the 42,000 POWs there, and a relatively high percentage given a home population of just 9 million (1939) to 10 million (1945). In Java alone there were up to 114 civilian internee camps in 1942, later consolidated down to around 30.8 In addition, the memory of the Dutch internees became wrapped up with the memory of the loss of empire, as the NEI fought for, and won, independence by 1949. Table 1.3 Civilian internee numbers and deaths in Asia, 1941–45a,b Country of origin

Total internees

Deaths

Proportion of deaths (%)

Netherlands East Indies China Philippines Malaya Hong Kong Japan Burma Thailand Indochina Total

105,530 9,350 7,800 4,525 2,535 690 200 200 65 130,895

13,567 250 453 218 127 32 Unknown 9 1 14,657

12.8 2.6 5.8 4.8 5.0 4.6 Unknown 4.5 1.5 11.2

Note a Within these figures, men, women and children were evenly balanced within the Netherlands East Indies, and to a much lesser extent in China and the Philippines. In the other areas, men were generally more than double the combined number of women and children, due both to the nature of colonial society, and to evacuation prior to December 1941. b An additional 1,000 plus were captured in New Guinea (488 died) and the Pacific Islands.9 Source: Adapted from ‘van Waterford’, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994), p. 145, who drew on D. van Velden, De Japanse Interneringskampen voor burgers gedurende de tweede wereldoorlog (Japanese Civilian Internment Camps during the Second World War) (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1963), pp. 519–44.

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Thus, for the Dutch, memories of civilian internment are strong in public memory, eclipsing those of soldiers. In addition, the Dutch were almost unique in having similar numbers of men (36,720), women (32,050) and children (36,760) internees in their 105,530 total, and so, in those memoirs, women and children feature as strongly as men. Again, this book reflects the relative role of internees and, among them, of women and children, by providing separate chapters by Eveline Buchheim (Chapter 15, ‘Hide and seek’: Children of Japanese–Indisch parents’), and Bernice Archer (Chapter 10, ‘Internee voices: Women and children’s experience of being Japanese captives’). The book also goes beyond that, to overcome the exaggerated binary between all-powerful Japanese and totally powerless captives, by including chapters from both ‘sides of the fence’. It includes chapters which discuss the problems of maintaining authority and the necessities of life both from

ADEK GROGOL KAMPONG MAKASSAR KRAMAT STRUISWIJK TJIDENG

BATAVIA

HALMAHEIRA GEDANGAN KERANG PANAS LAMPERSARIE SOMPOK BANGKONG

Java Sea

BUITENZORG (BOGOR) GEDONGBADAK KOTA PARIS

BANDUNG

SEMARANG BANJOEBIROE

TJIHAPIT KAREES BLOEMENCAMP TJIMAHI

I

N D I A N

AMBARAWA BOYOLALI (BOYS SLAVE CAMP) SURAKARTA (SOLO) MUNTILAN

OC

E A N

CENTRAL JAVA CAMPS

BELAWAN MEDAN SI RENGO RENGO

GLOEGOER KAMPONG BAROE PULAU BERAJAN SERDANGKWARTIER TANJOENGMORAWA BELAWAN ESTATE

BANGKINANG PADANG SUMATRA

MANADO

BORNEO

AIRMADIDI

SULAWESI (CELEBES)

MUNTOK BANGKA

BELALAU PALEMBANG

BATAVIA BANDUNG

JAVA

AMBON BOSKAMP STOVIL TANTUI

PAREPARE WERFSTRAAT MARINE KAMPEMENT KAMPILI WIJK MALINO MAKASSAR DARMO

SEMARANG SURABAYA

BALI

KESILIR

OR

M

TI

CIVILIAN INTERNMENT CAMPS ADAPTED FROM SHIRLEY FENTON HUIE (1992) AND VAN WATERFORD (1994)

Map 1.2 Selected civilian internment camps in the Netherlands East Indies Source: Hack and Blackburn.


the Dutch side (Jacco van den Heuvel’s Chapter 11, ‘Crime and authority within Dutch communities of internees in Indonesia, 1942–45’), and from the Japanese side (Kaori Maekawa’s Chapter 10, ‘Japanese guards in film and memory: White Skin, Yellow Commander’). On the one hand, van den Heuvel reveals the difficulties faced by Dutch authorities within the camps, which included having to balance sanctioning or even encouraging breaking Japanese rules (for instance to buy food from beyond the wire), with keeping order. On the other, Kaori’s chapter reveals the awkward position of Japanese camp commanders within a military system pushed to the limits, and the sometimes ambivalent position of these commanders in Dutch memories as well. Finally, Arno Ooms’ Chapter 16, ‘The Dutch community in Thailand, 1945–46’ looks at what happened to captives when the war ended. He describes how at the time of the Japanese surrender, while there were still 4,634 Australian and 13,312 British ex-POWs waiting to return home from the Burma–Thailand Railway, there were also 11,334 Dutch citizens. He shows that generalisations about POW experiences – such as the idea that successful escape was impossible in Thailand – are seriously wrong. They are wrong because they fail to account for the experience of Dutch POWs, especially of mixed-race POWs of Dutch nationality. Many from both these categories considered the Netherlands East Indies to be their home. For these, not only was the return ‘home’ much delayed, but the very question of where ‘home’ was was thrown into doubt by the Indonesian determination to become independent. Among the varied experiences that these and other chapters reveal, some underlying themes do emerge. These include: the lack of detailed guidance, or virtually any guidance, for often low-ranking Japanese camp commanders working in a system unsympathetic to prisoners’ needs, which was at times desperately short of supplies; the tendency for conditions to deteriorate as the war went on; and what we might call the ‘captive’s dilemma’. This last is the moral uncertainty inherent in being an Eastern captive, if not in being a captive in general. There was an underlying feeling that authority was illegitimate, and so could or should be challenged. Many camps were desperate to obtain food from outside, by stealing and black market trading, to supplement often dangerously limited diets. Yet there was also a need for prisoners’ own camp authorities to limit this same stealing (both from the Japanese and from other prisoners) and to ensure stable conditions. ‘Illegal’ or forbidden trading beyond the wire could thus be a crucial community support, but also invite punishment, and encourage a breakdown of overall moral order, as portrayed in the film King Rat. King Rat is dealt with by Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn in Chapter 9, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat: Protest and ex-prisoner of war memory in Britain and Australia’. The same chapter deals with the need to cooperate with guards and camp commanders, and yet danger: cooperation could shade into, or be interpreted later as shading into, collaboration. It was the hyper-dramatised

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treatment of this dilemma which made the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai so controversial. The film’s exaggerated portrayal of the semi-fictional British Colonel Nicholson, determined to maintain health and discipline by building a better bridge than the Japanese, touched a raw nerve. In short, the dilemma was that right and wrong became unstable, and life, oxymoronic: theft could be good, ‘collaboration’ necessary to some degree. The problem for many was to balance these tensions, so that necessary transgressions did not become excessive. Life in a situation where there were moral and practical imperatives to both obey, and yet also to defy and subvert peacetime norms, was always going to be both ambivalent, and difficult. This was doubly so when Japanese codes of behaviour, attitudes to physical punishment, and the Japanese predicament as supplies dried up, provided an increasingly difficult situation for captives. To return to the theme of internments’ weight within overall captivity experiences, the chapters below show that writing on the Dutch internees began in the early 1960s. The greater saliency of internment in their experience drove this early writing. For other nationalities, where the number of civilian internees was much smaller, writing on internees only took off in the 1990s. For instance, Christina Twomey’s Chapter 12, ‘Remembering war and forgetting civilians: The place of civilian internees in Australian commemorations of the Pacific War’, shows how, despite some television coverage in the 1980s, Australian writing on internees took off fairly late, in the 1990s. By May 1942, then, the Japanese military forces held captive white POWs and civilian internees in almost equal numbers. But they also held another category; the soldiers of the colonial armies organised and led by the Europeans and Americans. What were the numbers of these colonial soldiers, overall and as captives? What were their dilemmas and decisions? They were not included in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial figure of 132,134 white POWs. Van Waterford estimates that the number of Allied POWs, including the soldiers of the colonial armies captured by the Japanese, was 192,600.10 Given the Tokyo War Crimes Trial figure of 134,132 white POWs, it seems his figure includes only the European soldiers, plus the equivalent of the Indian troops fighting alongside the British. It would thus exclude the captivity experiences of other colonial troops who entered captivity, including the temporary but terrible fate of over 45,000 Philippine troops.11 As we shall see, then, despite having some logic, his figures distort the scale and nature of colonial troops’ experience. One reason that Waterford chooses a low figure may lie in a crucial difference between European and colonial captivities. Many colonial soldiers dispersed into the population before or just after surrender, others were allowed to go free after a relatively short period. However, the remaining ‘captivity’ experiences of this category are too substantial to ignore. Take just the one category of colonial troops: Indians serving alongside British forces. At the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, Douds’ Chapter 6


below, ‘Indian POWs in the Pacific, 1941–45’, suggests that approximately 60,000 soldiers of the British Indian Army became POWs. Official historian Kirby suggested 67,000 back in 1957.12 Either way, most were captured in Malaya or on Singapore, where they were imprisoned in camps separately from other POWs, notably at Farrer Park. Their numbers declined as the Japanese captors and Indian nationalists within their ranks recruited many for an INA. The INA was committed to liberating India with Japanese help. British sources later estimated that around 20,000 defected, with the Japanese forming these into an INA division limited to 16,000. Douds nevertheless argues that the majority rejected the idea of recruitment into the INA despite Japanese threats and promises. Many were shipped to New Guinea as labourers and suffered appauling treatment.13 The implication is that ‘loyal’ Indian forces have been badly served by an emphasis on those who joined the INA. Douds puts their story back into the larger picture, arguing they suffered at least as much as the European POWs did. Whatever the real reason for the neglect of those who remained loyal, the Indian troops’ position also demonstrates another form of the captive’s dilemma. For them, the moral hazard presented by the tension between cooperation and non-cooperation, between fighting alongside the Japanese in the INA or remaining POWs, was acute. Should they remain loyal to the Indian Army and their izzat (martial and unit honour), or join the INA and march through Burma to Delhi? In addition to these Indian troops, there were also two battalions of the 2nd and 9th Gurkha Regiments in Singapore. They were imprisoned at Skeleton Camp away from their white officers and the white POWs. Despite beatings and torture to get them to switch sides, many refused.14 So some Indian Army troops held out as POWs and others saw their role in the INA as heroic ‘nationalists’. For Indians as for captives as a whole, there was no one generic experience. Similar dilemmas presented themselves to other Asians who had served alongside the European armies. There were two battalions of Malays in the Malay Regiment at the fall of Singapore, numbering 1,400. Some melted back into the population, some ended up in pro-Japanese militias, but around 90 were shot for their fierce resistance against the Japanese in the Battle of Pasir Panjang of February 1942, or for refusing to change sides afterwards. The rest were released and returned to their home villages.15 This latter policy of quickly releasing Asian captives reflected practices in China, where the emphasis was on weeding out potential organisers of resistance, while hoping the mass would return to civilian life. The Japanese, in Southeast Asia as in occupied China, did not have the men and resources to treat entire local male populations, or even those males who had fought against them, as POWs.16 On this model, post-surrender screenings, in plain language sifting out men prior to executions, were favoured for the most troublesome locations. These were mostly where there was guerilla resistance,

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or where Chinese populations, assumed to be soured by sympathy for their mainland comrades, were strongest. In Singapore, where a mere 1,250 Chinese had joined the irregular ‘Dalforce’ to fight alongside British forces, more than 30,000 Chinese were selected as potential trouble-causers and executed in the early March 1942 ‘sook ching’. In some senses, then, the Japanese methodology limited the numbers in captivity, whether by early release, or crude selective culling of likely opponents. They also hoped that an ideology featuring Japan as liberator and leader of Asians would help them to turn their new subject populations into supporters, rather than hindrances.17 In the Philippines the Japanese faced a similar problem to China and Singapore. Despite the ideology of Asian liberation, there were potentially large numbers of Asian POWs, many of whom remained strongly proAmerican. In April 1942, a couple of months after the fall of Singapore, about 140,000 men of Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright’s army surrendered to the Japanese. These included about 22,000 Americans, and around 118,000 Philippine troops (mainly called-up reservists). The majority of captives, then, were local Filipinos.18 Starting from July 1942 the latter would be released.19 But in the early months they often shared the fate of their American comrades. The Bataan death march of around 70,000 prisoners in April 1942 is usually presented as a specifically American tragedy. Yet Stanley Falk estimates that between 9,921 American POWs and 62,100 Filipinos began the march to what would become POW camps. Between 5,000 and 10,000 Filipino soldiers died due to brutality, exhaustion, lack of food and water, and execution, compared to around 650 Americans.20 In other words, the Bataan death march was equally a Filipino tragedy. Furthermore, while some melted away into the civilian population, 45,000 Filipinos had stayed with the Americans in their POW camps in the first months. As captives, the Filipino soldiers’ death rate reached 334 a day from dysentery and malaria, with little food and no medicine. For a while at least, they shared the high death rates of American POWs.21 The Japanese then indoctrinated the Filipino POWs with classes, teaching them that the Japanese were their brothers in the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere. After signing a pledge that they would do nothing to impede Japan, they were released. Despite these precautions, significant numbers later joined anti-Japanese guerrillas in the jungle.22 Yet, as P. Scott Corbett shows in Chapter 7 below, ‘In the eye of a hurricane: Americans in Japanese custody during World War II’, it was the fate of American military POWs that continued to predominate American images of captivity. From a Filipino Philippine perspective the American POWs were, by contrast, just one part of a larger story of captivity, with high death rates inside and outside of camps and marches. For many of the soldiers of these colonial armies, there was thus a real dilemma of whether to hold to their oath of allegiance to their colonial units, or renounce it and obtain freedom. We regret that space forbids including also the stories of Malays, Chinese and others who suffered similar dilemmas. For


the moment, it is enough to reiterate that the figure of 132,134 Western POWs should not be allowed to blank out of the story of 60,000 or more Indians (with 40,000 or more remaining POWs for the duration), 62,000 Filipinos on the Bataan death march (45,000 becoming temporary POWs), and the other Asian troops. The latter included 23,000 local recruits of the Royal Dutch East Indies army, the Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (KNIL). Many of these deserted in February and March 1942, or melted into the background after surrender. But of those who were captured, the Japanese recruited up to 15,000 into their auxiliary units, the heiho, some for want of a better option, many under threat of punishment or even of execution.23 In a sense, such forced recruitment was also a form of captivity. The wider ‘captivity’ or occupation of civilian populations, and their resistance, is also too big a topic to tackle in this volume. But P. Lim Pui Huen’s Chapter 14, ‘Unlikely heroines: Sybil Kathigasu and Elizabeth Choy’, does touch on the captivity of civilian colonial subjects who remained steadfastly loyal to their colonial states, to the extent that they helped the antiJapanese resistance, or civilian internees and POWs. Her chapter is included in this collection because she focuses in particular on two Malayan women whose resistance resulted in them becoming captives. They had to undergo not only direct torture, but seeing their family harmed as well. They remind us that for those civilians who resisted, captivity could be an especially brutal, if not short and deadly, experience. Thus, this book seeks to go beyond the common Western images of captivity not only to balance POW and internee, and male and female and child experiences, but also to begin to include captivity of the Asian colonial troops and of Asian subjects who were imprisoned for their resistance. There is one category of ‘captive’, however, that even we have not had the space to include. These are the forced wartime labourers who were, in a sense, ‘captive’, but nevertheless not captives of war under the terms of international agreements. Paul Kratoska’s edited volume, Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire, has surveyed these. There were at least 4 million Japaneserecruited labourers throughout its empire, 600,000 or more of these Asian romusha being posted long distances. The latter included 294,000 from Java alone. The vast majority of overseas romusha never returned home. Without the benefit of officers and previous organisation many, by some accounts most, died. Although we exclude them, it is worth noting that the overseas romusha were recruited on false promises of pay and conditions, could not easily leave, and were directly employed on war production tasks.24 The diversity of experience the chapters below do tackle is not just restricted to under-reported groups. The chapters also show that the picture was surprisingly complex for the male Western POWs who have constituted the mainstream of captivity studies. In the years that Japan occupied Asia, 1941 to 1945, Japan created 378 POW camps (Senso Furyo Shuyojo) and a similar number, 358, of civilian internee camps (Tekisei Gaikoku Jin Shuyojo).25 The sheer number of camps ensured that there would be diversity

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in the way individual Japanese commandants and camp guards treated their captives. The challenge is to capture this diversity, while not losing sight of overarching constraints and contexts, and systemic problems. Let us outline some of those general conditions. The legal and historical background to Japanese attitudes to POWs and civilians is sketched in by Corbett’s Chapter 7, on American prisoners, and by Kaori Makaewa’s Chapter 10. The story that they trace shows that the Japanese were not culturally or institutionally predetermined to maltreat prisoners. By contrast, Japan began the twentieth century determined to act by international norms, and even to exceed them. So what were the general regulations for treating POWs and civilian internees? For the treatment of the POWs, all Japanese units possessed an updated version of the Japanese Army Regulations for Handling Prisoners of War designed for soldiers in the field. These had been issued as far back as February 1904 and revised with minor changes. The regulations were humane, with Article 2 declaring: ‘Prisoners of war shall be treated with a spirit of goodwill and shall never be subjected to cruelties or humiliation’.26 These same regulations were in force for all Japanese units of World War II. The regulations had been enforced for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 in which Japan captured 80,000 Russian POWs. Japan treated these in an exemplary manner. They even repatriated Russian officers who agreed to take no further part in military action.27 Japanese Army Regulations for Handling Prisoners of War had stated: ‘Those enemy sick and wounded who, after medical treatment at dressing stations or hospitals, are considered incapable of military service shall, after due promise not to serve in the same war, be returned to their homes.’28 In 1907, Japan signed the Hague Convention, which contained a chapter on POWs. Section IV, Chapter 2, article 4 stated that prisoners must be ‘treated humanely’.29 Article 7 noted that ‘prisoners of war shall be treated as regards board, lodging, and clothing on the same footing as the troops of the Government who captured them.’ The Japanese Army Regulations for Handling Prisoners of War article 20 affirmed this: ‘For Prisoners of war accommodations, army establishments, temples or other buildings which suffice to prevent escape and are not detrimental to the health and honour of the prisoners shall be utilised’. Article 6 of the Hague Convention further stated that: ‘The State may utilise the labour of prisoners of war according to their rank and aptitude, officers excepted. The tasks shall not be excessive and shall have no connection with the operations of the war.’ There was no comparable paragraph in the Japanese Army regulations. However, during World War I when Japan captured the German POWs while taking the German colony of Shantung (Shandong in hanyu pinyin) in China, it once again treated POWs in an exemplary manner. In 1929, Japan signed the Geneva Convention that also contained provisions on POWs, but never ratified it. The rising power of the military, the example of fascist defiance of the League of Nations in the West, and


fears the convention might exclude severe treatment of pilots who bombed Japanese cities, all played a part. It seems Japanese attitudes were reaching a watershed around the early 1930s, retreating from the pattern of fulfilling, if not over fulfilling, international best practice. Japan did, however, remain a signatory to the Hague Convention. It also promised, upon the outbreak of hostilities with the Western powers in 1941, to honour the Geneva Convention, mutatis mutandis, meaning in part or with changes. For civilian internees the legal position was more ambivalent. Neither The Hague nor the Geneva Convention dealt with them. However, Japan did appear to accept the Annex to the International Red Cross Convention of Tokyo of 1934, which provided for the humane treatment and protection of civilians of a belligerent country taken captive. Although the articles of the annex were drawn up under the auspices of Prince Iyesato Tokugawa, who hosted the conference, Japan never ratified it. There was nevertheless some expectation that Japan would honour the annex. It stated that enemy civilians were not to be interned in camps unless they posed a risk to the security, that they should not be subject to physical punishment, and if interned it should not be in an unhealthy area.30 On 24 February 1942, moreover, Japan informed the Americans that it would apply the humane treatment outlined in the Geneva Convention to the civilian internees as if they were POWs.31 On paper, then, a newly captured POW, internee, or a new subject of the Japanese empire, had little to fear in early 1942. In reality, POWs, internees and local populations all had a great deal to fear in early 1942, largely because of how the Sino-Japanese conflict since 1931 had impacted on evolving Japanese military attitudes and practices. The Sino-Japanese conflict, which often lapsed into guerrilla warfare in the interior of China, and where the Japanese could not easily distinguish combatant and civilian, had ingrained new practices. The Sino-Japanese conflict was regarded as an ‘incident’, not a war covered by international conventions. As early as 1932 Japanese military and police there were authorised to use genju-shobun (severe punishment) or genchi-shobun (on the spot punishment), leading to massacres. Chinese might be released, executed or deported to other areas, and there never was a regular POW administration in China. By 1941 the Japanese military were schooled in these more ad hoc and sometimes brutal practices. They were also informed by the idea that Japan was involved in a war of survival, where all resources, their own men and prisoners alike, must be utilised to the full and possibly to the death in the service of the emperor.32 Beyond these changes in military culture, Japanese leaders set the tone for prisoner mistreatment. Japanese premier Hideki Tojo, as the minister in charge of the War Ministry (Rikugunsho), and Lieutenant General Mikio Uemura, his subordinate and the head of the POW Information Bureau within the War Ministry, were the key individuals. In the months after war was declared they issued orders contrary to what Japan had agreed to in handling POWs and internees. Uemura wrote that: ‘In the war with Russia we gave them excellent

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treatment in order to gain recognition as a civilised country. Today no such need applies.’ At a conference with camp commandants on 30 May 1942, Uemura added that: ‘Not a man amongst them must be permitted to eat the bread of idleness’. Tojo authorised the use of POWs to work on the Burma–Thailand Railway, in breach of the Hague Convention. Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata has concluded that despite the diversity of treatment of the POWs and internees, their ill-treatment was widespread, and this was due in part to the policies laid down by Tojo and Uemura.33 While Tojo would face the consequences in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial – being sentenced and executed – Uemura did not. He left POW administration in 1943 to command troops in China and Manchuria, where he was captured by the Russians and committed suicide at Khabarovsk POW camp in 1946. This reinforces the point that, given the natural dangers inherent in supervising large numbers of captives, the highest levels of military and civilian leadership bear an acute responsibility for the messages they send about prisoner treatment. But Hata has also identified the military culture we outlined above as a culprit in the change in behaviour towards POWs. Japanese troops as far back as the Russo-Japanese War had been taught to regard surrender as dishonour, and many had committed suicide when captured. This ethos increased with the rise of the militarists in the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese military sought to incorporate the samurai battle code into the Japanese Army’s Field Service Code (Senjinkun) which told the soldier to choose death rather than surrender. This implied contempt for foreign soldiers who surrendered.34 The war in China had also contributed to the low value that Japanese soldiers placed on POWs. While there was no uniform treatment of captured Chinese soldiers during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the latter all too often experienced cruelty and brutality. Surrendered Chinese soldiers were on occasion used for target and bayonet practice. There were occasions when prisoners were beheaded by new recruits so that the latter could undergo acculturalisation into the violence of the military and the China campaign. Other Chinese prisoners found themselves used as forced labour working in Manchukuo and Japan.35 The Sino-Japanese War reinforced the Japanese troops’ contempt for POWs and accelerated the acceptance of the militarists’ culture of violent discipline. Tojo and Uemura were themselves members of the overall group of militarists who achieved dominance over Japan by the late 1930s. Thus, the use of POWs as forced labour with little food and medicine and the brutal beatings and deaths at the hands of individual Japanese guards that we find with the Allied POWs from 1941 to 1945 all had precedents in the Sino-Japanese War. In addition to this legacy, POWs were, from August 1942, classified as the lowest rank in the Japanese army. Yet the Japanese Army itself used corporal punishment widely on its own troops, and Koreans who became camp guards were accustomed to both this and being looked down upon by the Japanese. Hence, in some ways, mistreatment was an


extrapolation of practices, codes and problems within the Japanese military itself.36 This was situation was made worse over time by the intensifying logistics crisis in what became a ‘tapioca empire’: one where staples such as rice and textiles became scarcer, and were partially replaced by substitutes.37 Despite previous agreements and regulations, and reassurances to the Allies, it was thus all but inevitable that POW treatment should be varied, and at times dangerous. When combined with the worsening state of Japanese logistics, death rates in many Japanese POW and (to a lesser extent) civilian internee camps became alarmingly high. The figures in Table 1.2 above were given as evidence when prosecuting the major Class ‘A’ war criminals, such as the Japanese Prime Minister and War Minister Hideki Tojo. The figures suggest what the war crimes testimony and later personal memoirs also demonstrate. Contrary to the Hague Convention, POWs were used as forced labour on military projects, such as the 60,000 employed on the Burma–Thailand Railway, and smaller numbers on a Sumatra Railway. Their health was not looked after as the rules of the Hague Convention and Japanese Army Regulations for Handling Prisoners of War prescribed. Death rates ranged from 16 per cent for the Canadians, through 25 per cent for the British, to 36 per cent for the Australians. Civilian internees faired better according Table 1.3 above. Their death rates were substantially lower, often not far from the 5 per cent mark, although there were camps in the Netherlands East Indies that had death rates up to 17.6 per cent, such as those in the North Celebes. Since the vast majority of internees were held in the Netherlands East Indies, this pushed the average internee death rate up to 11.2 per cent, as opposed to 27 per cent for POWs.38 Beyond these averages, the detailed figures in tables 1.2 and 1.3 also show how treatment varied, notably between POW and civilian internee camps in different geographical locations. Testimony at war crimes trials and in personal memoirs confirms this diversity. This diversity could exist even in one location, driven by the personality of individual Japanese. Take the treatment of 4,500 civilian internees in Singapore’s Changi Prison. From September 1942 to April 1943 Count Isohi Asahi was the Japanese Controller of Enemy Aliens in Singapore, Malaya, and Sumatra. Asahi came from a Japanese aristocratic background, was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and had worked as a Japanese consul to pre-war Singapore. Internees such as T. P. M. Lewis, former Governor Shenton Thomas and his wife described Asahi helping with food and medical supplies, intervening against the brutality of subordinates, and helping civilian internees in working outside of Changi Prison. Internee George L. Peet, writing later as editor of the Singapore newspaper the Straits Times, described how, under Asahi, they had ‘more food than they could eat’. Peet wrote that they called this period ‘Changi University’ because they were able to find ‘compensation in intellectual and artistic simulation’ due to the large number of professionals who could offer classes.39

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In April 1943, Lieutenant Sakae Susuki became the new commandant of Changi Prison internment camp, assisted by Jikko Tominaga. Americaneducated Tominaga’s arrival marked a switch to a harsher regime. There were frequent searches for radio sets, and internees were made to labour for long hours at humiliating jobs. Tominaga commandeered possessions and reduced food and medical supplies. After the Double 10th Incident (10 October 1943), in which the Japanese mistakenly blamed the internees for espionage and sabotage, conditions further deteriorated. A move to Sime Road in April 1944 led to increased deaths due to malaria and other tropical diseases. Tominaga was later convicted of atrocities at a war crimes trial held in Singapore during August to September 1946. His sentence was death, later commuted to ten years imprisonment.40 P. Scott Corbett, in his landmark 1987 study of the exchanges of American and Japanese civilians during World War II, also confirms the variability of treatment. He noted that American civilians interned in the Philippines received harsh treatment from day one. This was viewed by the Japanese as punishment for the poor American system for interning Japanese civilians during December 1941 to January 1942, one which had breached the Geneva Convention.41 In Chapter 7 below, Corbett demonstrates that despite this some internees were treated well. He also shows most of the better treatment was concentrated in the early days. Bernice Archer’s Chapter 13 below, ‘Internee voices: Women and children’s experience of being Japanese captives’, likewise demonstrates the diversity of captivity. She provides a synthesis of the experiences of women and children using memoirs, diaries, and oral history to uncover the experiences of 40,000 children and a greater number of women internees. Archer asserts that the major difference between civilian camps, with the biggest influence on women and children’s survival rates, was the way in which some camps (in China and Hong Kong) were mixed family camps while others (Changi and Santo Tomas in the Philippines) were partially segregated. Worse still, those in the Netherlands East Indies were completely sexually segregated. As a general rule, the higher the segregation, the worse conditions tended to be. The key here was ability, or inability, to access male professionals such as doctors and engineers. Also the Japanese administration in the Netherlands East Indies was much harsher, with beatings and hard labour imposed on women and children, something that was uncommon elsewhere. Treatment in the POWs camps also varied, as demonstrated by the two best known areas: Changi and the Burma–Thailand Railway. Changi was a holding area in eastern Singapore, encompassing former barracks, open ground and, later on, Changi Prison as well. It was used as a holding camp for prisoners before they were sent to labour elsewhere, or upon their return. It had a low death rate and good conditions compared to others. Prisoners there also enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as the Japanese guards left its internal administration to the POW’s commanders.42


Figures given by British military authorities at the war’s end indicate that of 87,000 POWs who passed through, 850 died. The death toll presented by the British military at post-war Changi commemoration ceremonies stated that 905 POWs and civilian internees combined died in Changi. Most civilian internees died later, at Sime Road Camp.43 Many men only stayed in Changi for a brief time, before moving onto labour camps elsewhere; the best known being those along the Burma– Thailand Railway. POWs described Changi as ‘POW Heaven’ or ‘Phoney Captivity’ compared to the Burma–Thailand Railway camps. According to Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson, over 60,000 POWs worked on the railway from November 1942 to October 1943. Over 12,000 died: a death rate of 20 per cent concentrated in a short time.44 Horrendous as these figures were, the number of Asian conscripted labourers working in the Burma–Thailand Railway alone, the romusha, was greater than the sum of all Japanese-held Western POWs. Some estimate there were over 200,000. The number of romusha who died there was 33,000 even according to Yoshinori Murai, who examined the Japanese military records. Some Dutch sources claim half or more of Javanese shipped there, perhaps even the vast majority, died. What is without doubt is that three quarters or more of these overseas romusha failed to return home.45 The variety of POW experience is further explored below in Hank Nelson’s Chapter 2, ‘Beyond slogans: Assessing the experiences and the history of the Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese’. Nelson uses personal narratives of POWs to show how some were treated comparatively well. Examining how the captivity of the Australian POWs under the Japanese has overshadowed the captivity of Australian POWs held in Europe, Nelson concludes that there were camps in Europe that were bad. In the Far East, meanwhile, there were a minority of camps in which Australian POWs faired comparatively well. Thus, he concludes it is an oversimplification to take the overall figures of deaths under the Japanese and say that all experiences were the same, or to assume most abuses and failures were the result of specifically Japanese culture and practice. He uses oral history to show that some problems – down to the almost comical impossibility of getting accurate roll calls – were intrinsic to captivity experiences across theatres. Nelson’s chapter, more than any other in this volume, points us towards the need to take a broad, comparative view of the ‘POW’ and ‘internee’ or ‘captive’ situation, looking for patterns as well as regional specifics. Only by a broad approach can we see what was truly ‘Japanese’ about captivities in Japanese-occupied Asia.

Conclusion This chapter reveals Eastern captivity experiences as varied, and as needing to be located within a larger mosaic of worldwide captivity experiences and of analytical approaches.

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The challenge is how to start to get specialists to be more aware of, and interact more with, specialist knowledge of other categories of captivity. For instance the different categories (POW, internee, Asian labourer, local resister), the different nationalities, and the different approaches (archival, oral history and memory work, commemorative) all form part of the potential overall framework for captivity study. As Hank Nelson’s chapter shows, even quite specialist work on individual nationalities or categories can make quite erroneous claims about the ‘exceptional’ nature of experiences, if conducted as if in a goldfish bowl. Arno Ooms, meanwhile, shows that quite standard assumptions, such as the lack of successful escapes from the Thailand–Burma Railway camps, are only sustainable if whole categories of POW are ignored. Over and above these points, both Hank Nelson and Kaori Makaewa, in her nuanced study of the ‘good’ Japanese camp commander, show us that we spend far too little time in working out why and how certain nations, specific commanders, and even specific types of prisoner or individuals, are able to make the captivity experience less traumatic. Studies have been depressingly pathological in content and tone, rather than diagnostic and prescriptive. In short, even quite specialist studies need to be placed in a strong comparative framework if they are to tell us anything about captivity per se, let alone be instructive for future captivity planning and management. Up to this point such frameworks have been notably lacking. If this book makes a contribution towards making people aware of different traditions, categories and experiences, and in beginning to assemble a framework of facts for Japanese-occupied Asia in specific, it will have done a worthwhile job.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

For a survey of different nationalities’ memories of the fall of Singapore, see Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn (eds), Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), ch. 6, ‘After the Battle’, pp. 142–82. The parallel ‘forgotten armies’ theme has a venerable history, from General Slim’s supposed warning to his 14th Army veterans from Burma, that compared to the Western armies they would be the ‘forgotten army’, to Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten Armies: the fall of British Asia, 1941–45 (London: Penguin, 2004). For European and American POWs see R. J. Pritchard and Sonia Magbanua Zaide (eds), The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Complete Transcripts of the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Volume 16 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), pp. 40, 337. This figure is also accepted by Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt: The Changing Nature of Japanese Military and Popular Perception of Prisoners of War Through the Ages’, in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), p. 236. Hata compares the number of 132,134 with figures from records from Japan’s National Defence Agency in Tokyo. E. Bartlett Kerr, Surrender and Survival: The Experience of American POWs in The Pacific 1941–1945 (New York: William Morrow, 1985), p. 339. De Jong, Collapse of a Colonial Society, p. 272. The 37,000 would include only Dutch KNIL troops, excluding auxiliaries and naval personnel. McCormack and Nelson, The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), confirm the higher Australian figures, see pp. 162–3.


6 Official historian S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, Vol. V, pp. 532–41, drew on Cab101/199, M. M. Baird, on Eastern POWs. Kirby and Baird both fail to tally figures, but Baird’s details (which themselves appear self-contradictory in places) suggest a higher figure when RAF and RN are included, in the region of 50,000–56,000. 7 For the number of internees see Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994), p. 178 and p. 182. For European and American POWs see Pritchard and Zaide (eds), The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Volume 16, p. 40,337. 8 Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, p. 319. 9 For the Pacific Islands and New Guinea see Yuki Tanka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in WWII (Colorado: Westview, 1996); and Hank Nelson, ‘The Return to Rabaul’, Journal of Pacific History, 30, 2 (1995), pp. 135–53. 10 Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, p. 178. 11 William B. Breuer, The Great Raid: Rescuing the Doomed Ghosts of Bataan and Corregidor (New York: Miramax Books, 2002), p. 84. 12 Alan Warren is dealing specifically with Singapore and Malaya. To this we must add Indians captured elsewhere. See Alan Warren, Singapore 1942: Britain’s Greatest Defeat (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), p. 301. 13 At the end of the war, despite high casualties, in Rabaul New Guinea, there were still 5,589 Indians, 1,397 Chinese, 688 Malayans and 607 Indonesians. Gavin Long, The Final Campaign (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1963), p. 557. 14 Byron Farwell, The Gurkhas (London: A. Lane, 1984), pp. 190–2. 15 See Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (ed), Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 26–9 and, in the same work, Abu Talib, ‘The impact of the Japanese occupation on colonial and anti-colonial armies in Southeast Asia’, pp. 213–38. 16 See Abu Talib Ahmad, ‘The Impact of the Japanese Occupation on Colonial and Anti-Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia’, and Kevin Blackburn, ‘Colonial Armies as Postcolonial History: Commemoration and Memory of the Malay Regiment in Modern Singapore and Malaysia’ in Hack and Rettig, Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, pp. 213–38 and pp. 302–26. 17 ‘Dalforce’ in Encyclopedia of Singapore (Singapore: Didier Millet, 2006), p. 154. For more detail, see Kevin Blackburn and Chew, Ju Ern, Daniel, ‘Dalforce at the Fall of Singapore in 1942: An Overseas Chinese Heroic Legend’, Journal of the Chinese Overseas, 1, 2 (2005) (1), pp. 233–59. 18 See Table 1.2 above, and Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington: US Center of Military History, 1989), pp. 27, 587. 19 See Kerr, Surrender and Survival, pp. 339–40; and Ricardo Trota Jose, The Philippine Army, 1935–1942 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1992) and the official history by Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines, p. 587. 20 Stanley L. Falk, Bataan: The March of Death (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), pp. 196–8. 21 Ricardo T. Jose, The Japanese Occupation, volume 7 of Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People (Manila: Asia Publishing Company, 1998); and A. V. H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, Volume 1 (Manila: Bookmark, 1967), pp. 221–2. 22 Breuer, Great Raid, p. 84. 23 Some of these groups are covered in Hack and Rettig (eds), Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, passim. See also de Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society, pp. 158–9, 283–5, 304–7. A fraction of local soldiers, and Dutch officers, did hold out after the official surrender, risking execution if caught. Most Javanese KNIL were released by May 1942, with ‘loyalist’ and often Christian Ambonese, Manadonese and Timorese released more cautiously, some joining Japanesesponsored units. The KNIL was two-thirds European and Eurasian (42,233 POWs) to one-third Indonesian (23,000). Dutch Eurasians were legally classified as Dutch.

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24 Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, p. 146, Kratoska, Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire, passim; de Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society, pp. 248–50, for only 77,000 of 294,000 returning home. 25 Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, p. 171. 26 Falk, Bataan: The March of Death, p. 241. 27 See Denis Warner and Peggy Warner, The Tide at Sunrise: A History of the RussoJapanese War, 1904–1905 (New York: Charterhouse, 1974); and Olive Checckland, Humanitarianism and the Emperor’s Japan, 1877–1977 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 47. 28 Falk, Bataan, p. 245. 29 For easy reference to Chapter 4 on the Laws and Customs War on Land of the Hague Convention see the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School’s copy at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/lawwar.htm 30 Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, Volume 1, pp. 97–9. 31 P. Scott Corbett, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians Between the United States and Japan During the Second World War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987), p. 50. 32 See Laurence Rees, Horror in the East: The Japanese at War 1931–1945 (London: BBC, 2001). 33 Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt’, pp. 266–7. 34 Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Surrender, Japanese POWs of World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); and T. R. Sareen, Japanese Prisoners of War in India 1942–1946: Bushido and Barbed Wire (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). 35 Hsi-Sheng Ch’I, Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937–45 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), pp. 54–7 and 79–81; Dick Wilson, When Tigers Fight: The Story of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1982), pp. 78–81; Lincoln Li, The Japanese Army in North China, 1937–1941: Problems of Political Control (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 198–201; and Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War: World War II and the Japanese, 1931–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 168–70. 36 De Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society, pp. 300, 308–16. Remco Raben, Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia (Amsterdam: Waanders for NIOD, 1999), pp. 127–42. 37 Hack and Rettig, Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, p. 65. 38 D. van Velden, De Japanse Interneringskampen voor burgers gedurende de tweede wereldoorlog [Japanese Civilian Internment Camps During the Second World War] (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1963). Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, p. 145. 39 T. P. M. Lewis, Changi: The Lost Years, A Malayan Diary 1941–1945 (Kuala Lumpur: The Malaysian Historical Society, 1984). Brian Montgomery, Shenton of Singapore: Governor and Prisoner of War (Singapore: Times, 1984). Straits Times, 13 September 1946. 40 For Tominaga’s war crimes trial see The National Archives, Kew Gardens, WO 235/889. 41 Corbett, Quiet Passages, pp. 50–2. 42 R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 43 Straits Times, 7 September 1945, and 19 August 1957; and David Nelson, The Story of Changi, Singapore (Perth: Changi Publications, 1974), p. 10 and pp. 210–11. 44 Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson, ‘Introduction’ in Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), p. 1. 45 De Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society, pp. 248–50. Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, pp. 144–5, supposes 230,000 of 300,000 died.

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Part I

National memories

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2

Beyond slogans Assessing the experiences and the history of the Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese Hank Nelson

Two particular Australian prisoners of war illustrate something of the range of experiences and the nation’s remembering of them. Gunner Alex Barnett, born in 1920, abandoned a science course at Melbourne University to serve overseas in the 2nd Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF). When his unit, the 2/3rd Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, got together to write a history, Barnett publicly recounted something of what had happened to him as a prisoner, but it was not until 1994, after he had retired from his pharmacy, that he felt able to attempt to write a complete reminiscence.1 He published his account of his time as a prisoner of war in 2001.2 He wrote of arriving at a new camp and being greeted by the commander, known to the prisoners as ‘The Frog’: What he lacked in height he proceeded to make up for with noise and bluster. To emphasise his authority, he stood on a round, three legged stool, carried and placed for his requirements by a subservient underling. From the moment he entered the parade ground until he mounted his stool, he did not cease his tirade. . . . It was some time before we could decipher his raving monologue . . . He had instructed his guards to enforce his orders with the rifle and bayonet and that shirking of work would not be tolerated. . . . Escape was totally impossible . . . and . . . any attempt or failed attempt would earn a bullet. The image of this fanatical lunatic imprinted itself indelibly on our minds. Here was a diminutive soldier dressed in riding breeches immaculately tucked into his polished leather riding boots which were minus spurs. He rose tiptoe to his full height . . . and screamed until his voice croaked.3 At the end of 1944 Barnett was shifted from the care of the ‘ranting’ commandant, and after a debilitating journey arrived at what he called ‘the Hellhole of Hellholes’. He had ‘ulcer-like sores on [his] legs, feet and arms and [his] belly grotesquely swollen’. As the guards were now worried about Allied bombing, no fires were allowed at night, and the roof had ‘gaping holes

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Hank Nelson

through which the rain and sleet poured converting the dirt into oozing mud’. Men wanted to sleep on the top bunks but: Great were the difficulties encountered when the gripe of dysentery forced a top floor prisoner to career down to the latrine . . . a revolting, nauseous, open trench. To reach this, a stricken prisoner had to negotiate rows of sleeping men, who were very disgruntled at being disturbed . . . and it was inevitable that not everybody in distress managed to reach the latrine. The unfortunate consequences caused more abuse but most men were so weak that curses sufficed for blows.4 As there was only one pump where the 3,000 men could get water, it was in use all the time. The constant spilling of water turned the area around the pump into a quagmire. Without drugs or even bandages, the medical orderlies set up an aid post, but it was not ‘a haven but a last resort’.5 At his release, Barnett was 24 years old and weighed 112 pounds. Having lost about one third of his body weight, he had reached a dangerous level of deprivation. He had, he said, ‘been saved in the nick of time’. He was taken by ambulance to the ship that carried him back to Australia. He never escaped his nightmares.6 Ray Tyrrell, born in 1909, was over 10 years older than Alex Barnett.7 After he left school in Orbost in eastern Victoria, he worked in the post office and a bank before he left for Broome and Darwin. He survived the economic depression working on boats searching for pearls, shells and trepang or beche de mer. He was one of the few Australians who, in the 1930s, had worked alongside Japanese who were then employed as divers and seamen in the northern shell-fishing industry. Back in Melbourne, he worked in sales for a cable-making firm, even sailing to England and spending a few months employed in the firm’s headquarters. Believing that war was coming, Tyrrell joined the militia, trained as a coastal gunner and was promoted to lieutenant. Refused permission to join the 2nd AIF, he volunteered in March 1941 to go north with the force directed to defend Rabaul, in New Guinea. On 22 January 1942, Japanese bombers destroyed his unit’s two guns. Walking back through town to join the troops, Tyrrell and three or four other gunners found the truck that carried the cans from Rabaul’s lavatories. He says he can now claim to be one of the few soldiers who went to battle in a shit cart. The Australians at Rabaul were quickly overwhelmed by the better equipped and more numerous Japanese. Tyrrell tried to escape inland. After a fortnight without rations and trying to force his way through jungle, Tyrrell and another Australian were picked up by a Japanese patrol. Like others taken prisoner in the two world wars in all theatres, he immediately lost his watch to a souveniring captor. But the Japanese sergeant, finding that Tyrrell was hungry, sent a soldier to fetch food. Ironically, he came back with tins of Australian bully beef and packets of biscuits. With his limited English, the

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sergeant asked for Tyrrell’s mother’s address and said he would write to her. No letter arrived in Melbourne so it is unknown whether he tried to do so. The sergeant explained that he would not take Tyrrell into the camp at Vunakanau just then. If he did so, Tyrrell would be left standing in the sun then put through a tough interrogation, but if they waited until the evening meal was about to be served, Tyrrell would get more cursory examination. Tyrrell and his captors sat in the shade, and talked as best they could. Late in the afternoon, Tyrrell was handed to Japanese officers who acted exactly as the wily sergeant had said. He was stood outside briefly, asked a few questions, and sent to join fifteen or so other prisoners. That evening, Japanese officers came to talk to them, gave the surprised Tyrrell a bunch of flowers, and the Australians and Japanese ended the encounter by singing, each group in its own language, ‘For Auld Lang Syne’. In the morning Tyrrell received a razor and soap so he that could clean himself up. Shifted to Rabaul where over 1,000 Australian civilian and military prisoners were being held, Tyrrell was forced to work as a labourer before being shipped to Japan in mid-1942. He was held briefly at Yokohama with about sixty other Australian officers. The guards, he said, were casual. One simply rested his rifle and bayonet in a corner and left it there. On the train that took them away from Yokohama, the guards shared beer and cigarettes. At Zentsuji camp on Shikoku, the Australian officers were not required to work; they were sometimes allowed out of the camp on walks; Japanese English language papers were delivered; and from 1943 the prisoners sent and received letters. Some men received twenty or so in a month.8 Conditions deteriorated in 1943 as food became scarce, and by mid-1944 men had lost a quarter or a third of their body weight and were displaying mental and physical torpor and the first signs of beriberi and other manifestations of malnutrition. Red Cross parcels, at one a month or one every 2 months, saved the prisoners. In the last months of the war, the prisoners were moved to work camps in either northern Honshu or Hokkaido. Tyrrell said of the Hokkaido mine manager with whom he shared a meal after the end of the war, ‘You wouldn’t meet a nicer man in a month of Sundays’. Not one of the sixty Australian officers from Rabaul died in Japan as a prisoner of war, and while there was some slapping and punching, there was no brutal bashing.9 Ray Tyrrell celebrated the end of the war by walking out of the camp into a village, entering the barbers, taking his shoes off, joining the queue, taking his seat in the chair, getting a short back and sides, offering the Japanese woman barber a handful of coins, seeing her take a few, exchanging bows and leaving. Ballarat is an old Australian goldmining town and provincial centre in western Victoria. Now with a population of 85,000, it is, it claims, a ‘city of gold and architectural heritage, parks and gardens, art and cultural activities’.10 Ballarat is also a city of statues and monuments: down the centre of Sturt Street there is a succession of monuments to events and people of note, including the bandsmen who went down on the Titanic. Ken Inglis has said that Ballarat’s Arch of Victory, commemorating World War I, would ‘fit into

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the landscape of the Roman empire’.11 In the late 1990s, a local committee began planning to add to Ballarat’s public memorials. By 1999, the committee had a model designed by local sculptor, Peter Blizzard; a name (The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial); support of ex-service groups and governments; and had launched an appeal for $2,000,000.12 The completed memorial was opened by the Governor-General of Australia, Michael Jeffery, in February 2004. The Ballarat ex-prisoners of war memorial was ambitious in scope. It was significant that a provincial city, not a state or national capital, should build an Australian memorial, and it is not just for the prisoners of the Japanese, or even of World War II but for all Australian prisoners of all wars. Erected at the city end of the Botanical Gardens and close to Lake Wendouree, the memorial is a simple design of six sand-coloured basalt obelisks listing the places where the prisoners had been held, another, fallen obelisk for those who died, and one more flanked by flag poles announcing that this is ‘The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial’. A polished black granite wall extends over sixty metres on each side of central stone columns. A shallow water channel and a paved and gravelled pathway run the length of the wall. The names on the wall list the 35,000 Australians captured in the Boer War (200), World War II (4,000), World War II (30,000) and Korea (29). No Australian serviceman has been captured in the wars of the last 50 years. The decision to include all prisoners was significant. Except for those in World War I, Australians have given little public or scholarly attention to prisoners of war. And, in World War II, no event or stalag in the European theatre has anything like the recognition granted to Changi or the Railway. The Ballarat memorial is almost aggressively democratic and non-specific. All names are without rank or decorations, all places, whether it is Singapore or Syria, are listed in the same type and in no particular order. The paving stones on the footpath are cut in the shape of railways sleepers, but at the entrance to the memorial, visitors are told that this is because of the ‘place of railway journeys in the history of Australian prisoners of war’. Alex Barnett’s memories of the diminutive, screaming camp commander, ridiculous in the eyes of the prisoners as he stood on his stool; the descriptive, demeaning name ‘The Frog’; the prisoners’ physical marks of debilitation – the ulcers and distended bellies; the evocation of the stench, filth, congestion and the dehumanising of those stricken with dysentery; and the anger of an ex-prisoner who believed that the rest of his life was scarred by his experience – all these are familiar to all who have read or heard ex-POWs of the Japanese. But Barnett was captured in Libya and was a prisoner in Italy and Germany. In the section quoted, he was writing of his time in camps in Poland and Eastern Germany. He encountered ‘The Frog’ at Weltende at Hirschberg (now Jelenia Goria) in Poland and the Hellhole of Hellholes was at Duderstadt in Germany. What those extracts from Barnett’s memories demonstrate is how we have to be careful not to assume that what we read about Japanese POW camps, and what recurs in that reading, is peculiar to Japanese POW camps.


Two other examples that help illustrate possible confusion between what is general and what is particular. Firstly, ‘tenko’, roll call, has been described by many ex-POWs of the Japanese. ‘Tenko’ was even used as the title of the 1981 BBC-TV fictional series.13 But many ex-POWs have vivid memories of confusing roll calls. Edwin Broomhead at Camp 52, Liguria, thought that problems with getting the count right were simply part of the casual chaos of the Italian military. ‘On some rare and fortunate occasions’, he wrote, ‘they would count us correctly the first time. It usually needed two attempts, and sometimes three’.14 Sam Birtles has described the long predawn roll calls as the prisoners of the Germans began their long march west ahead of the advancing Russians. They stood in fives on the road, stamping their feet to keep warm, while the ‘Jerries’ took up to an hour and a half to count them.15 Alfred Passfield says that, while he was at Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf in Germany, two men hid within the camp and were never found by the guards.16 A greater problem was caused by men from outside work camps being brought into the massive Lamsdorf camp for punishment, making a dash for safety into a crowd of prisoners, and effectively disappearing. William Dellar says that, at one stage, up to forty prisoners might have been hiding among the 16,000 men in Lamsdorf.17 At Stalag IIIA, Luckenwalde, when the war ended and the German guards became the guarded, there were ironic cries from the prisoners, ‘Count them!’18 It might have surprised the Australian prisoners to know that, at the camps near Murchison in northern Victoria, the Australian guards had just as much trouble counting their German prisoners. The Australians had resorted to the equivalent of the sheep race to help them get an accurate muster: at Camp 13D the working parties were counted at the inner gate, sent through the race, and counted again at the outer gate. But the Australians still had difficulty getting the tally right. When military police rang to say that two possible escapers had been seen, the Australian guards could not tell whether they were two men short of their 990 total.19 The German prisoners confused the guards by secretly shifting from one outside work party to another so that one group returned short and another had too many. At other times they exchanged identities; answered the roll for missing prisoners; claimed ignorance of the English language to evade questions; and hid within the prison so that the Australians were not sure whether they should be looking for missing prisoners inside or outside the wire. But those standard deceptions aside, it seems that the apparently simple exercise of counting prisoners, and the more demanding task of matching bodies and names, stretched the capacities of guards of several nations.20 Secondly, much has been said by ex-prisoners and commentators about Australian prisoners of the Japanese joining mutual help groups, about what John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, was pleased to call ‘mateship’.21 But one of the strongest sections in Barnett’s memoirs is his recalling the three, ‘Bill, Dud and myself’, who tried to stick together through the last

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months of the war, and his search for them in the post-war.22 In the most anarchic times when theft and intimidation were rife, all the Australians tried to group together and enforce their own discipline, and Barnett said, his trio tried to get into the ‘centre of an Australian enclave’.23 Birtles conceded that in the German camps there were a few ‘lone wolfs’ but most men worked in ‘combines’ and he himself was in a combine of five. He wrote: ‘It was a well known fact that wherever one Aussie was to be seen, the others would be nearby because they ‘stuck’.24 Colin Robinson said that ‘Australian mateship’ had been derided by some of his fellow servicemen, but on Crete when dysentery was rife among the prisoners and men were trying to crawl to the ‘stinking latrine trenches’ then ‘Men stuck together and helped the less fortunate as a matter of course and it made me proud to be in such company’.25 Again, the scene, the behaviour of the prisoners and Robinson’s comments could be from many of the Japanese camps. Even the death marches and death railway, so often seen as defining horrific events of imprisonment under the Japanese, have their precedents in the aftermath of the 1916 surrender of the British forces to the Turks at Kut el Amara in Mesopotamia. Around 5,000 men, one third of the force, died in the forced marches and labour camps. One of the surviving Australians, Flying Corps officer Thomas White, remained embittered at the apparent indifference of the Turkish guards to the suffering of the prisoners.26 After 1918, Australians learnt little of what happened to their prisoners of the Turks, because they were so few and the numbers who had died at Gallipoli and the Western front so many. Johnny Turk retained his image as the tough but fair fighter. The demonic guard may also be more universal than is usually admitted. Those who wanted to exercise sadistic power may have been attracted to the role of POW guard. If that is the case, then the questions are: how common were the brutal guards and to what extent did prevailing beliefs and policies encourage and protect the brutal guards. An Australian example of a man who should never have been appointed a guard is Captain J. W. Waterson who was said to have been drunk often, bashed Italian prisoners at Rowville in Victoria, fired his revolver to intimidate them, took their property and shot and killed one prisoner.27 In the writing of the history of the POWs of the Japanese, the Australian (and the Allied) experiences have often been seen in isolation from what happened to other prisoners of other nations, and often there has been an implied assumption that what happened in the Japanese camps was different. This is partly because so much of the published writing on POWs of the Japanese has been autobiography, biography and unit histories. By their nature they are narrow in focus and with no intention of locating experiences in a broader context. The scholarly studies have also largely been confined to prisoners of the Japanese. Where they have made comparisons they have generally been concerned with the behaviour of different nationalities or


officers and men as prisoners of the Japanese.28 The book that stands out in its breadth, narrative and perception is Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese. It is for that book appropriate that he sticks with the ‘tribes’ formed out of shared initiation, but leaves open what makes his tribes different from those confined in other times and places.29 One of the few Australian books to deal with more than one war is Patsy Adam-Smith’s Prisoners of War: From Gallipoli to Korea, but her conclusions are ones of sentiment, rather than of tough analysis of the behaviour of guards and prisoners.30 The few readily available comparisons across time and place have been more likely to come from collections of papers, and with divergent authors the comparisons are more implied than explicit.31 This is not to argue that there was nothing peculiar in the beliefs and practices of the Japanese military of the 1940s. Anyone reading the reminiscences of the prisoners of the Germans is immediately struck by the fact that they could usually find someone from their own ranks or among Germans who could speak at least a little of the language of the enemy. L. J. Lind, captured on Crete said, ‘To our surprise most of the officers spoke pretty good English and conversed freely with us’.32 In north Africa the 2/8th Field Ambulance after its capture worked for 5 days, almost without rest, treating German, English and Australian wounded. Later, under less stress they spent weeks treating Italian and German wounded from Tobruk. Sometimes up to forty casualties arrived at a time. The Australians greeted them; ‘Ow are you doing, cobber? All right, eh?’ And ‘Hullo mate. Wait a minute and we’ll have you inside with us’.33 That degree of communication (or assumed communication) and cooperation over that length of time between the Australian and Japanese was unthinkable. The Australians and the Germans shared beliefs about the treatment of wounded and that captured medical personnel were different from other prisoners and most would eventually be exchanged – as the men of the 2/8th Field Ambulance were. Differences in the values of the Australians and the Japanese can be illustrated by this, admittedly, extreme case. Alf Robinson was a survivor of the Tol massacre on New Britain where about 160 Australians were killed. With his hands bound, he was being marched into the bush for execution when he dropped down, responded to the muttered advice from a comrade ‘lower sport’, and hid until the killings were over. Unable to free his hands, Robinson was in a desperate condition when he was rescued by other Australians. Later, he served with a small group of Australians who joined the Americans in their assault on Manus Island. When a Japanese prisoner jumped overboard and tried to drown himself, it was Robinson who rescued him. The differences in attitudes towards surrender and life were obvious, but the laconic comment of one of the Australians watching – ‘The crazy bastards’ – may have referred to Robinson as well as the Japanese. The extreme behaviour was also by Robinson.34 Ray Tyrrell, from his surrender to the shrewd and sympathetic Japanese sergeant to his release into a barber’s shop on Hokkaido, met Japanese who

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were just, even generous, and although he endured a long period of starvation, he suffered no brutality. From early in captivity, Tyrrell knew that other surrendered Australians were executed – it was his comrades who were killed at Tol and he knew about their deaths within days – and other prisoners arriving at Zentsuji spoke of mass suffering and death. The condition of American survivors of ‘hell ships’ was incontrovertible evidence of horror. He did not need post-war revelations to tell him that his experiences were unusual. But he was not alone. Many of his group of sixty officers were treated similarly, and while no Australian prisoners of the Japanese lived the high life, others did have conditions wholly or temporarily tolerable. Frank Jackson, captured in Singapore, spent 4 months in 1942 on the east coast of Malaya defusing Australian-laid mines. The work was dangerous, but the food and conditions were good. When five of the men tried to escape, the Japanese commanding officer ‘read the riot act’ and confined the escapers for a few days, but they had beds, books and extra food, and the officer did not report the attempted escape to higher authority. At the end of their work on the Endau River, prisoners and guards had a ‘final party’: We sat down to an excellent repast, each Australian being seated between two Japanese, with Lieutenant Karkawici taking the head of the table. Each of us in his turn, was required to sing a national, or folk, song, whilst several of our Officers sang verses from their old school songs. Our host, who had been a student of Tokyo University and, incidentally, had played rugby against a Sydney University team which visited Tokyo in 1934, sang his old school song in Latin. He also produced a bottle of ‘Black and White’ Scotch whisky, labelled with a Union Jack over printed with . . . ‘Britain Delivers the Goods’. After the meal, cigarettes and coffee were enjoyed by all. . . . War was far from us.35 Jackson’s next journey out of Changi was with F Force. His experience on the Railway overwhelmed all that had gone before, and 50 years after the end of the war he still had an ‘intense dislike’ for the Japanese ‘for what they did to so many’.36 The largest group of Australians who suffered confinement and malnutrition rather than brutality and a high death rate were the 2,000 who stayed in and near Changi.37 Recently back from F Force, Stan Arneil wrote in his diary for 31 December 1943: ‘Food is excellent, Changi is delightful’.38 Little wonder that Changi incited envy. K. T. Barrett who had been captured in Java and sent to the Railway, Saigon and back to Singapore said: Changi was head and shoulders above any other camp. . . . It was also obvious that quite a number of men who had been at Changi right through and doing easy jobs had hardly known what it was to be a P. O. W. and some of these had had practically no personal contact with the Japs at all.39


Barrett went on to point out that in Changi men – by order of their own command – had to display badges of rank, and where on the Railway men had worked through mild attacks of malaria, in Changi they went to hospital. Understandably, when we write about POWs we give most space to those places and events where conditions were worst. The extremes of behaviour forced on prisoners and the extremes demonstrated by guards are most in demand of explanation. The extremes make compelling narrative: a year of chess and card games, a slow decline in weight and energy and an increasing obsession with food (and everything associated with food – recipes, fruit growing, bee keeping, cooking, Red Cross parcels) may not look like engrossing material for a book. But our failure to write good histories of the most benign camps and times has partly been because we have not been asking the right questions about groups, privilege, ambition, stress and confinement in such places as Changi and Zentsuji. The result has been histories that fail to give the range of experiences. We have claimed that the ‘hellhole of Changi’ is a misleading slogan, but we have not provided the detail to show that it is untrue. ‘Changi’, as John Doyle demonstrated, is still the evocative summary for all experiences of all British prisoners of war of the Japanese.40 Ray Tyrrell said that when people asked him casually about being a POW, or a journalist wanted to interview him, he chose to say as little as possible. He thought that if spoke openly, he would appear to be contradicting the testimony of other prisoners, diminish the suffering of the many dead, and appear to excuse the crimes of guards. He did not want to do any of that, but he was clearly worried that the whole story of the treatment of prisoners of war had not been told, and that was one reason why he agreed to record a lengthy interview, and why he deliberately and carefully explained how particular Japanese had behaved towards him. We still have a long way to go before we have written the history that I believe Ray Tyrrell wanted: one that gives the range of prisoners’ and guards’ experiences, carefully sets out what is common and what is unusual, and does not let the humane excuse the inhumane. The power of the established stereotypes about prisoners of war of the Japanese is now so strong that popular writings, films and speeches are likely to confirm, rather than modify, them. It is also true that any ex-prisoners themselves who are still to record their reminiscences will be so conscious of what the public expects them to say that it will be difficult for them to dissociate themselves from the cumulative impact of their comrades’ words and those who have commented on them. The Australian Prime Minister John Howard expressed one of those apparently established assumptions about Australian prisoner behaviour when he spoke at Kanchanaburi war cemetery in Thailand on 25 April (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) Day) 1998: [What distinguished the Australian prisoners was] that they had each other. They had their mates. Mates who could carry a man’s pack or his body when pain or fatigue became too much.

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Hank Nelson Mates who would break all the rules or give up their own meagre rations to a friend in need. Mates who listened to last words whispered from dying lips – for it’s been said that no Australian died alone. Mates who contained their fear but freely shared their courage and strength. . . . Mateship, courage and compassion. These are enduring qualities of our nation. The essence of a nation’s past and hope for its future.41

When in a prepared and formal speech the Prime Minister places such significance on the performance of the prisoners – they expressed the essence of the nation’s past and future qualities – then the burden on those who might want to modify that history is sharply increased. But much of that history is yet to be written, and on many topics we have just one or two scholarly accounts. The strength of present popular perceptions about prisoner behaviour makes it all the more important for scholars to go back to the contemporary documents and the earliest personal testimonies. It may mean that this will confirm what is now asserted. For example, when the survivors of the Rokyu Maru (Rakuyo Maru) were picked up by American submarines, returned to Australia, and debriefed, they praised the ‘devotion and skill of their medical officers’ and the reporting officer noted – and this is in 1944 – ‘The name of Lt Col COATES AAMC of MELBOURNE seems to be almost legend amongst the PW’.42 The reminiscences of one of those Rokyu Maru survivors, Arthur Bancroft, completed before the end of the war, was the first book published by an Australian ex-prisoner of the Japanese. Bancroft included what must now be the most frequently told anecdote of prisoner humour and resistance. This is the story of the guard who said he knew how the prisoners were stealing food, and to demonstrate he put his hat over a tin of condensed milk, walked away with studied casualness, looked around, returned to pick up hat and tin, only to find that a prisoner had already swiped the tin.43 So that story had wide currency among prisoners well before the end of the war. But a comprehensive study of what the contemporary documents tell us about attitudes to doctors, mateship, humour, rank and nationality is urgent history. In the 60 years since the first prisoners of the Japanese arrived home, Australians have had a changing relationship with them. The prisoners were welcomed at the docks, crowds lined streets, and relatives and friends packed reception rooms. Small home towns arranged additional welcomes at railway stations and town halls. In the immediate post-war, the war crimes trials, the newspaper reports of atrocities and the first of the best-selling ex-prisoner books kept the ex-prisoners in the public mind. Extracts from one of ex-prisoner books, Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo, became part of a school text book.44 But by the 1960s the ex-prisoners were fading from public consciousness. This was part of a general decline in enthusiasm for the remembering of war, a mood reflected in Alan Seymour’s play, One Day of the Year, first


performed in 1960. Seymour’s sharp vernacular expressed the antagonism between the generation of the digger and his educated son, and it seemed that the son, embarrassed by the father’s sentiment about war, reunions and comrades, was a preview of attitudes that would become more common in Australia. Then in the 1980s, the numbers attending Anzac Services began increasing. In Canberra there were about 2,000 at the Anzac ceremony in 1977, 5,000 in 1986 and 12,000 in 1990.45 Now there is a system of privileged ticket holders and the War Memorial has reshaped the grassed mounds at the front to accommodate the crowds. The revival in interest in the ex-POWs of the Japanese was part of this general rediscovery, and in some ways the revised public estimation of them was earlier, rose higher and changed more. By contrast, the Australians who had served in England in Bomber Command almost disappeared from public recognition. Aircrew in Bomber Command had suffered 4,000 dead, an appalling loss measured against other Australian battle casualties of World War II. In the immediate post-war, they had been well known for their exploits. Books and films of the dambusters and prison escapers had been popular, but they were not included in the resurgence of interest in war, nation and history in the 1980s.46 The other group to benefit were those soldiers who fought in New Guinea, particularly at Kokoda.47 Strangely, Australians in their rediscovery of the ex-POWs of the Japanese have rarely included those 8,000 Australians who were POWs of the Germans and Italians. By any statistical measure the loss of so many prisoners, over 3,000 in Crete alone, was disastrous. In World War II, Australia lost twice as many prisoners in Europe and the Mediterranean as they did in all theatres of World War I. And some Australian POWs, by escaping or through prisoner exchanges, were back in Australia before the end of the war and accounts of their escapades were printed in newspapers. Two of the returned prisoners, Edwin Broomhead and Lewis Lind, published books.48 Conscious that they spoke to the friends and families of those still in distant prison camps, the first of the ex-prisoners were guarded. Broomhead even prefaced his book with a reassurance: ‘There will be no question of mental rehabilitation for our imprisoned men after the war – it is possible to be busy, to be well-occupied, to be amused – and even to be happy, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Europe’.49 He dated his preface, May 1944, just 4 months before the prisoners of another enemy were to escape from the sinking Rokyu Maru. The revelations of atrocities and deaths in the Japanese camps, sustained through the post-war, overwhelmed Australian public concern for the prisoners returning from Europe. The ex-prisoners of the Japanese published their books; the prisoners of the Germans wrote unpublished manuscripts.50 Most knowledge of the prisoners in Europe came to Australia via British books and films, and even the American television series, Hogan’s Heroes.51 The statistics seemed to justify the public dominance of the ex-prisoners of the Japanese: 22,000 prisoners of the Japanese against 8,000 of the Germans and Italians. And more compelling were the numbers of dead: 8,000 Australians died as prisoners of the Japanese as against 265 who died as

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prisoners of the Germans and Italians.52 The failure of the Australian public to renew its interest in the ex-prisoners from Europe was apparently confirmed by the government when, in May 2001, the Minister for Veterans Affairs announced that a payment of $25,000 was to be made to all surviving ex-POWs of the Japanese or their widows or widowers.53 That payment was extended to the ex-prisoners from the Korean War in 2004.54 Again the ex-prisoners from Europe missed out. There was little comment, presumably reflecting the absence of broad public awareness of and sympathy for the ex-prisoners of the Germans and Italians. Unit associations in their newsletters, statements to the media and histories are keepers of the group’s wartime record.55 The histories of those units that fought in the European theatre give limited space to their members who were captured. The 2/6th Battalion that had 351 men imprisoned after the fighting in Greece and Crete, 7 dying as POWs, grants its ex-prisoners a 33 page appendix in its 600 page history, Nothing Over Us.56 The 2/1st had about 550 men captured by the Germans, over half the battalion, and they have sixty pages in the 558 pages of The First at War.57 The 2/7th Battalion’s history, Fiery Phoenix, gives more space to evaders and escapers than to about 480 men who spent 4 years in prison camps.58 Alex Barnett’s unit, 2/3rd AntiAircraft Regiment, told the detailed story of the capture of two batteries,

Figure 2.1 Commonwealth war graves (including thirty Australians), Klagenfurt, Austria. The World War II war graves scattered through Europe are largely unknown to Australians Source: Jan Nelson.


covered imprisonment in a four page reminiscence from one prisoner, and concluded: ‘Each man had his own remarkable story to tell, the relating of which would require another book’.59 But the 6th Division’s units that fought the early battles, and had many men captured, later took in reinforcements. By the end of the war the total numbers passing through the battalions numbered close to 3,000, four times their original strengths. And through the next 3 years, those battalions went on to fight tough campaigns in New Guinea, further diminishing the relative significance of the POWs left in Europe. By contrast, the battalions that fought the first battles in Southeast Asia and Rabaul had just one campaign, and nearly all survivors of battle were captured.60 Their histories are appropriately dominated by the 3 1/2 years of captivity. Even the 2/18th, the one battalion that had more killed in battle than as prisoners of war, gives more space in its unit history to imprisonment than battle.61 The unit histories appear to confirm the greater importance of the prisoners of war of the Japanese. For most Australians, the greater numbers, death rates and suffering of the ex-POWs of the Japanese justifies their dominance, but that is not the case in Britain, where those who are called the Far East prisoners have not had the recognition given to the Australians who shared the same camps. In the United States, the ex-prisoners of the Japanese – or some incidents such as the Bataan death march – are known, but the American prisoners of the Japanese are relatively less significant numerically and in public memory than they are in Australia. In Canada and New Zealand the small numbers of prisoners of the Japanese in comparison with the numbers captured in Europe and the Mediterranean have meant an early and continuing importance of the ex-prisoners from Europe. The stature of ex-prisoners in national memory is, however, only partly related to numbers. It is in this context that the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial at Ballarat is significant. With its deliberate rejection of the particular and its determination to be comprehensive, it breaks with the dominance in public consciousness of the Burma–Thailand Railway to recall all railways, and it gives equal honour to all men and women ex-prisoners. It does not distinguish between those who died as POWs and those who survived. The one previous national memorial said to be for all prisoners was opened in the grounds of the Royal Military College Duntroon in 1988. But the physical form of that memorial is the Changi Chapel, a re-erection of a Table 2.1 Surviving Australian prisoners of war, 2004 Country

Number

Japan Europe Korea

1,791 1,000 14

Source: Figures from Department of Veterans Affairs, 2004.

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Chapel originally built at Changi in 1944. By its origin, name and appearance it has more to do with ex-prisoners of the Japanese than those captured in other wars and theatres. Whether the Ballarat memorial indicates a change in Australians’ public remembering of their POWs is uncertain. If it does, then that change will have taken place with no influence from the academic historians who have published little on the prisoners of war in World War I or in the European theatre in World War II. It is a salutary reminder of the lack of impact that scholarly historians can have on popular national history. In summary, then, this is broadly the position of the Australian ex-POWs of the Japanese. They have recovered the preeminence in public consciousness that they had in the immediate post-war, and they have shifted from being seen as the victims of a barbaric enemy to having exhibited those characteristics which Australians would like to claim as defining national qualities. But they have obtained that position with little public understanding of the range of experiences endured by prisoners of the Japanese, with little comparison with other Australian or international prisoners in other places and other wars, and with little scholarly re-examination of which particular prisoners exhibited the attributes now granted to them. In this respect, the comparison of death rates, 3 per cent among the Australians in German camps against over 30 per cent in the Japanese, is often made. But one factor that was critical here was the Red Cross parcels. In the most accessible and organised German camps, the Red Cross supplies began with an initial captive kit in an imitation leather case.62 It contained pyjamas, underclothes, socks, jumpers, tooth paste, razors, cigarettes, chewing gum, and more. In most camps, there were regular distributions of parcels: in many, one a week. In addition, musical instruments, sports equipment and books were available. Even on the forced march west in the last months of the war, the Red Cross parcels sometimes arrived through snow and the chaos of war. With food parcels, the prisoners gained more than goods for immediate consumption: prisoners could trade with, and bribe, guards. When Sam Birtles was shifted from Meiningen in 1944, he offered his guards a few cigarettes ‘to get them on the right side’, and they responded by buying beers for their two prisoners. Later, as they slept on the floor of a station waiting room, Birtles offered some of his American coffee to German civilians. Some took it with a warm thank you, some rejected it, and ‘one lass burst into tears and left the room’.63 On arrival at Stalag Luft VII, the guards helped the prisoners carry their gear. The Red Cross parcels could give the prisoners a wealth and power that the prisoners of the Japanese could only dream about. The prisoners in Europe benefited from their proximity to Switzerland, the generosity and efficiency of Red Cross societies in Great Britain, the Dominions and the United States, the organisation and commitment of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the greater willingness of the Germans to cooperate with the Red Cross. In another obvious way, the Australian concentration on the comparison of World War II death rates of prisoners of the Japanese, as compared to those


of the Germans, leaves a misleading impression. Well over half the Russian, Polish and Serbian prisoners of the Germans died. The scale of imprisonment in Eastern Europe was also beyond any comparison with Singapore or the Philippines. Something like 5 million Russians were captured by the Germans. In total, as custodian of prisoners, Germany has a worse record than Japan. In the world history of the treatment of POWs there are many cases where the death rates were greater than among Allied prisoners of the Japanese, including American prisoners in Korea, American prisoners in Vietnam,64 Japanese prisoners of the Russians in Manchuria, German prisoners of the Russians, and this is without considering the Iraq–Iran war and others where there was slight expectation that any internationally ratified rules of war might apply. The attempts to find unique cultural forces that made Japanese more likely to neglect or kill prisoners are worthwhile, but they are usually carried out in isolation and with the implication that as the Japanese were worse offenders then there were extraordinary cultural forces to be located and defined. The problem with pointing out that a thirty per cent death rate among prisoners of war is not exceptional runs the risk of seeming to diminish or excuse it.65 Whatever the comparisons, it remains appalling.

Notes For further discussion and photographs of Ballarat, see Lachlan Grant’s Chapter 3 below. 1 C. J. E. Rae, A. L. Harris and R. K. Bryant, On Target: The Story of the 2/3rd Australian Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment . . . (Privately published, 1987). 2 Alex Barnett, Hitler’s Digger Slaves: Caught in the Web of Axis Labour Camps (Loftus: Australian Military History Publications, 2001). 3 Barnett, Hitler’s Digger Slaves, p. 168. 4 Ibid, pp. 242–3. 5 Ibid, p. 244. 6 Ibid, pp. 254 and 261. 7 Based on Hank Nelson’s interview with Ray Tyrrell on 28 May 1993. See also, Hank Nelson, The Importance of veteran memory, paper at Foundations for Our Future, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 28–9 October 1999. 8 Hank Nelson, Zentsuji and Totsuka: ‘Australians from Rabaul as Prisoners of War in Japan’, paper Australian National University conference, 7–8 August 2003. Several of the Australians at Zentsuji left records, eg D. C. Hutchison-Smith, ‘Guests of the Samurai’, Australian War Memorial (AWM), MSS1534; John McCallum, diary, AWM, PR88/056; R. J. B. Parkhill, diary, copy in the AWM. 9 One Australian from about 90 in Zentsuji died: Lieutenant Bill Furner. 10 www.ballarat.vic.gov.au 11 Ken S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1998), p. 157. Australian prime ministers are honoured in the Botanical Gardens’ Prime Ministers’ Avenue. 12 Barbed Wire and Bamboo, official organ of the Ex-Prisoners of War Association of Australia, April and August 1999, reported on progress. 13 Tenko was written by Lavinia Warner who co-authored with John Sandilands, Women Beyond the Wire: A Story of Prisoners of the Japanese (London: Michael Joseph, 1982).

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14 Edwin Broomhead, Barbed Wire in the Sunset (Melbourne: The Book Depot, 1944), p. 114. 15 Samuel Birtles, Memoirs, MS 10173, State Library of Victoria. 16 Alfred Passfield, The Escape Artist (Perth: Artlook Books, 1988), p. 108. 17 William Dellar, diary, 31 May 1944, MS 12395, State Library of Victoria. 18 Birtles, ms. 19 Barbara Winter, Stalag Australia: German Prisoners of War in Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1986), pp. 60–7. 20 Alan Fitzgerald, The Italian Farming Soldiers: Prisoners of War in Australia 1941–1947 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981), pp. 153–65. 21 Speech on 25 April 1998. 22 Bill Cowper and Dud Jarvis, Barnett, pp. 221, 265 and 270. 23 Barnett, Hitler’s Digger Slaves, p. 244. 24 Birtles, memoirs. 25 C. Robinson, Journey to Captivity (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1991), p. 95. 26 T. W. White, Guests of the Unspeakable: The Odyssey of an Australian Airman – being a record of captivity and escape in Turkey (Sydney: Little Hills Press, 1990, first published 1928); and Fred and Elizabeth Brenchley, White’s Flight: An Australian pilot’s epic escape from Turkish prison camp to Russia’s Revolution (Brisbane: Wiley, 2004), p. 109 ref to Dante. In World War I a total of about 150 Australians became prisoners of the Turks. Nine other ranks were caught in the siege of Kut, and two survived (p. 109). 27 Alan Fitzgerald, The Italian Farming Soldiers: Prisoners of War in Australia 1941–1947 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1981), pp. 153–65. 28 This is generally true of Jean Beaumont, Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity1941–1945 (Sydney: Allan Unwin, 1988); Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: William Morrow, 1994); and Hank Nelson, Prisoners of War: Australians Under Nippon (Sydney: ABC, 1985). 29 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese. 30 Patsy Adam-Smith, Prisoners of War: From Gallipoli to Korea (Melbourne: Viking, 1992). 31 Gavin McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993); and Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Berg, Oxford, 1996). 32 L. J. Lind, Escape from Crete: being the personal narrative of a Prisoner of War (Sydney: Australasian Publishing, 1944), pp. 44–5. 33 Broomhead, Barbed Wire in the Sunset, p. 32. 34 Hank Nelson, entry on Alfred Robinson in J. Ritchie and D. Langmore (eds), The Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol 16 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. 113–4; and J. K. McCarthy, Patrol into Yesterday: My New Guinea Years, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1963), pp. 219–20. 35 Frank Jackson, ‘My War: Fifty Years On’, ms, copy held by Hank Nelson, p. 29. 36 Jackson, ibid, p. 54. 37 See David Nelson, The Story of Changi Singapore (Perth: Changi Publication Co,1974), pp. 202–5.; and R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 38 Stan Arneil, One Man’s War (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-operative, 1980), p. 156. 39 K. T. Barrett, My Experiences as a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army, MS 11567, State Library of Victoria, p. 107.


40 John Doyle, Changi (ABC Books, Sydney, 2001). Doyle noted that his ‘Changi’ had ‘little resemblance to the real Changi’ but he accepted that ‘Changi’ was evocative as far as the public was concerned (p.xi). 41 From transcript issued by the Prime Minister’s office. 42 Sinking of the Rakuyo Maru, Report . . ., 25 October 1944, AWM54, 1010/9/109. 43 A. Bancroft and R. G. Roberts, The Mikado’s Guests: A Story of Japanese Captivity (Perth: Patersons Printing Press, 1945?), pp. 148–9. 44 Rohan Rivett, Behind Bamboo: An Inside Story of the Japanese Prison Camps (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1946). The extract was printed in P. R. Smith, ed, Australian Pageant (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1955, reprinted 1956, 1958 and 1960). 45 Inglis, Sacred Place, p. 435. 46 Paul Brickhill, The Great Escape (New York: Norton, 1950), and The Dam Busters (London: Evans Brothers, 1951); film, 1954. Hank Nelson, Chased by the Sun: Courageous Australians in Bomber Command (Sydney: ABC, 2002). 47 Hank Nelson, ‘Kokoda: The track from history to politics’, Journal of Pacific History (2003) 38, 1 pp. 109–27. See also Peter Fitzsimons, Kokoda (Sydney: Hodder, 2004). 48 Edwin Broomhead, Barbed Wire in the Sunset (Melbourne: The Book Depot, 1944); and Lind, Escape from Crete. 49 Broomhead, Barbed Wire in the Sunset, p.x. 50 There have been a number of books on or by Australian prisoners of the Italians and Germans, but they have not had a great impact. Examples include: Barnett, Hitler’s Digger Slaves; Basil Brudenell-Woods, Four Packs to Freedom (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1998); J. Champ and C. Burgess, The Diggers of Colditz (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985); P. Dornan, Nicky Barr: An Australian Air Ace (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002); Lind, Escape from Crete; M. N. McKibbon, Barbed Wire: Memories of Stalag 383 (London: Staples Press, 1947; Keith Stevens, Flak. . .Fighters and Fliers: An Aussie with the RAF (Privately published, 2003); and A. F. Taylor, One Way Flight to Munich (Loftus: Australian Military History Publications, 2000). 51 Some of the films were: The Wooden Horse (1950), The Colditz Story (1955), The Danger Within (1958), Stalag 17 (1953 American), and The Great Escape (1962). 52 Gavin Long, The Final Campaigns (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1963), p. 633. 53 Australian, 23 May 2001. 54 Australian, 14 May 2004. 55 As a result of the age of their members, the World War II unit associations are just ending their active lives. Some of the smaller associations have disbanded e.g. 2/10th Field Ambulance. 56 D. Hay, Nothing Over Us: The Story of the 2/6th Australian Infantry Battalion (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1984). 57 E. C. Givney (ed), The First At War: The Story of the 2/1st Australian Infantry Battalion 1939–1945, The City of Sydney Regiment (Sydney: The Association of First Infantry Association, 1987). See also the two histories of the 2/2nd battalion: S. Wick, Purple over Green: The history of the 2/2nd Australian Infantry Battalion (Privately published, 1977; and Margaret Barter, Far Above Battle: The experience and memory of Australian soldiers in war 1939–1945 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994). 58 W. P. Bolger and J. G. Littlewood, The Fiery Phoenix: The story of the 2/7th Australian Infantry Battalion, 1939–1946 (2/7 Battalion Association, 1983). 59 Rae, et al., On Target, p. 230. 60 The battalions that suffered casualties on the Malay Peninsula were reinforced on Singapore. Most going to the 2/19th with 500 reinforcements and the 2/19th 370. Over 1500 served in the 2/19th.

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61 James Burfitt, Against All Odds: The History of the 2/18 Battalion A. I. F. (Sydney: 2/18th Battalion A. I. F. Association, 1991). There are exceptions: A. W. Penfold, W. C. Bayliss and K. E. Crispin, Galleghan’s Greyhounds: The story of the 2/30th Australian Infantry Battalion 22nd November, 1940 – 10th October, 1945, 2/30th (Sydney: Bn A. I. F. Association, 1979). F. G. Galleghan, the commanding officer, was determined that the 2/30th men would think of themselves of ex-soldiers rather than ex-prisoners. The 2/22nd has little history of prisoners of war as many were killed at Tol and on the Montevideo Maru: D. Aplin, Rabaul 1942 (Melbourne: 2/22nd Battalion Lark Force Association, 1982); and Carl Johnson, comp. Little Hell: The story of the 2/22nd Battalion and Lark Force (Melbourne: History House, 2004). 62 Birtles, ms. 63 Birtles ms. 64 Figures for the numbers of Americans who died as prisoners in Korea and Vietnam are complicated by the numbers of missing in action. Here a conservative estimate is taken of missing in action who were captured before being killed. 65 I made some comparisons in McCormack and Nelson (eds), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History, pp. 162–5, and was attacked in the press.

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3

Monument and ceremony The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial and the Anzac legend Lachlan Grant

Following the demise of the original members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) – the veterans of Gallipoli and World War I – Australian prisoners of World War II are emerging as the inheritors of the Anzac legend. This legend holds up Anzac troops’ mateship and defiance of authority in adverse conditions as exemplars of national character.1 The prisoner of war (POW) story as a genre continues to be popular, and there is a growth in numbers of memoirs and diaries published by ex-POWs. An additional layer of memory has also developed: a ‘delayed commemoration’ of Australian POWs through the commemoration of significant anniversaries, and the construction of new memorials and museums both in Australia and in the places of the prisoners’ suffering.2 The most significant of these memorials in Australia is the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial. This 2 million Australian dollar memorial was dedicated with great fanfare in the provincial city of Ballarat, in February 2004.3 The rhetoric surrounding its dedication, and the symbolism and iconography inherent in its design, help us to explain POWs continuing prominence within the Australian national legend of men at war.4 The Ballarat memorial has also acted as a place of pilgrimage and closure for ex-POWs and their families. At the same time, however, the location of the historical narrative for Australian prisoners of the Japanese in the context of the Anzac myth has ensured that distinctive aspects of their experience have been marginalised. The foremost aspect in which their experience differed from Australian prisoners in other parts of the world was in the complex moral dilemmas they faced in order to survive in particularly harsh camp conditions.5 The experience of captivity in Asia, as the first large group of Australians to interact with the people and cultures of Southeast Asia, is the second aspect that makes the experiences of these particular Australian POWs distinctive.6 Despite such unique experiences, in popular Australian memory the Asian POW experience has been written as another example of the more general Anzac legend. At present, a discussion on Australian POW historiography reveals two particular models for the incorporation of the POW experience into the bigger picture of Australian history. One model is externally focused. The other more nationalistic model is internally focused.

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Figure 3.1 Ballarat Ex-POW War Memorial: Concrete sleepers. The memorial features concrete slabs, laid like the sleepers of a railway track, both evoking the Burma–Thailand Railway in specific, and the idea of prisoners’ journeys in general. Source: Stephen Grant.

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The external model aligns itself with the progressive politics of Paul Keating’s (Prime Minister, 1991–96) ‘big picture’ of Australia as part of Asia. This sees the prisoners of the Japanese as pioneers, and emphasises the compassion shown by men such as Tom Uren and Weary Dunlop, ex-POWs who offer a model of tolerance towards their Asian neighbours. The second, more internal or nostalgic view, focuses on how the POW experience best serves the Anzac legend. By focusing on mateship, the POW, despite his questionable performance on the battlefield, was able to find a niche within the chain of Anzac memory. This nostalgic model aligns itself to the politics of Keating’s successor as Prime Minister, John Howard. Both Prime Minister Keating and Prime Minister Howard have been central to the recovery of public commemoration of Australian POWs. Keating used Anzac for his own contemporary purposes, using it to shift the focus of remembrance in Australia from the Great War to World War II, and from Europe to the Pacific. This served his ‘big picture’ of Australia as a part of Asia. Speaking at the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in Thailand in April 1994, Keating recognised the significance of POWs in popular memory, stating that: ‘the Burma–Thailand Railway has become one of those episodes in our history from which we have chosen to draw inspiration. It has become a legend of courage, comradeship, sacrifice and resourcefulness.’ Keating highlighted that Australia’s ‘first major engagement with Asia was in war’ and that in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam ‘it was war again.’ He highlighted Australian medic, ‘Weary’ Dunlop, and his Thai friend and provider to POWs on the Thailand–Burma Railway Boon Pong as symbols of respect, affection, compassion and tolerance for not only the people of Australia and Thailand, but for other countries in the region in the common interest of reducing conflict and suffering. For Keating the lessons learnt from the POW experiences were not only that ‘we saw the best in ourselves’, but that the best in us was an inspiration for ‘us to find a way to peace and friendship, justice and prosperity’. For Keating there was no better way to honour the Australian and Allied prisoners who suffered and died than for Australia to succeed in its partnership with Thailand and other countries in the region. This would ensure that what the prisoners and ‘their allies and hundreds of thousands of the countries of Asia endured . . . [would] . . . not happen again’.7 Alternatively, the next Prime Minister, John Howard, used the prisoners’ story to focus on the values represented within the Anzac tradition. In Thailand at the opening of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Hellfire Pass, on Anzac Day 1998, Howard made the distinction between the experience of Australian prisoners and prisoners of other nations, recounting the story that: As an English officer stood in the driving rain and watched a group of Australians sing, as they trudged back exhausted from their work he asked, ‘Just what is it that these Australians have?’ The answer, plain now as then, was that they had each other – They had their mates . . .

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Lachlan Grant Mateship, courage and compassion, these are enduring qualities – the qualities of our nation. They are the essence of a nation’s past and a hope for its future.8

Here Howard claims Australian ownership of the concept of mateship. Using the Anzacs and veterans, including the ex-POWs, as his models, Howard’s use of ‘mateship’ is an attempt to conjure notions of national identity. Of these two models, the nostalgic, parochial model is the dominant narrative of the POW story in Australian popular memory. It is unsurprising then, that generalisations regarding the experiences of Australian POWs – such as the focus on mateship – were prevalent in the publicity surrounding the new Ballarat Memorial: both in the campaigning for funds and in its dedication. Two key speakers at the February 2004 dedication ceremony exemplified such nationalist rhetoric. Governor-General of Australia, Major-General Michael Jeffery stated that the experience of over 35,000 Australians who had the misfortune to become POWs was ‘a triumph’: A triumph of the human spirit. A triumph of individual and group discipline. A triumph of physical and moral courage. And a triumph of the enduring bonds of mateship – transcending the indignities and vicissitudes of life as a POW.9 The head of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, expressed similar sentiments. Cosgrove focused on the story of Australia’s POWs as one of moral superiority, honouring the ex-prisoners in their ability to triumph by survival. In stating the place of the returned POWs in ‘the history of our nation’, Cosgrove highlighted their ‘resilience in the most cruel of circumstances, their capacity to endure the most trying of experiences with their hearts and spirits intact’ as being ‘the stuff of legends’. He described the Australian soldiers’ character and ‘ability to laugh at hardship, and the unmitigated nerve to annoy the stuffing out of anyone who tries to keep them down’.10 Therefore, at the dedication of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial, the POW story was incorporated into Anzac through the use of broad nationalistic and triumphal messages. Furthermore, the iconography and symbolism of the memorial to Australia’s Ex-POWs, particularly the incorporation of both modernist and traditional monumental styles into its design, is significant. Situated in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial’s main symbolism, according to its creator, artist Peter Blizzard, is that it represents a journey. Blizzard told the ABC ‘to heighten the sense of the journey, I’ve made this memorial really straight, and it disappears 130 meters [sic] into the distance so that you get a visual perspective


Figure 3.2 Ballarat Ex-POW War Memorial: Obelisks. The Ballarat memorial mixes traditional and modern architectural styles of commemoration. Here the obelisks recall traditional forms. Source: Stephen Grant.

as you look along it.’ Running east–west, the ‘journey’ begins at the eastern end of the Botanic Gardens opposite Lake Wendouree, beneath the flag of the Australian Ex-POW Association. The pathway is made of stone cut into slabs representing railway sleepers, ‘a reference’, states Blizzard, ‘to the iconic journeys’ the prisoners experienced, but also to the Thailand–Burma Railway, the best known symbol ‘for prisoners of war around Australia’. On the southern edge of the pathway, a 1.6 metre high black granite wall stands at a slight angle of 6.5 degrees, engraved with the names in gold lettering of the nearly 37,000 Australian POWs from the Boer War, the Great War, World War II and the Korean War. No Australians have been held as POWs since Korea. In the centre of this wall, standing above a pool of reflection, rise six 4-metre-high obelisks made from basalt, listing the countries and regions of the world that were the sites of Australian servicemen and women’s internment. A seventh obelisk has symbolically fallen, shattering into the pool of remembrance, signifying the fallen prisoner who did not return home with his mates. Opposite the pool is an eighth obelisk, listing the conflicts in which Australians have been taken prisoner, for the laying of wreaths on commemorative occasions. This is flanked by the Australian flag, and

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the flags of the Army, Navy, Merchant Navy and Air Force. ‘The idea of having obelisks,’ explains Blizzard, ‘is that every little town in Australia has an obelisk with names of ex-servicemen who died overseas. . . .’11 A small rivulet of water runs past all these areas, in between the pathway and the wall in a continuous cycle, filling the pool of remembrance within which the stone obelisks sit. The continuous cycle of the water is symbolic of the ongoing memory that exists between the survivors, those who never returned, their families, and the horrors of internment. It is also symbolic of the notions of healing, cleansing and rebirth. The obelisks stand in such a position within the pool of remembrance that they are out of reach across the water, symbolic of Australia’s geographic location and that POWs were held in camps overseas and often out of contact from relatives at home.12 At the end of the pathway, the words ‘Lest We Forget’ are engraved allowing for an area of contemplation after the visitor has completed the journey.13 The inclusion of obelisks addresses the designer’s intention for the memorial to be ageless, and the memorial’s obelisks are cut in a way that conjures the natural simplicity of one of Australia’s geographical landmarks, the Twelve Apostles: a series of limestone rock formations off Victoria’s southwest coast in the Port Campbell National Park.14 However, the inclusion of obelisks raises what Jay Winter calls ‘one of the most widely debated issues of cultural history of the early twentieth century. This was the clash between ‘traditional’ and ‘modernist’ approaches to twentieth-century art’. In form, ‘traditional’ monuments often favoured statues or classicallystyled obelisks, columns or shrines. These tended to be associated with the monuments of the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman empires. Later, following World War II, memorial styles sometimes featured elements such as a memorial wall, an eternal flame, or may even have been entirely utilitarian in function, such as a community hall.15 Traditional forms of commemorative art and public remembrance dominated the public landscapes before the 1960s and especially in the aftermath of the Great War. In this period, the monuments’ ‘late-Victorian and Edwardian clichés about duty, masculinity, honour’ represented everything the modernists rejected.16 In the past 25 years, more ‘modern’ forms appeared. In these, traditional elements could be maintained, such as the listing of names, but nationalist and militaristic elements were de-emphasised. These were often more abstract in design, and their initial public function became less clear. Such was the case of the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Canberra, unveiled in 1992, or the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, unveiled in 1982. Both move away from traditional memorial forms, the American example in particular turns away from monumentality and the vertical memorial as it is horizontal in nature and literally cut into the ground. The Australian memorial is such that encloses itself and needs entering in order to be engaged, and there is an emphasis on a flowing rivulet of water as a symbol of cleansing and healing. Both cause reflection upon the divisive nature of the conflict in


Australia and the United States, as well as the difficulties that has placed upon veterans of the war. The more ‘modernist’ form of commemorative public art emerged in the later part of the twentieth century, especially in relation to what have been described as monuments of defeat (such as the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington), and of horror (such as the memorials to the Holocaust). James Mayo states that remembering such events can be painful or even shameful and, therefore, monumental architecture, encompassing classical styles and romantic values, is overtaken by ‘modernist’ commemorative art, which is less noble and causes subtle reflection.17 Ballarat’s Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial is unusual in that it has incorporated both ‘traditional’ monumental forms and more ‘modernist’ forms. ‘Traditional’ elements include the monumental obelisks and list of names. These help establish ideas of a wider nation and its strengths, and notions such as sacrifice for a cause, and community. ‘Modernist’ elements include the reflective wall, the rivulets and pool of remembrance, and more realistic symbols such as the railway sleepers, which recall suffering as well as positive values. This mixture of styles highlights the ambiguity of the ex-POWs and their place within the Anzac legend: they are both located within a wider Anzac story which trumpets national values and solidarity; and yet they also echo ideas about the pointlessness and tragedy of suffering in war, more often associated with memorials to the Holocaust or Vietnam. A critical and nuanced interpretation of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial therefore needs to take place: one which relates its symbolism and iconography to attempts to integrate the POW story into a wider Australian story, with its national and gendered aspects. It could be said that Vietnam veterans and World War II ex-POWs share similar historical narratives when attempting to incorporate their individual stories into the history of nations and of men at war: a masculinised history emphasising the brave deeds in the face of battle by the, mostly victorious, male warrior. Marita Sturkin suggests that there was ambivalence toward the Vietnam War ‘due to an inability to fit it into traditional paradigms’, with its unclear boundaries between combatant and civilian and equally messy conclusion in which any claims to victory were dubious. The experience of the Vietnam War as different from previous wars has made the construction of an identity for Vietnam veterans after their return difficult.18 Similarly, the incorporation of the experiences of large numbers of Australian World War II POWs within Anzac has been difficult, and barbed with ambiguity. The captured soldier, like the returning veteran from Vietnam (both in the American and Australian experience), were both unable to fulfill their nation’s expectations of them as victorious soldiers in a just cause.19 This ambiguity plays itself out in the use of different architectural styles and symbolism at the Ballarat Memorial, such as the inclusion of the ‘traditional’ form of obelisks. There is the obvious point about the obelisks representing

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a ‘phallic’ symbol of masculine strength. It is also important to think about the meaning and history of the obelisk as a public monument. In ancient Egypt, obelisks are thought to have represented the divine image of a ray of light, linking the divinity of the King (whose name, deeds and military victories adorned the monument) directly to the divine. Later, Roman conquerors removed obelisks from Egypt and erected them in Rome as a symbol of their military triumphs. Likewise, the British and French removed obelisks from Egypt, erecting them in their capitals. Hence from divine image they became clichéd symbols of power, duty, honour, and the triumph of Empire. This imperial significance of the obelisk needs to be taken into account when discussing obelisks as a commemorative form in Australia, especially when considering Phaoronic architecture as being a continued inspiration for eternal memorials.20 Whereas the obelisk has in the past represented romanticised notions of duty and honour, the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial is a monument marking personal defeat. Yet, as an ode to the many classically influenced war memorials in towns around the Australian landscape, it still incorporates the traditional form of the obelisk – eight of them no less – which tower 4 metres above the memorial walls listing the names of Australia’s POWs. The inclusion of such classical, monumental symbols contributes to a healing process, in that it re-masculinises the exPOW, placing them into the history of Anzac and traditional commemorative forms dedicated to Anzac, so reconnecting them to the notion of martial triumph. From a more parochial nationalistic stance, the obelisks could also be seen as representing the triumph of the Australian spirit over grim adversity. This is a recurring theme in the POW narrative. By incorporating quintessential Australian values, in particular mateship (and its link to survival) into the prisoner’s story, their place within the Anzac legend is much more viable. ‘If it was impossible, given the nature of the situation, to proclaim their military supremacy’ wrote Robin Gerster, then the ex-POW ‘could always point to the Australian’ prisoners’ moral superiority over the Japanese.’21 Such sentiments were expressed in the speech by General Peter Cosgrove, Head of the Australian Defence Force from 2002–05, at the memorial’s dedication ceremony. Where the prisoners could not defend Australia on the battlefield, Cosgrove stated, the prisoners were ‘instead called to defend the essence of their humanity, the quality of their Australianess, the bond of their mateship. This they did with incredible courage. Not the courage of battle . . . but the patient, enduring, steadfast courage in the face of long captivity.’22 As pillars of strength through their proximity to one another, the symbolism of the seven standing obelisks is tied into the notion of mateship being a key to POW survival. This is exemplified by the obelisk that has fallen into the pool of remembrance, representing the comrade who never made it home.23


Adopting a traditional memorial form, the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial, therefore, re-establishes the prisoners’ story as one of triumph over adversity, remasculinising the prisoners’ from the passivity of captivity, and while acknowledging prolonged suffering, the listing of their names ensures that Australia will not forget, placing the prisoners’ story directly within the narrative of Australians at war. Bestowing honour, however, may not be the only function of a memorial. In certain circumstances, war memorials function at a humanitarian level, both honouring those who served while making a statement to counter inhumanity with humanity, such as honouring humanity in adverse circumstances, or offering a plea for peace.24 Such an example is evident among the Changi Murals in Singapore, which were created by Stanley Warren in a chapel at a POW hospital in Changi in 1942–43. The artist took great pains to include different races, including Asians, within his Christian murals, and the words accompanying the murals were chosen to emphasise a common humanity that the prisoners shared with their captors. On his mural of the crucifixion, Warren included the message ‘Father Forgive them. They know not what they do’. Painting amidst the suffering of a hospital ward in Changi, his message was one of common humanity.25 Such a humanitarian purpose was initially envisaged for the Australian ExPrisoners of War Memorial. One of its prime purposes was to acknowledge Australian POWs’ suffering in a commemorative form. Les Kennedy, the Chairman of the Australian Ex-POWs Committee told the Ballarat Courier at the launch of the fundraising campaign on 23 July 1999 that the aim was for surviving POWs to see ‘a tangible acknowledgement by the Australian community for all POWs endured during their time in captivity.’26 Ex-POW Jack Simmons, who travelled form Bundaberg, Queensland, for the dedication ceremony in February 2004, told the Ballarat Courier that the day had meant a lot to him and other ex-POWs, because ‘it is recognition’.27 In contrast, former POW and member of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial Appeal Committee, Viv Robinson, said at the appeal launch: ‘People forget so easily, we can forgive, but we can’t forget the unimaginable things that one human being could do to another.’28 Clearly there was a tension between the humanitarian impulse to commemorate suffering and avoid it in the future – evident in the names of the dead – and in the nationalist desire for ‘recognition’ as part of a national story, the Anzac Legend, as reflected in the obelisks and speeches. The issue is partly what is meant by ‘acknowledgement’ and ‘recognition’. A memorial appeal pamphlet states that the mission is ‘to acknowledge the pain and suffering they endured during their time in captivity, and to the thousands of mates they left behind’.29 Unfortunately the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial is limited in its humanitarian purpose. It does mark the names of the dead. But it does not convey any message for peace. By contrast, as we have seen, its obelisks and integration into the Anzac story tend towards more martial, masculine and nationalistic meanings.

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A humanitarian message (and a message for peace) is much more evident upon a visit to a war cemetery such as the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in Thailand or the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore. Both feature rows of identical graves of nations’ youth and white stone monuments among immaculately kept lawns, conveying the message of life, death, suffering and waste in war at a much more intimate and sobering level than does the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial.30 As it stands, the Australian ExPrisoners of War Memorial fails to tell Australians anything divergent from the popular memory of Australians at war. By borrowing and recreating the traditional iconography and symbolism of Australian war memorials within the towns, suburbs and cities of Australia, it is rendered as just another commemorative monument, and represents the prisoners’ story as just another example of the Anzac legend. Nevertheless, the acknowledgement and bestowment of honour and the inclusion of traditional monumental forms, does add to the healing process, confirming the prisoners’ story as one of triumph: of human spirit over grim adversity; and of the ability to uphold quintessential Australian values under times of duress. So the traditionalist and classical elements combine with more modernist elements in design to help the healing process. Notably, the modernist element in the memorial’s design, the rivulet and the memorial wall listing all Australian POWs, has ensured that the Ballarat memorial has acted as a place of pilgrimage for ex-POWs and for their families, while also bringing a sense of closure to those who have felt neglected since the end of hostilities. While the obelisks represent a traditional form, the modern commemorative form – the black granite face of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial – has been clearly influenced by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Because of its modernist approach to war remembrance, the Washington memorial was condemned by some as a ‘black gash of shame’, and a ‘black spot in American history’.31 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial differs from traditional commemorative art, as John Beardsley notes, as it is horizontal rather than vertical, black rather than white, and spatial rather than architectural. On one level, the blackness of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial simply serves to remind the visitor that people die and suffer in war.32 On another level, the black stone gives the memorial a reflective surface, allowing viewers to participate in the memorial as they see their own reflection upon the list of names.33 Similarly, the polished black granite wall of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial gives a reflection of the visitor against the spatial backdrop of the sky (the wall is at a slight angle of 6.5 degrees), incorporating them into the memorial by imposing their reflection upon the names engraved there. Thus the memorial is personalised, incorporating the image of the visitor. Particular Australian traditions, however, have emerged when listing names on war memorials compared to practices in other nations. In Australia, the most common form of listing names is in alphabetical order. Ken Inglis has


suggested that while there may be a temptation ‘to read these unranked names as expressing an Australian egalitarianism’, in this Australians were in step with Europe. Australia’s practice was different because of the listing of names of returned servicemen as well as those who had died. This practice is virtually unknown on memorials in Italy and France, and uncommon in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Just over half of the war memorials in Australia list the dead and the living, marking the dead with an asterisk, cross or dagger, and often separating both groups on different panels. Inglis suggests that this practice is due to the makeup of the AIF as a ‘volunteer’ army. During the Great War it was also used to encourage enlistment.34 The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial lists all Australian prisoners of war alphabetically, although separating them chronologically by conflict. The memorial’s designer, Peter Blizzard, feels that this form of monument acknowledges the suffering of ex-POWs and the affects that had on their families. ‘What I wanted to do when I was doing this was have a significant monument that would really mean something to the families of people who didn’t come back and the families of those who did survive and had to live with the horrors for a long time.’35

Figure 3.3 Ballarat Ex-POW War Memorial: Names in granite. The mixture of architectural styles of commemoration are evident within the Ballarat memorial by the polished granite walls containing the names of all Australian POWs. The reflective surface incorporates the visitor into the memorial. Source: Stephen Grant.

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Eleventh hour alterations to the list, such as the inclusion of Merchant Navy personnel, boosted the figure of men and women honoured to nearly 37,000. Three blank panels have been left at the memorial’s end for additions. These blank panels, on the other hand, are a stark reminder that Australian servicemen and women are presently, and will be in the future, at risk to warfare. The blank panels may also be of significance on a more personal level. For General Cosgrove, they symbolised ‘the emptiness left by a person’ away from home and in danger. This vacuum, represented by the polished black granite of the empty panels, also exists for POWs, ‘cut off from news of home, unaware of the progress of the conflict.’ Furthermore, upon the return home of the ex-prisoner, the vacuum existed, according to Cosgrove, as the troops often returned to society ‘to step into another emptiness’, disconnected from those around them and separated from the bonds of their mates ‘upon whom they’ve relied for their very survival’. Without that support, states Cosgrove, ‘try as they might their friends and their family often simply could not understand.’36 Such strains upon individuals, for both ex-prisoners and their families, are evident in the work of Hank Nelson and Betty Peters. Both oral history projects by Nelson (interviewing ex-POWs) and Peters (interviewing ex-POWs’ wives) have revealed the impact of the POW experience upon ex-POWs: the difficulties of return and subsequent separation from wartime mates; the illness, disabilities and related inabilities; and especially the difficulty in communication between ex-prisoners, their wives, husbands and family.37 The manner of listing the names, therefore, is the significant element of the memorial’s design for bereaved families and veterans. It is this that creates a sense of closure and marks the site as a place of pilgrimage. The sense of closure is evident by the way in which veterans, their families and bereaved families have reacted to and interact with the Ballarat Memorial. Les Kennedy, project manager has explained that: ‘It is very emotional for family members to go up there and very emotional for POWs when they go up there, particularly when they are looking for their mate’s name on the wall that didn’t return.’ Mr Kennedy pushed hard for funding for ten seats to be erected because when people came they became so emotional ‘that they need to sit down and relax and meditate for a little while.’38 Such was the case for Diane Tuck, who took her parents to the memorial over the Anzac Day weekend in April 2004. ‘To see my father there, looking up his name and that of his mate who is now deceased,’ stated Tuck, ‘is a memory that will remain with me.’39 Ex-POW Bob Roswell, survivor of Hellfire Pass and the Thai Burma Railway, arrived at the memorial with a list of fifty names of both surviving and deceased comrades to find. ‘I’m here, I was lucky’, Mr Roswell told the Ballarat Courier, ‘it’s very emotional, I haven’t got many mates left.’40 For Jim Cahir, captured after his plane was shot down over Germany, the memorial offered a place to come and grieve. ‘If you can get grief out’, stated Mr Cahir, ‘you’re a better person afterwards.’41


Even before the memorial’s completion, designer Peter Blizzard often found messages stuck to the wire construction fence with handwritten notes saying ‘thank you’ or ‘we will remember them’ on his arrival to work on some mornings. Occasionally, stated Blizzard, ‘you would see an old bloke with binoculars outside the fence trying to see if their names are listed. It’s pretty emotional for them. We said no worries, come in’.42 By listing the names of all Australian POWs, the memorial brings closure to ex-prisoners and their families, articulated by one of the important rituals: the touching the names listed on war memorials.43 This action has been witnessed at the site of the war memorial and captured by a photographer from the Ballarat Courier on Anzac Day 2004. Wreaths, poppies, flowers and letters have all been left, personalising the list of names.44 Furthermore, the ability to see a burial place can play an important role in the overcoming grief for the bereaved.45 A classic example of this is the Civilian War Memorial in Singapore, a structure of four pillars or ‘four chopsticks’ which soar into the sky in the centre of the city, sitting atop the recovered bones of over 20,000 victims of wartime Japanese massacres. For Singaporeans whose relatives ‘disappeared’, the memorial provided a focus for grief from its construction in the mid-1960s. For Australians whose family died as prisoners in Asia, they usually know where their relatives are buried, but accessibility to Commonwealth War Graves can be difficult, if not dangerous.46 Furthermore, families of the estimated 4,000 Australian POWs who have no known grave, which includes the 1,500 Australians POWs who perished at sea upon Japanese ‘hellships’, have no site to visit.47 The complete list of names of POWs upon the memorial provides a place for such families to grieve. For Rollo Jackson, 8 years old when his father, Frederick was reported ‘missing in action’, the memorial offered a place for his family to pay their respects. Although honoured on a plaque at Rabaul, Rollo and his family felt they had no place in Australia to pay tribute: ‘We will bring the families here, it’s a place where they can see his name and identify.’48 The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial thus represents two very different kinds of remembrance.49 One is an attempt to tell the prisoners’ story within the paradigms of the Anzac legend. The other is a form of remembrance that allows ex-prisoners and their families to honour those who died during their time in captivity and those who survived. As a monument to survival it recognises the prisoners’ ability to endure grim circumstances. By listing survivors it also acknowledges the suffering of the many ex-prisoners who found difficulties in their return to civilian life and also for the traumatic effects that this had upon ex-prisoners’ families. As a monument remembering those who died the memorial, by listing the names of the dead, works as a place of remembrance within Australia for widows, bereaved families and veterans to grieve for a loved one or lost mate who has no known grave, or is buried in a commonwealth war cemetery near the place of their captivity in an inaccessible place.

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The mixture of modern and traditional forms of memorial architecture nevertheless ensures that a tension remains within the prisoners’ story. The traditional element of the design and the publicity surrounding the opening of the memorial renders the experiences of prisoners as just another example of Anzac. This compromises the aim of the memorial, to acknowledge pain and suffering. Nevertheless, the modern elements in the design have ensured that the response of the POW community has been profound. The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial, therefore, confirms Stephen Garton’s contention that Australian POWs’ incorporation into the Anzac legend as inheritors of Anzac undermines their differences and individual needs.50 Where a unique opportunity for Australia to learn something different about its wartime experience existed, the memorial instead symbolises the prisoners’ ability to uphold the quintessential values that are the pillar stones of the Anzac ethos.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7 8 9

Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 227. Joan Beaumont, ‘POWs in Australian National Memory’, in Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (eds), Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace: Captivity, Homecoming and Memory in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2005) p. 194. Ken S. Inglis, Sacred Paces: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001) p. 372. More than 10,000 people attended the dedication ceremony. 1,300 were ex-POWs, and 5,000 family of ex-POWs. Over 1,000 visited the memorial daily in week following. A separate memorial to the Montevideo Maru was unveiled the following day, attracting 1,000. Ballarat has a population of 80,000. Ballarat Courier, 7 February 2004. ANZAC is an acronym for Australian & New Zealand Army Corps. The legend associated with Anzac was forged from the moment the ANZACs landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 (Anzac Day). Anzac Day has become a day of national commemoration and remembrance in both Australia and New Zealand. Joan Beaumont, Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity 1941–1945 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988). Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994). See: Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993); Hank Nelson, Prisoners of War: Australians Under Nippon (Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 2001); and Hank Nelson, ‘“The Nips are Going for the Parker”’, War & Society (1985) 3, 2, pp. 127–43. Paul Keating, ‘Speech By The Prime Minister, The Hon P. J. Keating, MP, Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, Thailand, 9 April 1994’, Ministerial Document Service, Number 159/93–4, Monday 11 April, 1994, pp. 5409–10. John Howard in News Bulletin: The Official Organ of the Ex-Prisoners of War and Relatives Association of Victoria, May 1998. See also www.pm.gov.au/. Major-General Michael Jeffery, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Address At The Dedication Ceremony For An Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial’, at www.ballarat.vic.gov.au/, accessed 30 May 2004.


10 General Peter Cosgrove, ‘Dedication of the Memorial to Australian Prisoners of War, Ballarat’, at www.ballarat.vic.gov.au/, accessed 30 June 2004. 11 Peter Blizzard in ‘Peter Blizzard – Artist Behind the Memorial’, ABC, www. abc.net.au/, accessed 6 July 2004. 12 Peter Blizzard in ‘Peter Blizzard – Artist Behind the Memorial’. 13 Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial to be Located in Ballarat Botanical Gardens, pamphlet obtained from Ballarat RSL, Lyon St. Sth, Ballarat. 14 Janette Bomford, ‘Fractured Lives: Australian Prisoners of War of the Japanese and Their Families’ (PhD, Deakin University, Geelong, 2001), p. 292. 15 Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 352–8. 16 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 115–6. 17 James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond (New York: Praeger, 1988) p. 211. 18 Marita Sturken, ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, Representations, vol. 35 (1991), pp. 129–30. 19 On the issue of gender, see Garton, The Cost War and Robin Gerster, Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987). 20 Robert S. Merrillees with Colin A. Hope, Graeme L. Pretty and Piers Crocker, Living With Egypt’s Past in Australia (Melbourne: Museum of Victoria, 1990) p. 58. 21 Gerster, Big-Noting, p. 234. 22 General Peter Cosgrove, ‘Dedication of the Memorial to Australian Prisoners of War’, at www.ballarat.vic.gov.au/, accessed 30 May 2004. 23 Perhaps perversely, it may represent prisoner who did not have a mate. 24 Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape, p. 8. 25 Kevin Blackburn, ‘The historic war site of the Changi Murals: a place for pilgrimages and tourism’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 34 (2001) and Kevin Blackburn, ‘Changi: A Place of Personal Pilgrimages and Collective Histories’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 112 (1999), pp. 152–71. 26 Ballarat Courier, 24 July 1999. 27 Ballarat Courier, 7 February 2004. 28 News Bulletin: The Official Organ of the Ex-Prisoners of War and Relatives Association of Victoria, October 1998. 29 The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial Appeal, pamphlet obtained from Ballarat RSL, Lyon St Sth, Ballarat. 30 The power of nation over the individual is also represented in military cemeteries. 31 Sturken, ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image’, p. 122. 32 John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (New York: Abbeville, 1998), p. 125. 33 Sturken, ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image’, p. 118. 34 Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 181. 35 Peter Blizzard in the The Courier, 6 February 2004. 36 General Peter Cosgrove, ‘Dedication of the Memorial to Australian Prisoners of War’, at www.ballarat.vic.gov.au/, accessed 30 May 2004. 37 See final chapter of Hank Nelson, POW: Australians Under Nippon (Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1985); and Betty Peters, ‘Life Experiences of Partners of Ex-POWs of the Japanese’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, No. 28 (1996). 38 Interview with Les Kennedy, Ballarat, 25 November 2004. 39 News Bulletin: The Official Organ of the Ex-Prisoners of War and Relatives Association of Victoria, August 2004. 40 Ballarat Courier, 7 February 2004.

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Lachlan Grant Ballarat Courier, 7 February 2004. Herald-Sun (Melbourne), 6 February 2004. See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, p. 113. Such artifacts have been observed by myself. See also the Ballarat Courier, 9 February 2004. Janette Bomford, ‘Fractured Lives: Australian Prisoners of War of the Japanese and Their Families’ (PhD, Deakin University, Geelong, 2001) p. 108. Pilgrimages to Ambon, for example have been suspended since 1999 and the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs advises travellers not to go to Ambon. Burma is difficult to access. Figures cited upon Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial, also in Lionel Wigmore, The Japanese Thrust, Canberra: Australian War Memorial (1957), p. 642. Ballarat Courier, 7 February 2004. Sturken, ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image’, p. 137. Garton, Cost of War, p. 227.

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4

Memory and the prisoner of war experience The United Kingdom Sibylla Jane Flower

‘Surely you fetched up in Singapore?’ Cheesman nodded. ‘In fact, you were a Jap POW?’ ‘Yes.’ Cheesman gave that answer perfectly composedly, but for a brief second, something much shorter than that, something scarcely measurable in time, there shot, like forked lightning, across his serious unornamental features that awful look, common to those who speak of that experience. I had seen it before. Cheesman’s face reverted – the word suggests too extended a duration of instantaneous, petrifying exposure of hidden feeling – to an habitual sedateness.1 In these words, Anthony Powell, one of the foremost British novelists of the twentieth century, describes an encounter between Nicholas Jenkins, the hero of A Dance to the Music of Time (1973), and another officer, Cheesman. Cheesman and Jenkins had served together at the outbreak of war, and meet by chance at a military dinner years later. Powell had held a commission in the Army during World War II and was a perceptive observer of military life. In describing Cheesman’s reaction to the query by the successful, confident Jenkins, Powell portrays the mental anguish of the returned Far Eastern POW, anguish induced by memories of surrender, hunger, suffering, the death of friends and, later, survivors’ guilt. For a second, Cheesman, taken by surprise, reveals the intensity of ‘hidden feeling’. The manner in which this ‘hidden feeling’ has been revealed to the British public only in the last 20 years is the subject of this chapter. The image of the British POW in the popular imagination has been fashioned by books, films and television programmes with the prisoners of the Germans receiving more favourable attention than those of the Japanese. Although there were three times as many British servicemen in German hands as there were in Japanese (approximately 135,000 to 50,000), the mood among the prisoners held in Europe was largely one of boredom, and few of the many surviving diaries and letters are memorable. Nevertheless, the image of the POW in Europe, the Western Desert campaigns and North Africa has been enlivened by tales of daring escapes. Eric Williams’ account of successfully tunnelling under the wire at Stalag Luft III in Silesia using a wooden vaulting-horse as cover is one example, as are stories of the repeated

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attempts to escape from the fortress prison, Colditz, in Saxony, by Douglas Bader and others. The exploits of members of Special Operations Executive who were infiltrated into occupied Europe have also inspired books and films. The nom de guerre of Wing Commander F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, ‘the White Rabbit’, provided the title of his biography and a film. Prisoners of the Japanese have fared less well than their European counterparts. The two most famous films Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and King Rat (1965) have cast long shadows over their reputation. Both portray the POWs in a less than heroic light and will be discussed in detail in Hack and Blackburn’s Chapter 9 below. Both derive from authors who knew something of conditions in the camps. The author of The Bridge on the River Kwai was a French novelist who used historical facts, picked up from former prisoners, as props for his tale. The author of King Rat was a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery at the time of his capture (subsequently captain). He wrote convincingly of the anarchic conditions in Changi Jail in the last months of the war after the Japanese had destroyed the successful command structure put in place by the British and Australian generals in 1942,

British prisoners of war of the Japanese Between December 1941 and March 1942 the Japanese captured large number of British prisoners. 40,000 entered captivity after the surrender of Singapore alone, on 15 February 1942, with significant additional numbers also taken at the fall of Hong Kong (25 December 1941); and at the capitulation of the Netherlands East Indies (8 March 1942). The POWs belonged to all three services, including naval survivors from a number of ships: HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales destroyed by the Japanese off the coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941; and those lost at the Battle of the Java Sea (27 February to 1 March 1942), including the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter and the destroyers HMS Electra, HMS Encounter and HMS Jupiter. The personnel of the Royal Air Force had been evacuated from Singapore to the Netherlands East Indies in January and early February 1942, but few escaped and some 5,000–6,000 became POWs. The first point to be made about the British POWs is that they were a far from homogeneous group. It is unsafe to employ popular national stereotypes, because they came from a variety of backgrounds. The Volunteer Forces of Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong included Eurasians and Anglo-Indians. There were also the Anglo-Indians of the Indian Medical Department who entered captivity with British officers from more than thirty units of the Indian Army which fought in Malaya. The Indian officers and men were later removed by the Japanese with a view to the creation of an Indian National Army. The largest British military contingent in captivity was the 18th Division, an East Anglian Territorial Army formation with significant additions from the Midlands (1/5th Bn The Sherwood Foresters) and the North (9th Bn The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers) who were diverted to shore up

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the defences of Singapore with some arriving 5 days before the surrender. There were also wide differences between these British units. The two machine-gun battalions engaged in the battle on Singapore Island provide a useful comparison. The 1st Battalion The Manchester Regiment was a unit of the Regular Army recruited from the city of Manchester during the depression of the 1930s. The battalion left for service overseas in 1934 and by the time of the surrender some 200 of the enlisted men had had no home leave in the intervening period. As a general observation the Regular Army adapted less well to the conditions in Japanese POW camps than the Territorials, but two misfortunes befell the 1st Manchesters which also help to account for the high death rate (378 out of 889, 43 per cent). First, in 1939, many of their senior warrant officers, non-commissioned officers and men were sent back to England as instructors to the militia; secondly, on the night of 13–14 February 1942, a similar party numbering twenty-six was ordered to leave on board HMS Dragonfly with a view to providing key personnel for a reconstituted battalion. Dragonfly was sunk with the loss of twenty-two senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who could have helped to provide the necessary cohesion in captivity.2 The 9th Battalion The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers was recruited from the small towns and villages between Morpeth (north of Newcastle upon Tyne) and Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border. Historically the Northumbrian yeomen regarded skirmishes as a normal way of life. The town of Berwick changed hands thirteen times before finally being recognised as English in 1482. But by the late 1930s the fusiliers were engaged in more peaceful rural occupations. Two companies were recruited from collieries, a fact that the Japanese engineers on the Thailand–Burma Railway were quick to note. Being Territorials these men were close to their officers, many of whom they had known or worked alongside in civilian life. The fusiliers arrived in Singapore during the night of 5–6 February, soft from the long sea voyage and unaccustomed to tropical conditions, and went into action within hours. They laid down their arms 10 days later. On the Railway or in the camps in Japan, the fusiliers were able to retain an army structure under the command of their own company commanders and senior NCOs. These factors had a bearing on the survival rate (776 entered captivity, 151 died, 19 per cent).3

The dispersal The surrender of so many POWs took the Japanese by surprise but was quickly assessed by the Army Ministry in Tokyo. Attempts were made to extract information on the technical aspects of Allied warfare by interrogation – often under torture – of personnel of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. But collectively the POWs were seen as a vast labour force that could be incorporated into the Japanese war machine. General Tojo Hideki, the Prime Minister, also believed that the sight of white POWs used as navvies would

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help to banish any sense of racial inferiority among people in the former British colonies. The majority of POWs began their captivity on 17 or 18 February 1942 at Changi military camp in the northeast corner of Singapore Island. Within weeks, POWs were formed into labour battalions and drafted to Japan and to the Japanese-occupied territories. More than 30,000 British POWs were employed between June 1942 and October 1943 in the building of the Thailand–Burma Railway, which has become a symbol of Japanese maltreatment of POWs. But this has overshadowed the experiences of others in captivity who worked in equally (if not worse) conditions and for much longer, in the mines, steelworks, docks and factories of Japan, in the islands of the Moluccan Archipelago (Ambon, Haruku and Seram), on the Sumatra railway, in the copper mines of Taiwan and elsewhere. At the end of hostilities, British POWs were recovered from camps all over the Asia-Pacific region. Some could not be accounted for. It was not until the 1990s, for example, that the fate was established beyond reasonable doubt of 500 members of the Royal Artillery who had been transported in 1942 from Singapore to Ballale Island (in Shortland Bay) to construct an airstrip. Although the Australian report on the remains of 438 men exhumed after the war was in the hands of the British authorities, along with the confession of the Japanese naval lieutenant commander who ordered the massacre, the information was not communicated to the families of the men who died.

The war years The first intimation of Japanese brutality toward POWs was received by the Allied governments in February 1942. After the surrender of Hong Kong on 25 December 1941 an official in the Colonial Secretariat, Phyllis Harrop, escaped to Macao at the end of January and made contact with the British Vice-Consul. Her statement when forwarded to London was received with disbelief until corroboration was received from a senior British officer and a Dutch merchant who had managed to reach Chungking.4 This information presented the British government with a dilemma because, if publicised, the details would cause great distress to the families of those in Japanese hands and possibly undermine morale in countries such as India, Burma and Ceylon. Furthermore, diplomatic negotiations between the Allied governments and the Japanese on the question of the repatriation of civilian internees were at a delicate stage. When accounts by American escapees from the Philippines appeared in the press it was no longer possible to suppress the details of Japanese atrocities in Hong Kong. On 10 March 1942 the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made a detailed statement in the House of Commons: Out of regard for the feelings of the many relations of the victims, His Majesty’s Government have been unwilling to publish any accounts of


Japanese atrocities at Hong Kong until these had been confirmed beyond any possibility of doubt. Unfortunately there is no longer room for doubt. His Majesty’s Government are now in possession of statement by reliable eye-witnesses who succeeded in escaping from Hong Kong. Their testimony establishes the fact that the Japanese army at Hong Kong perpetrated against their helpless military prisoners and the civil population, without distinction of race or colour, the same kind of barbarities which aroused the horror of the civilised world at the time of the Nanking massacre of 1937. It is known that 50 officers and men of the British Army were bound hand and foot and then bayoneted to death. It is known that 10 days after the capitulation wounded were still being collected from the hills . . . It is known that women, both Asiatic and European, were raped and murdered . . . Two things will be clear to the House, to the country and to the world. The Japanese claim that their forces are animated by a lofty code of chivalry, Bushido, is a nauseating hypocrisy . . . the enemy must be utterly defeated.5 ‘Rarely has any Minister of the Crown had to make . . . a statement more terrible’, commented The Times on the following day.6 Eden made clear that no information relating to Singapore had been received and it was not until 1944 that a further major speech was made in the House of Commons about the POWs in Japanese hands. Although details of conditions on the Thailand–Burma Railway were known to the British Government by mid-1943, no official statement was made on the grounds that this would endanger the clandestine channels through which the information arrived and provoke Japanese reprisals on the POWs. But in 1944 Japanese transports Rakuyo Maru and Kachidoki Maru set out from Singapore in a convoy bound for Japan. The two ships carried a total of 2,218 POWs from Burma and Thailand: the Rakuyo Maru with 599 British, 716 Australian POWs and three senior officers and the Kachidoki Maru with 900 British. The ships were torpedoed by American submarines on 12 September 1944 in the South China Sea. Some POWs were rescued by the Japanese, but four American submarines recovered 152 of the POWs (92 Australians and 60 British). The British survivors arrived at Greenock in Scotland on 9 November 1944. Considering the fact that they were the first British prisoners of the Japanese to return, they were disappointed by their reception.An ‘obscure general’ read a message from the King. ‘Then they shunted us off to a shed on the dockside, then out a back door to a train,’ complained Ed Starkey.7 The information given by the survivors enabled Sir James Grigg (Secretary of State for War) to make a statement in the House of Commons on 17 November to coincide with an announcement made by the Australian Government. Grigg confined himself to giving details of the Thailand–Burma Railway and conditions on the Japanese transports, praising ‘the amazing way in which the morale of the prisoners has remained high, despite the worst the Japanese could do.’8

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The return home In 1945 the majority of the POWs returned home by sea. Unlike the Australians (see chapters 2 and 3 above), there was no official celebration in the United Kingdom and families were forbidden to go to the docks. The POWs were ordered by the War Office (WO) to make their own way home from London. In the attempt to come to terms with their freedom some POWs were more fortunate than others. This was partly a question of location. The 18th Division was the largest military formation in captivity, raised in the sparsely populated eastern counties of England. Three battalions were raised in Norfolk, two in Suffolk, two in Cambridgeshire and three in BedfordshireHertfordshire with the additions from Northumberland and the Midlands already mentioned. There were few villages in any of these counties unaffected by the captivity. The strong paternalistic tradition in the Territorial Army ensured that the majority of the returned POWs were assisted to establish themselves in civilian life. Those POWs who had no regional affiliations were at a disadvantage as were many members of the Regular Army. Officers hoping for promotion found themselves overlooked by boards who favoured those who had fought in victorious campaigns and many of the enlisted men were without the necessary skills to find employment. The POWs felt their sufferings were beyond comprehension to anyone who had not shared their experiences. Gradually local clubs and associations sprang up all over the United Kingdom which enabled the POWs to socialise together. In June 1950 a meeting was held in London under the chairmanship of Lieutenant General A. E. Percival to formulate an approach to the British Government. They wanted to include in the forthcoming Peace Treaty with Japan an admission by the Japanese of the maltreatment of the POWs. The success of this initiative was limited to the inclusion in the Treaty of a reference to ‘the undue hardships’ suffered by POWs, but it demonstrated the desirability of setting up a national committee to act on behalf of the entire POW community.9 Accordingly, on 20 July 1952, the National Federation of Far Eastern Prisoners of War Clubs and Associations (NFFCA) was established with Percival as its first President. Considerable sums of money accrued to the fund over the years, including the proceeds of Japanese assets seized during the war. These funds enabled the NFFCA to distribute welfare funds to the various clubs and associations under their wing for the benefit of POWs and their widows and families.10 ‘The Far East Prisoner-of-War Association (1941–45) London’, the senior branch of the National Federation, organised a variety of events during the year for their members including ‘Tenko’ evenings with music, dancing, a bingo session and drinks. The branch also organised an annual memorial service in St Martin-in-the-Fields, the London church most closely associated with the POWs, and the placing of crosses in the Field of Remembrance at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster on the Friday evening before Remembrance Sunday. The highlight of the Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) Association


year was the Annual Reunion held until 1992 at one of the large concert halls in London. The evening gathering attended by POWs from all over the country (and abroad) took the form of a Memorial Service, a variety show on stage and a party. The importance of this event was described by Lieutenant General Percival in a letter to a fellow officer after Percival had presided at the 1956 gathering: I wish you could have seen the Royal Festival Hall Reunion . . . It was packed to capacity with over 3000 FEPOWs and their families . . . and was a really wonderful occasion . . . The spirit of this FEPOW organisation is really quite remarkable. Apart from the welfare and other things which it does, I feel that an organisation of this sort with such a real spirit of friendship and desire to help each other must have a good influence generally in the country. One of the interesting things about it is that it is largely run by ex-Other Ranks with a few chaps like us to guide them. It is worth taking a bit of trouble to keep it on the right lines . . .11 The fortieth annual reunion took place at the Barbican Hall in London in 1992. ‘All good things have to end sometime,’ announced the President of the Reunion Committee (Ted Coffey), ‘That “sometime” is unfortunately now. This is to be the last Reunion on this scale.’12

Figure 4.1 The Far East Prisoner of War Association, Leeds Branch. The Committee of the Leeds FEPOW Association with Lieutenant General A. E. Percival, Chairman of the National Federation (front row, second from right) and Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Flower, President of the Sussex POW Association (front row, far right). Source: Yorkshire Post Newspapers.

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Few officers chose to join these commemorations, the majority feeling ambivalent about the need to recall the captivity in this manner. They met on more discreet occasions. Thus, the officers of the 18th Division formed their own Association initially 500 strong with a dinner (later, a luncheon) held in alternate years at the Army and Navy Club in London or at a hotel in Cambridge. The Association kept in touch with a bulletin issued to all members. In 1971, 49 out of 223 members attended the dinner, by 1991 the figure had been reduced to 27. It was decided to meet for the last time in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war with Japan. In the late 1980s Douglas Weir, who had been commissioned in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in January 1942 from the Malayan Police, convened an annual lunch for those who had fought in the Malayan Campaign. Of the 78 officers who attended the lunch in 1990, 1 officer only had not been a prisoner of the Japanese. Away from London there were officers in the Territorials and others who retained their links with the local FEPOW associations. In Northumberland, the POWs of the 9th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers have met for a lunchtime reunion in the Percy Arms at Chatton (sixteen miles from Berwick-uponTweed) every month since they returned from the Far East. One of their former company commanders, Captain Henry McCreath who presides at the reunion, explained to the Press in 1995, ‘We were determined that some of us would survive to tell the world what happened. But when we did, the world didn’t want to know, so we’ve rather kept to ourselves.’13

The British government and the Far Eastern POWs The attitude of the British authorities towards the Far Eastern POWs has been at best ambivalent: the surrender of Hong Kong and Singapore cast a long shadow. When the POWs returned home they were instructed not to speak of their experiences in captivity to family or friends. The release of information about the POWs was strictly controlled. Reports on certain incidents and some relating to intelligence remain closed to this day. An article in the Daily Telegraph in 2004 entitled, ‘Mystery and absurdity of secret Britain’, drew attention to the large number of documents either retained in government departments or subject to extended closure in The National Archives (TNA).14 The original intention had been to record the POW experience in one volume of the official history of World War II. A civil servant, M. M. Baird, carried out research with full access to the relevant records. Her substantial, but incomplete, typescript history forms the basis of any study of British POWs of the Japanese.15 But the project was abandoned. Possibly some of the frank quotations Miss Baird selected may have influenced the decision. By the 1960s the importance of furthering links between the United Kingdom and Japan was paramount. Also, there was little appetite among the senior surviving officers to recall the captivity in any detail. The subject remained a painful topic as much to be avoided as confronted. Thus, when the fifth volume


of the official history, The War against Japan by Major-General S. Woodburn Kirby, appeared in 1969, the POWs were accorded only nine pages of an appendix.16 The Australian and New Zealand official histories explore the subject of their own POWs in detail if not in depth. Certainly the POW issue has repeatedly disrupted Anglo-Japanese relations. The signing of the Commercial Treaty of 1962 after negotiations lasting 7 years enabled the United Kingdom and Japan to resume normal bilateral relations. The volume of trade expanded rapidly and lobbies of members of Parliament, businessmen and academics were set up to promote Japanese interests with the assistance of sympathetic British journalists. The first major test of this influential network took place in October 1971 with the state visit to The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh of the Shøwa Emperor (Hirohito) and the Empress. The announcement that the Emperor was to be reinstated in the Order of the Garter, England’s most ancient order of chivalry, from which he had been excluded in 1942, caused widespread dismay. The likelihood of protests by POWs and others was a cause for concern in both Tokyo and London. The British government approached Sir Philip Toosey, a respected British commander in camps on the Thailand–Burma Railway, to ask his opinion. Toosey had succeeded Lieutenant General Percival as President of the NFFCA on the latter’s death in 1966 and he understood the sense of betrayal felt by many POWs at the announcement of the forthcoming imperial visit. Toosey accepted the need for closer diplomatic relations between the two countries although he was critical in private of the decision to invite the Emperor, believing that The Queen had been ill advised.17 Before the annual conference of the National Federation in May 1971, Toosey persuaded the executive to agree that under no circumstances would they countenance protests. But he knew that the delegates’ anger would be more difficult to harness. Harold Payne, Toosey’s deputy on the executive, assured government ministers that as a highly respected ex-servicemen’s organisation they would do nothing to jeopardise their standing in the country. Toosey made it clear to the delegates that a failure to support the executive’s decision would result in his resignation. His authority among the POWs and his standing in the country ensured that the motion was carried, eliciting a sigh of relief from Whitehall. In a letter to Toosey, Lord Mountbatten (the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle) praised the POWs for ‘their statesmanlike attitude’.18 On 5 October the Emperor was accorded ‘a silent welcome’ as he processed with The Queen in an open landau up The Mall – a ‘welcome’ that referred directly to Japan’s war record and in particular the treatment by the Japanese of POWs and civilian internees. Later the Emperor planted a specimen of Cryptomeria japonica in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which had been imported for the occasion from Nikko, the central shrine of Shintoism. A few hours later the tree was felled and poison poured over the earth to destroy the

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roots. A placard left nearby proclaimed: ‘They did not die in vain.’ Next day the incident was described in detail on the front page of The Times providing a timely riposte to the effusive twelve-page supplement on Anglo-Japanese relations which had appeared in that newspaper 3 days earlier.19 The State Visit to London of Hirohito’s son, the Heisei Emperor (Akihito) took place in 1998. The Queen’s intention to create him an Extra Knight of the Order of the Garter was received with dismay even beyond the POW community.20 This time, no assurances about potential demonstrations could be given by senior POWs. In the late 1980s the POW organisations were engaged in a bitter debate among themselves about whether to press for extra compensation from Japan. The leadership of NFFCA recommended compromise whereupon one of the clubs (at Southend-on-Sea) seceded and in 1988, under the chairmanship of Bill Holtham, set up a new organisation, the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors’ Association (JLCSA). This was a much more assertive group whose aim was to secure compensation from the Japanese. Their newsletter, FEPOW Fulcrum, took the place of the London Association’s FEPOW Forum, which ceased publication in 1986 at a time of increasingly acrimonious debate over the compensation issue. Later, under the chairmanship of Arthur Titherington who had been a POW in Taiwan, the JLCSA worked closely with the Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region (ABCIFER), formed in 1994 by survivors among the British civilians interned by the Japanese during the war. The Association included members who had been born in captivity thus providing a potent combination of men and women of different ages. Their expressed intention to demonstrate wherever the Imperial couple travelled in the United Kingdom alarmed the British government. The Japanese government was reported to have agonised over the form of words to be used in a statement expressing regret but without offering the formal apology the POWs sought.21 The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, begged the nation to give the Emperor ‘a warm welcome . . . to celebrate a strong modern relationship.’22 He pleaded with the POWs to remember the trade links, tourism, investments, and cultural links. The popular newspaper, The Mirror, rightly mocked his insensitivity on their front page, enquiring ‘What Price Our Heroes Tony?’23 As the procession headed by The Queen and the Emperor passed up The Mall to Buckingham Palace on 26 May 1998 hundreds of former POWs and civilian internees turned their backs and there were jeers and boos from the crowd. A Japanese flag was burnt in the street. Television crews from all over the world were in attendance. Spokesmen for both governments insisted that the visit had been a great success. The Emperor’s aide, Kazuo Chiba, a former Japanese ambassador to Britain, declared: ‘My impression was that he [the Emperor] took it in his stride. If I may invite another phrase, it doesn’t get under our skin.’24 It is noteworthy that not one single former POW was invited by the Royal Household or the British Government to any of the official dinners or


receptions given for the Emperor and Empress. Eric Lomax, who had written a popular account of his wartime experiences in Thailand and embraced reconciliation, was the ‘token’ POW at the Japanese banquet. When one former POW managed to speak with the Emperor at a reception given by the Japan Society, the latter expressed his pleasure at their meeting and commented that this was the first opportunity he had to meet with anyone who had been in captivity.25 The Empress met with a group of children and grandchildren of former POWs and civilian internees in Westminster Abbey and was moved to tears.26 Throughout the 1990s the campaign by the JLCSA and ABCIFER for additional compensation gained momentum. They obtained the support of a ‘Cross Party Group’ of members of the House of Commons and, belatedly in 1998, the executive of NFFCA and the British Legion. Although both governments – British and Japanese – were adamant that the San Francisco Treaty of 1951–52 had settled the issue of compensation, the increasing probability of a legal challenge forced the British government to act. On 7 November 2000 an announcement was made that a special ex-gratia payment of £10,000 would be paid to surviving POWs and internees or their widows. A senior British journalist, John Simpson, commented, ‘Realistically only Whitehall can make up for the meanness and contempt with which it behaved towards these people nearly 50 years ago.’27

The historical record The three seminal books on the captivity relate to the Thailand–Burma Railway and in their time defined the public perception of POWs of the Japanese. These are: Behind Bamboo by Rohan D. Rivett, with a foreword dated November 1945, published in early 1946; John Coast’s Railroad of Death, which appeared in July 1946; and Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, written in 1950 and published in 1952. Rivett was an Australian journalist. Rivett was seconded from the Australian Imperial Force at the end of 1941 to go to Singapore as news editor, and subsequently war correspondent, of Malaya Broadcasting Corporation. He escaped from Singapore only to be captured in the Netherlands East Indies where he spent the first months of his captivity before being shipped to Burma. His account is based closely on the diary he managed to keep for much of his time as a POW. Coast was a subaltern in the Royal Norfolk Regiment whose fascist views were a matter of concern to the Home Office in London. Braddon was captured during the Muar River battle as a gunner in the Australian Imperial Force. He began his captivity in Pudu Jail in Kuala Lumpur, experienced Changi, and then went to Thailand as part of the Australian contingent in ‘H’ Force, before returning to Singapore. Rivett, Coast and, to a lesser extent, Braddon were all in a position to retain notes reflecting their immediate experiences. Very few POWs had the opportunity to maintain diaries especially after 1944 when the Japanese were

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Figure 4.2 The original cemetery at Chungkai Camp in Thailand, 1945. The photograph shows the original wooden crosses that were replaced by concrete head plinths bearing engraved bronze plaques when the cemetery was laid out by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Source: Private collection.

seeking to destroy evidence of their crimes. But these records do exist and outstanding accounts were written by newly liberated POWs or by those on the voyage home. The national repository of these manuscripts, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London, has seen its collection grow, but is rightly cautious of narratives written in recent years where memory is the only source. Gradually, as time passed, a ‘collective memory’ developed and memoirs fed off each other. But there has been no manipulation of the wartime record in the United Kingdom for purposes of national identity as has occurred in Australia with the ‘mateship’ contention, to which Hank Nelson alludes in Chapter 2 above, and Hack and Blackburn in Chapter 9 below. For many POWs, writing an account of the years in captivity proved cathartic. David Piper, author of I am well, who are you?, served in the Indian Army in Malaya and became a POW in Taiwan. He described the stages by which he came to record his experiences: For a decade after the war I was haunted by the need to formulate, precipitate the essential character and significance of our prison existence, and frustrated by the apparent impossibility of translating it into a form


comprehensible to anyone who had not shared it. Only in 1955 was I released from this need, when I saw [Samuel] Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. That play for me was a near-perfect statement of the prisoner’ condition of suspension in stagnant time, and I recognised it with profound gratitude. But, Piper adds, Below a certain subsistence level, other considerations vanish . . . the urgency of hunger was the essential governor of survival. . . . But twenty years later, I can no longer feel, even remember, this state of being hungry, of living as hunger.28 Perhaps the book that has had more influence than any other is that of Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido, an overview of Japanese war crimes published in 1958. Russell was a barrister and for many years was also judge advocate-general. His intention was not to write a sensational book but to prepare a multi-volume scholarly work on the trials from the transcripts. But his publishers decreed otherwise and the two books on war crimes, one relating to the Japanese and the other to the Germans, became bestsellers. In 1978 TNA began to release the transcripts of the proceedings of the British War Crimes Tribunal in the Far East (the B&C Trials) providing a wealth of material about both the POWs and their captors. The sworn statements made by the POWs in 1945 and 1946, and the reports, provide the single most important source for the history of the captivity. As commentaries too on the ‘collective memory’ they are invaluable. But it has to be remembered that many of the reports written in captivity or immediately afterwards had a purpose in seeking to justify actions or to exonerate individuals whose decisions were open to question.

Memory and commemoration The subject of POWs of the Japanese has been kept alive in the United Kingdom by a flow of books, films, documentaries on television and magazines. Much of this interest has been stimulated by recent commemorations of wartime events, in particular the fiftieth anniversary in 1995 of the end of World War II, and the sixtieth of the two major events in POW history: the fall of Singapore (2002) and the end of World War II (2005). In many ways the 1995 commemorations marked a watershed in both the public perception of POWs and official recognition of their sufferings. For the first time, POWs were feted in cities and towns throughout the United Kingdom. Although denied an official memorial service in London’s Westminster Abbey, the POWs organised a service in St Paul’s Cathedral, which was filled to capacity.

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Thus it was 50 years before the legacy of defeat began to fade and the POWs could make claims on the public attention. When I began my researches on POWs of the Japanese in the early 1990s, I soon discovered that very few of these men had spoken of the captivity to their families or to friends outside the POW circle. I started with large reunions: in England at the Norham and District Ex-Far East P. O. W. Club at Alnwick, Northumberland in 1990, and in Australia at the International Reunion at Adelaide in October 1993. I concluded that had I started 10 years earlier I would not have gained considerably more information, although I have often had reason to regret the fact that particular POWs were no longer alive. As the general perception of POWs in the United Kingdom altered from the 1990s onwards and the sense of isolation diminished, many more were encouraged to come forward and share their experiences. This change has been helped by the interest shown in the history of POWs by their children and grandchildren, who have recently added a new memorial for the ex-FEPOWs. Previous memorials to the POWs include one in the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, where a relic of the Thailand– Burma Railway is preserved together with the standard of the FEPOW Association (1941–45) of London which was laid up in 2002. The church of Our Lady and St Thomas at Wymondham in Norfolk in the heartland of the 18th Division was built in 1952 by the Revd Fr Malcolm Cowin, a chaplain on the Thailand–Burma Railway, and dedicated to the memory of all who died at the hands of the Japanese. The FEPOW shrine is within the church and contains memorial books listing the names of both POWs and civilian internees. A service of remembrance is held in May each year attended by former POWs and their families, and also by diplomatic representatives of the principal Allied nations involved in the war against Japan. This church has also made links with Japan to emphasise the need for reconciliation and understanding.29 But the principle memorial in the United Kingdom has been established by COFEPOW (Children and Families of Far East Prisoners of War), a group founded in 1993 by Carol Cooper, the daughter of a POW on the Thailand–Burma Railway who died in captivity. The FEPOW Memorial Building was built at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire with funds raised by COFEPOW and dedicated on 15 August 2000 at a ceremony conducted by a former POW, Revd Ray Rossiter, the last chairman of NFFCA.30 A permanent exhibition at the Memorial Building which was fashioned in the style of the huts in which the POWs lived in Southeast Asia includes descriptive panels, photographs, drawings and artefacts covering all aspects of the FEPOW experience as well as video recordings. A touch-screen installation provides access to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s records which enables visitors to discover the burial places of those who did not return. A section of the Thailand–Burma Railway was presented to the Memorial Building and installed as a reminder of the human cost of this undertaking. When the decision was made to close


NFFCA, it was agreed that COFEPOW was the natural successor. In this way future generations were entrusted with the commemoration of the POWs and the guardianship of the POW story in the United Kingdom. In Thailand the POWs are honoured in a building situated next to the principle military cemetery in Kanchanaburi. This houses the Thailand– Burma Railway Centre which was planned, designed and built by Rod Beattie, an Australian who has made a study of the construction of this railway his life’s work. Here visitors are able to gauge the enormity of the task which faced the Allied POWs and the Asian labourers during the period June 1942–October 1943 and the toll of suffering and death. By means of models, videos, photographs, relics and memorabilia the story of all the nationalities involved is narrated with exemplary accuracy and fairness.31 Here an appropriate corrective is given to the thousands who flock to Kanchanaburi each year in search of The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Notes 1 Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 206. 2 ‘First Battalion, The Manchester Regiment Malaya, Thailand, Burma 1939–1945’, pp. 1–30, offprint from The Manchester Regiment Gazette, Manchester, 1946. See also, A. C. Bell, History of the Manchester Regiment First and Second Battalions, 1922–1948 (Altrincham, John Sherratt & Son, 1954), pp. 79–103. 3 ‘9th Battalion Eastern Tour, 1941 to 1945’, [by Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Flower], Dover, St George’s Gazette, LXIV, 143–8, 157–61, LXV, 10–14, 18–23, 30–3, 43–6, 59–60, 72–4. See also, C. N. Barclay The History of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers in the Second World War (London: William Clowes, 1952), pp. 84–94. 4 TNA, CO980/52, telegram, Sir R. Campbell, Lisbon to Foreign Office, 2 February 1942; Foreign Office memorandum signed by Lieutenant Colonel S. J. Cole, 4 February 1942. 5 Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Volume 378. House of Commons Official Report, 24 February–26 March 1942 (London: HMSO, 1942), pp. 930–47. 6 The Times, 11 March 1942. 7 Quoted in Joan and Clay Blair, Return from the River Kwai (London: Futura Publications, 1980), pp. 301–2. 8 Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series- Volume 404. House of Commons Official Report, 24 October-28 November 1944 (London: HMSO, 1944), pp. 2243–6. 9 Article 16 of the 1952 Peace Treaty expressed a desire to indemnify those members of the armed forces of the Allied Powers who suffered ‘undue hardships’ while prisoners of war of Japan. 10 There have been four chairmen of NFFCA: Lieutenant General Percival, Brigadier Sir Philip Toosey, Mr Harold Payne who resigned in 2000 because of ill health and Revd Ray Rossiter. The ceremonial closure of the organisation occurred in 2005. 11 Typed letter signed by Lieutenant General A. E. Percival to Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Flower, Widford, Ware, 15 October 1956 (Private Collection). 12 Programme, London FEPOW Association, Fortieth Annual Reunion and Service of Remembrance, Barbican Hall, 3 October 1992, President’s Message [page 1]. 13 Quoted in the Telegraph Magazine, 29 July 1995, pp. 30–35. The article is a profile of members of the 9th Bn The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers by Robert Chesshyre. 14 The Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2004, p. 4.

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15 TNA, CAB 101/199. 16 S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. v (London: HMSO, 1969), appendix 30, pp. 532–41. 17 Julie Summers, The Colonel of Tamarkan (London: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 359. 18 Summers, Colonel of Tamarkan, p. 360. 19 The Times, 3, 6 October 1971. 20 Brian Sewell, ‘The Shaming of the Garter’, in the Evening Standard, 19 May 1998. 21 The Times, 15 April, 28 May 1998. 22 The Express, 26 May 1998. 23 The Mirror, 26 May 1998. 24 The Mirror, 27 May 1998. 25 The officer was Colonel P.S.W. Dean, a POW in Thailand and Japan who served as British Military Attaché in Tokyo, 1960–64. 26 The children and grandchildren of former POWs and civilian internees who met the Empress were members of ‘Pacific Venture’ which was established in 1995 as part of the ‘Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative’ of Prime Minister Murayama to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The children are invited to visit Japan under the scheme which has recently been extended to 2009. 27 The Sunday Telegraph, 31 May 1998. 28 David Piper, I am well, who are you? (Exeter: Delian Bower Publishing, 1998), pp. 14–15. 29 Fr Cowin was chaplain to the 2nd Bn The Cambridgeshire Regiment. The website of the Church of Our Lady and St Thomas at Wymondham is www.fepowmemorial.org.uk. 30 The COFEPOW website is www.cofepow.org.uk. For the National Memorial Arboretum, see www.nationalmemorialarboretum.org.uk. 31 Rod Beattie is the author of The Death Railway, A Brief History (Bangkok, Image Makers Co Ltd, 2nd edition, 2006). This provides a succinct and accurate survey of the building of the railway. For the Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, see www.tbrconline.com/.

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5

Indian POWs in the Pacific, 1941–45 G. J. Douds

The truth is that our Indian Soldiers had a double burden to bear. In addition to years of brutal treatment, semi-starvation and disease from which all prisoners of the Japanese suffered, they had to contend with prolonged attacks on their loyalty by persecution and persistent insidious propaganda. When continued unchallenged for years on end this must have had a telling effect, for how could they fail to feel that perhaps after all the British Raj was finished? Even for the unconvinced but fainthearted it must have been a temptation to salve the conscience with the excuse of duress. . . . thousands of loyal Indian soldiers stood firm. For some reason their story has never been fully told . . . Their loyalty to their salt under such conditions is something for which no praise can be too high.1 Colonel Russell-Roberts, with first hand experience of Japanese captivity, recorded the above tribute in 1965. To a degree the ‘story’ has remained untold. Indians seldom figure either in published work dealing with POWs in general, or in museums in Singapore and Hong Kong which refer to captured ‘Allied Troops’.2 The only detailed assessment to date, dealing with camps in New Guinea, confirms that Indian POWs have been ‘largely overlooked in the war literature of both India and the Western Allies’.3 Not untypical is a magisterial study dealing with the prisoners of the Japanese in the Pacific, where a rationale is set out for confining the project to whites and Eurasian Dutch. Captured Indians, Chinese, Filipinos and Indonesians are summarily dismissed: ‘thousands died in the first weeks as prisoners, of those surviving the great majority were released within months’.4 A recent BBC Timewatch study of the Indian Army in World War II bears the wistful title, ‘The Forgotten Volunteers’.5 It is the purpose of this chapter to establish that Indian POWs endured parallel periods of captivity to those experienced by white counterparts in conditions equivalent or worse; that they were consistently subjected to compelling propaganda; that a majority exhibited adherence to a soldierly ethos in the most adverse circumstances. The discussion will uncover Japanese-sponsored intrigue in the East. It will examine strategies calculated to suborn POWs; levels of resistance; and the treatment of Indian POWs.

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It will review Allied policies designed to manage the Indian POW situation in respect of publicity and repatriation. Finally, it will assess the validity of Colonel Russell-Robert’s claims for ‘loyalty to the salt’ beyond praise. A first priority is to quantify the Indian troops involved. By the end of 1941 some 300,000 Indians had been sent overseas. By the end of 1942 the Indian Army numbered over 1,800,000.6 Much would be made of the ‘volunteer’ aspect, but the sharp pace of recruitment brought problems. Events in Malaya would expose predominately adolescent and inexperienced Indian troops.7 In the Malayan campaign, cultimating in the fall of Singapore, the 9th and 11th Indian Divisions sustained major losses8. The extraordinary speed of the Japanese advance in Malaya at the close of 1941, 55 days from the north to the southern coast opposite Singapore, produced a run of surrenders, the great mass of Indian troops going ‘into the bag’ with the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942. Hong Kong, with a small Indian garrison, surrendered on Christmas Day 1941. Precise numbers captured are not easy to establish. The most recent scholarly estimate for Indian troops captured at Singapore is around 60,000.9 The Cabinet paper estimate for the proportion who afterwards defected to the Japanese-sponsored INA was 20,000. But an India Office memorandum of January 1944 admitted to a strong dose of guess work in any figure. Death rates for prisoners are also unclear, and varied with location, the highest being claimed for Indian POWs in New Guinea.10 The death rate for Indian POWs who resisted Japanese overtures remained substantially higher than for those who went over to the INA.11 Fundamental cultural differences between the Nazi and Japanese military hierarchies also determined very different conditions for, and death rates of, their British and Allied POWs. A major point of departure lay in attitudes to the 1929 Geneva Convention. The early months of the war saw British and German governments set up arrangements for the implementation of the Convention.12 When the Allies sought an assurance from Japan that she would adhere to the Convention, Japan replied that she was not formally bound, but would apply it mutatis mutandis. In practice, the Japanese ‘violated the letter and spirit of the convention in almost every prison and internment camp’.13 Red Cross parcels, which were to transform the lives of Indian prisoners in Europe, loyal and disloyal, did not reach Indian prisoners in the Pacific.

Groundwork for sedition Japanese groundwork for subversion was documented in a confidential ‘Guide’ issued by the Government of India in 1943. This acknowledged that the Japanese had ‘stolen a march on us’.14 A basis was provided through colonies of disaffected Indians, present in centres in the Far East ‘for many years before the war’. An Indian Congress Party, Bangkok, was founded in 1936; by 1939 batches of ‘fifth columnists’ were poised for propaganda work in Malaya. A conference in Tokyo in 1937, attended by future leaders of the

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India Independence League and Indian National Army, planned anti-British propaganda in Siam, Malaya, Burma and India; ‘special’ attention was given to Indian troops in the Far East. Japanese consular signals intercepted in 1939 revealed subversive activity among Indian troops.15 The subversion campaign moved up a gear with the decision of the Japanese General Staff in September 1941 to commission Major Fujiwara, a specialist in Military Intelligence, to promote disaffection among Indian troops in the British garrisons of Malaya and Singapore.16 Fujiwara thought of himself as a kind of ‘Japanese Lawrence of Arabia’.17 His remarkable drive and sincerity focused on the achievement of freedom for indigenous peoples and the rejection of Japanese occupation of India.18 This startling idealism did not travel far in the higher reaches of the Japanese military, where the prospect of an all-India revolution was not taken seriously. But the desire to wreck the British Indian Army drew Indian dissidents and Japanese together.19

Suborning Indian troops in the Far East In May 1941, the American journalist C. M. Crighton predicted, in a Japanese publication, that Indian troops in Singapore might refuse to resist a land attack on grounds of ‘discriminatory treatment, quarters and duties’. He reported ‘constant large scale clashes’ between Indian and Australian troops.20 On 18 September the Japanese Army established a subversion mission in Bangkok which enabled Major Fujiwara to meet Pritam Singh of the Indian Independence League and establish an immediate personal bond. It was agreed that propaganda activities among British Indian troops stationed in Malaya, who according to Pritam Singh were highly susceptible, should be immediately stepped up.21 Thus the Fujiwara Kikan organisation dedicated to the subversion of British Indian troops moved forward with the support of leaflets dropped from the air, and an intensive pan-Asian propaganda campaign mounted by Japanese radio.22 Japan’s attack on Malaya in December 1941 ushered in insurrections and surrenders among Indian troops. At the close of December, Fujiwara’s organisation, with the key involvement of captured Indian officers, established the INA. This drew upon Indian troops who had already ‘gone into the bag’. On the surrender of Captain Mohan Singh’s 14th Punjab Regiment, in Fujiwara’s version, ‘there was a roar of joy from the Indian soldiers’. This force had been decimated by a Japanese surprise attack on 11 December 1941, north of Jitra; many of the Indians having never seen a tank before.23 However, other Indian units held up; the ‘Thomas’ report of May 1942 (based on accounts from over fifty officers, civil servants and private individuals) attested to the ‘good spirit’ of the 11th Indian Division at the end of a rearguard action fought over 400 miles.24 A number of contemporary explanations for Indian defections do not convince. The Thomas Report challenged the assertion by the Australian General, Gordon Bennett, that the prime cause lay in ‘low morale Indian

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troops’ due to ‘Eastern races less able to withstand the strain of modern war’. This drew the riposte: ‘Indians had fought the whole way down the mainland and at the end little to choose between their morale and A. I. F.’.25 A thoughtful view emanated with the editor of the Straits Times. Granted, it went, some Indian units had held up admirably, but others ‘gave themselves up to the enemy distressingly readily’: here the Japanese propagandists were at their most brilliant. By means of radio and pamphlets dropped by aircraft, they flogged the point that they were fighting only the white man; that the British were putting the Asiatic troops in the front line as cannon fodder, while the white soldiers remained skulking in the background. They promised that any Asiatic soldier who gave himself up would go unharmed, and there is evidence the promise was kept, at least in the first instance.26 The sheer volume of Indian troops deployed in the Malayan and Burma campaigns, over half the Allied forces, has been consistently overlooked.27 Nor have minimal levels of training for Indian troops and unpreparadeness for jungle warfare been given due weight. Brigadier Bristow recalled ‘jungle training’ in Persia: ‘bare narrow valleys of solid rock . . . we say to the Dogra, “Imagine a dense jungle of trees, with visibility of only ten yards”’.28 The commander of the 17th Indian Division recorded major reservations as to the potential of his 45th and 44th Brigades. The 45th, diverted from the Middle East, was overrun on the Muar front, north of Johor. The 44th which arrived on 29 January 1942, participated in the final rout across Singapore Island. As Brigadier Smythe recalled, ‘they were unfit for any form of military operations – let alone jungle warfare against the most highly trained jungle fighters in the world’.29 The raw character of the 45th greatly exercised a veteran Australian battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Anderson, who had the ‘highest regard’ for the fighting qualities of Indian troops as remembered from the East African campaigns of 1914–18: ‘in common with my officers I felt extremely disturbed that it was necessary to have had to employ such immature and partly trained troops. Most of the troops were I should say about 17 years old and had adolescent fluff on their cheeks’.30 The circumstances of total defeat left their mark, as John Crasta, a Madrasi serviceman recalled: ‘Days of high nervous tension . . . we saw lorries and motor cycles moving at top speed, conveying defeated men, both Indian and British, retreating’.31 Crasta participated in the historic gathering at Farrer Park, Singapore, on 17 February 1942 when around 60,000 Indians were handed over to the Japanese. General Kiani has spoken for his fellow ‘outraged’ prisoners: it appeared as if they were being handed over from one master to another like a herd of cattle’. Fujiwara spoke at length (in Japanese translated into English) on the astonishingly speedy rout of the ‘mighty British forces in


Malaya’ and the destruction of ‘the invincible fortress of Singapore’, the Emperor had commanded that all Indians be treated like brothers.32 Fujiwara was succeeded by the ‘arch traitor’ (as styled by the Government of India) Captain Mohan Singh, who drew upon his ‘marked gift for eloquence’ to explain how British Imperialism had reduced India to a state of abject poverty.33 The theme of ‘independence’ and a ‘national army’ followed. Predictably, Fujiwara recalled ‘continuous applause, flying caps, waving hands’ and a surge forward to pledge to Captain Mohan. Crasta’s memoir noted enthusiasm, and something else: ‘Several faces becoming sad’; such sentiments as ‘What will become of my family? Oh God’. Crasta mused: ‘This only goes to illustrate . . . how the privations of a one-sided campaign, defections, despair, discouragement, and a sense of helplessness overcome a soldier when he is deprived of his arms’.34 When explanations came to be sought, much was made of the role of Indian officers in sponsoring defection. The inadequacy of the British chain of command had been mercilessly exposed in the Malayan campaign, and the stock of the Indian officers rose accordingly. Moreover in the Singapore of February 1942, everything did point to the end of the Raj. ‘The City of Blimps’, as an American CBS correspondent described it, had manifested snobbery both in the humiliation of white servicemen and in affronts to Indian commissioned officers. Now, the ‘Heaven Born’ British were vanquished.35 These were propitious circumstances in which to suborn captured Indian troops. As General Tucker explained: They had seen disgraceful sights in Singapore before the surrender – men of all races behaving in craven fashion. They had ceased to believe in these people or in their capacity to win the war . . . they were alone with the Japanese conqueror. They joined him, not willingly because there was no one else and would be no one else they could join, and, with him, perhaps they would once more see their homes.36 One clue lay in the divide between officers and men. The erratic Bengali litterateur, N. C. Chaudhuri, argued that: a fundamental distinction has to be made between the conduct of the officers of the Indian Army and of the rank and file . . . the latter were overwhelmingly peasants from the rural districts of the Punjab with little or no political consciousness. They had joined the Indian Army because it offered them money and because military service was the hereditary and traditional profession for young men of the peasantry. The Indian officers Chaudhuri dismissed as ‘a brood of opportunists’.37 But this does scant justice to the mix of motives at work. National conviction weighed with Captain P. K. Sahgal and his immediate colleagues:

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G. J. Douds The only solution we could think of for our country’s problems was the formation of a strong and well-disciplined body which should fight for the liberation of India from the existing alien rule, [which] should be able and ready to provide protection to their countrymen against any possuble molestation by the Japanese, and to resist any attempt by the latter to establish themselves as rulers of the country in place of the British.38

Pointers to Sahgal’s frustrations lay in grievances about pay and racial discrimination which surfaced in captivity, indeed were present to a degree in the larger Indian Army.39 Perhaps the most rounded contemporary explanation of why some went over was offered by the Commander in Chief, India, Auchinleck, in a letter sent to all senior commanders in February 1946. He reminded them of the bitterness bred in the minds of many Indian officers in the early days of ‘Indianisation’, by the discrimination exercised against them. As for the other ranks, Auchinleck argued that: the terrible tragedy of Singapore following on the fall of Hong Kong must have seemed to the great majority . . . to be the end of all things, and certainly of the British Raj to whom the Army had been used for so many years of war and peace to look to as its universal provider and protector. . . . Removal of British officers had been critical. Indian troops ‘were at once assailed by traitors who had been kept in readiness by the Japanese to seduce them from their allegiance’. Auchinleck cautioned, though, against blanket condemnation: The strain and the pressure to which these men, the majority of whom were simple peasant farmers with no educational or cultural background, were subjected to is very difficult for any British officer, however experienced, to visualise . . . It is quite wrong to take the attitude that because these men had taken service in a British controlled Indian Army that therefore their loyalties must be the same as those of British soldiers. As I have tried to explain, they had no real loyalty or patriotism towards Britain as Britain, not as we understand loyalty.40 Explaining why Indian officers went over presented a more complex task. Auchinleck singled out the mismanagement of ‘Indianisation’: Many senior British officers believed and even hoped that it would fail . . . The differential treatment in respect of pay and terms of service . . . the prejudice and lack of manners by some British officers and their wives, all went to produce a very deep and bitter feeling of racial discrimination in the minds of the most intelligent and progressive of the Indian officers.


These Auchinleck took to be ‘naturally nationalists, keen to see India standing on her own legs and not to be ruled from Whitehall forever. It is no use shutting one’s eyes to the fact that any Indian officer worth his salt is a nationalist’.41 Despite these pressures, many Indian prisoners testified later that the campaign to get them to join the INA had no effect, despite the removal of anti-INA leaders into ‘separation camps’ and the inflicting of beatings.42 Indians appear to have held out for a number of reasons. Some officers were highly Anglicised, while others drew upon generations of service with British colours. There was suspicion of officers moving to the new INA on the basis of rich promotion prospects. Viceroy commissioned officers became junior officers in the INA.43 One ‘reliable’ estimate proposes a figure of 400 Indian officers going over, but that includes 250 doctors of the Indian Medical Service who put the care of their men first.44 The statistics prepared for the British Cabinet’s India and Burma Committee give a figure of 20,000 defectors out of 60,000.45 In all 16,000 were formed into an INA division, a ceiling imposed by the Japanese. The surplus remained POWs. The collapse of the first INA in January 1943 could have been anticipated. It stemmed from the wide gulf between Indian expectations and Japanese intentions. The detachment to other duties of Fujiwara, the one Japanese who held the trust of Mohan Singh, contributed. And the Japanese officer corps was disinclined to respect soldiers who had switched allegiance, and whose wish was to return to their own country rather than die for Nippon.46 In January 1943, tensions between Mohan Singh and the Japanese resulted in his arrest, whereupon around 4,000 of the INA deserted. Hostility between Sikhs and Muslims further undermined INA solidarity.47 The arrival of the charismatic Subhas Chandra Bose in the East in May 1943 (courtesy of a dramatic two-stage submarine voyage) inspired a second INA, further enlistments partially compensating for previous losses.48 But when Bose sent his regiments into Burma in 1944 with cries of Chalo Delhi (On to Delhi) and Jai Hind (Hail to India), their endeavours proved disastrous. There were complaints about the absence of a proper fighting role and lack of supplies.49 This doubtful record supplied meat and drink to critics of the INA, headed by General Tuker who wrote; ‘When they engaged the Indian Army they did so with only half a heart and at the first chance they either fled or, preferably, surrendered themselves in shoals . . .’.50 However its military frailty did not detract from the political impact of the INA, exercised to good effect in the course of the Red Fort Trials which commenced in November 1945.51 This ill-judged exercise initially placed three senior INA officers, one Muslim, one Hindu, one Sikh, on trial for – among other charges – ‘waging war against the King’. The unprecedented scale of popular uproar and repeated rioting, which accompanied the show trial and its findings, led Auchinleck to quash the transportation sentences and release the men.52

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Treatment of Indian prisoners of war in Japanese hands For the majority of the Indian POWs who rejected Japanese blandishments, transportation lay ahead, principally to New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville. To this end, camps were established on Java at Batavia (Jakarta) and Surabaya, for transit purposes.53 In determining the treatment of Indian prisoners, little confidence can be placed in Japanese published instructions. Official Japanese guidelines on the ‘Handling of Indian Soldiers’ issued in April 1943 described the captured Indian troops as ‘nothing but hired men’ who harboured little affection for their former colonial masters. Possibly for this reason, it stated that they would receive ‘the unexpected and sincere protection of the Imperial Army’. There followed an extensive briefing on Indian religions and instructions on appropriate treatment. Indian officers would be granted authority to command Indian troops. Japanese Guards should ‘restrain from striking or ridiculing a soldier in the front of others. Especially, when giving sincere guidance and instructing an officer, it is important that he be reprimanded at a secluded place’. Significantly, only minimal and indirect reference was made to the INA: ‘1000 INDIAN soldiers, fired with a desire for independence, are doing duty as Imperial Army replacement units and labour units’.54 Pious hopes were by and large demolished by practice on the ground. Files compiled by Allied interrogators reveal that the privations endured by Indian prisoners often exceeded European levels.55 When Sepoy Maqsud Ali of the 4/9 Jats was captured near Bakri, Malaya, in January 1942, his party of some 200 were bound, ordered to stand to attention, then massacred with pistol, rifle, bayonet and sword. Only Ali, who escaped into a swamp, and two comrades survived.56 The testimony of Captain V. K. Pillay (Indian Medical Service) was equally damning. In Singapore, Japanese troops confiscated watches, compasses, binoculars and other items of value. Indian officers were treated as Other Ranks for the purposes of fatigues. In Malaya’s Buller Camp hospital, patients slept on salvaged rags or sandbags. The supply of surgical requirements was negligible. There was a similar absence of beds, mattresses and sheets at the Kranji Hospital on Singapore. Last but not least, numbers of POWs were used ‘as subject[s] for experiments. . .[on] certain diseases, in particular dysentery and malaria’.57 Transportation from Singapore to the Netherlands East Indies and beyond produced its own horrors. Crasta found himself one of 2,000 men crammed onto the 900-ton ‘Torture Ship’, Cargo Vessel No. 369. He had to make do with a space 3 foot long and 1 foot broad. On another ship, Captain Pillay was informed that ‘water and air was not for the prisoners’. There were three latrines for 2,200 prisoners. Indian POWs shunted between the islands of Ambon and Palau (New Guinea) in June 1943 made the mistake of cheering the sinking of two Japanese ships in the convoy. They were incarcerated in an airless hole below decks, where many died. Lieutenant Patel of the Indian Medical Service, who survived a 56-day voyage from Singapore to Rabaul,


claimed 80 per cent of his comrades died. Captain A. M. S. Charmarette arrived at Kokopo, New Britain, in June 1943, after 57 days at sea ‘in the ‘Hell Hole’ ship Hibi Maru: one of 669 men crowded in one hold. He claimed they had been given no food, had had no sleep, and had been compelled to drink salt water. By the end, more were dead than alive.58 Once transported to New Guinea and New Britain, POWs like Pillay had to contend with ‘even more scanty’ supplies of medicines. Initially adequate rations dwindled until, after June 1944, prisoners and Japanese in administrative employment became entirely dependent on what they could forage in the jungle. The Japanese justified this barbaric treatment on the grounds that since Allied forces in Malaya had surrendered unconditionally, they were free to act as they pleased with the captives. Major Fujiwara’s pan-Asian ideals counted for little in New Guinea. Japanese there placed Indians outside their Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, as ‘a race of coolies and barbarians’. Although newspapers in Urdu and English were provided, they contained only anti-British propaganda. There were summary executions for alleged food thefts and escape attempts.59 At Hansa Bay in New Guinea, Hindu prisoners were also severely beaten for their refusal to touch beef. Yet in an ironic twist given the paucity of rations, the Japanese tried to prevent Muslims from fasting during Ramadan. Extra fatigues were imposed in a bid to enforce eating. The Muslims held out and the fast was eventually permitted; but in general no toleration was shown in religious matters. Clothing was only issued if the alternative was stark nudity. No clothing was received from the International Red Cross, nor visits made. When boots became unserviceable, prisoners improvised sandals from pieces of motor tyre, while at Batavia Prisoners’ Camp most went barefoot.60 But the most oppressive feature of life in the camps in New Guinea and New Britain was the requirement to work during daylight hours. Every man who could stand was forced to labour 7 days a week; and Indian officers were punished for the slightest misdeamenour or slackness on the part of their men. As Jemadar Sarwan Singh recalled, ‘The Japs were primarily concerned with getting as much hard work as possible out of the prisoners, everything else being subordinate to this aim’. Interrogation materials speak for the resolve of the Indian prisoners. During a 2-month voyage between Singapore and Rabaul, Naik Aziz Ahmad testified, constant efforts were made to turn prisoners. Their refusal to cooperate extended to the rejection of Japanese puttees in place of their own ragged clothing, ‘as they feared this might be construed to signify that they were favourable to Japanese military effort’. Likewise there was staunch resistance to forcing the prisoners to learn Japanese words of command in Mizuho Camp, Palau. According to Havildar/clerk Ajit Singh, the senior officer, Captain Pirzai, maintained that his men ‘could not be compelled to learn Japanese words of command or drill’. In consequence Pirzai and his fellow officers were subjected to savage treatment. They did not yield. As late as 1945, vicious attempts were made to suborn Indian prisoners at Kuala Belait

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(North Borneo). A mass refusal to join the Free Indian League attracted immediate bayoneting and beheading for some, ‘frequent and severe’ floggings for others.61 The scale of repression in the South Pacific is reflected in the execution procedures in New Britain documented by Captain Pillay. Attempted escape and food theft were principal crimes: Condemned men [were] forced to dig their own graves, were beated with sword blades, clubs, fists etc., starting off with the highest ranking Japanese officer, down the line to the privates. This was done the night before. In the morning the men were blindfolded, shot with rifles. [They were pushed] into the graves and were buried. In a case where a victim tumbled into a newly dug grave still alive, a machine gun was brought into play. Indians sick with disease, weakened by lack of food, and exhausted by long and heavy toil were routinely kicked and beaten even after they had collapsed.62 Of the 176 Indian POWs assigned to a working party at Wewak, New Guinea, in May 1943 under the command of Lieutenant Imamura of the 19 Special Sea Company, just one was still alive in February 1945, and he was subsequently killed by other Japanese.63 The fortitude shown by the Indian prisoners was remarkable. At Wewak, Indian POWs ‘usually slept in water’.64 At another camp in New Guinea, the commanding officer, Colonel Takano, routinely administered beatings with a 4-foot stick to sepoys stricken by beriberi. Nevertheless, they did not suffer mutely. At the end of July 1943, senior officers of Indian working parties signed a petition drawn up by Captain Nirpal Chand: The petition asked for better food, medicines, medical attention, shorter working hours and a rest day each week. It also requested that prisoners of war be treated according to international law, that officers should not be made to work and that Indian medical officers should be allowed to treat their own sick and not made to go on fatigues. Takano angrily rejected the petition, reminding the senior officers that they had surrendered unconditionally. They persisted, and when in August 1943 a second petition was rejected, they called a hunger strike. Takano’s first instinct was to bluster: ‘I will go to the Army commander and after his sanction I will kill everybody’. But some short-lived concessions followed. At the height of the protests, Takano dangled the lure of service with the INA, issuing notices proclaiming that any man joining ‘would not be made to work and would be sent back to Singapore by air’. None did.65 Another more formidable protest led by Captain Chand took place in April 1944. This was triggered by Japanese fears that an American landing in northern New Guinea was imminent. Indian prisoners were ordered to march west to


Hollandia, 300 kilometres through coastal jungle, to a ‘safer’ zone. In the testimony of Captain Mitsuba, Nirpal Chand incited his men to resist the move. Chand ‘spoke the Indian words and these Indians started to raise . . . knives and clubs’. They were overpowered, and Mitsuba and two fellow officers executed Nirpal Chand by beheading. As Mitsuba explained: ‘In view of the fact that an uprising had already taken place I had the orders from the Co[mpan]y Commander to deal with such matters’.66 Again at Komoriyama, New Britain, in June 1945 an attempt was made to impose badges on Indian prisoners belonging to the 5/11th Sikh Regiment.67 Their officers protested: ‘We are Indian Army prisoners of war and according to the law we are not allowed to wear any rank badges except those worn in that Army’. The Japanese threatened to shoot anyone who refused. At the end of a 5-day period of defiance Sikh officers were beaten senseless.68 Many similar episodes could be recounted.69 Conversely the participants of the eighty to ninety cases brought under the jurisdiction of Australian Military Courts for war crimes by the Japanese against Indian prisoners contain nothing suggestive of willing collaboration.70 In summary, Indian prisoners underwent ill treatment on a par with, and perhaps beyond, that meted out to European and American POWs. What is more, their unique cultures presented particular opportunities for humiliation, including the forcuble beard – and hair – cutting of Sikhs, on occasion with the use of matches.71 The New Guinea War Crimes Trials proceedings uncover a consistent pattern of beatings, incremental starvation, crippling labour regimes and summary executions. The virtual absence of any form of medical care was reflected in Surgeon Mukohata’s words at Komoriyama camp, where applicants for treatment were greeted with the taunt: ‘You want medicine, here it is. The stick is here for your inspection’.72 The failure of a prisoner to acknowledge this sinister doctor’s presence with a warm smile drew a ‘merciless beating’.73 Some of the darkest passages of this evidence concern cannibalism. In the summer of 1944 Lance Naik Hatam Ali was working in a forced labour party some 300 miles from Manokwari, New Guinea. Rations having dried up, ‘the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the Japanese. I personally saw this happen . . . about 100 prisoners were eaten’. In some cases, it seems, the Indian POWs were only kept alive as a potential food source.74 In the New Guinea War Crimes Trials, Australian military authorities went to great lengths to ensure that no impression of ‘victors’ justice should emerge. Twenty-five Japanese observers attended each trial. Sworn witness statements were habitually read back in Urdu or other ‘own’ languages prior to signature, and translations checked. A number of not guilty verdicts were recorded, and several apparently strong prosecution cases were thrown out due to technical identification difficulties.75 When Jemadar Chint Singh, a principal witness, exploded: ‘Why don’t you just shoot him?’ he summed up the frustration of many with the War Crimes process.76 Yet in the run of

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evidence provided by around ninety cases, only one instance stands out of ‘humanitarian’ behaviour by Japanese personnel or agencies – that of a Japanese camp commander who provided an Indian fugitive with shelter for 8 days.77

Managing the Indian prisoner of war situation: publicity and repatriation The Atlantic Charter of August 1941 legitimately portrayed the war as a democratic struggle against totalitarian darkness. Hence, a transfer of loyalties by Indian prisoners of war had a potential for embarrassment. The scale of defections in the Far East was so large that the British propaganda machine was forced to tone down more extravagant public statements extolling the loyalty of Indian troops.78 Not till after the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945 did an agreed press release about the INA surface, at the behest of the Indian delegation at the United Nations meeting in San Francisco. The document was only issued after detailed editing by the India Office and the Commander-in-Chief in Delhi. Nevertheless the government accepted that it could not continue to deny what was now widely known. A War Department memorandum cautioned that ‘[p]laying down’ the INA ‘would perplex Indian troops who had been fighting against them . . .’. Reference was also made to Japanese tactics involving bribery and coercion, and to the ‘many thousands’ who held firm, thus sentencing themselves to a life ‘of indescribable filth and suffering’ in Japanese labour camps in the South West Pacific.79 With post-war repatriation came the conundrums involved in disentangling the gullible from the malevolent. There was also the problem of identifying those who might have joined the INA ‘with a view to deceiving the enemy and escaping with information both about the enemy and Indian traitors assisting them’, as some had been instructed to by their officers in basic training. 80 The retrieval of prisoners in the Far East was placed in the hands of an organisation called Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI), soon to be restyled by cynical prisoners as ‘Retain all Prisonersof-War Indefinitely’.81 A directive on ‘Treatment and Evacuation’ of August 1945 anticipated ‘high morale . . . but their mental and physical conditions will vary considerably. At least 50% will require minor medical attention while up to 10% may be stretcher cases’. A ‘small advance of pay’ and 3 months repatriation leave were authorised.82 On the vexed issue of possible INA membership, Delhi advised its Australian agency along cautious lines: Based on our experience to date our policy is not to classify these men as traitors unless circumstances of capture show conclusively that they were willingly and actively assisting the enemy as combatants or they are proved to be engaged actively in espionage or fifth column work. . . . In many cases men have acted under compulsion or with intention of escaping as soon as opportunity offered.83

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Figure 5.1 Indian prisoner of war. Red Cross representative taking particulars from a member of a Punjab Regiment captured in Malaya. Source: Australian War Memorial Negative Number AWM017107.

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In practice, treatment varied. The Australians ‘gave us more than what we could eat, ungrudgingly, and better things than they gave to their own soldiers, drinks etc . . . disregarding all codes of etiquette’, wrote Crasta. Under the British RAPWI commandant, however, things changed. Indians had to build their own huts without material, while the offer of Japanese labour was rejected.84 Crasta attributed this to the ‘meanness or racial prejudice’ of the commandant. Equally, it may be that the INA was casting a long shadow. Commanders were impressed by the extent to which the Indian troops, despite severe privation in captivity, had retained a strong sense of military identity and demeanour. An Australian officer, observing the manner in which a ‘weak and ragged’ company of Sikhs and Punjabis had transformed themselves prior to entering headquarters, described it as ‘enobling’. At Komoriyama camp near Rabaul, Indian prisoners drilled with sticks within weeks of liberation.85 With hostilities closed down, the treatment of Indians who had gone over to the INA was sharply dividing the Indian military establishment.86 Reflecting probably a majority British view, General Tuker thought ‘the wall and the firing squad’ to be an appropriate end for INA leaders. They ‘had the mental habit of the Nazi prisoners I saw in Africa . . . They were the stuff of which the SS gunmen and criminals were made’.87 The unsurmountable difficulty lay in the strength of popular support for the INA prisoners, which was exacerbated by the government’s miscalculated decision to put INA officers on trial in the Red Fort. According to the Governor of Madras, ‘the cardinal error was made by bringing these men to India and not dealing with the leaders in summary courts martial on the spot.’88 Others, however, including the viceroy, Lord Wavell – a former commander-in-chief in North Africa – were exercised by the need to stand by loyal prisoners. Wavell found two Gurkha battalions, recently returned from camps in Malaya in October 1945, ‘far more bitter about the INA than about the Japs and said the worst of their ill treatment came from the former’.89 The key consideration revolved round the reliability of the Indian Army, as it was constituted at the close of 1945. As the War Department acknowledged: There was no doubt that the great majority of the Indian Army were hostile to the INA and that too much clemency would have appeared to them a mistake. This is probably still the feeling of those who were prisoners of war and remained true to their allegiance, of units which fought the INA in Burma and of the older men of the regular Army. But it no longer seems to be true of the majority, who are much more liable to be influenced by opinions in the Press and public clamour than the pre-war Army.90 Accordingly it was agreed that ‘abstract justice must to some extent give way to expediency’. Future trials would be limited to the small number of cases


which involved brutality and murder. In the event, only about 20 to 50 stood accused out of the original 20,000 thought to have joined the INA. The rest were redeployed on principles of ‘clemency and generosity’.91

Conclusion This paper set out to test the validity of Colonel Russell-Roberts’ tribute to the achievement of the Indian POWs. In the Pacific theatres, where RussellRoberts’ experiences were grounded, Japanese propagandists took advantage of the exposure of Indian troops to one of the most ignominious defeats in British history. The scale of the ordeals sustained by Indian troops during the Malayan campaign and the state of mind that followed eluded Allied leaders. As Colonel Hugh Toye, prominent in the interrogation of recovered Indian prisoners, wrote: ‘Indian troops had taken the brunt of the defeat. We should have understood. We didn’t’.92 Insensitive commanders also weakened old ties.93 All this was fertile soil for Japanese propaganda which persistently played upon the theme of Indian soldiers as cannon fodder, a screen behind which their white comrades took cover. Even General Tuker acknowledged the demoralising impact of British and Australian troops behaving in a most ‘craven fashion’ during the Singapore debacle.94 The contention that Indian POWs endured parallel periods of captivity to Allied counterparts and in general equivalent conditions can, to an extent, be sustained. The RAPWI arrangements for the Far East, marked by a determination to have recovered Indian troops classed as ‘British Troops’, were an acknowledgement, perhaps, of similar privations suffered. While it remains the case that captured Indian troops did not undergo the horrors of the Burma–Thailand Railway, the evidence adduced above suggests that Japanese behaviour towards POWs in the South Pacific was hardly less violent than that meted out in Burma. Indians held captive in the Pacific region endured ‘years of physical and mental persecution’.95 However, Russell-Roberts’ unqualified encomium, ‘their loyalty to their salt under such conditions is something for which no praise can be too high’, does not hold up universally. Defections in the Pacific were on a large scale. Moreover, there have been claims that one particular body of defectors behaved with brutality towards their former allies. Recalling the River Valley Camp on Singapore Island, Braddon condemned Sikh Guards ‘who given the smallest chance would rape’.96 One function of the original Red Fort Trials was precisely to try the perpetrators of such crimes. As Wavell informed London: ‘There are some very ugly cases to come for trial of torture and murder of loyal soldiers by the renegades’.97 On the other hand the numbers in this category do not appear to have been large. The official schedule of December 1945 refers to only a ‘small number’ involved in acts of ‘gross brutality’.98 Ultimately, it is a question of balance. An authoritative first hand source, dealing with Changi on Singapore Island, concedes that ‘some Indian guards who had gone over to the Japanese behaved vindictively’, but adds that

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there were ‘other Indians of unshakeable loyalty who made great sacrifices for their European and Australian fellow-prisoners and others who paid with their lives for their refusal to collaborate’.99 In support of Russell-Roberts’ claim of ‘loyalty to the salt’ can be entered a catalogue of resistance mounted by Indian prisoners. Nirpal Chand’s uprising at Wewak, and almost universal resistance to the adoption of any items of Japanese language or of Japanese uniform or insignia, are evidence of enduring resilience. So too is the virtual absence of collaboration in the grim circumstances of the Japanese South West Pacific camps.100 The sense of comradeship and the devotion to izzat (honour) among Indian sepoys has been convincingly proposed as the cement which held the Indian Army together – much more influential than British direction.101 Certainly this was true after the Singapore surrender; with no British officers around, the captured sepoys had to fend for them.102 Their abiding sense of military honour and obligation helped them – overwhelmingly – to endure. As Lieutenant Harbans Singh of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps remarked stoutly: ‘any person who does not stick to his oath can deceive at any time . . . forsake religion, forsake anything’.103 That said, some 20,000 sepoys did not stay ‘true to their salt’ after the fall of Singapore. Why not? Analysing their motives is far from straightforward. The INA itself was by no means a homogeneous body. The tight tracking of motivation is difficult to reach in view of Delhi’s instructions to those captured to join the INA with a view to double defection.104 Also, in the course of the war, the concept of loyalty itself underwent some transformation, in step with the changing character of the Indian Army, the greatly expanded community of Indian Commissioned Officers, and the growing normalisation of nationalism.105 By the close of hostilities, the Delhi War Department conceded that a majority of the Indian Army, especially those who had not fought against the INA, had moved away from a stance of hostility towards it. Those who remained implacably opposed were the loyal POWs and older men of the regular army. Moreover when we look at individual cases, what mostly comes to light is how mixed and confused the men’s motives for joining the INA were: how rarely this was configured mentally as ‘defection’. The scion of a distinguished military family, Colonel N. S. Gill, was not alone in opting to ‘drift’ with the INA. His was a troubled state of mind which felt let down by the British, wished to do something for the Indians, yet rejected the Japanese and what they stood for.106 Significantly, the final arrangements governing treatment of the defectors, based on clemency, acknowledged that many who had forsworn their oath of allegiance had been misled. These mixed patterns of defection require that Russell-Roberts’ confidence in the sepoy’s instinct for loyalty be modified; but they do not overturn his position. The public acknowledgement of Indian valour in the course of the Pacific War, for which Russell-Roberts argues so warmly, has been grudging and belated – certainly in England. Finally, in November 2002 following protracted fund-raising, memorial gates were installed across the top of


Constitution Hill, London, to commemorate (along with others) the services of Indian sepoys in the two world wars.107 But only in 2003 did the United Kingdom High Court concede that Gurkhas imprisoned by the Japanese were eligible for the £10,000 payment given to the British Far East POWs.108 And Asia, too, has shown little interest in commemorating the sacrifice made by the Indian Army.109 In 1995 a small but dignified war memorial was erected in Singapore adjacent to the Singapore Cricket Club, an institution redolent of comfortable imperial times. Ironically, it is a monument to the Indian National Army.

Notes I am indebted to the British Academy for the Award which facilitated research in Australian archives; to Drs P. Addison, Kent Fedorowich and Bob Moore for unstinting support; and to Peter Stanley and his colleagues at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. See an earlier, longer version of this story in G. J. Douds, ‘The Men Who Never Were: Indian POWs in the Second World War’, South Asia, 27, 2 (August 2004): 182–216. 1 Lieutenant Colonel D. Russell-Roberts, Spotlight on Singapore (Douglas I. O. M., Times Press, 1965), pp. 267–8. 2 Hong Kong Museum of History, Gallery 7; the Changi Museum, Singapore. 3 Peter Stanley, ‘ “Great in Adversity”: Indian Prisoners of war in New Guinea’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial (November 2002), online at: www.awm.gov.au/journal/j37/indians.htm. 4 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War Two in the Pacific (New York: Morrow, 1994), p. 16. 5 BBC Timewatch, Forgotten Volunteers: The Indian Army at War 1939–45, originally transmitted 5 June 1999. 6 Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy (Stuttgart: Klett – Cotla, 1981), pp. 124–5. 7 F. Yeats-Brown, ‘Martial India: The Story of Two Million Volunteers’ (London: Egre and Spottiswoode, 1945), publishers blurb. 8 Alan Warren, Singapore: Britain’s Greatest Defeat (London: Hambledon, 2002), Appendix 3; and Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 70, and pp. 188–93. 9 Warren, Singapore, p. 301. 10 Oriental and India Office Collections (hereafter OIOC) L/WS/1/1363, Molesworth memorandum, January 1944. 11 Warren, Singapore, p. 277. 12 Bob Moore, Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), p. 20. 13 Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II: Statistical History, Personal Narratives, and Memorials concerning POWs in camps and on hellships, civilian internees, Asian slave laborers, and others captured in the Pacific Theater (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 1994, pp. 32, 34. 14 ‘Against Japan: a guide to those engaged in telling Indian Troops the truth about the Japanese’, Confidential Revised Edition (New Delhi: Govt. of India, 1943). 15 ‘Against Japan: a guide to those engaged in telling Indian Troops the truth about the Japanese’, pp. 26–7; TNA, Kew Gardens, London, WO 208/1221, Malaya Combined Intelligence Summary ‘Activities among Indian Troops’, 30 Sept, 1939; R. J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 41. 16 Hauner, India in Axis Strategy, p. 409.

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17 The observation of Joyce Lebra cited in Fujiwara Iwaichi, F. Kikan: Japanese Army Intelligence Operations in South East Asia During World War Two, trans. Yoji Akashi (Hong Kong: Heinemann Asia, 1983), p. xii. 18 In an early address, Fujiwara told Japanese officers: ‘We must impress on them that this is a war of righteousness aimed at freeing indigenous people and POWs and helping them achieve their national aspirations and happiness’. Fujiwara, ‘F. Kikan.’, p. 18; see too Hauner, India in Axis Strategy, pp. 410–11. 19 Hauner, India in Axis Strategy, pp. 411, 412. 20 TNA, WO 208/1221, Tokyo to Foreign Office, 17 May, 1941. 21 Fujiwara, F-Kikan, pp. 27, 32. For Government of India concern about Japanese propaganda, see TNA, WO 208/1221, Govt. of India to Secretary of State, 25 July 1941. 22 Major-General M. Z. Kiani, India’s Freedom Struggle and the Great INA (New Delhi: Reliance Pub. Ho., 1994) p. 34. One of the most effective leaflets depicted ‘a bulky whiteman in a pyjama suit sitting in a deck chair with a young local woman in his lap’. The caption read: ‘this is what the white people do to you’. 23 Richard Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 42; Fujiwara, F-Kikan, p. 77; Warren, Singapore, p. 84. 24 Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, p. 42; Fujiwara, F-Kikan, p. 77; TNA, CAB 120/615, Thomas Report, ‘Operations in Malaya and Singapore’, May 1942, p. 16. 25 Thomas Report, p. 20. 26 Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, pp. 42–3. 27 Warren, Singapore, p. xii. 28 Brigadier R. C. B. Bristow, Memories of the British Raj: Soldier in India (London: Johnson, 1974), pp. 128–9. 29 Brigadier Sir John Smythe, foreword, Russell-Roberts, Spotlight on Singapore; Kiani, India’s Freedom Struggle, p. 13; TNA, CAB 120/615, Admiral Layton’s War Diary. 30 Alan Warren, ‘The Indian Army and the Fall of Singapore’ in Brian Farrell and Sandy Hunter (eds), Sixty Years On: the Fall of Singapore Revisited (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002), p. 281; ‘Thomas Report’, p. 12. 31 J. Castra, Eaten by the Japanese: Memoir of an Unknown Prisoner of War (Singapore: SNP, 1999), p. 11; Crasta recalled: ‘groups of soldiers retreating on foot, their faces aghast with fear, their clothes and boots tattered and torn . . . They had only a few words to say; ‘’the Japanese are terrible. We are gone. There is no hope”’. 32 Kiani, India’s Freedom Struggle, p. 44; Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, p. 21. 33 Mohan Singh, a Sikh and King’s Commissioned Officer of 14th Punjab Regiment, passed out from the Indian Military Academy in 1934 following several years in the ranks. He was widely believed not to have received promotion in his turn. See Gerald H. Corr, The War of the Springing Tigers (London: Osprey, 1975), pp. 67–74. 34 Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, pp. 22–3; Fujiwara, F. Kikan, pp. 183–6; ‘Against Japan: a guide to those engaged in telling Indian Troops the truth about the Japanese’, p. 26; and Corr, The War Of the Springing Tigers, pp. 101–4. 35 As a humble gunner, Russell Braddon challenged the ‘out of bounds’ taboo at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel. Mohan Singh was stung by the protests of members’ wives at the Tanglin Club when Indian officers used the swimming pool. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, p. 123; Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (London: Werner Lourie, 1952), pp. 34–6; and Corr, The War Of the Springing Tigers, pp. 67–70. 36 Mason, A Matter Of Honour, p. 515; and Lieutenant General Sir F. Tuker, While Memory Serves (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 57.


37 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand Great Anarch! India 1921–1952 (London: The Hagarth Press, 1990), pp. 785–6. 38 Warren, ‘The Indian Army and the Fall of Singapore’, p. 284. 39 Conveyed to Linlithgow by the Punjab political leader F. K. Noon; Linlithgow to Amery, 29 July 1942, in Nicholas Mansergh (editor in chief), The Transfer of Power, 1942–47 (hereafter TOP), II (London: HMSO, 1970–83) p. 489. 40 Auchinleck to Army Commanders, 12 February 1946, TOP, VI, no. 425. 41 Auchinleck to Army Commanders, 12 February 1946, TOP, VI, no. 425. 42 Indian officers had been concentrated in a separate barbed-wire compound at Seletar, Singapore, ‘starved, kept in unhygenic conditions, beaten and otherwise ill treated. The resistors were regularly pronounced to be traitors to India and Asia’. Testimony of Captain Chint Singh, AWM 54, 1010/3/4; 1010/6/8. See also Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, p. 30. 43 Warren, ‘The Indian Army and the Fall of Singapore’, p. 284. 44 Corr, The War of the Springing Tigers, p. 121. 45 TOP, VI, no. 154. 46 Corr, The War Of the Springing Tigers, p. 133–4. 47 Corr, The War Of the Springing Tigers, p. 122; and Kiani, India’s Freedom Struggle, p. 51. 48 Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, p. 162; Corr, The War of the Springing Tigers, pp. 144–6. 49 So called because the banner of the Legion was a springing tiger. 50 Tuker, While Memory serves, p. 56; Corr, The War of The Spinging Tigers, pp. 163–4; and Mason, A Matter Of Honour, pp. 517–8. Outside Meiktila, Brigadier Bristow’s Dogras took the surrender of 2,000 INA without a fight. He found them confused, ‘subverted by a small group of turncoat ICOs’. Bristow, Memories of the British Raj, p. 133. 51 These were British treason trials of captured INA officers held in Delhi. Prominent Indian nationalist lawyers, including Jawaharlal Nehru, defended the accused. 52 T. Royle, The Last Days of the Raj (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), pp. 157–60. 53 Stanley, ‘Great in Adversity’, para. 6. 54 AWM55, 3/15. ATIS, SWPA, nos. 117–21, ‘Reference Guide to the Handling of Indian soldiers’, 20 April 1943. TNA, WO 208/1221. 55 AWM54, 432/9/34. Those interviewed were generally described as ‘belonging to the martial races of India . . . Only the more intelligent were interrogated’. AWM54, 779/3/46. 56 AWM54, 779/3/102. 57 AWM54, 423/9/34. 58 See AWM54, 423/9/34; AWM54, 779/3/118; AWM54, 1010/4/170; AWM54, 1010/4/1641; and Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, p. 33. 59 AWM54, 423/9/34. 60 AWM54, 799/3/46. Muslims were especially offended by an instruction to bow by inclining from the waist when encountering a person of importance. This was regarded as offensive to Islam. 61 AWM54, 779/1/17. In Ajit Singh’s testimony, ‘the fourteen Indian officers of our party were drawn up in single rank in presence of all the sepoys and surrounded by Jap soldiers. The Jap officers drew their swords and the soldiers loaded their rifles and closed. Lieutenant Takoda then went along the line and slapped each Indian officer in the face’. The officers were subsequently incarcerated in a 15 feet by 8 feet room, denied food and given minimum water for 3 days. See too AWM54, 779/3/46; and AWM54, 779/3/102. 62 AWM54, 779/3/118. 63 AWM54, 1010/3/4. 64 Testimony of Jemadar Chint Singh, AWM54, 1010/4/31.

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65 AWM54, 1010/4/31. Indian prisoners were assured by guards that ‘about 20,000 Indians were cooperating with the Japanese in Singapore and were working for the independence of India’. 66 AWM54, 1010/3/118. 67 Variously spelt Komoriyama, Khumriyama and Kumoriyama in War Crimes Transcripts, and Kumuia Yama in Stanley, ‘Great in Adversity’. 68 AWM54, 1010/3/102. 69 Eg., Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, p. 36. A single instance of Indian collaboration to emerge occurred at Kuala Belait. A Sikh civilian, Gurdyal Singh Gill, resident in Borneo for 15 years, acted as an informer to the Kempeitai (secret police) and was complicit in the killing of three escaped Indian prisoners in June 1945. AWM54, 1010/2/19. 70 The Rabaul Military Court transcripts are instructive on defence arguments and the Australians’ attention to procedure. Lieutenant Imamura, commander of 3rd platoon, 19 Special Service Water Company (known as Kasai [the butcher] to Indians in his charge), testified: ‘I firmly believe that they were not POWs and cooperated with the Japanese forces with their whole heart’. This was a standard defence. AWM54, 1010/6/106. 71 AWM54, 1010/3/76, evidence of Sepoy Sandara Singh; AWM54, 1010/3/101 evidence of Havildar Karm Singh; and AWM54, 1010/3/102, evidence of Sergeant Sakashita Morizo. 72 AWM54, 1010/3/103. 73 AWM54, 1010/4/164. 74 AWM54, 1010/9/94. See too Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 120–3. The testimony of Jemadar Abdul Latif refers to mutilation and canibalism. Crasta came to be involved in an investigation into cannibalism perpetrated in April 1945; the two Indian victims belonged to the 13th Pioneer Company. Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, p. 77. 75 See in particular AWM54, 1010/6/2; AWM54, 1010/6/3 and AWM54, 1010/6/4. No guilty verdicts were given despite the unconvincing nature of much defence testimony. For example, Corporal Nakamura of 20 Special Sea Duty Company stated: ‘I pretended to slap him [Subadar Santa Singh] on the cheek when suddenly he stood and flinged [sic] up a stick at me. I thought he was going to resist me, so I slapped him on the cheek four or five times’. AWM54, 1010/6/62. 76 This was a complex case to follow for those present in the cramped hut used as the court room, even more so for distant listeners: ‘Voices were coming from several parts of the hut virtually at once’. The Japanese witness would ‘gibber into the mike’, then [the broadcaster] would crawl over to the interpreter in time to catch the last half of what he was saying. See E. Sparkes, ‘First Broadcast Of Pacific War Trials’, in Reveille: The Voice Of 100,000 Ex-Servicemen and women’, Vol.27 (Jan. 1954). 77 AWM54, 1010/6/77, testimony of Sepoy Syed Chand. 78 An Air Ministry memorandum to Molesworth in November 1944 cautioning against extravagant claims admitted that Indian intelligence was ‘aware of the existence of at least a division of JIFS in the early stages of the Manipur campaign’. OIOC, L/WS/1/1536, Air Ministry to Molesworth, 22 Nov. 1944; Govt. of India, WO, amendment, 7 May 1945; minute, Col. B. F. Montgomery, 7 Aug. 1944; and Hauner, India in Axis Strategy, p. 592. 79 OIOC, L/WS/1/1536, Government of India, War Department. to Secretary of State for India, 14 May 1945. 80 OIOC, L/WS/1/1363, ‘Subversive Activities Against the Indian Army’, General Headquarters India, p. 59. 81 Braddon, The Naked Island, p. 262.


82 OIOC, L/WS/1/938, ‘The Treatment and Evacuation Of Recovered Allied POWs’, 13 August 1945, para. 15. 83 OIOC, L/WS/1/1516, C-in-C India to LHQ Melbourne, 6 Apr. 1944. 84 Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, p. 75. 85 Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, pp. 56, 78; and Stanley, “Great in Adversity”, para. 28. 86 Corr, The War of the Springing Tigers, p. 172. 87 Tuker, While Memory Serves, p. 69; and P. French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Flamingo. 1997), p. 211. 88 Sir A. Hope to Wavell. 10 December 1945, TOP, VI. no. 277. 89 TOP, VI, nos. 127, 185, 222. See also ‘Note by Military Intelligence’, 15 June 1945, TOP, V. no. 512. 90 Governor General War Department to Secretary of State, 30 November 1945, TOP, VI. no. 252. See also Paul Scott’s fictional The Day of the Scorpion (London: Mayflower, 1968), pp. 447–8. 91 TOP, VI. no. 252; and. Gov. Gen. War Dept. to Sec. of State, 2 December 1945, TOP, VI, no. 258. The 20,000 defectors were broken down as follows: 5,000 yet to reach India, and less than 1,000 still untraced, and 14,000 in India. Of the 14,000 in India: 2,500 had been exonerated and rejoined units alongside other POWs. Of the remaining 11,500, 6,000 were believed to have gone through propaganda, threats and torture. In view of the special circumstances, the enemy triumphant on all fronts, ‘clemency and generosity’ was to be exercised. That left 5,500, of whom 1,700 were still being examined. The balance of 3,300 who were involved with the Japanese in an invasion of India in the majority concluded to have been genuinely misled and qualified for clemency. 92 Cited in ‘Enemy of Empire: S. C. Bose’, BBC2, 13 August 1995. 93 For example, Lieutenant Colonel Deakin of a Dogra regiment came to regret his unjustified abuse of a subaltern: ‘Even now I can see him looking at me and saying: “Sahib, we destroyed three tanks almost with our bare hands and this is all that remains alive of my company”’. Cited in Warren, Singapore, p. 143. 94 Mason, A Matter of Honour, p. 515; and Tuker, While Memory Serves, p. 57. 95 Russell-Roberts, Spotlight on Singapore, pp. 267–8. 96 Braddon, The Naked Island. p. 158. 97 TOP, VI, no. 127, pp. 277. 98 Sir A. Hope to Wavell, 10 December 1945, in TOP, VI, no. 127, p. 277. 99 Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 265. 100 Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese, pp. 56, 78 and Stanley, ‘Great in Adversity’, para. 28. 101 David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 235. 102 French, Liberty or Death, p. 211. 103 BBC Timewatch, ‘Forgotten Volunteers’. 104 OIOC, L/WS/1/1363, ‘Subervise Activities against the Indian Army’, GHQ India, p. 59. 105 Auchinleck to Army Commanders, 12 February 1946; TOP, VI, no. 425. 106 Corr, The War of the Springing Tigers, pp. 102–3. 107 Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1999, 30 March. 2000; The Guardian, 6 November 2002. 108 Daily Telegraph, 22 February 2003. 109 The veteran Nila Katan, in Britain for VJ celebrations in 1995, was overwhelmed by the number of associations for which his war record, nine medals, appeared to ensure eligibility, namely: the Burma Star Association, Africa Star Association, Italy Star Association, Cassino and Alamein, Tobruk, the Desert Rats, and Greece. . . . ‘We have no such thing in India. Nobody bothers’. C. Somerville, Our War: How the British Commonwealth fought the Second World War (London: Weindenfield and Nicolson, 1998), p. 339.

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6

Dutch memories of captivity in the Pacific War Remco Raben

Dutch who were held captive by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945 are entrenched in public memories of the war. The history of colonisation, World War II in Asia, and the retreat from empire, are well represented in school curricula and textbooks, which invariably mention the experience of Dutch nationals in Japanese prison camps.1 There are also several dozen monuments in the Netherlands devoted to the experience of imprisonment under the Japanese, and famous Dutch novelists have written about the Japanese occupation of Indonesia and its aftermath.2 The relative weight of the memories of Dutch captivities during the Pacific War can be explained by several specifically Dutch contingencies. Firstly, the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany of 1940–45 remains the single most important, most-debated, and most-publicised epoch in Dutch history up to the present day. On the one hand, memories of the war in the East, and captivities there, have been overshadowed by the ‘hegemonic’ narrative of the war in Europe; but on the other they have gained by being seen as analogous to events in the West, with its predominent notions of an innocent Dutch nation being raped by brutal occupiers, of the resilience and resistance of the Dutch, and of imprisonment and deportation. Secondly, the Netherlands East Indies were far and away the largest and most important colony of the Netherlands, with a population of around 70 million by the 1940s, as opposed to the Netherlands’ population of almost 9 million in 1940. Unlike Britain or France, there were not many other colonies to compete for post-war attention, and the few there were had little significance. Consequently what happened in the Netherlands East Indies weighed heavily in Dutch post-war consciousness. To this can be added the relatively large numbers of Dutch, and in particular the large numbers of Dutch civilians, involved in the Pacific War. The total number of Europeans in the Netherlands Indies on the eve of the Pacific War was approximately 290,000, of whom 260,000 were classified as Dutch nationals. The majority of the latter were Dutch Eurasians, many of whom the Japanese did not intern. In contrast, British and French populations in their

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Southeast Asian colonies, and in the treaty ports in China, numbered at most in the low few thousands in any one location. Hence there were approximately 130,000 British and allied forces captured in Singapore in 1942, but less than 5,000 civilian internees there. By comparison 142,000 Duch military and civilians were imprisoned at one time or another during the Japanese occupation, with the overwhelming majority being civilians. The vagaries of decolonisation, in the 1945 to 1949 independence struggle, also contributed to around 300,000 people arriving in the Netherlands from the Netherlands East Indies during the 15 years after 1945. Most of these had experienced the Japanese occupation, almost half of them in a POW or internment camp. This means that 2.7 per cent of the 1960 Dutch population of around 11 million had come from Indonesia. Compared to those figures, the ex-prisoners among the English, French or Americans are negligible, not only in relative, but even in absolute numbers. Another characteristic of the Dutch situation was the involvement of large numbers of civilians in the eastern war. A long history of settlement – in particular on Java – and the decision to allot European status and Dutch nationality to the offspring of Dutch fathers and Indonesian women, accounts for this large number. Whereas Australian, and to a lesser extent British, memories seem to be closely related to the war and POWs, civilian internees play a relatively large part in Dutch memories. More Dutch citizens were imprisoned during World War II in Asia than nationals of any other colonising power in the region. Of the total of 142,000 Dutch men, women and children who spent time in camps, about 100,000 were civilian internees and 42,000 POWs.3 The large numbers of civilians left deep marks in the Dutch representations of the war. It has, for instance, resulted in the central position of women in ‘memory activities’. On the other hand, in great contrast to Australia, the military presence in commemorations of the eastern war has been low. This low military visibility is due not only to the absence of a strong veterans’ culture in the Netherlands, but also to the ambiguous reactions of the Dutch public towards the role of the army during the Indonesian revolution after 1945, which after 4 years of fighting culminated in the Dutch recognition of the Republic of Indonesia in late 1949. Only in the last two decades have the former military achieved a larger visibility in public representations of the war. This has been part of a wave of increasing activity among the communities from the Indies. After more than 60 years, the history and memories of the Dutch experiences in the Pacific War seem to have become part and parcel of the Dutch commemorative landscape and popular history. Attention to the war in Asia and the memories of captivity has not always been this prolific. The years since the war seem to show a continuing, rising effort by individuals and representatives of war victims’ associations and other communities in the Netherlands Indies, to include their experiences in the Dutch public memory, to publicise their life stories, and to create their own commemorative spaces.

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This chapter analyses the results of these efforts, and the vicissitudes of the memory of captivity, over the six or more decades since the end of the war in 1945. In particular, it connects changes in the culture of commemoration and publicity to broader developments in Dutch society. In the end, the process does not appear as a linear development from silence to presence. Nor should the relatively high representation of the Indies’ war memory be considered as a trustworthy gauge for the Dutch ‘collective memory’. Even now representatives of migrants and returnees from the former Netherlands East Indies complain about under-representation of the colonial past in the national media, and incomprehension of their experiences under Japanese occupation. They still seem to feel that their personal and collective memories of the war are not reflected fully and accurately by public discourse, and do not fit in easily with the mainstream of Dutch history.

Captivity memory as silence and struggle The 300,000 people who arrived in the Netherlands from the Indies (or Indonesia, as it came to be known), arrived in consecutive ‘waves’, which washed up on European shores right up to the early 1960s. The cohorts showed a great variety in backgrounds, but, roughly speaking, the first waves contained more people with strong connections with the Netherlands. Later migrants were often people with stronger attachments to Indonesia, who were born there, and had at least some Indonesian forbears. An important exception is the massive departure of Dutch in 1957 to 1958, years when Indonesia subjected Dutch enterprises to involuntary nationalisation. Many Eurasians, commonly referred to as Indo-Europeans, who had formed about 70 per cent of the ‘European’ population of the Netherlands Indies before the war, had Dutch nationality. For this reason, the Netherlands government grudgingly accepted these immigrants when their situation in Indonesia – with an economy spiralling downward and a tense political climate – worsened in the mid- to late-1950s. The Indo-Europeans were referred to as ‘Oriental Dutch’ (Oosterse Nederlanders) and were considered to have a different culture: which supposedly made adjustment to life in Europe problematic.4 After arrival in the Netherlands, the immigrants from Indonesia had few opportunities to have their story of the war included in the commemorative landscape of their new country. This had several causes. First of all, they were socially diverse, and their experiences of the war varied. Moreover their memories of the war years were also embedded in a much larger range of reminiscence about life in the colonial pre-war Indies, and about post-war problems of evacuation and migration. Most importantly, apart from the Japanese occupation, most of them had lived through the turbulent and for many even more threatening period of the Indonesian revolution. Former POWs had also been remobilised after their liberation, and served the Dutch army fighting the Indonesian revolutionaries. To this was added the shock of displacement and the rigours of adjusting to a new country. Those who had


been born in the Indies and had no social network to help them take the first hurdles after arrival in the Netherlands had the biggest difficulties in finding homes and jobs. Most energy initially went into accommodating a new society and a new life. It has been suggested that initially memories of the war in Asia were relatively neglected by Dutch Society, compared to memories of the occupation of the Netherlands itself.5 The preoccupations of the time were reconstruction, and a commonly professed myth of the Dutch national experience of Nazi occupation and Dutch resistance. But while these concerns did overshadow memories of the war in the East, a closer look at the media and commemoration shows that the war in the Indies early on became a recurring topic in the national press. The community of migrants also started to develop a number of activities to remember and commemorate the events in Asia. Public (or collective or national) memory is not monolithic; it is produced by various forms of representation and communication – not only in memorials or televised images, but most importantly in daily conversation and verbal clichés. Therefore, public memory not only responds to the needs of governments or group representatives, nor to the awareness of a specific community, but it also follows the idiomatic developments of cultural trends in society. Moreover, the issue of amnesia and neglect can only be analysed within the context of the Dutch media landscape and Dutch commemorative culture. During the 1950s, there were very few channels and means to produce ‘memory’. There was no television. Most of the papers catered to a specific ideological or denominational constituency. Over all this was draped a 1950s Cold War rhetoric that called for national concord on the historical basis of national suffering and resistance in wartime. There was little room in all this to promote dissenting or alternative histories.

From weakness to strength It has been suggested that public memory of the war in the Indies evolved over time. According to one view, at first there was assimilation of the Indies’ war in the broader national memory. This changed to include emancipation of sub-community memories, as represented by the Women War Victims’ Monument erected at Apeldoorn in 1971. Ultimately an integrated but distinct Indies’ war memory emerged, separate from the Dutch national memory of Nazi occupation.6 The idea of an emancipation of the memory of Japanese captivity is attractive, but not altogether accurate. A register of war monuments and plaques concerning World War II in the Netherlands shows high activity in the late 1940s to early 1950s, and a sharp decrease in building activity in the second half of the 1950s. In the 1980s and especially 1990s (around the 50-year celebration of the war’s end), there was a new spurt of building,

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characterised by a proliferation of monuments devoted to the specific experiences of subgroups. Monuments devoted to the war and war victims in Asia follow this same rhythm, the difference being their smaller numbers. The number of monuments exclusively concerning the war in the Pacific is 39 – against more than 3,000 devoted to the war years in the Netherlands.7 The majority of the monuments that commemorate the war in Asia, moreover, have a ‘double’ character; they are devoted to World War II in general, or have included the Asian war as a later addendum. The Asian memorials are a fraction of the European, although there are also numerous war cemeteries in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia where POWs died as forced labourers of the Japanese troops. These military cemeteries were instituted in the immediate post-war years. They were the centres of commemoration of the war dead in the Indies, and to a large extent have remained so.8 The under-representation of the war in Asia in monuments is not sufficient proof of an almost total neglect of the war in the Indies in the 1950s and 1960s. Looking beyond the single medium of war memorials, another picture emerges: that of an active, if fragmented minority community. Their organisations covered a broad range of interests, which reflected the complicated mixture of experiences in war, revolution and migration, as well as the civilian character of many war memories. Committees such as the Birma Committee or the Kampili reunion committee organised reunions of former internees of specific prison camps; others such as Pelita looked after the well-being of migrants from the Indies. The Tong Tong Foundation promoted Indische culture (Indische could refer to any European or Eurasian who had at one time settled in the Indies) in the Netherlands. Yet another organisation represented the material interests of former internees. This latter, the NIBEG (NederlandsIndische Bond van Ex-Krijgsgevangenen en -Geïnterneerden – Netherlands Indies’ Association of Ex-Prisoners-of-War and Internees), even staged a large ceremony for the commemoration of the ‘victims of the struggle for freedom against Japan’ in The Hague in December 1949. It was attended by Queen Juliana, ministers and ambassadors, and was repeated in 1955.9 There were other means. One was the publication of war memoirs, often by women.10 The number of these decreased after the late 1940s, but this holds too for the memoirs of World War II in Europe. Several exhibitions were also organised soon after the war to show the hardship of the Dutch in the Indies. Some of these had an explicit political agenda, to show how the Japanese had poisoned the Indonesian people with the seeds of ‘extremism’, or to help returnees from the prison camps.11 In 1946 and 1947, the Indisch Instituut organised an exhibition devoted to ‘The Indies under the Japanese occupation’, which was shown in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. Newspaper coverage was positive, one writing frankly about the misery in ‘the extermination camps’, using the term more commonly reserved for Nazi camps.12 Another reported that the exhibition showed ‘that despite the oppression by the Japanese and despite the poverty and misery that has been suffered in the camps, the spirit among the internees had been excellent and


the faith in the ultimate liberation had remained unshaken’.13 The rhetoric of the undamaged spirit of survival was common in the post-war years, and would remain a standard ingredient in the linguistics of commemoration. The same institute 10 years later, by then renamed the Royal Tropical Institute, presented an exhibition of artefacts from the Japanese prison camps. At this time, plans were crafted to form a permanent exhibition of camp art and crafts from the Indies, for which the Amsterdam mayor pledged to find a suitable location.14 The war in Asia regularly featured in the newspapers, in particular in stories about imprisonment in Japanese camps. Maybe the most significant conclusion from the activities of the Indies’ organisations, and press reporting, should be that the war was not yet something of the past. In the 1950s, the issue was further kept alive by the problem of compensation. One recurring newspaper theme was the negotiations with Japan, which only concluded by 1956. Even after this, the feeling persisted that several wrongs had not been satisfactorily settled. In the first place, the salaries of Dutch military and civil servants from the Netherlands Indies who had been imprisoned by the Japanese were not paid after the war. Until the present day, bitterness prevails about the unwillingness of the Dutch government to pay these salaries, the reason being that salary obligations had passed to the new Indonesian government.15 Another problem was the scale of material losses by the population of the Netherlands Indies during the Pacific War and the following revolution, for which suitable compensation has never been given.16 National commemorations created an atmosphere of Dutch unity, in which the resilience of the people under Nazi occupation was exploited to the full. But the episode of the Pacific War far from disappeared into total silence and neglect. Changes in the commemorative landscape of the war in the Indies did not follow a simple, linear development from being disregarded to later emancipation. Certainly, the disinterestedness of the indigenous Dutch was there, and it still is; and indeed the Indies’ memory activists did increasingly speak up in later decades, but so did everybody else. Since the 1960s, communal memories of sub-categories of war victims, such as POWs, and women internees, were to crystallise into separate memorials; but the various topoi of these groups were already clearly discernible in the previous decades. Memories of the Pacific War followed the same trends as those of the war in Europe and were directed as much by the changing mass culture and the democratisation of representation.

Fiction: Kwai and Kampili memories International developments have done much to bring the war in the Indies to a wider audience. Above all, films and television have become the most forceful forces for shaping public impressions of the past. Thanks to these media, the war in the East was presented to the Dutch public much more

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widely from the 1960s onwards. The ‘silence’ of the 1950s had not been total, but the rising interest in the Pacific War was, in large part, helped by the moving image: by a blockbuster movie; by a Japanese B-film; and by the new medium of television. Prominent in the representations of imprisonment under the Japanese is the ‘Death Railway’ the Japanese built between Thailand and Burma in 1942 to 1943. Although not the only location where large numbers of Western prisoners died, it was one of the most deadly, and became the focal point of a famous, if partly fictitious image of the Pacific War. About 18,000 Dutch prisoners played a part in building the railway. One place where the memory was, and is, kept alive, is close to the river ‘Kwai’ (or Khwae) at Kanchanaburi, some 130 kilometres west of Bangkok, at the place where the railway line enters the mountains. There, in the war cemeteries, are the remains of 1,896 Dutch POWs who died during the construction of this 414 kilometre railway line through the mountainous borderlands between Thailand and Burma. The cemetery in Kanchanaburi along with the one in nearby Chungkai where another 313 Dutch POWs have been buried, became and remains a place of pilgrimage for former POWs and their children.17 It has also become a fixed part of every Dutch royal visit to Thailand since Queen Juliana’s in 1963. Kanchanaburi is also the place where the famous bridge spans the ‘River Kwai’, which acquired world fame through David Lean’s box-office hit Bridge on the River Kwai of 1957. The film, which is covered in detail in Chapter 9 below, was a blockbuster in the Netherlands too. About 1.5 million people went to see it. The original book by Pierre Boulle appeared in translation a year later, and went through five reprints within 2 years. The premiere of the film in the Netherlands – in 1958 – was introduced by the famous Dutch comedian Wim Kan, who, as a POW, had worked on the Burma side of the railway.18 In 1957 he had performed a sketch on the national television on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, performing the songs he had sung on the Queen’s birthday during captivity. Already, in 1946, he had published a short memoir of his experiences, together with his wife, Corry Vonk, who had spent the war years imprisoned in a camp on Java. Their book, Honderd dagen uit en thuis (A Hundred Days Away from Home) was republished in a revised edition in 1963.19 By then, the experiences on the railway had become a frequent ingredient of Kan’s shows. Although based on a novel, The Bridge on the River Kwai was experienced as a homage to the survivors, or at least as a recognition of their experiences. Newspaper reports and reviews were generally positive. According to the leading communist newspaper, De Waarheid (The Truth), the film conveyed the message ‘that war is madness’.20 The issue of ‘collaboration’ did elicit some comment: the British officer who zealously works to finish a bridge for the Japanese being seen as an artistic way to present this moral issue.21 Few people protested against the implausibility of the film plot, although there was some dissatisfaction. One former Dutch POW, the Roman Catholic missionary priest Pater Ezechiël, saw the film as a trick to mask the British


attitude in the camps. In his view, ‘The British behaved as egotists; they put on their splendid isolation also in the jungle and chummed up with the Japanese when they saw material gain.’22 The film did not stimulate much effort to unearth the ‘true’ stories from the railway. A review of 28 June 1958 in Trouw (Fidelity), a leading Protestant daily, stated that the situation depicted by David Lean was ‘an exception, if it ever happened at all . . . The Dutch prisoners-of-war in Burma had the right response: passive resistance and sabotage’.23 Supported by David Lean’s film hit, the ‘Kwai’ became a topos or recurring image of Dutch memory. In 1960, the Dutch War Graves’ Commission produced a film of the cemeteries in Thailand and Burma that circulated in eleven cities in the Netherlands. In her Christmas speech of 1963, Queen Juliana mentioned the plight of those who had died along the Burma–Thailand Railway. She had visited Thailand earlier that year, travelled to Kanchanaburi, and had been impressed by the war graves there.24 The comedian Wim Kan, who had introduced David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai to the Dutch public, remained active in the 1960s. Kan reissued his memoirs on captivity in 1963, and appeared in the famous television programme De Bezetting (The Occupation) in 1964, a serialised documentary on the Netherlands in World War II, which included three instalments (out of twenty-one) on the events in Asia. Wim Kan was also invited to enliven the first reunion of former POW labourers of the Burma–Thailand Railway on 27 May 1967. This was organised by the board of the large supermarket concern Albert Heijn on the occasion of its 80-year jubilee. One of the board members was a former POW and had discovered that the anniversary had a darker side: on that day 25 years earlier, the first shipment of Dutch POWs had been sent off to Burma.25 A second topos in Dutch representations of the war was the women’s internment camps. They had figured prominently in the exhibition of 1946–47, and the struggle for life in the prison camps had been commemorated at the national Women’s Exhibition of 1948. Several women had published their memoirs of imprisonment in the late 1940s; and their plight had been mentioned by many others. The resilience of women internees had been lauded by many authors who covered the war in the Indies.26 Their suffering was turned into heroism; their capability to endure without the support of their husbands idealised as a token of perseverance and courage. In 1960, this image of the courageous Dutch woman was threatened when the Japanese director Horiuchi Manao shot his Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho (White Skin, Yellow Commander).27 It was based on a prize-winning story about the commander of an internment camp for Dutch women on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi: Camp Kampili. The film, which is dealt with in more detail by Kaori Maekawa’s Chapter 10 below, tells the story of the fatherly, hard-working Japanese camp commander Yamaji Tadashi, and the enthusiasm, even love, he supposedly generated among female prisoners. The film was a vehicle for showing lots of white skin. Yamaji was presented as a young, ambitious and scrupulous commander, who turned his camp into

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an autarkic community and saved the women from the harassment by his often inebriated underlings and from being abducted to serve as sex slaves in brothels for the Japanese military. In the final scene of the film, Yamaji is acquitted in a post-war Allied court martial, amidst the enthusiastic cheers of the former women internees who had anxiously followed the court case against their former camp commander, waving signs saying ‘Save Yamaji’. The court scenes and the romantic episodes of Dutch women in love with their commander were fictional. Yamaji was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment on accusation of mistreating male prisoners in a previous camp. The representation of Camp Kampili was idealised. Dutch members of parliament on a visit to Japan went to see the movie in Tokyo in 1960 and considered it tasteless and boring, but not offensive.28 Even the former Dutch camp head of Kampili judged the film of ‘umpteenth rank’ and exaggerated.29 The film did not circulate in the Netherlands at the time, but the reports from Japan were enough to trigger indignation. The loudest protests were by NIBEG, at that time one of the few organisations for former prisoners of the Japanese. It demanded strong protests from the Dutch government, which informed the Japanese ambassador that relations would suffer if the film continued to be shown.30 More awkwardly, the parts of the European women in the film had been played by American and Canadian actresses, some of whose family were members of the American expatriate and diplomatic community in Japan. The Dutch press reported extensively on the movie and took the opportunity to dwell on the experiences of Dutch women’s in Japanese captivity.31 The issue was complicated by the fact that the Kampili camp had indeed been a less drab place than some of the massive internment camps on Java, where hundreds of prisoners had died of starvation during the last months of internment. And as far as commanders of prison camps went, Yamaji Tadashi had indeed been a relatively humane official. When in 1961 one former inmate of the Kampili camp was invited to appear on Japanese television in the programme ‘East is East’, NIBEG ‘demanded’ that she would emphasise ‘the appalling conditions that the Dutch internees generally suffered’.32

Authenticities In the years around 1960, the story of internment in the East gained a more prominent place in press coverage of annual ceremonies and commemorations in the Netherlands. A tale of internment in the East was included in the radio broadcast on National Liberation Day, on 5 May 1960.33 From about this time, it also became standard to explicitly mention the victims of the war in Asia on Remembrance Day, 4 May, as well as on Liberation Day. The 1960s also saw a heightened activity among people who had been imprisoned by Japan. Former inmates of some internment camps had organised reunions since the war’s end, and they were now joined by others. The medium of expression and to some extent the aims were changing. The main catalyst of the shift in the late 1960s and the 1970s was the changing


political and cultural climate in the Netherlands, and much of the Western world. Narratives of a ‘national’ past became increasingly fragmented. Secularisation, immigration and the development of a critical youth culture undermined the weight of old authority structures and the image of a single nation. The influence of mass and increasingly fragmented media was decisive, with the expanding possibilities for publication and broadcasting which this bought. Adding to this were new tendencies in journalism, for instance the increasing space given over to human interest stories, and the tendency to take a critical attitude towards accepted ideas and authorities. Lighter cameras, and influences from the cinema vérité, stimulated a more spontaneous manner of filming. These tendencies of the late 1960s fuelled, and were accompanied by, a democratising tendency. The experience and opinions of ‘ordinary’ people were now brought into focus. Within 10 years, between 1965 and 1975, television culture in the Netherlands changed dramatically.34 History became individualised and made a turn towards ‘authenticity’: the use of the experiences of those who lived through events. This left its traces in the documentaries made from the early 1960s, which showed a shift in emphasis from the grand narrative to personal experience. History became the domain of eyewitness accounts. In the serialised documentary De Bezetting (The Occupation) by Loe de Jong and Milo Anstadt of the early 1960s, most people appearing on screen had been former prominent administrators in the Indies. The first two instalments dealt with the big political picture: the situation in the Indies before the war, the Japanese expansion, and the war in 1942. Only the third instalment (broadcast in March 1964) went into the events during the occupation and the experiences of internment. But even at this stage, this programme contained only a few accounts by ‘ordinary’ ex-prisoners, one of whom was Wim Kan. One manifestation of the changing tone in the media was Wim Kan’s appearance in the news show Achter het nieuws (Behind the News) by the leftist, pro-Labour broadcasting company VARA on 3 October 1971, 5 days before Emperor Hirohito’s first (and only) visit to the Netherlands. A few days later, Kan appeared in the main evening news bulletin, in an attempt to prevent the emperor from coming.35 In the previous decade there had been an increasing rapprochement between the Dutch and Japanese governments, and even more so between the two royal families. Kan’s protests were ineffective, but never before had the Japanese episode stirred up so many emotions, and come to the attention of so many people. Kan had a staunch adversary in the writer Rudy Kousbroek, who accused him of distorting history and misreading the emperor’s role in the wartime atrocities.36 Kousbroek’s entrance in the debate was the beginning of a long career of fighting exaggerated representations of internment. Kousbroek also saw a causal relationship between the irrational resistance against the truth and the incapability of many Dutchmen from the Indies to see the innate injustices of the pre-war colonial regime.37 A few years earlier, in December 1968, a

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former veteran of the Dutch forces fighting against nationalists in the Indonesian revolution had revealed that the Dutch forces were guilty of war crimes in the struggle against Indonesia. The colonial past became tarnished. The victims of captivity could be the pre-war oppressors of the Indonesians, or the post-war perpetrators of war crimes. The changing climate was also visible in the character and number of publications. Starting in the early 1970s, there was a modest wave of publications on life during the war in the East Indies. Again, this occurred at the same time as the peak in publications on World War II in Europe. Personal accounts were prominent in these. Memoirs, which had been published in numbers in the immediate aftermath of the war, now made a reappearance. To this was added a new medium, which symbolised the drive for authenticity: the war diary. Initially appearing at a frequency of only a few per year, their number swelled during the 1980s and 1990s.38 The trend towards autobiography and authenticity ran parallel with a turn to publicity and a growing activism. Moreover, there was a mushrooming of organisations that catered to different aspects of the communities from the Indies. This also resulted in an increasing number of reunions, and the establishment of new memorials. By this time, recognition was not only a moral issue, but had substantial material consequences. In 1973, Dutch parliament passed a law on financial assistance to victims of persecution of the German and Japanese occupying forces, the Wet Uitkeringen Vervolgingsslachtoffers (WUV), or Benefit Act for Victims of Persecution. It was followed by a law on benefits for civil war victims, the Wet Uitkeringen Burger-Oorlogsslachtoffers (WUBO), or Benefit Act for Civilian War Victims, in 1984. While the first act is limited to Dutch persons who have been imprisoned or have suffered physical or mental damage due to acts of persecution by the occupying authorities between the invasion and capitulation, the second also accepts other causes of disablement, including disturbances during the Indonesian revolution of 1945–49. These laws and the considerable level of assistance they provide have triggered a race for war benefits. Moreover, the emphasis on the medical and psychologically damaging effects of war and imprisonment and the material arrangements has called into being a large infrastructure of institutions and organisations involved in investigating, registering, paying and treating war victims, both from the war in Europe and in the East Indies.

Colonial fault lines In 1988, the Dutch Queen Beatrix inaugurated a monument devoted to the war experience of the Dutch in the wartime Indies, the ‘Indisch Monument’ in The Hague, which was to become the centre of annual commemorations of the end of the war in Asia on 15 August. The idea originated with an outsider, a former member of the Dutch resistance and government advisor on war


memorials, who wanted to create a separate location for commemoration of the war in Asia.39 Did the institution of the Indisch Monument mark the final integration of the Asian war memories into Dutch commemorative culture? With some justification, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten has characterised the monument as a sign of consensus, as it claims to represent the entire Indies’ community in the Netherlands, irrespective of the internal fault lines among postcolonial migrants. The text on a small triangular pillar in front of the main sculpture group reads: ‘Innumerable military, resistance fighters and civilians from all population groups in and outside the prison camps have lost their lives’. But although the monument has become an important point of focus for the Indies’ community, its form and ambitions bring the complexities of war memory into full daylight. For one, the Indisch Monument marks the failure to integrate the Pacific War into the mainstream Dutch war commemoration, which remains the main frame of reference for the Indies’ organisations. Tellingly, the main text on the sculpture reads: ‘The spirit triumphs’ – literally the same as on the National Monument in Amsterdam, the centre of commemorations of World War II in the Netherlands.40 While the annual commemoration ceremonies at the Indisch Monument are attended by several thousand people, the national television only broadcasts a short impression of it in its afternoon programme. To a large extent, the Indisch Monument confirms the isolation of the Indies’ war memory from the large national commemoration on 4 and 5 May. Moreover, despite its pretences, the monument and the annual commemoration cannot erase the fault lines in the migrant communities from the Indies. One such line existed between those who had been imprisoned by the Japanese and those who were not. In 1997, the well-known Dutch director Orlow Seunke made the first and only Dutch feature film on the Japanese period in the Netherlands Indies, Gordel van smaragd (Emerald Belt). The title referred to the metaphor which the famous Dutch author Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker) had used for the Dutch East Indies. The movie tells the story of a woman of Dutch-Indonesian descent, Ems, who has an affair with a young rubber employee from Holland, Theo. When Theo is imprisoned by the Japanese army on suspicion of sabotage, Ems saves his life by courting, and sharing the bed with, the responsible (nameless) Japanese officer. After war’s end, Theo and Ems reunite, but her affair with the officer remains a bone of contention. After the transfer of sovereignty in December 1949, Theo and Ems prepare to travel to the Netherlands. But on the brink of departure, Ems decides to stay and jumps out of the starting train, walking home on bare feet. The fictional episodes were interspersed by footage of the political events, which emphasised the historical aspect of the film. The film was praised for its technical achievements, but reviews were lukewarm. Film critics judged the film ‘a bloodless romance’ burdened by the

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ambition to teach a history lesson. One review applauded Seunke’s attempt to do justice to all communities involved in this history – meaning Dutch, Indo-Europeans and Indonesian nationalists.41 But others criticised the film for its clichéd rendering of the Indo-European woman Ems. Capricious and adulterous, she seems to stand for a promiscuous woman, who not only betrays her man but also her lover, and ultimately his nation by courting a Japanese man and ultimately by opting for Indonesia.42 In interviews, director Orlow Seunke dismissed any suggestion of having presented a clichéd image of a Eurasian woman.43 Remarkably, Seunke’s scrupulousness in making a historically well-researched film, made him vulnerable to criticism. Gordel van smaragd also marked the growing activism of a group that had hitherto been completely overlooked in history: those Dutch nationals who had not been imprisoned by the Japanese. This group consisted mainly of Eurasian (Indo-European) women, children and the aged. Most men had been imprisoned as soldiers or civil servants. Most of those Dutch IndoEuropeans who had escaped imprisonment had done so on the basis of their Asian complexion and genealogy. When the Dutch had received orders to register, people of mixed descent had to give proof of their percentage of indigenous ‘blood’. In the 1980s, this category was branded as buitenkampers: those who remained outside of the camps. It seems certain they formed a majority, perhaps as much as three-quarters, out of the total population of 290,000 people with European status at the start of the war. To some extent, the barrier between the former prisoners and the buitenkampers was therefore a racial divide. It was not a clear divide, however, as many Indo-European men had served in the army and had been imprisoned after capitulation. It also pointed at social differentiations in colonial times, when the expatriate community of white colonial civil servants had demonstrated considerable condescension towards the poorer classes of Indo-Europeans. The protests against Seunke’s Gordel van smaragd gave proof of the ambiguous position of the Indo-European Dutch community within the Dutch historical and commemorative landscape. Their relatively late arrival in the struggle for war memory was due to their slow start in the Netherlands and to the fact that as immigrants they had represented a minority culture and memory. Gordel van smaragd demonstrated the complexities of Dutch memory of its colonial past, and of the war in particular, to the full. Seunke’s film reflected the recent trends in Dutch memory of the war. It had become impossible to present a view on the Netherlands Indies without eliciting heated discussions and criticism. In later years, mention of The Bridge on the River Kwai, for instance, was invariably accompanied by remarks on the way in which the film presented a distorted truth. This represented a moral urge to present the historical truth. What had seemed to be obvious in the 1950s, had to be emphasised 20 years later. Since the 1970s, authenticity had become a weapon in the hands of specific groups of war ‘victims’ who were striving towards recognition of their experiences in the war.


The accommodation of memory Memories of captivity in the Pacific War have come a long way. The differences with 50 and even 30 years earlier are great. When the Japanese Emperor Akihito, Hirohito’s son and successor, visited the Netherlands in 2000, as part of the programme to celebrate 400 years of relations between the two countries, the episode of the Japanese occupation was widely discussed as early as a year before the trip. Wim Kan had fought a one-man struggle 30 years earlier, but now the Indies’ communities were represented by a large number of organisations. The visit itself passed without major incident, with potential protesters – now mostly people of 60 years and older – kept at a great distance from the touring royals. Despite this, many of the memory wars had continued, and were continuing, across a space of 60 years or more. The showing of White Skin, Yellow Commander in 1960 in Japan elicited fierce protests from the community of former internees in the Netherlands. In 2001 the showing of the motion picture Merdeka 17805 by Fuji Yukio on Indonesian independence sparked off similar reflexes. The film tried to demonstrate how crucial the Japanese were in the freedom struggle of the Indonesian Republic. It focused on the contribution of a few thousand Japanese military who opted to fight with the Indonesians for independence after 1945. Without having seen the film, delegates from Dutch Indies’ organisations demonstrated in front of parliament and demanded a formal protest from the government. They were received with unusual protocol by members of parliament, and had ample time to convey their message that the film was a falsification of the historical truth.44 The movie never circulated in the Netherlands. Thanks to the efforts of individuals, community representatives and organisations, the war in the East has acquired a distinct place in the Dutch commemorative landscape, but this has not ended the discussions over how to commemorate the war years, and how to educate children on them. Since 1999, 15 August has become a national day of commemoration for the war in Asia. A ceremony is held at the Indisch Monument in The Hague. This is broadcast, albeit not at prime time. The war in the Indies has also acquired a place in the Dutch history textbooks, in examinations, and documentaries. The main catalysts behind the growing attention to the war in Asia were the social and cultural changes of the late 1960s, and the expansion of the welfare state. Recognition of Dutch imprisonment in the East also found its niche, as Dutch ‘national’ memory fragmented, allowing space for different memories, which were accommodated by the policies of the Dutch government. As a result, the range of stories from the Indies has expanded. The prisoners at the Kwai railway and the women’s internment camps have been joined by others: children internees, forced labourers, buitenkampers, comfort women, children of Japanese fathers, Jews, and Moluccans. Most of these groups have organised themselves, often with financial assistance from the government.

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Much of this has been achieved through the efforts of community leaders, who had struggled over many years for increased recognition. Theirs was a two-pronged fight: one for separate institutions and social life; and another for inclusion in the national historical and commemorative culture. While the first aim has been materialised, it has come at a price. Dutch memories of the war in Asia are still characterised by a continuing struggle for attention, recognition and benefits; by a bitterness about the neglect by the government and the incomprehension by many other Dutch; and by the protests against any intrusion upon the established features of their memories of the East. Complaints about distorted or neglected history remain as strong as ever. Despite the growing attention to the war in the Indies, only token inclusion was achieved. While the episode of Dutch life under the Japanese occupation has much airplay, general knowledge about this history of the East Indies remains shallow, at best. Recent surveys of modern Dutch history all but fail to mention the events in the colonies.45 Why this is so is not hard to fathom, although it is not often recognised. The war in the East Indies has always fitted awkwardly into Dutch memory. It remains minority history, and lacks the quality to become a trope for the national experience. More generally, despite appearances, the Dutch colonies have been less central to Dutch identity than often is assumed. Memories from the East will always suffer from a fundamental moral ambiguity: the repudiation of colonialism, which the Indies epitomised, thwarts a full embrace of the wartime events. This rejection of colonialism, and deep divisions about Dutch behaviour in 1945 to 1949, make the war in the Indies unfit as a moral gauge for society to the extent that the Nazi occupation still is.46

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

The history of colonisation, decolonisation and the war in Indonesia were prescribed subjects for final school examinations in 1987 and 1988, in 2001 and 2002 and again in 2007 and 2008. To mention a few: A. Alberts, Adriaan van Dis, Rudy Kousbroek, Beb Vuyk. Jeroen Kemperman of the NIOD has assembled all available figures. See www.niod.nl/nl/content.asp?s=/nl/CijfermateriaalJapanseBezetting.htm, accessed 10 February 2007. See: Wim Willems, ‘No Sheltering Sky: Migrant Identities of Dutch Nationals from Indonesia’, in Andrea L. Smith (ed), Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 33–59; and Wim Willems, De uittocht uit Indië 1945–1995 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2001). Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘After the “Distant War”: Dutch Public Memory of the Second World War in Asia’, in Remco Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia: Personal Testimonies and Public Images in Indonesia, Japan, and the Netherlands (Zwolle and Amsterdam: Waanders Publishers and NIOD, 1999), pp. 55–70, esp. p. 60. See Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘From Urn to Monument: Dutch Memories of World War II in the Pacific, 1945–1995’, in Andrea L. Smith (ed), Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 105–28.


7 The register is made by the Dutch foundation for national war commemoration, Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 Mei. The register can be consulted at www. oorlogsmonumenten.nl, accessed 13 February 2007. The total number of monuments is 3,153. 8 See also Esther Captain, ‘“Geen spoortje Indisch, geen bamboe, geen prikkeldraad”: Het tweesporenbeleid van Indische zelforganisaties (1946–2000)’, in Conny Kristel (ed), Binnenskamers: Terugkeer en opvang na de Tweede Wereldoorlog: Besluitvorming (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002), pp. 325–55. 9 Voormalig Verzet Nederland, 17 December 1949; L. van Poelgeest, Japanse besognes: Nederland en Japan 1945–1975 (Den Haag: Sdu, 1999), p. 444. 10 This is also mentioned by Esther San Johanna Captain, Achter het kawat was Nederland: Indische oorlogservaringen en –herinneringen 1942–1995 (Kampen: Kok, 2002). 11 For an exhibition in Alphen aan den Rijn, see De Rijnlandsche Courant, 29 January 1946. 12 Trouw, 21 December 1946. 13 Maasbode, 18 June 1947. 14 De Telegraaf, 21 June 1956; De Tijd, 9 June 1956; Voormalig Verzet Nederland, 1 September 1956. 15 Hans Meijer and Margaret Leidelmeijer, Indische rekening: Indië, Nederland en de backpay-kwestie 1945–2005 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2005). 16 Peter Keppy, Sporen van vernieling. Oorlogsschade, roof en rechtsherstel in Indonesië 1940–1957 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2006). 17 In addition to the graves in Kanchanaburi and Chungkai, 621 Dutch victims are buried in Thanbyuzayat, on the Burma side of the railway line. 18 See Kustaw Bessems, Er leven niet veel mensen meer. Wim Kan en de komst van de Japanse keizer (Amsterdam and Antwerpen: Contact, 2000), pp. 14–5. 19 Corry Vonk and Wim Kan, Honderd dagen uit en thuis (1946; rev. ed. Utrecht: A. W. Bruna & Zoon, 1963). 20 Ber Hulsing in De Waarheid, 26 April 1958. 21 Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, 24 April 1958; De Volkskrant, 5 April 1958. 22 De Volkskrant, 20 February 1959. 23 Trouw, 28 June 1958. 24 Algemeen Handelsblad, 27 December 1963. 25 De Tijd, 21 February 1967; De Volkskrant, 21 February 1967; Het Vrije Volk, 22 February 1967. 26 Captain, Achter het kawat was Nederland, pp. 153–7. 27 For the story of Yamaji Tadashi and the story behind White Skin, Yellow Commander, see Maekawa Kaori’s chapter in this volume. For the Dutch reception of the movie see Remco Raben, ‘White Skin, Yellow Commander’, in Remco Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia: Personal Testimonies and Public Images in Indonesia, Japan, and the Netherlands (Zwolle and Amsterdam: Waanders Publishers and NIOD, 1999), pp. 159–60. 28 De Telegraaf, 10 October 1960; Algemeen Handelsblad, 10 October 1960. 29 A. H. Joustra, ‘Notitie over de film “Das Frauenlager von Kampili” ’ (24 March 1964), Archive NIOD, Amsterdam. 30 NIBEG Orgaan, 14 October 1960 and 28 October 1960. 31 De Telegraaf, 29 October 1960. 32 Trouw, 27 April 1961. 33 Willem Brandt, Het geheim (‘s-Gravenhage: Van Hoeve, 1960). 34 See also Chris Vos, ‘De levende getuige: De opkomst van het egodocument in de Nederlandse audiovisuele geschiedschrijving’ in: Oorlogsdocumentatie ‘40-’45: Tiende jaarboek van het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (n.p.: Walburg Pers, 1999), pp. 182–99, esp. pp. 190–1.

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35 Bessems, Er leven niet veel mensen meer, pp. 44–5. 36 Rudy Kousbroek, ‘Het psychodrama van Wim Kan’ (1971), reprinted in Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom: Anathema’s 6 (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1992), pp. 410–13. 37 Kousbroek, ‘Pleidooi voor een gemengd monument’ (1969) in Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom, pp. 380–83. 38 Mariska Heijmans-van Bruggen and Remco Raben, ‘Sources of Truth: Dutch diaries from Japanese Internment Camps’, in: Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese Occupation, pp. 163–76, esp. p. 174. 39 Locher-Scholten, ‘From Urn to Monument’, pp. 123–4. 40 L. Ch. Hoestlandt a.o., Indisch verleden: Lustrum-herdenkingsboek 1995; Stichting Herdenking 15 augustus 1945 (Purmerend: Asia Maior, 1996); see also David Wertheim, ‘Over and Done With?’, in Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese Occupation, pp. 200–1. 41 Hans Beerekamp, ‘Seunke geeft dekolonisatie eindelijk een echte kroniek’, in NRC Handelsblad, 1 October 1997. 42 Pamela Pattynama, ‘Innerlijk verscheurde speelfilm’, in Pasarkrant, November 1997); Pamela Pattynama, ‘A Shattered Idyll’, in Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese Occupation, pp. 220–1; Ricci Scheldwacht, ‘Karaktermoord’, in HP/De Tijd, 3 October 1997. 43 ‘Indo-vrouwen zijn prachtig’, interview with Joost Niemöller, in De Groene Amsterdammer, 24 September 1997; ‘“Ik ben waanzinnig gekwetst door de Indische gemeenschap” ’, interview with Ricci Scheldwacht, in Pasarkrant (December 1999). 44 De Telegraaf, 26 April 2001; Algemeen Dagblad, 27 April 2001; NRC Handelsblad, 13 June 2001; Trouw, 14 June 2001. 45 See J. J. Woltjer, Recent verleden: Nederland in de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam: Balans, 1992) and Piet de Rooy, Republiek van rivaliteiten: Nederland sinds 1813 (Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt, 2002). 46 See f.i. Remco Raben, ‘Koloniale Vergangenheit und postkoloniale Moral in den Niederlanden’, in Volkhard Knigge and Norbert Frei (ed.), Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermörd (München: Verlag C. H. Beck 2002), pp. 90–110.

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7

In the eye of a hurricane Americans in Japanese custody during World War II P. Scott Corbett

Dreaming of becoming a missionary, in 1940 Judy Skogerboe accepted a Lutheran Missionary posting in China. By the end of 1940, however, the State Department no longer permitted Americans to disembark in China, so Ms Skogerboe and her Lutheran comrades went to Manila to work on their Chinese and wait for their opportunity to commence their China mission work. Little did she know that she and her compatriots were headed into the eye of a hurricane that would land them in Japanese custody during what became the American phase of World War II.1 As early as the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) Japan had partnered with Western nations in the evolution of diplomatic law and practices regarding the treatment and status of both civilians and prisoners during warfare. That conflict was the first international conflict in Asia where the evolving concept of a ‘protecting power’ was employed. This was because both China and Japan requested that the United States serve as such to help protect the persons and property of nationals from each side in the territory of the other. The system was again utilised during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), with the United States serving as Japan’s protecting power in Russian territories. A system was set up to exchange information regarding the status of captured warriors on both sides and the Japanese sought and were granted the right to have their POWs visited by the American protectors to verify the humane treatment of its warriors.2 The effort to establish more humane behaviour was taken up by the International Red Cross after World War I, through amendments to refine the earlier Hague Convention of 1907, which Japan had already acceded to. These efforts produced the Geneva Convention of July 1929, agreed to by a total of forty-seven powers. The provisions of the Convention required humane prisoner treatment in a more comprehensive and explicit manner than the 1907 agreement, for instance demanding proper housing and hygiene (Articles 9–15), treatment of women ‘with the regard due to their sex’ (Article 3), no employment on unhealthy work or work related directly to war operations (Articles 27–32), no corporal punishment (Article 46), and a level of food commensurate with that given to the detaining power’s troops in base camps (Article 11).3 Officers were also not required to work, although they could request this.

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Japan signed the Geneva Convention of 1929. A number of factors then coalesced to prevent the ratification of the Geneva Convention by the Japanese government, not the least of which were the views of the Japanese military. Japanese governments were already perched precariously on top of the constitutional strengths of the Japanese military and its paranoia about enemies foreign and domestic. It was maintained that ratification of the Convention would seem to offer protection for possible enemy airmen in air raids on Japanese targets, thereby placing Japan itself in the bombsites of enemy aircrews.4 Increasingly the tone of the 1930s, with the strident role model of Hitler’s Germany, and the intensification of the Japanese love/hate relationship with Western civilisation, itself helped ferment deeper hostilities towards the West in general. Throughout the 1930s as the Sino-Japanese War intensified and Japan was inching closer and closer to total war and expanding their operations to include the Western imperialist nations in Asia, the Japanese military did not imagine that its warriors would ever become prisoners of war. Therefore they would not need the protection of the Geneva Convention themselves. This distancing from the need to protect prisoners may also have been related to shifts in military training and codes of honour. During the 1930s what was stressed was the unique spirit of the Japanese military. This was epitomised by, the Field Service Code (Senjinkun) of 1941, which included the passage: ‘You shall not undergo the shame of being taken alive. You shall not bequeath a sullied name’.5 Consequently it was consistent with Japanese military values that Japanese soldiers received little or no instruction as to their responsibilities under the Geneva Convention. According to one estimate, Japanese naval officers attending the Japanese naval college after 1941 might have received only 1 hour of instruction on international law during their whole course of study there.6 When Japan expanded its war to include European enemies after 7 December 1941, the American and British governments enquired if the Japanese were willing to abide by the Geneva Convention of 1929. It came as some relief when Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Tojo assured them that, although not required to do so, the Japanese government ‘would apply its provisions mutatis mutandis’: meaning ‘with the necessary changes’. The Allies took this as the equivalent of ratifying the Convention. They did this without knowing that the Japanese Ministry of the War had already decided to interpret the Convention by reserving the right to ‘apply it with any necessary amendments: not that we shall apply it strictly.’7 This was further indicated by the fact that in the three previous instances of Japanese belligerency, the Imperial Rescripts declaring war contained comments on observing international law regarding the treatment of prisoners. Such comments were missing from the Rescript declaring war in December 1941.8 Noted Japanese scholar of International Law Shinobe Jumpei published an article shortly after the commencement of hostilities, criticising the mild treatment of Russian and German prisoners in the Russo-Japanese War and

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during World War I respectively. Simultaneously, many battle-hardened Japanese field officers had fought for years in the China theatre. Japan had categorised the Sino-Japanese hostilities as an ‘incident’, not a ‘war’ covered by the Geneva Convention, and officers there also faced opposition from nonuniformed insurgents. In this context, they had grown accustomed to meting out severe treatment to Chinese and other Asian combatants. As early as September 1932 during the mop-up operations in its seizure of Manchukuo, as the Japanese dubbed Manchuria, the Japanese military classified the perpetrators of anti-Japanese activity as ‘bandits’. As such, Japanese officers, Manchukuo military officers, and police were authorised to ‘dispose’ of such elements through summary execution regardless of whether the opposing forces might actually meet the test of guerilla forces according to the rules of war. Known as genju-shobun (severe punishment) or genchi-shobun (on the spot punishment), this lead to instances of Japanese troops massacring whole villages suspected of resisting Japanese order. This practice continued throughout the existence of the state of Manchukuo.9 Such stern attitudes and practices were applied to China proper after the commencement of the Sino-Japanese hostilities. In 1933 the Infantry Academy published a book entitled A Study of ways to Fight the Chinese Army which noted in the chapter dealing with prisoners of war: There is no need to take POWs into custody nor return them, in contrast with our treatment of POWs of other nationalities. Except in certain special cases, it is sufficient to free them on the spot or in another location. Further, the Chinese system of residency registration is imperfect, and most soldiers are homeless anyway and seldom registered. Thus no problems will arise if we kill them or deport them.10 Since the Japanese government maintained that the fighting in China was an ‘incident’ rather than a war, and the Japanese Government never formally declared war on China, the Ministry of War instructed field forces in China that the rules of warfare and the Hague Convention did not apply there. Hence Japanese forces never established a regularised POW administration or POW camps for Chinese prisoners.11 Officers schooled in the China conflict were, after 7 December 1941, challenged to adapt their behaviour towards enemies in such a way as to afford captured Western military personnel a different type of treatment all together. Some found it hard not to fall back on earlier learned behaviour. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo took a hard line, as did the first director of the POW Information Bureau, Lieutenant-General Miko Uemura, who established two simple rules governing the treatment of POWs in early 1942. These were that: ‘within the limits prescribed by humanity enemy POWS must be treated severely’; and that they should be applied to useful work tasks to expand production. In one conference with camp commanders, on June 25, 1942, General Uemura noted that: ‘We shall use the POWs to make the native

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peoples realize the superiority of the Japanese Race.’12 A month later the Minister of the Army in instructing the commandants of POW camps warned against the ‘dangers’ of ‘excessive’ humanity towards Allied prisoners.13 As the Japanese tsunami bore down on the Philippines in early 1942, American civilians, having been assured that the Philippines were impregnable, stood in its path. One American woman noted, ‘everyone was thinking of the rape of Nanking’.14 Anxiety among American civilians in the Philippines was ratcheted up with the invasion of the islands by Imperial Japanese Forces, and then the harsh treatment meted out to American military prisoners once they surrendered the last bastions at Bataan and on Corregidor Fortress, in April and May 1942 respectively. Of around 100,000 American and Filipino POWs taken by April 1942, some 70,000 were marched – many already stricken – from Bataan to Camp O’Donnell, before later transfers to Camp Cabanatuan. Several thousand died along the way of illness, neglect, beating, or execution when they could go no further. Most Filipino POWs were then paroled. For the American POWs, shipment to Japan and elsewhere around its empire commenced on ‘Hell Ships’ from October 1942. Hastily Japanese military and civilian authorities devised policies towards Allied citizens. In the Philippines, just after the Japanese secured Manila, Allied civilians were instructed to collect 3 days of rations and prepare for ‘registration’.15 It had been determined in Tokyo that American POWS and civilian internees could be put to ‘useful’ purposes. This labour, often war-related, was performed at 169 locations in Japan or territories occupied by Japan.16 An example of what began to evolve can be seen in the desires of General Seishiro Itagaki of the Chosen Army in Korea who requested in March 1942 that 1,000 British and 1,000 American POWs be sent to Korea because he felt it would ‘be very effective in stamping out the respect and admiration of the Korean people for Britain and America, and also in establishing in them a strong faith in’ Japan’s victory in the war.17 By June 1942, Prime Minister and Minister of War Hideki Tojo informed the chiefs of POW camps: In Japan, we have our own ideology concerning POWs, which should naturally make their treatment more or less different from that in Europe and America . . . you must place the prisoners under strict discipline and not allow them to lie idle doing nothing by eating freely for even a single day. 18 By the fall of 1942 the Japanese had worked out different allocations of Allied prisoners. One large pool of prisoner labour was to be shipped to the Asian mainland to work on the Burma–Thailand Railway project.19 Deeming the relocation of POWs to Korea a success, more white prisoners would be sent there. Others would be sent to Japan where they might be assigned ‘scores of jobs, in dockyards, factories, cottage industries, shipyards, coal and copper


mines, and on construction gangs.’20 Despite prohibitions in the Geneva Convention against employing POWs on war-related work, partnerships developed between private Japanese industries and the government for the use of American labour. In October 1942 the governor of Kanagawa Prefecture commented on this to the Minister of Welfare and Home Affairs: It is generally admitted by all the business proprietors alike that the use of POW labour has made the systematic operation of transportation possible for the first time, and has not only produced a great influence in the business circle, but will also contribute greatly to the expansion of production, including munitions of war, and the execution of industry. Though the public has not been informed of POW labour, those who have guessed about it from seeing them . . . seem to realize with gratitude the glory of the Imperial Throne, seeing before their eyes English and American POWs at their labour . . . makes them determined not to be defeated.21 What developed was a crushing regimen of uncompensated work – work was supposed to be compensated – as remembered by Vernon La Heist, a POW assigned to the Mitsubishi factory in Mukden: The Japanese decided to start paying us for our work . . . 20 sen per day for a 10 hour day and 25 sen if you worked overtime. They even paid us in cash one pay day [sic], but when there was nothing to spend our money on, gambling became a problem. As a result the Japanese quit paying, but made us sign the payroll each payday and said the money would be put in a savings account in our name and we would get the money after the war. After a while there was no more signing and we assumed they just stopped paying. In any event, we never saw any more of the money.22 But no matter how lethal or painful such working assignments were, perhaps the biggest threat to survival for American POWs was getting to such labour camps. POWs were transported on ‘hellships’. One scholar of this, himself a survivor, characterises them as representing ‘a kind of depravity, a supreme form of evil beyond the scope of history.’ 23 As early as 10 December 1942, Japanese War Ministry, in its Secret Order No. 1504, noted with concern the ghastliness of the hellships. Noting that many of the POWs transported had died or become too ill to be of use, those in charge of these prisoners were instructed to ‘ensure that they reached their destination in a condition that would allow them to be constructively put to work’. The implementation of these instructions left much to be desired. Perhaps 90 per cent of the POWs being sent to labour stations died as a result of friendly fire and inadequate accommodation during transport.24 One estimate puts the death rate for American POWs in Japanese custody at 27 per cent, seven or eight times higher than in German POW camps.25 Japanese

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military sources put the overall death rate at 25 per cent of the approximate 140,000 Allied POWs in its charge, and admit to the death of 11,000 out of the 27,000 Americans who were POWs of the Japanese.26 American civilians were also interned in various corners of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. When American civilians were taken into ‘protective custody’ varied. One of the goals of such detention was to demoralise the Asian friends and supporters of the Western imperialists who were being deservedly trounced by the ‘liberating’ Japanese Imperial forces. As Langdon Gilkey and other Americans in Beijing were gathered together to be sent into internment he observed: The Japanese had lined up most of the city’s Chinese population along the street to view our humiliation. We knew the Japanese intended that these marches, which took place throughout the cities and ports of China, be symbol of the final destruction of Western prestige in the Orient.27 The Americans tried to maintain as much dignity as possible while being forced to walk a mile or so through the streets of Beijing. Gilkey noted that, ‘we provided precisely the ridiculous spectacle that the Japanese hoped for’.28 As American civilians were interned in the Philippines, the anxieties of the women there regarding a repeat of the ‘Rape of Nanking’ proved unfounded. Japanese soldiers did not abuse American women. Various explanations for this have been offered, some focusing on the fact that most American women interned in the Philippines were mothers with children. Japanese soldiers seemed chary of violating the mother–child bond and demonstrated obvious fondness towards Caucasian children.29 In the early days of the war, the Swiss government representatives who were serving as America’s Protecting Power in Japanese-occupied territory were able to provide a few details about the conditions of confinement. The conclusion the Special Division of the State Department, assigned to handle related matters, was that conditions for Americans varied depending on where they had been taken into custody, the element of the Japanese government exercising authority, and their distance from war zones. Moreover, it seems that camp commandants with ‘previous experience with western peoples’ or who had been in ‘Europe or America’ were generally ‘much more liberal in their treatment of Americans’ than commanders with ‘no previous occidental contacts.’30 Immediately after the assault on Pearl Harbor, the Secretary of State of the United States, Cordell Hull, called upon the Swiss Government to relay to Japan a proposal for the exchange of diplomatic personnel. Such was pretty standard practice in the advent of hostilities, and given the fact that Japanese had already agreed to accept the Geneva Convention as the framework to govern the treatment of prisoners, it seemed a good bet that the Japanese would agree to such an exchange. The Japanese indicated their acceptance in principle by 13 December 1941, and that the exchanges should take place at


the Portuguese port of Lourenco Marques in Africa.31 By the end of 1943 two exchanges of civilian internees had been affected between the United States and Japan. These even included Japanese nationals from Canada and Latin and South America, all in an effort to leverage the largest number of American civilians out of Japanese detention. Although this repatriated several thousand American civilians and extracted them from increasingly deteriorating conditions of confinement, 10,000 or so American civilians languished in Japanese custody until the war’s end. One of the repatriates, Gwen Drew, published her account of her experiences in the Philippines in 1943 under the title Prisoner of the Japs. This recounted, among other things, what she had heard of the abusive treatment of British nurses at the hands of the Japanese during the capture of Hong Kong. Publication of such atrocity stories was rare during the war as the American government sought to suppress them under the theory that any critical assessment of Japanese behaviour might hinder the prospects of retrieving more people through exchanges. The resulting lack of knowledge fed some of the worst fears of those hoping for the safe return of their loved ones. Depending on one’s age and familial roles, the internment years were a severe challenge and a scaring interlude, or an ‘adventure’ into the depths of the human spirit. Desmond Power recalls being confined first in Shanghai and eventually in Weihsien in Shantung Province. Power reconstructs a dialogue between a Harvard Ph.D. According to Power, the professor suggested that despite the Spartan camp conditions and the attendant anxieties, internees had discovered the exhilarating necessity of banding together for the common good and achieving unity in the face of danger. Accordingly, the professor speculated that there might come a time when the internees would miss their experiences in the internment camp.32 As war took its toll on Japan the conditions of confinement deteriorated. Daily caloric intake plunged to dangerous and even fatal levels. In just one instance, for Fukuoka POW Camp No. 17 on Kyushu Island, one of the camp physicians, Dr Thomas Hewlett, noted drastic drops in calorific intake in 1943–45. In 1943–44 the daily diet provided dropped to 597 calories per day for workers, and 341 calories a day for men in the hospital. For 1944–45 it declined to 500 a day for workers and 153 a day for men too sick to work.33 For various reasons, relief supplies that had been delivered to the Japanese either through the Swiss government or the International Red Cross had been withheld from POWs and internees. Concerned that the treatment of POWs might be undermining the Japanese War effort, in March 1944 the Japanese Prisoner of War Bureau alerted camp administrators that ‘enemy propaganda’ was whipping up even more hostility towards Japan and that continued mistreatment of POWs would hamper the nation’s ‘prosecution of moral warfare. . . . Accordingly, the charges of the Japanese were to be given their rightful allocation of ‘food, medicine, and clothing’.34

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In the Philippines, various bits of information had reached General MacArthur of the perilous condition of civilian internees in certain detention centres. He formed a ‘flying column’ of nearly 1,000 battle-hardened veterans to effect the rescue of civilians at Santo Tomas, Bilibid Prison and Malacanan Palace despite the minimal strategic importance of those locations for recapturing Luzon.35 The liberation of Santo Tomas included a dramatic crashing of the gates by American tanks and a hostage crisis as retreating Japanese troops sought refuge in the Education Building and attempted to use civilian internees as shields against American firepower.36 Although it has never been proven, in 1945 there was reason to believe that the internees at Los Banos might be the subject of vengeful reprisals for the recapture of Manila. Rumours arose of a Japanese ‘massacre’ order regarding the internees there that only added to the haste with which the military wanted to affect the rescue of that camp.37 In what has been termed a classic example of coordinated tactics involving several different types of military units, the relief of Los Banos commenced on 23 February 1945. The plan included the rapid evacuation of the internees to remove them from any potential battlefield harm. The joy of the civilians over their salvation led many to profusely thank their liberators. Not wanting to waste time, one American soldier shouted to the celebrating and somewhat confused internees: ‘You are free, liberated! Pack up and be ready to leave in five minutes. Take only what you can carry!’38 In American popular memory, these stunning rescues have been eclipsed by the rescue of 500 American POWs at Cabanatuan 30 miles behind enemy lines by the 6th Ranger Battalion on 30 January 1945. The Cabanatuan rescue received greater publicity at the time. Popular books have kept its memory alive, as well as a 2005 Miramax movie, The Great Raid, which had Hollywood stars Benjamin Bratt and James Franco playing the rescuers and other stars, such as Joseph Fiennes, playing the POWs.39 In the books and the movie, there is no mention of the thousands of civilian internees held by the Japanese in the Philippines. Images of the Bataan death march and the Cabanatuan rescue have crowded out the memories of the civilians. The internee experience has been largely forgotten compared to public memory of the POW experience. The American military had begun planning for the rescue of American POWs and civilians not only in Japan but in Korea, Manchuria and various places throughout China, including Hainan Island and Taiwan. Initial estimates were that it would take up to a year to bring them all out. Yet the rescue efforts proceeded so expeditiously that, within 6 weeks of the Japanese surrender, 32,000 or so Americans were steaming homeward.40 Survivors recounted ‘incidents of genuine humanity shown to them as well as cases of appalling brutality.’ It also became clear that towards the end of the war senior Japanese officers ‘began to intervene’ as they anticipated that ‘some would be forced to answer for their behaviour.’41


That accounting process was begun as the Allies against Japan, with the United States taking the lead, cobbled together the precedents and procedures of prosecuting war criminals. Three classifications, A, B, C, and were allocated to different jurisdictions and legal proceedings. Class A criminals, deemed the most serious, were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. Among the Class A war criminals, offences against POWs accounted for approximately 10 per cent of the 1,445 pages of judgment against them. In the end, half of the eight men convicted of crimes against POWs were sentenced to death.42 Even the lower levels of war criminals had to account for their treatment of Allied POWs. Lesser war criminals were put on trial by national tribunals conducted by the various Allies in hundreds of prosecutions in local jurisdictions throughout the former Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Allies generated a list of some 300,000 individuals who deserved prosecution as Class B and Class C war criminals. Some 5,700 were prosecuted, with 3,000 or so being convicted, and 920 of those executed.43 The horror of the hellships was accounted for in some of these cases. In Case 154 of the Class C war crimes trials, Lieutenant Toshino and Interpreter Wada were convicted of abuses and atrocities on three hellship voyages, contributing to the deaths of 1,039 Americans. Wada received a life sentence and Toshino was executed.44 When we look at the particulars of many of the trials, it becomes obvious that medical malpractice was common, including: withholding medical and related supplies; forcing ill men to work; maltreating medical personnel; maltreating patients; preventing the ill from obtaining medical care; conducting illegal or unethical experimentations; withholding food; functioning in a medically incompetent manner; willfully neglecting the welfare of the sick and injured; interfering with International Red Cross supplies; and finally, performing euthanasia.45 One of the things that had helped sustain American POWs during their darkest days was the demonstration of gratitude they anticipated from their grateful nation upon their return. Many POWs dreamed of ‘free this, all you can eat that, a lifetime supply of the other’.46 But that was not to be the reality. By 1948, Congress had passed the War Claims Act. This created the War Claims Commission, which was to pay a lump sum to all American POWs of both the Germans and Japanese out of a fund created by the sale of assets seized from Germany and Japan. The rate of compensation was $1 a day for the deprivation of food and an additional $1.50 a day for being forced to perform labour. Certain categories of civilian internees were to receive $60 a month for their spells in Japanese custody.47 Doing the arithmetic means that a survivor of the Bataan death march might have received as much as $3,104: when in 1944 the lowest rank in the American military earned $50 a month or $600 a year.48 To many that seemed woefully inadequate.

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As early as 1946 one of those Bataan march survivors, Lester Tenney, began his quest for ‘justice’.49 As the Japanese economic miracle blossomed after World War II, and later as the movement for ‘redress’ for the internment of Japanese and JapaneseAmericans in the United States during the war gathered momentum, individuals and aggregates of POWs and internees began to seek additional ‘justice’.50 This might be from their own government, from the government of Japan, or from the private companies that had profited from their wartime labour. Lawsuits against Japanese companies for unpaid wages began as early as 1987, when Robert Aldrich, formerly a member of the 200th Coast Artillery, filed his suit against Mitsui & Co. in Florida State Circuit Court. The judge dismissed the suit as being prohibited by the peace treaty ending the war. The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, while recognising that Japan should pay reparations ‘for damage and suffering caused by it during the war’ also recognised the limitations of Japan’s resources at the time. Accordingly, in Article 14, Section b, the Allied powers waived ‘all reparations claims of the Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan and its nationals in the course of the prosecution of the war’. In return, certain categories of wartime-seized Japanese assets were retained, and used to compensate victims.51 In late 1999, POWs and internees filed suits in California courts against several major Japanese companies seeking reparations. Former POWs have sued some sixty Japanese corporations, including such giants as Mitsubishi and Mitsui, in the American courts. Both the American and Japanese governments have consistently maintained that such claims were settled with the 1951 Peace Treaty. Through pre-trial maneuvres extending almost 4 1/2 years, the Japanese companies succeeded in having the cases dismissed. Neither did they voluntarily accept the example of various German corporations that have behaved differently regarding their wartime culpability in forced and slave labour cases. The accused Japanese corporations ‘neither compensated individual victims nor acknowledged the historical fact of POW forced labour. Nor did the Japanese government initiate any educational projects to disseminate information on the history of POWs of the Japanese.’52 But the clarity of the implications of the 1951 Peace Treaty also became an issue in Japanese courts. In a 1956 case, when a Japanese civilian sought to sue the Japanese government for renouncing his right to seek claims against the United States and American military personnel, the Japanese court affirmed the Japanese government’s interpretation that the reciprocal articles in the peace treaty also waived Japan’s claims against the Allies for their actions taken during the war.53 But a 1963 case arising from survivors of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggested otherwise. They sued the Japanese government for renouncing their right to compensation for suffering. The court ruled that: ‘The government of Japan, by Article 19(a) of the Peace Treaty, did not waive its nationals’ individual claims for damages against the government of the United States and President Truman.’54


In the 1980s a series of claims followed by Japanese POWs and internees who had been forced into harsh labour camps by the Soviets in Siberia at the end of the war, and even well after Japan’s surrender. Both former POWs and civilian internees sued their own government for compensation for their unpaid labour. This was on the grounds that the joint declaration of the Soviet Union and Japan ending their conflict had waived all claims of each nation against the other. The Japanese government argued in defence that: ‘The claims that Japan waived by Article 6(2) of the Joint Declaration by the USSR and Japan were claims owned by the government of Japan itself . . . and the claims owned by the Japanese national individuals were not waived.’55 Eventually, although these cases continued to make their way to and through the Japanese Supreme Court through the 1990s and early part of the new millennium, they were denied for technical reasons. The dismissal of the court cases mounted by American POWs and internees has rendered the Japanese government’s position on whether rights were waived or not in the various peace settlements moot. One can nevertheless understand a continuing, nagging hunger by Americans who were caught in the eye of a hurricane for some sort of honest closure to their ordeals. Nor are the Japanese united in rejecting the need for such a closure. For Japanese scholar Kinue Tokudume: It is not in the best interest of the Japanese state or its corporations to have a troubling legacy of refusing to address this painful history and the larger history of forced labour of which it was a part. The Japanese government and companies should acknowledge the wartime POW forced labour by making related historical records available to the public, offer a sincere apology, and initiate meaningful educational/reconciliation projects to bring to an honorable closure this tragic event of World War II while some of the survivors are still with us.56 Attempts to give POWs additional American compensation failed in the 106th Congress in 1999. Despite this, legislation was passed to find, declassify, and release any Japanese records that the United States might have relating to Japanese war crimes from World War II. A Congressional resolution also passed in 2000 asked the Administration to facilitate discussions between POWs and Japanese companies over POW slave labour claims. In 2002 Lester Tenney testified before Congress about his ordeal: I was forced to work in a coal mine owned by the industrial giant, Mitsui, who allotted me a bare 500 calories of rice each day, and the medical care was practically non-existent. It was in the coal mine where I was beaten, many times almost to the point of death. My back and shoulder were broken, my teeth knocked out, my nose and head split wide open, all of this done by the civilians working for Mitsui, and done on a regular basis.57

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Despite the interest that the American legislators displayed in these issues and the attention that Mr Teney was able to bring to his cause, the various pieces of legislation proposed in Congress died in committee or were never brought to a vote. The complexity of the international legal issues, and their intertwining with the concerns of other groups of veterans from the Korean and the Vietnam War, tended to derail legislative action. Although the exact number will never be known, perhaps as many as 80 million people were directly drawn in to the maelstrom of World War II. Of that number, probably more than 35 million warriors and civilians saw some form of confinement or capture between 1939 and 1945. So the experience of being in the custody of one’s enemies far from home or in unanticipated locations within one’s home and country of residence was not an uncommon event.58 Searching for meaning from those experiences and the tragedy of the war itself, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East thought their work in Tokyo, wrestling with issues of justice and accountability, might have a positive impact on warfare from 1945 onwards.59 In seeking justice for their experiences, American POWs and civilian internees laboured to solidify and codify what they believed was and ought to be the honourable behaviour of nations during warfare. Yet, efforts to make World War II a template for the level of humanity in warfare that belligerents can be held to may be doomed. If nothing else, World War II was one of the last big ‘ordinary’ wars the world has endured. With smaller insurgencies and unconventional forms of combat coming to account for an increasingly large share of conflict from the latter half of the twentieth century, a whole new raft of problems in the ethics of war, and the ethics of the treatment of prisoners and civilians, has become prominent.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Theresa Kaminski, Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 24–5. P. Scott Corbett, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the Second World War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987), p. 6. Articles taken from the Yale University Law School Avalon Project, online www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/lawwar.htm. Ikuhiko Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt: The Changing Nature of Japanese Military and Popular Perceptions of Prisoners of War Through the Ages’ in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Berg: Oxford, 1996), pp. 253–76, and pp. 262–3. Yoicha Kibata, ‘Japanese Treatment of British Prisoners of War: The Historical Context’, in Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge and Yoichi Kibata (eds), Japanese Prisoners of War (London: Hambledon, 2000), pp. 134–7 and p. 145. Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), p. 194. Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt’, in Moore and Fedorowich (eds) Prisoners of War, pp. 254–5, and 266. Kibata, ‘Japanese Treatment of British Prisoners of War’, in Towle, Kosuge and Kibata (eds) Japanese Prisoners of War, p. 145.


9 Hirofumi Hayashi, ‘Japanese Treatment of Chinese Prisoners, 1931–1945’, originally written for Nature-People-Society: Science and the Humanities, 26 (January 1999), online at www32.ocn.ne.jp/~modernh/eng01.htm, accessed 23 February 2007. 10 Hayashi, ‘Japanese Treatment’. 11 Hayashi, ‘Japanese Treatment’. 12 Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt’, in Moore and Fedorowich (eds) Prisoners of War, pp. 253–76. 13 Towle, ‘The Japanese Army and Prisoners of War’, in Towle, Kosuge and Kibata (eds) Japanese Prisoners of War, p. 78. 14 Kaminski, Prisoners in Paradise, pp. 36–7. 15 Kaminski, Prisoners in Paradise, p. 48. 16 Linda Holmes, Unjust Enrichment: How Japan’s companies built Post-war Fortunes Using American POWs (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), pp. 23, and 27. 17 Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, p. 23. 18 Kibata, ‘Japanese Treatment of British Prisoners of War’, in Towle, Kosuge and Kibata (eds), Japanese Prisoners of War, p. 145. 19 For details on the railway, and on use of Asian labour, including from Japan’s colonies in Taiwan and Korea, see also Paul Kratoska (ed), Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006). 20 Gregory Michno, Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001), pp. 276–7. 21 Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, p. 28. 22 Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, p. 31. 23 Michno, Death on the Hellships, p.ix. 24 Michno, Death on the Hellships, pp. 72–3 and 292. 25 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994), p. 361. 26 Tokudome, ‘Troubling Legacy’. 27 Corbett, Quiet Passages, p. 178. 28 Corbett, Quiet Passages, p. 178. 29 Kaminski, Prisoners in Paradise, p. 45. 30 Corbett, Quiet Passages, pp. 176–7. 31 Corbett, Quiet Passages, pp. 54–5. 32 Desmond Power, Little Foreign Devil (West Vancouver, British Columbia: Pangli Imprint, 1996), pp. 208–9. 33 Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, p. 52. 34 Michno, Death on the Hellships, p. 284. 35 Francis B. Cogan, The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941–1945 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 261. 36 Cogan, The Japanese Internment, pp. 267–76. 37 Cogan, The Japanese Internment, pp. 285–8. 38 Cogan, Japanese Internment, p. 300. 39 William B. Breuer, The Great Raid on Cabanatuan: Rescuing the Doomed Ghosts of Bataan and Corrigedor (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994); and Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission (New York: Doubleday, 2001). 40 Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 345. 41 Towle, ‘The Japanese Army and Prisoners of War’, in Towle, Kosuge and Kibata (eds) Japanese Prisoners of War, p. 14. 42 Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, pp. 368–9. 43 Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 370.

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44 Michno, Death on the Hellships., p. 302. Judith L. Pearson has produced a dramatic retelling of Estel Meyer’s story and that of the Oryoku Maru in, Belly of the Beast: A POW’s Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hell Ship ‘Oryoku Maru’ (New York: New American Library, 2001). 45 Charles G. Roland, ‘Human Vivisection: The Intoxication of Limitless Power in Wartime’ in Moore and Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War, p. 149. 46 Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 383. 47 Gary K. Reynolds, ‘U. S. Prisoners of War and Civilian American Citizens Captured and Interned by Japan in World War II’, online at: www.aiipowmia.com/wwii/ RL30606ww2.html, accessed 23 September 2006. 48 San Francisco Chronicle, 22 April 2001. The 1944 salary figures are from Malvern Hall Tillitt, ‘Army-Navy Pay Tops Most Civilians’ Unmarried Private’s Income Equivalent to $3,600 Salary’ (originally published in Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, April 24, 1944, online at: www.usmm.org/barrons.html, accessed 23 February 2007. 49 Alex Tresniowski and Lyndon Stambler, ‘LESTER TENNEY’S 60-YEAR WAR Imprisoned by the Japanese, an American POW aims to settle a wartime injustice’, online at home.comcast.net/~winjerd/People.htm, accessed 23 September 2006. 50 By August 1988, the ‘redress’ movement had succeeded in getting passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which offered survivors of the American internment movement a Presidential apology and a single payment of $20,000 in symbolic partial compensation for losses during internment and the discriminatory treatment they had received. 51 East Asian Studies Documents, online at: www.isop.ucla.edu/eas/documents/ peace1951.htm, accessed 90September 2006. Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, p. 137. 52 Tokudome, ‘Troubling Legacy’. 53 Tokudome, ‘Troubling Legacy’. 54 Tokudome, ‘Troubling Legacy’. 55 Tokudome, ‘Troubling Legacy’. 56 Tokudome, ‘Troubling Legacy’. 57 In ‘Mitsubishi, Mitsui, . . . and World War II Slave Labor’, online at www. mitsubishisucks.com/slave-labor/usa/lester-tenney.html, accessed 23 September 2006. 58 Moore and Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War, p. 1. 59 Tim Maga, Judgment at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), p. 139.

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8

The Canadian experience of the Pacific War Betrayal and forgotten captivity Gregory A. Johnson

The vast majority of work covering the Canadian experience of the Pacific War of 1941–45 has been dominated by two issues: the decision to send two battalions of Canadian soldiers to Hong Kong in the fall of 1941, and the treatment of Japanese Canadians in the aftermath of the fall of Singapore in 1942. This is understandable in light of the fact that the Canadians who fought at Hong Kong were the first Canadian troops to see action during World War II and they, along with other British Commonwealth forces, were beaten so quickly and so badly. The government was almost immediately charged with sending poorly-trained and ill-equipped troops to defend the crown colony. So strong was the criticism that Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King struck a Royal Commission to look into the matter. This exonerated Mackenzie King’s administration of any wrongdoing. The general consensus was that Hong Kong was an unforeseeable tragedy that was perhaps best forgotten. Then, in March 1942, some 21,000 Japanese Canadians, most of whom were Canadian born, were forced to move from the coast to the interior of British Columbia. Their property was seized and much of it later sold off. The official explanation was that the Japanese Canadians had to be ‘evacuated’ to ‘relocation camps’ for reasons of national security. After the war, the Japanese Canadians were more or less dispersed and the matter became a minor footnote to history and to national memories – or non-memories – of the war in the Pacific.1 It would be more than a quarter of a century before revisionists began to question the wartime version of the Canadian experience of the Pacific. When they did so, they produced a very different assessment not only of what had happened but of what was important. The experience of the Japanese Canadians, which was more or less ignored before the mid-1970s, now occupies the central place in national memories of the Pacific War. The ‘evacuation’ has become the ‘internment’ and racism has replaced national security as the central reason for uprooting the Japanese Canadians. The matter is considered nothing less than a betrayal of the rights of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry and a black stain on the Canadian consciousness.

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Gregory A. Johnson

The Canadian experience at Hong Kong, although still not as widely known, has also undergone revision. The new version, with the largest public exposure, largely dismisses the Royal Commission’s conclusions and is highly critical of the Mackenzie King government’s decision to send troops to Hong Kong. Even if the Hong Kong debacle is still open to debate, the broad consensus is that it, too, was a betrayal and a stain on the Canadian record. The despatch of Canadian troops to Hong Kong and the uprooting of the Japanese Canadians from the west coast of British Columbia were and are important historical issues, but lost in the narrow concentration on these two matters is the truly forgotten captivity of the survivors of the two battalions of Canadians after the defeat at Hong Kong. It has been only very recently that anything resembling a serious treatment of these Canadian POWs has appeared, and it has a heavy emphasis on medical history.2 Nonetheless, the story of the captivity is slowly beginning to emerge. This chapter will sketch the background of these three wartime developments and offer tentative explanations about why the Canadian understanding of the experience of the Asia-Pacific war has turned out the way it has. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 forced an immediate concern over two issues. The first, and at the time dominant matter was: what would happen to the two battalions of Canadian troops in Hong Kong? The origins of the Hong Kong expedition, the so-called ‘C’ Force, are to be found in a visit the outgoing General Officer Commanding British troops in China, Canadian born Major-General A. E. Grasett, made in Canada in August 1941. Grasett had relinquished his command to Major-General C. M. Maltby in July 1941. On his way back to England he stopped at Ottawa to see his old friend, General H. D. G. Crerar, the chief of the Canadian general staff. Grasett and Crerar had both attended the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. Although Crerar later denied that Grasett had raised the question of sending Canadian troops, most historians believe that Grasett did discuss the prospect of Canada sending a couple of battalions to Hong Kong.3 Whatever the case, on 19 September 1941 London sent Canada an official request to supply troops for Hong Kong.4 The government approved the British request on 2 October. On 27 October, 1,975 Canadian soldiers of the Royal Rifles of Canada and of the Winnipeg Grenadiers sailed for Hong Kong. Unfortunately, they left more than 200 military vehicles behind. Mackenzie King appears to have been the only high level official to raise any objections to sending the troops. He stressed ‘the importance of care being taken to see that our agreement in that particular did not later afford an argument for conscription.’5 The conscription of men for overseas service was a divisive issue. It had split the country into two hostile factions during World War I and Mackenzie King was determined to avoid repeating that scenario.6 Yet, curiously, the prime minister later expressed some pride in the decision to send the troops. On 16 November, the day the Canadians arrived in Hong Kong, he wrote in his diary: ‘For Canada to have

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troops in the Orient fighting the battle of freedom, marks a new stage in our history . . .’7 For the Canadian soldiers, that battle was short lived.8 The Japanese attacked Hong Kong on 8 December. The defending forces surrendered on Christmas Day. According to the official history, of 1,975 Canadians who fought at Hong Kong, 23 officers and 267 other ranks (a total of 290) died, including ‘C’ Force Commander Brigadier J. K. Lawson.9 It was not long before recriminations began. On 21 January 1942, Colonel J. L. Ralston, the minister of national defence, issued a statement, admitting that some of the troops did not have full combat training. The next day The Globe and Mail, carried the headline: ‘138 Hong Kong Men Lacked Training, Troops Never Got Needed Vehicles’.10 The Opposition began accusing the government of making hasty decisions and sacrificing Canadian men. On 29 January, Howard Green, a Conservative member of parliament from British Columbia who was virulently anti-Japanese, told the House of Commons that ‘Hong Kong has been taken, wiping out our courageous but ill-fated, ill-equipped and ill-trained Canadian sacrifice force.’11 Later, someone leaked information about some of the supply problems to George Drew, leader of the Conservative opposition in the province of Ontario. A World War I battery commander who had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, Drew charged that ‘[A]t the very last moment a large number of untrained men were attached to the forces. Many gallant young Canadians went into one of the bitterest battles in all history with little knowledge of the weapons they were called upon to use.’12 Mackenzie King responded by appointing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Sir Lyman Duff, to investigate. Duff began his enquiry in February 1942 and reported his findings the following June.13 Although Chief Justice Duff was somewhat critical of the government’s bungling over the transportation of the military vehicles, he cleared the government of misconduct. George Drew continued to try to make an issue of the Hong Kong affair and was apparently threatened with prosecution under a Defence of Canada regulation that prohibited a person from engaging in activity that could have a negative effect on recruiting.14 The government won a vote of confidence by a wide margin (130 to 34) and the controversy died down.15 There was brief flurry over Hong Kong in early 1948, following the publication in the London Gazette of a report Major-General C. M. Maltby had prepared in November 1945. He claimed that the men in the Royal Rifles and Winnipeg Grenadiers ‘proved to be inadequately trained for modern war under the conditions existing in Hong Kong’.16 Once again the Opposition tried to demonstrate that the government had knowingly sent untrained and ill-equipped troops to war and once again the government managed to escape censure, and the issue lapsed.17 In the 1950s the official Canadian military historian, C. P. Stacey, argued that the decision to reinforce the garrison at Hong Kong was a mistake, but

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on the charge that the government had sent ill-trained troops he wrote: ‘The Royal Rifles of Canada and The Winnipeg Grenadiers would doubtless have been more effective units if they had received more advanced training before going to Hong Kong. But too much can be made of this. Their casualty lists show that their contribution to the defence was a large one, and the Japanese accounts which have been quoted attest the battalions’ solid fighting qualities.’18 Thereafter the battle of Hong Kong, when it figured in historical accounts, tended to be presented as a tragic but gallant fight against insurmountable odds. The well-known Canadian journalist, Ralph Allen, advanced this type of interpretation in a volume that appeared in a popular Canadian history series in the early 1960s.19 Donald Creighton, the foremost Canadian historian of his generation, was reticent over Hong Kong in his volume in the Canadian Centenary Series. ‘It was an heroic, but a vain resistance,’ he wrote.20 Beyond the odd honourable mention, however, the battle for Hong Kong became ‘the forgotten battle’. It would appear that even Canada’s official military historian, C. P. Stacey, wanted to keep it that way. Writing to official British military historian, J. R. M. Butler in the spring of 1953, Stacey noted: ‘My view is that, particularly in the light of the rather fortunate fact that many of the controversies [over battleworthiness] have not reached the press, there is no point in raising these matters in print more than we have to.’21 There were some attempts to raise public consciousness about Hong Kong, but much of the work reflected the ‘tragic narrative’ that had already grown up around the affair. In 1978 Oliver Lindsay published The Lasting Honour.22 Alberta-based journalist Ted Ferguson’s Desperate Siege appeared 2 years later, the opening line of which is ‘The Hong Kong expedition was a shameful tragedy’. Then in 1981 Carl Vincent published No Reason Why.23 It was a scathing indictment. Vincent contended that the Canadians who fought at Hong Kong ‘are the only Canadian soldiers and possibly the only Commonwealth soldiers of World War II who were deliberately sent into a position where there was absolutely no hope of victory, evacuation, or relief’.24 He was critical of ‘British cynicism and Canadian thoughtlessness’.25 In many respects Vincent repeated the wartime charges that George Drew had levelled. He contended that the British government knew war with Japan was inevitable and that Canadian officials ought to have known.26 MajorGeneral Henry Crerar, the chief of the general staff had failed to recognise ‘the actual military situation in the colony.’ This was an evasion of responsibility, Vincent noted, which ‘would have caused Pontius Pilate to send out for a second washbasin’.27 The tone of the book was vitriolic and Vincent left no doubt that in his view the Canadians had been betrayed by a callous and uncaring government. Despite some serious shortcomings and not being reviewed in mainstream journals, Vincent’s book had an enormous impact.28 No Reason Why established a new foundational myth about the Canadian experience at Hong Kong. This was given wide currency a little more than a decade later when


the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) showed The Valour and the Horror, a three part television series written and produced by Brian and Terence McKenna. One of the programmes, Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941, dealt with Hong Kong. The other two programmes Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command and In Desperate Battle: Normandy 1944 focused on Europe. The series sparked an enormous controversy. Where Hong Kong was concerned, the McKenna brothers borrowed heavily from Carl Vincent, claiming that the ‘British High Command considered that war in Hong Kong was inevitable . . .’ that they knew Hong Kong could not be held but succumbed to a powerful lobby from General Grasett and asked Canada for troops. The Canadians, in turn, should have been more aware of the situation. The result, the McKenna brothers charged, was that the Canadian government sent ‘woefully untrained and unprepared’ troops to their doom.29 Significantly, neither Vincent nor the McKenna brothers were historians. Vincent was an archivist and the McKennas were journalists. But their respective versions began to have considerable impact upon the public and veterans. For example, at the beginning and near the end of Savage Christmas an actor portraying a youthful Roger Cyr, who fought with the Royal Rifles and later headed the Hong Kong Veterans Association, tells the audience: ‘As a soldier, I have no problem being sent to war. Doesn’t bother me. What frightens the daylights out of me [is] the thought that my government would have not only willingly but very actively placed itself in a situation where it would knowingly offer a couple of thousand of its young men as lambs to the slaughter in order to meet some political expediency.’30 It is highly unlikely that Cyr had this view in 1941, but before he died in 2001 he gave an interview to Veterans Affairs Canada in which he stated that: I don’t think that the authorities of the day played fair. It’s now, it’s now been proven, because we have documentation to that effect, that Canada knew on the day that we left there were two possible solutions. One we would die there or the other we would become prisoners of war because Britain had made the commitment that Hong Kong was not going to be defended period. So the authorities knew this. So they knowingly sent, you know 1900 [sic] men to, sent them to peril knowingly so.31 Similarly, when George S. MacDonell penned his memoir in 2002, the first person he acknowledged was Carl Vincent.32 A Company Sergeant Major in the Royal Rifles, MacDonell’s recollection closely followed the Vincent–McKenna thesis: The decision of the Canadian Cabinet under Prime Minister Mackenzie King to send Canadians to Hong Kong was incomprehensible. . . . They did not correctly assess the strategic situation in the Far East and Hong Kong until the entire Canadian force had disappeared in the flaming wreckage of the defeated colony.33

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Two important points have to be made here. First, with respect to the question of why Canadians were sent to Hong Kong, there are those who had a different recollection. Private Arnold Graves of the Royal Rifles, for example, told historian Daniel Dancocks that ‘I feel we were sent to Hong Kong because it was considered a safe place. Ours was a “million dollar” regiment. There were a lot of very prominent people in the Royal Rifles.’34 Another Canadian soldier, Private Don Nelson of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, recalled ‘My understanding is that we were supposed to be garrison troops. Our government never thought there would be a war that soon.’35 The second point concerns the degree to which the Canadian government ought to have known war was imminent.36 The best that can be said about the Pacific War is that it became ‘inevitable’ only after the Japanese made the decision to go to war on 6 November 1941. Still, commentators are fond of quoting the ‘This is all wrong’ minute that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill penned to his chief of staff, General Hastings Ismay, in early January 1941.37 Churchill made it clear that Hong Kong could not be held or relieved, that it would be ‘most unwise to increase the loss we shall suffer there’ and that Britain ‘must avoid frittering away our resources on untenable positions’. It is a damning indictment of the decision that was taken some 9 months later (and about which Churchill says in his memoirs only that he ‘allowed himself to be drawn from this position’).38 What tends to be overlooked is Churchill’s contention in the same document that ‘Japan will think long before declaring war on the British Empire’.39 Churchill consistently downplayed the idea that Japan would attack in the Far East.40 Just 4 days before Pearl Harbor, Churchill regarded the notion of a Japanese attack as ‘a remote contingency’.41 Similarly, on 4 December 1941, Canadian officers at Hong Kong attended a briefing at the China Club by a Colonel Robertson from the WO. Asked about the possibility of an outbreak of war, the Colonel replied, ‘I don’t think the Jap will declare war. He is too involved in China’.42 The pertinent question is this: if the British war leader and his local commanders did not think war with Japan was inevitable, why should the Canadian prime minister have thought otherwise? But myths die hard. When George MacDonell published his memoir of the war in 2002, he opened it with Churchill’s minute, adding that ‘in complete disregard for Churchill’s warning, Canadian troops were sent to defend Hong Kong anyway’.43 Despite the popularity of Carl Vincent’s book and wide coverage of the Valour and the Horror series, the battle of Hong Kong was again pushed back to the margins. One of the standard bibliographies of Canadian history, Canadian History: A Reader’s Guide does not contain a single reference to Hong Kong.44 The second volume of C. P. Stacey’s Canada and the Age of Conflict, a standard source for the Mackenzie King era, also ignores Hong Kong.45 Part of the reason for this neglect lay in the nature of Canadian history, which has tended to emphasise relations with Europe. But another, perhaps more important reason, lay in the shifting paradigm in mainstream history


away from what are viewed as ‘traditional’ areas of study to a new focus on the oppressed, the marginalised and the victimised.46 In Canada that led to a whole new focus on the experience of the Japanese Canadian during the Pacific War. According to Mackenzie King, on the evening of 7 December 1941 his cabinet discussed ‘at some length’ the situation of Japanese Canadians in British Columbia and concluded that it was desirable to counsel against ‘any anti-Japanese demonstrations in B. C. and expressing the government’s belief in the loyalty of Japanese nationals and Canadian-born Japanese in BC’.47 It was not to be. In the 11 weeks following, the government issued Orders in Council that led to the evacuation of some 21,000 Japanese Canadians, many of them Canadian born, from the coast to the interior of British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada. The government impounded more than 1,000 Japanese Canadian-owned fishing boats, closed Japanese language schools, shut down Japanese newspapers (although the English language weekly, The New Canadian, continued to publish) and even prohibited Japanese Canadians from possessing shortwave radios. Finally, the government confiscated property, much of which was sold off at bargain prices, and then began proceedings to deport or restrict the movement of persons of Japanese ancestry. During the war the official and generally accepted explanation for the forced removal of the Japanese Canadians from the coast of British Columbia was that it was done for reasons of national security. Order in Council P. C. 1665 of 4 March 1942, stated: ‘Whereas in view of the serious situation prevailing in the Province of British Columbia arising out of the war with Japan it is deemed necessary for the security and defence of Canada to take further steps for the evacuation of persons of the Japanese race from the protected areas in that Province.’48 Writing in 1960, Jack Pickersgill, who served in the prime minister’s office during the war, contended that ‘[T]he news from Hong Kong, and particularly the reports of Japanese treatment of prisoners, aggravated the unrest and hostility towards the Japanese Canadians in British Columbia and the Government decided, in the interests of national security, to move the Japanese Canadians from the coastal area.’49 The sale of property was often viewed as a regrettable side effect of the war. Pickersgill held much the same view 30 years later. ‘I did not like the action [of selling Japanese Canadian property],’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘which those with responsibility felt was necessary as an act of war, but it was certainly less painful than most acts of war.’50 At the time, very few questioned either the government’s decision to move the Japanese Canadians or the national security rationale. Even the socialist based Co-operative Commonwealth Federation [CCF], which normally championed full democratic rights, accepted in April 1943 that ‘the CCF was in favour in [sic] evacuation of the Japanese from the protected area for reasons of defense [sic]’.51 Those who did try and argue that the rights of Japanese Canadians had been violated met a barrage of criticism. In early

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1948, the award winning newspaper columnist Jack Scott reported that, ‘Even today the writer who defends the rights of those citizens of Japanese extraction can count on a flood of vitriolic, hysterical mail.’52 The story of what had happened to the Japanese Canadians receded into the margins of Canadian history. Maryka Omatsu, a Toronto lawyer whose family was moved, recalled that her father had kept secrets about his past. ‘Never once did we speak of your wartime experiences,’ she wrote in a letter her father never read. ‘Unbelievably, you let me learn about the most central event in your life from my grade twelve history textbook, which reduced your incarceration, property confiscation, and degradation to four lines’.53 In most textbooks – or any books for that matter – four lines about the treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War II would have been generous. Donald Creighton’s volume in the Canadian Centenary Series did not mention the Japanese Canadians. In 1948 the sociologist Forrest La Violette published The Canadian Japanese in World War II in which he argued that the government of the day had mistakenly given in to public pressure in British Columbia.54 It would be 28 years before the next serious work appeared. In the meantime the vast majority of Japanese Canadians preferred to remain silent. Keibo Oiwa has argued that many Japanese Canadians had a ‘blame the victim’ mentality that led to ‘self-censorship’ and ‘silence’ about the wartime experience.55 Others formed the National Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association (NJCCA), which was re-named the National Association of Japanese Canadians in 1980. In the early 1970s, in preparation for the upcoming centennial of the arrival of Manzo Nagano in Canada in 1877, the NJCCA initiated and helped sponsor a history of the Japanese Canadians.56 Ken Adachi published the result as the path breaking The Enemy That Never Was in 1976. This was followed 5 years later by Ann Gomer Sunahara’s explosive account, The Politics of Racism.57 The two books turned the wartime explanation for the evacuation of the Japanese Canadians on its head. Sunahara, especially, argued that the expulsion of the Japanese Canadians had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with racism and political expediency. She contended that at no point were the Japanese Canadians a threat and that senior officials in the army and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police knew they were not a threat. While acknowledging that the wartime racism in Canada was: certainly less extreme than those practised by the Third Reich, the actions of the Canadian government were nonetheless also based on the political exploitation of racism, and in the Canadian case, such tactics were cruelly hypocritical. The Canadian government betrayed not only Japanese Canadians but also the men and women it was sending to Europe and Asia, by making a mockery of the principles for which they were fighting and dying.58


There are three very important things to note about those two books. First, they were not written by professional historians: Adachi was a well-known Toronto based literary critic and book review editor for the Toronto Star; Sunahara was a writer and lawyer in Edmonton, Alberta. Secondly, both books were widely publicised. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the books established interest in a new interpretation that has resisted any attempt at revision. Jack Granatstein, one of Canada’s most distinguished historians, later recalled that when he questioned some aspects of the new version, ‘I was subjected to the worst barracking I have ever received.’59 In subsequent histories of the experience of the Japanese Canadians during the Pacific War, the very terminology used to describe their ordeal underwent a dramatic shift. Wartime ‘evacuation’ to ‘relocation camps’ became ‘internment’ and ‘incarceration’ in ‘detention camps’.60 Some writers referred to the ‘imprisonment’ of Japanese Canadians in ‘POW camps’.61 In extreme cases, it was ‘internment in concentration camps.’ One Canadian scholar has recently written that ‘the use of the word ‘internment’ here does not suggest an equating of experiences with the Jewish internment/ concentration camps that were established in Europe at this time by the Germans. . . . Nevertheless, I do not use the word “evacuation” here, as some researchers do, because it does not accurately describe what was experienced by more than 22,000 [sic] Canadians of Japanese descent’.62 Also significant was the shift in emphasis from an enemy that never was or runaway racism to Canadians who were deliberately ‘betrayed’ and then to growing demands for apologies and redress.63 The redress campaign was extraordinarily successful. In September 1988, just 7 years after the appearance of Sunahara’s book, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney formally apologised to the Japanese Canadians and announced a redress package, part of which was to be devoted to the establishment of a ‘Race Relations Foundation’.64 The government’s decision to apologise and offer a redress package was not universally accepted. Earlier that year the Royal Canadian Legion had at its national convention passed a resolution which opposed redress for groups adversely affected by wartime decisions. The Hong Kong Veterans Association chose to remain neutral on the redress issue but acting president John Stroud said that he had received ‘calls from across the country . . . I’m afraid that a lot of the hatred from the war years is still out there’.65 Part of the implied criticism behind that statement stemmed from the Mulroney administration’s refusal to support the Hong Kong veterans fight for compensation from Japan for their wartime ‘slave labour’. The primary opposition to the redress package by an unnamed number of veterans, however, came from what Stroud – himself Hong Kong veteran – referred to as ‘memories’.66 Those ‘memories’ were not of the 18-day battle for Hong Kong which claimed 290 lives, but of the more than 1,300 days of incarceration that followed and took another 267 men.67 The epitaph ‘forgotten captivity’ is

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most appropriate here. When Alberta-based journalist Ted Ferguson, who had a reputation for searching out forgotten stories and lost causes, began researching his book on Hong Kong in the late 1970s, he found neglect. He wrote that the Hong Kong veterans that he met: have impaired physical health, recurring nightmares, and a high rate of alcoholism. In traveling across Canada to conduct interviews, I contacted many men who refused to talk about what happened. Others drank heavily during interviews and two men wept as they remembered how friends died.68 Similarly, Peter J. Allain of the Royal Rifles recalled in 2004: You know, when we got home we were told to be quiet and not talk about our experiences because people would think we were crazy. Most guys did that and the feelings really didn’t come out until we were older.69 One example of just how widely forgotten is the Canadian captivity and how some of the feelings ‘come out’ in later life can be found in Kenneth Cambon’s experience. In the mid-1980s his daughter travelled to Japan and went to Niigata, where Cambon had spent 2 years in Camp 5B. The civic authorities in Niigata said that no POW camp had been located there. Cambon’s daughter subsequently wrote him to ask if he was not mistaken about the location of the POW camp. It was ‘a suggestion’, Cambon wrote, ‘that I did not take too kindly’.70 Cambon then wrote a letter of protest to the mayor of Niigata. The mayor wrote back, expressing regret over an apparent misunderstanding. He invited Cambon to visit Japan, promising that no effort would be spared to find the camp. Cambon did travel to Japan (the first Canadian POW to return to Niigata): I stepped into the station with some trepidation, fighting back old memories. But surely this wasn’t NiiGata [sic] – NiiGata the primitive, over-grown village with narrow streets, many houses still having thatched roofs and only a few western style buildings. Instead, the station opened into a Square surrounded by steel and glass buildings. Traffic pulsated to a steady rhythm of horns as smartly dressed men and women hurried by. How silly of me to expect to find oxcarts, women in long bloomers, men in army style dress with the inevitable military cap. . . . It was a short walk to the City Hall and the Mayor’s Office. Here I was invited to sit in the Mayor’s chair. Sitting on the throne-like plush red upholstered chair, I was presented with the keys to the city. . . . I was deeply touched. These young people had been born long after the war and I accepted their honouring me in all humility. Apparently I was the first member of Camp 5B to return. . . . We had been in three different camps in NiiGata, the first two being make-shift temporary structures. The last had been located on


a rise of ground just outside the city. . . . We located it without too much difficulty, but no trace of the old camp remained, which was hardly surprising after more than forty years. . . . So many memories rushed into view that I was overwhelmed. . . . I was glad that nothing remained of all that, except in my memory. . . . It seemed fitting that where I thought the guardhouse had been was now a kindergarten or school.71 After visiting Niigata, Cambon travelled to Tokyo and then to Yokahama, where the Canadians who died in Japan during the war are buried: Paradoxically, we next went to the British Commonwealth Cemetery outside Yokahama where the Canadians who died in Japan are buried. It was most difficult to locate. The Canadian Embassy always seemed to be closed when we phoned and none of the local tourist offices had ever heard of it. By a stroke of luck we fell into the hands of a taxi driver who remembered that the Queen had gone there during the royal visit to Japan. Even then it was not easy to find, being poorly marked, almost hidden.72 The theme of forgotten captivity runs through both of these narratives and there is a real danger, as Hamish Ion has pointed out, that as memory of World War II recedes ‘the Canadian and Allied POW experience will be forgotten in the reappraisal of Japanese history as the appalling details of the extent of the hardships endured by the Japanese people during and in the aftermath of the war become better known’.73 The extent of the hardships of the Japanese people, at least for some POWs, pales in comparison to the suffering the Canadians (and other Allied POWs) endured in Niigata Camp 5B, Kawasaki Camp 3D and elsewhere in Japan. How bad was it? Historians always caution about making sweeping generalisations. There were differences between how the POWs were treated at different camps and the officers fared much better than the ordinary soldier. Still, Dave McIntosh, himself a veteran of the European theatre, interviewed a number of Hong Kong veterans about the conditions in which they lived. One veteran, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled that: I wouldn’t have believed I could be so hungry. I’d chew grass, weeds, anything I could find. I would have stolen food from my friends if they’d had any, and that was the worst thing you could do except, maybe, stealing drugs. We all had diarrhea [sic] or dysentery or both a good deal of the time and knew that rice and barley could go through you practically untouched. One day I was in such bad shape that – I’m going to tell this as quickly as I can to get it over with – I cupped my hands under a man squatting with diarrhea [sic], caught the barley coming through, washed it off as best I could and ate it. Later I saw some other men doing this now and then

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Gregory A. Johnson but it didn’t make me feel less ashamed. I didn’t feel ashamed while I was doing it, though. I was too hungry to feel anything but hunger.74

A vast majority of POWs suffered from lack of food, what was called ‘shot-gun diarrhoea’, ‘electric feet’ caused by malnutrition and more serious conditions. Ken Cambon claimed that for years he was not able to sleep with his feet under the sheets, a psychological legacy of electric feet.75 Charles Roland cites statistics of the various diseases that 325 Canadian and American ex-POWs experienced. After examinating POWs at Guam in September 1945, authorities determined that 56.4 per cent had suffered from dysentery, 42 per cent from beriberi, 24 per cent from malaria, 15 per cent from avitaminosis, 12 per cent from diphtheria and 11.4 per cent from pneumonia. In addition, 99 per cent had an infestation of Ascaris lumbricoides or tapeworm. Average weight loss in this particular group was 45 pounds. In other camps, the POWs’ weights dropped to about 110 pounds, which represented an average weight loss of between 60 and 80 pounds.76 These conditions took a heavy toll. About 16 per cent of Canadians died in the camps (only 5.6 per cent of officers). By comparison, about 4 per cent of Allied POWs in Europe died in captivity. The overall average for the death rate for POWs in the Pacific theatre was 27 per cent.77

Figure 8.1 Canadian prisoners of war. Commander Peter MacRitchie of HMCS Prince Robert meeting with liberated Canadian prisoners of war at Shamshuipo Camp, Kowloon, Hong Kong, September 1945. Source: Library and Archives Canada.


Given this sort of grizzly reality, it is small wonder that many of the Canadian POWs wished to forget their ordeal. Mary Prairie, the widow of Winnipeg Grenadier Alex Prairie, who survived the war but died prematurely, said that her husband ‘used to always tell me to be grateful for the good things and leave the bad things behind’.78 That attitude has also served to reinforce the forgotten captivity. Hong Kong veteran Roger Cyr has noticed that there often seems to be a greater emphasis put on those who died in the battle of Hong Kong. In his view ‘some of the bigger heroes were the guys who perished in the camps. You don’t hear about the guy who gave his food away, sacrificed his life and helped save three buddies. You don’t hear about the guy who took 25 beatings.’79 Wilf Queen-Hughes, who became an editorial writer with the Winnipeg Tribune, tried to reconcile his wartime experience by lashing out at the government. ‘We’ll probably never know the truth,’ he said during a 1966 trip to Hong Kong to observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle. ‘It’s like the government – it never really wanted to know what happened after sending us stupidly to Hong Kong in the first place. They might have to do something about it, like providing a decent pension, or asking Japan for compensation.’80 Kenneth Cambon, on the other hand, has argued that ‘Canada has to be very proud of the way they helped veterans of World War II, more so than any other country’.81 The matter of compensation for slave labour, however, was source of anger for years. The official position was that claims for compensation were extinguished by the Treaty of Peace with Japan, which was signed in San Francisco during September 1951 and came into force in April 1952.82 The Hong Kong veterans held that the Canadian government had no right to sweep aside the issue of forced labour. Roger Cyr said in the early 1990s that: I feel that the day I was captured by the Japanese, that my personal rights were hacked to death. I became a non-person. I was treated worse than a dog. I further believe that when time came for the allied powers to settle with Japan and when they eventually did negotiate a Peace Treaty and when they did sign the Peace Protocol in 1952, my rights were totally ignored.83 In the late 1980s, the Hong Kong veterans began fighting for compensation in earnest. In November 1996, Clifford Chadderton, Chief Executive Officer of the War Amputations of Canada, along with representatives of the Hong Kong Veterans Association, appeared before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Chadderton said: The agitation we felt as veterans involved in this [bid for compensation for slave labour] reached what I call epidemic proportions when the

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Gregory A. Johnson Mulroney government approved a $21,000 grant to each of the Japanese Canadians who were evicted from the west coast to Japan [sic] during World War II. We saw a great parallel. We felt that if the Mulroney government could pay the Japanese Canadians $21,000 because they were evicted – some of them interned – then the Canadian government now had to take a look at our claim, because it is for roughly the same amount of money.84

On 11 December 1998, 10 years after the Japanese Canadians had won their case for redress, the Canadian government granted each surviving ex-Hong Kong POW or their widow $24,000 in compensation for the labour that Canadian servicemen were forced to perform during the war. Even then the Hong Kong veterans were disappointed that it was the Canadian taxpayer, not Japan, who would foot the bill.85 For many of the surviving veterans, the betrayal and the forgotten captivity had, in a sense, come full circle. The broad themes of betrayal and forgotten captivity that are now associated with the Canadian experience of the Pacific war of 1941–45, stand in stark contrast to the dominant ‘just war’ theme that pervades most approaches to the European war.86 With the exception of the abortive raid on Dieppe in August 1942, the majority of writing about Canada’s role in the war in Europe falls into the category of the triumphant narrative. The 39-day battle for the Scheldt Estuary in October and November 1944 cost the First Canadian Army nearly 13,000 casualties, but one is hard pressed to find charges that an uncaring government sent good young men to their doom. Several thousand Germans, Italians and Canadian born Jehovah’s Witnesses were interned, some unjustly, yet there have been few offers to apologise and provide redress. How to account for the difference in the understanding and meaning of the experience of the Pacific War on Canada? Part of the explanation lay in the need to explain the failure of the defenders at Hong Kong by rooting out the ‘rat’ or ‘rats’ who sent Canadian boys to their doom. Another reason lay in the shift of the historical paradigm away from the study of elites and political history to a focus on marginalised peoples and social history.87 There is also the attraction of the victim in history.88 Another important factor in the Canadian context was the adoption of an official policy of multiculturalism in the early 1970s and more focus on the study of racism.89 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, has placed much more emphasis on ‘rights’, something reflected in both the Japanese Canadians and the Hong Kong veterans bid for redress and compensation.90 What has still tended to be overlooked, however, is the experience of the Canadian prisoners of war. While there are indications that this may be changing, particularly with the internet playing a larger role in the dissemination of information, more still needs to be done.91


Notes 1 There is still no full length treatment of the Canadian experience of the war in the Pacific. Michael G. Fry, ‘The Development of Canada’s Relations with Japan, 1919–1947’, in Keith Hay (ed), Canadian Perspectives on Economic Relations with Japan (Montreal: The Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1980), pp. 7–67 and Klaus H. Pringsheim, Neighbours Across the Pacific (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1983), pp. 67–112 provide brief overviews. See also Patricia Roy, J. L. Granatstein, Masako Iino and Hiroko Takamura, Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese during the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Robert Bothwell, one of Canada’s leading historians, has pointed out that ‘Culturally, Canadians, like Americans, faced east, not west, to Europe, not Asia.’ See Robert Bothwell, ‘Eyes West: Canada and the Cold War in Asia’, in Greg Donaghy (ed), Canada and the Early Cold War, 1943–1957 (Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing, 1998), pp. 61–2. 2 Charles G. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001). 3 See Paul Dickson, ‘Crerar and the Decision to Garrison Hong Kong’, Canadian Military History, 3 (Spring 1994), pp. 97–110 and J. L. Granatstein, The Generals: The Canadian Army’s Senior Commanders in the Second World War (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993), pp. 98–9. 4 Documents on Canadian External Relations [DCER], Volume 7, 1939–1941, Part 1, David R. Murray (ed) (Ottawa: Department of External Affairs, 1974), Document 941, p. 807, Dominions Secretary to King, 19 September 1941. 5 Library and Archives Canada [LAC], Ottawa, RG 2, Cabinet War Committee, Minutes, 2 October 1941. 6 See J. L. Granatastein and J. M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman Ltd., 1985). 7 LAC, W. L. M. King Papers, Vol. 394, file 48, ‘Extracts from diary re-Hong Kong to be found in cupboards in Library, L. H.,’ 15 November 1941. John D. Meehan, The Dominion and the Rising Sun, Canada Encounters Japan, 1929–1941 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), p. 192. 8 Tony Banham, Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003). 9 C. P. Stacey, Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain and the Pacific (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1957), pp. 488–9. One man died on the way to Hong Kong and two Canadian nurses were repatriated in 1943. For a discussion of some of the conditions in the camps see Patricia Roy, et.al., Mutual Hostages, pp. 68–74. 10 The Globe and Mail, 22 January 1942, p. 1. 11 Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 29 January 1942, p. 152. 12 Quoted in Ted Ferguson, Desperate Siege: The Battle of Hong Kong (Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1980), p. 231. 13 Sir Lyman Duff, Report on the Canadian Expeditionary Force to the Crown Colony of Hong Kong (Ottawa: Queens Printer, 1942). 14 Ferguson, Desperate Siege, p. 232. 15 Pickersgill, The Mackenzie King Record, Volume 1, p. 407. J. L. Granatstein, Canada’s War: The Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939–1945 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 240. 16 The full report was not released until the early 1990s and is at TNA, Kew, London, England, WO Records, WO 106/240113. A copy of the abridged version published in the London Gazette, 27 January 1948 can be found in King Papers, J4, pp. C248071–103. 17 See J. W. Pickersgill and D. F. Forster, The Mackenzie Record, Volume 4, 1947–1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), pp. 239–49.

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18 C. P. Stacey, Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain and the Pacific, Volume 1 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1957), p. 490. 19 Ralph Allen, Ordeal By Fire: Canada, 1910–1945 (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961), p. 395–6 and p. 422. 20 Donald Creighton, The Forked Road: Canada 1939–1957 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), p. 60–4. The Canadian Centenary Series was an eighteenvolume series published in honour of the Canadian centenary. 21 TNA, Kew, Cabinet Records, CAB 101/153, Stacey to Butler, 13 March 1953. 22 Oliver Lindsay, The Lasting Honour (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978). 23 Carl Vincent, No Reason Why: The Canadian Hong Kong Tragedy – an Examination (Stittsville, Ontario: Canada’s Wings, 1981). 24 Vincent, No Reason Why, p. 35. 25 Vincent, No Reason Why, p. 43. 26 Vincent, No Reason Why, pp. 13, 25–34 and 41. 27 Vincent, No Reason Why, p. 39. 28 On the shortcomings see especially Galen Roger Perras, ‘“Our Position in the Far East would be Stronger without this Unsatisfactory Commitment”: Britain and the Reinforcement of Hong Kong, 1941’, Canadian Journal of History, XXX (August 1995), pp. 231–59; Christopher M. Bell, ‘“Our Most Exposed Outpost”: Hong Kong and British Far Eastern Strategy, 1921–1941’, The Journal of Military History, 60 (January 1996), pp. 61–88; Kent Fedorowich, ‘“Cocked Hats and Swords and Small, Little Garrisons”: Britain, Canada and the Fall of Hong Kong, 1941,’ Modern Asian Studies 37 (2003), pp. 111–57; and Terry Copp, ‘Hong Kong: There Was A Reason,’ Legion Magazine, March/April 1996, online at www.legionmagazine.com/, accessed 14 July 2005. Aside from a brief mention in the trade publication Quill and Quire, the only review of No Reason Why is Major W. A. Morrison, ‘Book Essay: The Hong Kong Tragedy’, Canadian Defence Quarterly, 12 (Autumn 1982), pp. 54–6. 29 Brian and Terence McKenna, ‘Response to the CBC Ombudsman Report, November 10, 1992, Galafilm Inc,’ in David J. Bercuson and S. F. Wise (eds), The Valour and the Horror Revisited (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), pp.73–88. See also material posted online at www. valourandhorror.com. 30 The Valour and the Horror Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941, National Film Board of Canada, 1992. 31 Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember, Interview with Roger Cyr, video and transcript. Online at www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/, accessed 20 November 2006. 32 George S. MacDonell, One Soldier’s Story 1939–1945: From the Fall of Hong Kong to the Defeat of Japan (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2002), p. 15. 33 MacDonell, One Soldier’s Story, p. 90. 34 Quoted in Daniel G. Dancocks, In Enemy Hands, Canadian Prisoners of War 1939–45 (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1983), p. 221. 35 Dancocks, In Enemy Hands, p. 221. 36 See David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 12–13. 37 This minute is reproduced in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume III: The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 157. 38 Churchill, The Second World War, Volume III, p. 157 and 633. Ismay was no more forthcoming in his memoirs. See Hastings Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), pp. 236–47. 39 Churchill, The Second World War, Volume III, p. 157. 40 Gilbert Martin, Winston S. Churchill, Vol 5 Companion (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 306. TNA, CAB 65/23, W. M. (41), 21 July 1941; CAB 65/23, ‘Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram Serial No. T. 742’, 25 October 1941.


41 Quoted in Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 4. 42 Directorate of History, Ottawa, DHist 593.018 (D3), Hong Kong Diary, ‘C’ Coy, Royal Rifles of Canada, 4 December 1941. 43 MacDonell, One Soldier’s Story, p. 17–18. 44 Doug Owram (ed), Canadian History A Reader’s Guide, 2: Confederation to the Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). The claim is on the front cover. 45 C. P. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, Volume 2: 1921–1948, The Mackenzie King Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 198). 46 J. L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 93–100. 47 King Diary, 7 December 1941. 48 Reprinted in Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), p. 426–7. 49 J. W. Pickersgill, The Mackenzie King Record, Volume 1, p. 354. 50 J. W. Pickersgill, Seeing Canada Whole: A Memoir (Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1994), pp. 260–5. 51 Quoted in Werner Cohn, ‘The Persecution of the Japanese Canadians and the Political Left in British Columbia, December 1941-March 1942’, BC Studies, 68 (Winter 1985–86), p. 14. See also Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, pp. 218–19. 52 Quoted in Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, p. 336; Vancouver Sun, 3 January 1948. 53 Maryka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1992), p. 55. 54 Forrest E. La Violette, The Canadian Japanese in World War II (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948). 55 Keibo Oiwa (ed), Stone Voices: Wartime Writings of Japanese Canadian Issei (Montreal, Véhicule, 1991), pp. 16–17. 56 In 1877, 19-year-old Manzo Nagano jumped ship at New Westminster, British Columbia. He is generally acknowledged as the first Japanese immigrant to Canada. 57 Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1981). 58 Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, pp. 3–4. 59 Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? p. 98. When the present writer co-authored an article with Granatstein that raised questions about the new accepted view he was on one occasion threatened with bodily harm. See J. L. Granatstein and Gregory A. Johnson, ‘The Evacuation of the Japanese Canadians, 1942: A Realist Critique of the Received Version’, in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan and Lubomyr Luciuk (eds), On Guard For Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939–1945 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1988), pp. 101–30. 60 See Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobaysahi, Justice In Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver and Winnipeg: Talonbooks and National Association of Japanese Canadians, 1991). 61 Maryka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage, pp. 74 and 93. 62 Stephanie Bangarth, ‘Mackenzie King and Japanese Canadians’, in John English, Kenneth McLaughlin and P. Whitney Lackenbauer (eds), Mackenzie King: Citizenship and Community (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2002), p. 223, note. 1. 63 The classic statement here is Democracy Betrayed: The Case for Redress, A Submission to the Government of Canada on the violation of rights and freedoms of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II (Winnipeg: The National

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Association of Japanese Canadians, 1984). See also Justice in our time (Vancouver: Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens Association Redress Committee for the National Association of Japanese Canadians, 1988). See Audrey Kobayashi, ‘The Japanese-Canadian Redress Settlement and its Implications for “Race Relations,” ’ Canadian Ethnic Studies XXIV, 1 (1992), pp. 1–19. Globe and Mail, 26 September 1988, p. A5. Globe and Mail, 26 September 1988, p. A5. The official tally can be found in C. P. Stacey, Six Years of War, pp. 488–9. 23 officers and 267 other ranks were killed in battle or died of wounds. Four officers and 124 other ranks died in camps at Hong Kong. Four men were executed for attempting to escape. Starting in January 1943, one officer and 1183 other ranks were shipped to Japan, where another 136 died. Stacey gives a total of 557 dead, but the numbers add up to 558. Just over 28 per cent of ‘C’ Force died. Of the 1,975 sent from Canada, one man died on the way out, thus 1,974 actually landed, so minus the battle dead of 290, and that leaves 1,684 taken prisoner. Most Canadians spent 44 months in POW camps. Ferguson, Desperate Siege, p. vi. Quoted in Michael A. Palmer, Dark Side of the Sun: George Palmer’s Journey From Prince Edward Island to Hong Kong and the Omine Camp in WW II (Calgary: Privately Published, 2005), p. 92. Kenneth Cambon, Guest of Hirohito (Vancouver: PW Press, 1990), p. 118–19. Cambon, Guest of Hirohito, pp. 126–9. Cambon, Guest of Hirohito, pp. 133–4. A. Hamish Ion, ‘A Petty Problem or a Foul Bolt?: Some Aspects of the Treatment of Canadian Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in the Japanese Empire, 1941–1945’, in Yves Tremblay (ed), Canadian Military History Since the 17th Century Proceedings of the Canadian Military History Conference, Ottawa: 5–9 May, 2000, pp. 543–52. Dave McIntosh, Hell on Earth: Aging Faster, Dying Sooner – Canadian Prisoners of the Japanese During World War II (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1997), p. 18. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day, pp. 143–51. See also material in University of Alberta Archives, Benjamin Wheeler Papers, Box 1, File 5. Kenneth Cambon, Guest of Hirohito, p. 37. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day, pp. 323 and 261. George MacDonell gave his normal weight as 195 pounds at the beginning of the war and 140 pounds at the end of the war. One Soldier’s Story, p. 132. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day, pp. 78 and 318. Mac Johnson, ‘To Burma and Beyond’, Legion Magazine, March/April 1996, online at http://legionmagazine.com/features/memoirspilgrimages/96–03.asp, accessed 3 August 2005. Mac Johnston, ‘To Burma and Beyond’. McIntosh, Hell on Earth, pp. 272–3. Cambon, Guest of Hirohito, p. 109. See also MacDonell, One Soldier’s Story, pp. 163–82 for a similar view. The compensation story is beyond the scope of this paper but see Maureen Brioux, ‘Lasting Honour or Lasting Horror: The Hong Kong Veterans Compensation’, Paper presented to the First Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Conference of Defence Associations Institute, 13–14 November 1998, online at www.cda-cdai.ca/ symposia/1998/98brioux.htm, accessed 17 August 2005. The War Amps: Canada’s Military Heritage. Interview with Roger Cyr, online at www.waramps.ca/military/, accessed 11 February 2006.


84 Evidence presented before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 19 November 1996, online at www.parl.gc.ca/35/Archives/ committees352/fore/evidence/5. 85 See the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report, 11 December 1998, online at http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-171–1039–5836/conflict_war/canada_veterans/clip5. 86 See J. L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton, A Nation Forged in Fire: Canadians and the Second World War, 1939–1945 (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989), p. 267: ‘The Second World War was a just war. The war against the unspeakable evil of Hitler’s Germany, the savage buffoonery of Mussolini’s Italy, and the sinister militarism of Tojo’s Japan had to be fought, and had to be won. . . . The Second World War, Canadians should always remember, was fought to determine whether the world was to be slave or free.’ 87 This is quite pronounced in Canada, which has a small historical profession. See Veronica Strong-Boag, ‘Contested Space: The Politics of Canadian Memory’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 5 (1994), pp. 3–17; Doug Owram, ‘Narrow Circles: The Historiography of Recent Canadian Historiography’, National History: A Canadian Journal of Enquiry and Opinion, 1 (1997), pp. 5–21; and Larry A. Glassford, ‘The Evolution of “New Political History” in English-Canadian Historiography: From Cliometrics to Cliodiversity’, The American Review of Canadian Studies (Autumn 2002), pp. 348–67. A broader discussion of the marginalised can be found in T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 1–29. 88 Bangarth, ‘Mackenzie King and Japanese (July 1993), pp. 3–5. 89 Which was adopted by the Liberal government led by Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Trudeau was, however, opposed to giving redress to the Japanese Canadians. See Maryka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage, pp. 168–9. 90 See Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (Toronto: Anansi, 2000). 91 The 6 August 2005 Saturday edition of The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s better newspapers, carried a feature story on the battle of Hong Kong and the veterans. There is also a Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association website (www. hkvca.ca/index.htm) and Veterans Affairs Canada has part of a website devoted to Hong Kong (www.vac-acc.gc.ca/ ). One can only hope that more veterans will publish their recollections of the wartime experience.

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Part II

Forgotten captivities

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9

The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat Protest and ex-prisoner of war memory in Britain and Australia Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn

Two important films depicted the prisoner of war (POW) experience under the Japanese in the first two decades after World War II: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and King Rat (1965). Together they portrayed conditions at the biggest concentrations of Western prisoners in the East: at Changi in Singapore, a holding area for 87,000 POWs who passed through the camp at one time or another, of whom 850 died there;1 and, on the Burma–Thailand Railway, a string of jungle work camps stretching 265 miles, where a total of 61,806 British, Dutch and Australian POWs laboured alongside many more Asians. On the latter, supply failures, monsoon conditions, and a race to finish from mid-1943 – the notorious ‘speedo’ period – led to a death rate of 12,399 or more than 20 per cent. Because most British and Australian prisoners spent time both in Changi and on the Burma–Thailand Railway, these films touched on the captivities of the vast majority of ex-POWs from both Britain and Australia who were held by the Japanese. They also played a large part in shaping public memories about Eastern captivity, The Bridge on the River Kwai more so than King Rat. Both films were international box office successes, and well received by critics. Yet at the same time, both films portrayed captives in a less than heroic light, adding to the sense that defeat in the East, especially the humiliating fall of Singapore, had tainted many men’s wartime experience, and sullied their reputation at home.2 Both films attracted protests by ex-POWs, who feared that their ‘real’ experiences of captivity, of ‘mateship’ – the Australian value of sticking together with friends or ‘mates’ through thick and thin – and of British stoicism in the face of unspeakable suffering, would be forgotten by the public. They feared these might be replaced by images of collaboration (The Bridge on the River Kwai) or competitive struggle for survival (King Rat). In Britain, the Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOWs as the British ex-POWs held by the Japanese called themselves), quickly mobilised against The Bridge on the River Kwai. Later, in Australia, ex-POWs who had endured captivity under the Japanese campaigned against King Rat.

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Adapting novels to films Both movies were produced by the Hollywood film studio, Columbia Pictures. Had they been merely Hollywood productions, however, they would probably have been more obviously fictional and so less controversial. But they also had strong British dimensions. Both were made by British directors who had been involved in making classic British war films, and both appeared in the midst of a boom, in British war films. In 1955, the London-based head of Columbia Pictures in Europe, Mike Frankovich, accepted the idea of a movie based on French planter-adventurer Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. In February 1956, producer Sam Spiegel persuaded Britain’s David Lean to be director. Lean had already directed (with Noel Coward) the classic British war movie In Which We Serve (1942), about how service on the wartime HMS Torrin brings different classes together, remembered in flashbacks by a crew cast adrift after their ship was sinks.3 He proved to be an inspired choice. His panoramic treatment of The Bridge on the River Kwai won best film for 1957 from the New York Film Critics Circle and from the Golden Globes in January 1958. It collected more awards at the British Film Academy Awards on 9 February 1958 and at the Oscars on 26 March 1958. When James Clavell’s novel about Changi, King Rat, became a best-seller in 1962, Frankovich saw an opportunity to repeat the success of The Bridge on the River Kwai. By January 1963, just months after the book’s launch, he had appointed Bryan Forbes to direct a film of the same name.4 Frankovich was again backing a British director whose name had been established by a classic war movie. Forbes had played one of the successful escapees in The Colditz Story (1955), ultimately sending the remaining prisoners a postcard from freedom in Switzerland: a not uncommon motif in accounts of prisoner escapes in the European theatre. So both films brought together Hollywood, a British director, and books written by men who had some experience of captivities (Boulle had been a prisoner in Vichy French-controlled Indochina, Clavell in Singapore). Both films, following the books they were based on, were also more than mere stories. They were presented as studies on human character under conditions of extreme stress. The Bridge on the River Kwai showed British POWs forced to work in close collaboration with the Japanese on the Burma–Thailand Railway to build a bridge over what it called ‘The River Kwai’. The twist is that their commanding officer, Colonel Nicholson, decides the best way to maintain order and morale is to insist their own officers command them. This he achieves by persuading the Japanese that they would build a better bridge: in ‘the Anglo-Saxon sense of perfection’.5 King Rat showed how extreme stress, created by the struggle to survive, overrode moral codes of conduct. The Australians, led by actor Reg Lye, are shown as naturals at adapting to this survival of the fittest, with no moral principles except mateship. However, the best racketeer is an American,

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Corporal King (George Segal), who slowly corrupts British Flight Lieutenant Peter Marlowe (James Fox). One film critic wrote of King Rat that: ‘Even the senior British officer [Colonel Smedley-Taylor], played by in traditional stiff-upper-lip style by John Mills, turns out to be involved in food racketing.’6 This was more shocking because Mills had previously played the traditional officer in war films, the man who stuck to his moral code come what may. The Provost Marshall, played by Tom Courtenay, who is the only character to preserve a moral code, is, meanwhile, portrayed as a bitter man, whose enforcement of camp rules is motivated more by class envy than by moral rectitude. Because both movies were based on semi-fictional novels, written by men who had been in the East, the line between fact and fiction blurred. Some FEPOWs thought they could make out people they knew, or aspects of people they had known, in captivity. Yet the films closely followed the novels that they were based on, and neither novel stirred significant ex-POW protest. Pierre Boulle adapted The Bridge on the River Kwai (published in French in 1952 and in English in 1954) from the tales of Malayan rubber planters who had been POWs on the Burma–Thailand Railway, and from incidents in early POW memoirs, such as John Coast’s popular Railroad of Death and Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo.7 Boulle had not himself been a POW on the Burma–Thailand Railway. His experience of collaboration came in Vichy French-controlled Indochina, where the French accommodated Japanese demands, until the latter took over completely in March 1945. Boulle became a French undercover agent there, and was for a time imprisoned by Vichyite authorities, before escaping to join the British-run Force 136. So, while he claimed The Bridge on the River Kwai was a satire on the follies of the Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority during the days of the British Empire, he admitted his lead figure, Colonel Nicholson, owed something to French officers he had met.8 Boulle described his fictional officer in charge of the POW work party building the bridge, Colonel Nicholson, as seeing himself as adding a ‘chapter to the eastern legends of empire builders, firmly convinced that no one could have done the job better, confirmed in his certainty of the superiority of his own race in every field of endeavour’. Boulle has a British commando, sent to blow up the bridge, say of Nicholson that: ‘I am sure that he had read the whole of Kipling as a boy and I bet he recited chunks of it as the construction gradually took shape above water’. Boulle expanded on his theme by opening the book with a quotation from Joseph Conrad: ‘No it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he was so representative of all the past victims of the great Joke’: the joke being that man’s attempts to fulfil his own role and code of honour could lead to the most absurd, even appalling, consequences.9 As director, Lean quickly picked up on this aspect of irony in Boulle’s depiction of Nicholson.10 King Rat’s relationship with reality is less convoluted than that of The Bridge on the River Kwai. King Rat’s author, James Clavell, was a former

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second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, and had been a POW at Changi. He claimed that although King Rat was fiction, what he put into the novel were characters and circumstances based on his own experiences.11 In the preface, Clavell stated that while Changi ‘did exist’, ‘obviously the rest of the story is fiction and no similarity to anyone living or dead exists or is intended.’ Yet he had also worked as a scriptwriter on The Great Escape (1963), knew the demands of a good story, and was prone to exaggerating death rates in Changi, such as on the back cover of King Rat, which states the death rate as one in fifteen.12 Perhaps more pertinently, like Boulle, he aimed to investigate universal and psychological truths about behaviour in captivity. Hence the fact that Clavell wrote an anti-heroic war story always had the potential to offend. There were no characters here keeping a stiff upper lip when facing adversity – the main British image of captivity by the late 1950s – only individuals whom he compared at the end of the novel with rats struggling among themselves, competing ruthlessly to get enough food to survive.13 Bryan Forbes, when writing the screenplay for the 1965 movie of the novel King Rat, kept close to Clavell’s original text. Clavell visited the movie set in California and was impressed by how true the movie was to his Changi.14 In the movie, as in the novel, the POWs there were shown as unscrupulous individuals who stole and cheated from each other as well as the Japanese, in a dog-eat-dog world. The main novel’s main character was Corporal King, an American who gained control over Changi because he was the most successful profiteer. King muses that: ‘The world was jungle, and the strong survived and the weak should die. It was you or the other guy.’15 Australian POWs were, like King, skilled at profiteering. Clavell has one Australian POW observe: ‘There ain’t no thief in the world like a digger on the make for a piece of merchandise. No thief in the world.’ In Clavell’s world, the Australians were above all else the best thieves.16 This representation of Australians both reinforced, and yet also had the potential to undermine, an emerging public perception of Australian captives. Their behaviour was by this time being integrated into the ongoing construction of the ‘digger’, or ordinary soldier, as emblematic of wider Australian characteristics of mateship and opposition to pointless modes of authority: a tradition which backdated at least to the official history of Australian participation in the World War I Gallipoli campaign. Interestingly, Clavell’s approach paralleled one earlier, best-selling Australian account, Russell Braddon’s Naked Island (1952). Braddon, while being clear that most men did help their mates, was equally clear that a minority stole and plotted. Thieving could thus still fit the picture of Australian mateship, itself a major part of ongoing Australian myths about their national character, if thieving from each other could be seen as an occasional aberration.17 But Clavell’s picture of more pervasive skulduggery worked against the grain of emerging Australian public consciousness, which saw Australians lack of respect for authority, and ‘mateship’, as national strengths, and as underpinning initiative and ferocity in war. Clavell came dangerously close


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to presenting mateship not as a positive but as a negative national trait: as superiority in thievery, dishonesty, and shameless cunning against all those who were not immediate mates, in the lawless struggle of Changi. This was all the more explosive as, in contrast to Britain, memories of the Malayan campaign and captivity were in little danger of being publicly neglected in Australia. To the contrary, almost three-quarters of all Australian World War II prisoners experienced captivity under the Japanese rather than the Germans. The novels clearly contained claims about the nature of captivity, about national characteristics and codes under conditions of captivity that clashed with emerging popular memories of the war in Australia of its ex-POWs and less publicly acknowledged memories of the FEPOWs in Britain. This raises the interesting question: why did they not provoke complaints earlier? For example, when the novel King Rat was released in Australia, parts of the New York Times’ very favourable book review were simply reprinted in the NewsBulletin: Official Organ of the Ex-Prisoners of War and Relatives Association Victoria.18 The Australian book censors in the Customs Department wrote in August 1963 that King Rat was ‘quite innocuous’ and that they had ‘no hesitation in recommending release’.19 Although, the censors’ brief would not have included checking accuracy, they would usually comment on whether books would be likely to be offensive to the Australian public. King Rat clearly did not fall into this category. Was this lack of protest over the novels compared to the films something to do with the nature of the medium? A number of hypotheses can be suggested. Does the private nature of reading, as opposed to the public, group consumption of film, mean the former is experienced more as fiction, exceptional, and experiential, the latter as more a more public claim to truth? Does the medium of film, when applied to stories about events which actually happened, create a greater sense that it is portraying reality than with novels? Or is it simply that the wider audience, and the more vivid impact of film made it seem far more important in forming national and international – namely public – opinion, than literature? For whatever the reason, the reception of the novels and the films was very different. Upon their release and critical acclaim, the two major movies were quickly challenged by ex-POWs in Britain and Australia. They had rival narratives of the story of their captivity and feared that the stories in the movies could come to predominate in shaping public memory. The concern of the ex-POWs about their experiences being remembered in a distorted way was especially strong, as these were the first major Hollywood movies on the Eastern POW experience. Most previous POW films focused on prisoners of the Germans, mostly giving a positive impression of prisoners’ attempts to maintain dignity, and to escape. Notable examples included The Colditz Story mentioned above, and the 1963 Hollywood classic, The Great Escape. Both of these emphasised jaunty defiance of captors, and different nationalities ultimately overcoming differences to make their incessant escape

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attempts successful.20 By contrast, geography and Japanese behaviour made defiance and escape more difficult in the East. Robert Murphy in his landmark study, The British Cinema and the Second World War, has noted that British war movies in the 1950s, including those on the POW experience under the Germans, were unusually popular because they embodied the stoic ‘stiffupper-lip ethos’, strength in the face of adversity, that audiences reflecting on their experience of the war identified with.21 The Far Eastern prisoners were beset by two conflicting fears. One for British ex-POWs was that, compared to the Western campaigns, their experience (of barely 3 months of fighting compared to 3 1/2 years of captivity) would be forgotten. General Slim supposedly warned his ultimately victorious Fourteenth Army, a Commonwealth force which successfully reconquered Burma in 1944 to 1945, that they would be the ‘Forgotten Army’ upon return, with no one knowing about where they had fought, or why. The chances of the less successful Far East POWs becoming the ‘forgotten prisoners’ thus seemed great. They were returning to Europe after the war there had ended, after the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps had been exposed, and after a new Prime Minister had been elected, putting the focus on building a new, post-war world. Yet this fear of not being remembered had to be balanced against the danger of being remembered ‘wrongly’, including fears that Japanese brutality, and the horror of conditions in the worst camps, would be diluted. As we shall see below, these contrasting fears meant prisoner of war responses to the films were more ambivalent than we might at first suppose. Different ranks and individuals had varying responses, although most could probably support national level protests aimed at correcting false impressions and publicising their wider experiences. Analysing their reactions to these two early post-war films will reveal how they coped with representations of their past and their concerns about how they should be remembered in the future.

British FEPOWs and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) The Bridge on the River Kwai premiered in London on 2 October 1957, with FEPOW protests preceding the screening. The film pushed scenery and personality to the limits. David Lean’s direction made the scenery almost an extra star. According to the Daily Mirror critic Donald Zec on 2 October 1957, ‘the suffocating jungle almost entangles you’. The ‘Thai’ jungle (actually filmed in Sri Lanka) and ‘River Kwai’ combined with the clash of codes embodied in its lead antagonists, the British Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and the Japanese commander Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), to ensure an instant hit. The Daily Mirror’s critic crowed that ‘All Britain will be proud of it . . . It will rank as a classic in world cinema’ . . . ‘and the finest tribute ever paid to those ragged, tortured, broken Britons who died alongside that ghastly railway.’ Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer (High Commissioner in


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Malaya 1952–54 and Chief of Imperial General Staff 1955–58) called it ‘without any doubt at all, the best film I have ever seen in my life’.22 The film went on to win seven Academy Awards on 26 March 1958, including best actor (Alec Guinness), best supporting actor (Sessue Hayakawa), and best musical score for Malcolm Arnold with the defiant ‘Colonel Bogey’ march song of the prisoners, with which the film opens. Its culminating scenes also seared themselves into public memory. Commander Nicholson has successfully pushed his men to complete a better bridge than the Japanese could have done. He spots something at the base of the bridge just as a Japanese train steams towards it for the grand opening. Investigating while a horrified Force 316 Special Operations sabotage team watches from the nearby jungle, he is hit by crossfire. He falls on the detonator. The wooden bridge and train are spectacularly blown into the air. In this way the original pathos of Frenchman Pierre Boulle’s book – in which the Colonel prevents the bridge’s destruction – is converted into ambivalence and spectacle. The film closes with a horrified British medical officer surveying the dead men and the blown bridge and exclaiming ‘Madness! Madness! Madness!’ In Boulle’s work, by contrast, the final Force 316 report reads sardonically: ‘TWO MEN LOST. Some damage done but bridge intact thanks to British Colonel’s heroism’. The book also had Nicholson alert the Japanese (who cut the wires), and engage in mortal combat with a Force 316 officer who tries to warn him off. Ultimately, the Force 316 commander uses his mortar to kill two of his own men, rather than have them taken alive: taking ‘that old bullshitter [Nicholson] who couldn’t stand the idea of his fine work being destroyed’ in the process.23 Neither book (where the train is merely derailed), nor film bore any relation to the real opening of the biggest railway bridge, at Tamarkan, near Kanchanaburi in Thailand. At that, Japanese C56 locomotive C5361 passed over the bridge, followed by a ceremony for the 1,000 Japanese, 12,000 POWs and 8,400 Asians who the Japanese acknowledged had died building the railway: figures grotesquely below the reality.24 From the first, the film producers struggled with how to keep the book’s psychic drama but soften the treachery that Nicholson descends to in the book. They also wanted bridge and train to be blown up for the finale. By late 1955 the film script had Nicholson forcibly prevented from separating the detonator wires, before an American team member could detonate and destroy the bridge. Scriptwriter Carl Foreman and director David Lean moved the script even further away from outright obstruction by Nicholson. Alec Guinness, as the actor, also moved Nicholson away from a man taking a code to its extreme to being slightly mad. Thus, in the film, the folly of war created by each following their own codes is there but obscured by the portrayal of Nicholson. At the climax, David Lean leaves the viewer unsure whether the Colonel dies

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still crazed by the notion of saving ‘his’ bridge, or deliberately falls on the detonator in belated realisation that he had been wrong. Either way, the notion that POWs would willingly improve upon Japanese bridge-building, and that an officer might covet ‘his’ bridge, was certain to provoke, even if the script reassures viewers that the POWs only did so because they were convinced their trusted commander must have something up his sleeve. The POW reception of the film must also be judged against the wider background of their increasing organisation, as described in Chapter four above. Local FEPOW associations had sprung up after the war. In 1952 these had formed a federation: The National Federation of Far East Prisoners of War Clubs and Associations of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.25 Its immediate priority had been the successful fight to secure a share of Japanese assets to be confiscated under the 1952 Japanese Peace Treaty, to be distributed to ex-FEPOWs as compensation. The especially active London Association already had a regular circular, the FEPOW Forum (1948–86) with the motto: ‘To Keep Going the Spirit that Kept Us Going’. This in effect became a national as well as a local publication. By the 1950s the Federation was organising regular meetings, a grand annual reunion at the Royal Albert Hall or Royal Festival Hall for more than 2,000 (a figure maintained into the 1980s), and a remembrance service at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields opposite Nelson’s Column, as well as helping to distribute some of the funds mentioned above for FEPOW welfare.26 The National Federation was assisted by the sort of senior officers The Bridge on the River Kwai portrayed – much to their anger – as collaborating. Much later, in an Observer article by FEPOW Ian Watt of 1 October 1968, it emerged that there was a more specific personal element to this. Watt, now a Professor of Literature at Stanford University, had worked as a POW near Tamarkan, where POWs had built two bridges over the Khwae Mae Khlong (which the Thais later renamed ‘Kwai’, such was the power of the 1957 film).27 One senior Federation figure was Colonel Philip Toosey. He was Chairman of Merseyside FEPOW Association in 1957. Later, 1966–75, he would become National FEPOW Federation President, after the first President (Lieutenant General A. E. Percival) died in 1966. Watt argued that Toosey’s story had been woven into the fictional character of Colonel Nicholson. That is, one of the FEPOW Federation’s senior leaders was announced as a distorted mirror reflection of the book and film character Colonel Nicholson: the man who orders his men to desist sabotage, stop trying to escape, and arranges the bridge to be improved under supervision of British officers. True, Toosey’s men built the two bridges over the Khwae Mae Khlong, at Tamarkan and near today’s Kanchanaburi: a wooden one, and a metal one made from parts taken from Java. Both bridges had been destroyed at various times in 1945, but by American and later British bombing, not by sabotage from the ground. Toosey then moved on to command a hospital camp at


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Tamarkan Camp. But Toosey was also dissimilar to Nicholson in some ways. The real Toosey was an ex-banker and Territorial Army officer who at Singapore’s fall was commanding a Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery, whereas Nicholson was a regular. Like Nicholson, Toosey had an overriding sense of duty, of rules, of his role in protecting ‘his’ men, and of orderliness. At Tamarkan Camp, from where they built the bridges, he refused to have a separate officer’s mess in order to ensure all shared suffering, and ordered no beards, lest they harbour lice. He really did, at one point, insist his officers could not work according to the Hague Convention. In the film, however, Nicholson then takes the sole lead. In real life, Toosey consulted his officers. The latter – faced with threat of execution of a colleague – ‘unanimously’ agreed to work, whereupon, face saved, the Japanese did not insist after a while.28 Toosey was also involved in sanctioning black market activity to support meagre rations, endorsing camp radios, and sanctioning escapees, who were later caught and shot or, in the case of one group he considered joining himself, put to death by bayonet.29 At the same time, ‘it was quite normal to find him digging a new latrine’.30 But Toosey’s overriding sense of responsibility for protecting his men – after the war he sometimes helped find jobs for needy ex-FEPOWs31 – meant he had also been known for his attempts to limit damage to his men from the Japanese by keeping them disciplined, and the ambivalent relationship that this necessitated with the Japanese made the film depiction doubly painful. It touched on the element of real cooperation, a sort of quasi-collaboration, which many prisoners find inescapable if they are to make their own, or their men’s, lives more bearable.32 Toosey did develop a working relationship with his camp commander, Saito. His central assumption was, if the bridge would get built anyway, it was better to cooperate in order to minimise hardship, and get as much supervision done by British officers as possible.33 Toosey’s post-war report on conditions in POW camps emphasised that incidents were less frequent when he combined diplomacy with firmness, and ensured the discipline among prisoners was as ‘sound’ as that among the disciplined, if brutal, Japanese military. He secured a day’s holiday, more logical organisation of tools and work, and regular hours, at least until the ‘speedo’ period sent these haywire. He claimed that these measures helped limit casualties to nine deaths out of 2,500 between October 1942 and May 1943.34 We must remember, however, that Toosey did not himself see the parallel with Nicholson at first: something not surprising, if we conceive ‘Nicholson’ as an imaginary amalgamation of events and characteristics taken from Toosey, and from other French and British officers. In a sense, then, until the 1968 article by Watt, the issue was that the film extrapolated and distorted a prisoner dilemma Toosey, and many other officers, had wrestled with, compounding distress to those who had had to take the burden of command, including accepting beatings as part of their role in petitioning for their men.35

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Back in the 1950s, the European arm of the film maker, in the guise of Horizon Pictures (GB), knew the film would be sensitive, and yet hoped for military assistance in filming. By summer 1955 it had contacted the WO, and even sent representatives to Singapore in the hope of funding a suitable bridge site in nearby Malaya.36 In November 1955 the filmmakers agreed to show a revised script to the WO at a later date, in the hope of getting WO approval. In July 1956 the makers returned to the WO, again asking for approval, which the RAF had now said was needed before the latter service could assist with filming in Sri Lanka. The WO now argued it could not ‘approve’ the script, since this had not been altered to meet concerns it raised in 1955. In the WO’s view, it still featured a ‘wooden-headed’ British officer who appeared as ‘half mad at best and at worst a collaborationist’. Nevertheless it said it had no objection to RAF facilities being requested, and provided, to the makers in Sri Lanka.37 The ambivalent feelings of the WO were reflected in particular by those of its staff who were themselves ex-POWs from the Burma–Thailand Railway. Major A. G. Close and Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Broughton, of the WO’s Public Relations Department (and who had to deal with Horizon Pictures), had both worked on the Burma–Thailand Railway. After reading the film’s script, they were against giving official recommendation.38 However in a note to Close, Broughton, while he doubted that the script ‘was accurate enough for official approval’ admitted that ‘it will probably make a good film’.39 The National Federation of FEPOW associations got wind that Boulle’s book was being filmed. As its concerns mounted, its committee backed a letter of 26 April 1957 by its President, Lieutenant General Percival. This objected not to the script – which the Federation officials had not yet seen – but in principle to a film of Boulle’s book being made on the following grounds: (a) . . . the story is based on the building of the Siam-Burma Railway by British Prisoners-of-War. . . . It is reasonable to expect, therefore, that the public who see the film will think that the events which take place in the film are typical of what actually happened. (b) . . . there were certain accepted principles. . . . One was that it was the duty of all Prisoners-of-war to endeavour to escape. . . . another was that prisoners-of-war should do everything possible to impede the enemy’s war effort. (c) The conditions in the Far East made escape almost impossible but they were extremely favourable . . . for sabotaging the enemy’s war effort. Of this opportunity the British prisoners-of-war took full advantage, often at great personal risk. Thus, Percival wrote that the overall impression of British officers working to build a superior bridge was ‘a very false one’. He requested the Film Censor be requested to prohibit the showing of the film, or to ensure no negative


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aspersions were cast. The Federation’s case was that, however much a film based around real events was admitted to be a ‘story’, it would for its audience be taken as ‘representative’ of reality. In Percival’s words: Whatever may be said, either in the book or in the film by way of explanation, it is certain that a high proportion of those who read the book or see the film will form and retain an impression that this conduct was typical of that of British prisoners-of-war in the Far East. Given the endless small acts of defiance, theft, black market activity and sabotage, such as choosing weak wood for bridge supports, and the increase in Japanese reprisals such acts invited, Percival’s position was understandable. It was not, however, practical. The film company got its advisor, MajorGeneral ‘Lance’ (Lancelot) Perowne, ex-commander of the 17th Gurkha Division in Malaya during the early days of the Malayan Emergency, to argue that, ‘there is not the slightest likelihood of any intelligent film-goer forming the impression that Nicholson is intended to be typical of senior British officers taken prisoner in the Far East’, while the film did stress the men only desisted on sabotage and escapes in the belief their trusted commander must have something up his sleeve. In short, Nicholson would be correctly seen as an exaggeration to create the central ‘absorbing psychological problem’. The film’s deviations from truth were ‘within the license of story-teller’. Sam Spiegel, as producer, repeated that it would not slander ex-POWs, and argued the presence of David Lean as director and of British actor Alec Guinness were safeguards. With such credentials, and previous attempts to influence a film – Private’s Progress (1956) – having generated greater publicity, the WO had neither the clout nor will to pursue the matter.40 The FEPOW National Federation Council passed a resolution in May 1957 deploring the film as ‘contrary to actual fact’ and authorising Percival as President to take action on their behalf. A WO note of 23 May 1957 suggested the only possibility of squaring this circle might be to add something at the beginning and end, such as ‘this film is entirely fictional and is not intended to suggest that British Officers or other ranks who were P. O. W. in Japanese hands, did in fact do anything other than obstruct their captors in every possible way’.41 Percival responded in June with a version over 100 words long which emphasised voluntary building ‘has no foundation in fact and would have been contrary to the high standards of duty and loyalty maintained by . . . prisoners-of-war’. By September, an approximation was agreed for a ‘draft title’, along the lines of what Major-General A. C. Shortt (retired), Director of Public Relations at the WO, had suggested: To what point should men follow a lawful and revered Commander, once the balance of his mind and judgement has become suspect? This is a drama of conflicting loyalties – played out in isolation, upon a stage remote from all contact with civilisation with its normal human

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Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn values – a drama in which the strength and courage of one man, in turning from nobility to obsession, becomes a challenge to accepted rules of disciplined conduct and of patriotic duty.42

Sam Spiegel’s deputy felt a more enigmatic version of this might do, and allowed Percival and the Federation Honorary General Secretary, J. P. Howard, to preview the film. Howard saw it as a film in two parts, a first which ‘gives a true and vivid picture of the conditions in the camp and the conduct of the Japanese . . . [and] the splendid behaviour of the British officers and men in the face of great adversity’; and a second with an untrue picture of British officers collaborating over the bridge. He also confessed that the film ending, with the greater ambivalence over Nicholson’s last act, and the destruction of the bridge, was better than the book. In short, he conveyed the President’s opinion that: the film will do much to bring home to the public the wonderful courage shown by the British troops in the appalling conditions of the Japanese Prisoner-of-War camps that with the explanation referred to above (provided that the wording finally agreed is satisfactory) and the changes which have been made in the ending of the story, there should now be little danger of the public forming a wrong impression of the conduct of the British p.o.ws in the Japanese camps’.43 Unfortunately the draft title proved too long and specific for Sam Spiegel, when he returned from New York days before the premiere. Hurried discussions followed. The final agreement was a statement that all characters were imaginary, followed by a shortened version of the second part of Shortt’s original statement above, to be given as an unacknowledged quotation.44 There the matter might have rested. The Fepow Forum Christmas 1957 contained one restrained review, noting some mistakes, but concluding, ‘It is a fine film, providing one goes there with the object of being entertained, and not to criticise it by thinking of what actually happened to us in 1942–45’. It also contained an acid note provoked by information that the film had been submitted to the Japanese WO, but that the British WO appeared to have done nothing. The note’s title was ‘Lament: WO becomes Spiegelite’. Yet this finished, ‘we still think it a very fine film’. It did not rest there, however, partly because the truncated statement that the National FEPOW and Percival had worked for was only shown on some occasions in London, and not at all in other parts of Britain and abroad. This exacerbated the feeling of some individuals and local associations, where it was thought a more active stance was needed. On 5 May 1958, former Singapore Governor Sir Franklin Gimson, himself an internee under the Japanese in Hong Kong, spoke at length about the film at the Churchill Tea Club at Bradford. He described how ‘the film, gives an entirely wrong impression of the relations between the Japanese and the


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British’. Gimson discussed how Percival had tried to get Spiegel to ‘put in a disclaimer that the picture as presented was entirely at fault’. He blamed the WO for not looking after the interests of the FEPOWs regarding the lack of a disclaimer: ‘The film producer would not do it because he had already received an assurance from the War Office that the book could be filmed’. Gimson added that the film was ‘false’, the Japanese ‘brutes’, and conditions ‘far less endurable’ than those depicted.45 In May 1958, the Blackpool FEPOW Branch protested to the Liverpool Daily Post that the only job they willingly did was sabotage.46 The 17–18 May 1958 Annual Conference at Torquay saw some ‘very angry’ representations by those who worked on the railway, and registered ‘concern’ over the way the film had been handled.47 Percival felt compelled to reply on the theme of how FEPOWs had done all they could to sabotage the enemy, utilising the ‘courage and dedication’ not done justice in the film. He wrote afterwards to Shortt at the WO, ‘They do not see why they should be used in this way to make large sums of money for everybody concerned . . . They asked me to do everything possible to bring this matter to the notice of the public’.48 Percival’s response to that last request was to write a letter to the national press, one which was only published by the Daily Telegraph of 2 June 1958. He may have reflected on the ineffectiveness of a similar previous letter to the Manchester Guardian of 9 October 1957, written by his influential friend, Brigadier Sir John Smyth: Victoria Cross; Member of Parliament; and commander of 17th Division when the Japanese invaded Burma in 1941. Smyth had seen the film in early October 1957 with Percival and other FEPOWs, and had written his letter in response to the many excellent film reviews it received to point out that ‘it is, of course, fiction – glorious fiction’. Smyth had described the ‘revulsion’ felt by FEPOWs, particularly by those who worked on the bridge at Tamarkan. He had noted that ‘the point the F. E. P. O. W.s would like to make is that while the character of the British colonel is a possible one, he would never have persuaded 300 British soldiers to take the same point of view.’49 Percival’s letter to the press of mid-1958 was similarly written in the context of the many awards the film had picked up in 1958. He complained that the message at the beginning of the film stating the film was fiction, which was promised by Spiegel, had only been used in London when the film first showed. Percival wrote that his fears about the public taking the film as truth had been realised: ‘There is ample evidence to show, both in this country and abroad that people are asking whether the British troops who were in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, did in fact, conduct themselves as depicted in the film.’ He felt compelled to assert that the British POWs in the Far East, in particular those who worked on the bridge at Tamarkan, ‘became sabotage experts’ and ‘many of them suffered and died as a result of their efforts’.50 Percival received messages of support from FEPOWs thanking him for his letter. His assessment that many members of the public took the film to be factual was quickly confirmed. Maisie Sheed, from London, who had many

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FEPOW friends, had a follow up letter printed in the Daily Telegraph of 10 June 1958. She noted that when she saw the film in Sydney, Australia, ‘there was no explanation of the fictional nature of the plot’ and she was ‘horrified and incredulous, but everyone I asked about the picture told me it was “founded on fact”.’51 Responses for the rest of the year varied, reflecting the tension between the positive – the film meant the FEPOWs were no longer ‘forgotten’ – and the negative – the concern over public generalisation of Nicholson’s behaviour. The Fepow Forum of June-July 1958 printed a note from Mr G. C. Perschky of the 88th Field Regiment Royal Artillery, formerly of a ‘Sonkrai’ Camp under Lieutenant Colonel Wilkinson. He noted that: ‘Although it is said that this story is fictional, it is amazing how much truth there is in it’, having worked at a bridge-building camp where there were similar incidents. At another level, the Fepow Forum February-March 1958 contained a spoof letter from ‘Benjo Chambers’ (Toilet Chambers), noting that: ‘The Picture faithfully reproduces a beautiful holiday camp where prisoners work and live in lovely scenery and work voluntarily . . .’ The FEPOW Forum OctoberNovember 1958 contained a photograph of two ex-FEPOWs with a mock bridge suspended between them, a prize winner at an Isle of Wight holiday camp contest, under the title ‘That Bridge Again’. In 1961, FEPOW Forum was again parodying the idea of anyone being proud of building the many bridges on the railway.52 By contrast, the East Wales and Monmouthshire FEPOW and Dependants’ Association determined to use the film as a springboard for their own message and fund-raising. They drew up a battle plan before the film arrived in Cardiff. This involved writing to papers to set the record straight, and persuading ‘The Capitol’, a Rank cinema in Cardiff, to post a large notice ‘pointing out the errors in the film and explaining our point of view’. They also set up a mock guard hut – of bamboo and laurel hedging – in the Rank foyer, together with souvenirs. Rank was eventually persuaded to allow them to collect, enriching their welfare fund to the tune of £107. They gently criticised the lack of a similar central initiative to collect, or to boost publicity of real conditions. They also pronounced their determination to collect when Camp on Blood Island was shown in British cinemas in April 1958. This was an unexceptional film emphasising atrocities, made by Hammer Studios to cash in on the grisly images of the POW experience under the Japanese. One ex-FEPOW criticised it for aiming to ‘pile one atrocity on another’, although another praised it for showing the true savagery of conditions. Again, we should beware assuming a single ex-FEPOW voice.53 Camp on Blood Island featured two camps on an island off Malaya, one for POWs and one for internees, with the Japanese commandant intending a mass slaughter in the event of Japanese defeat. The Bridge on the River Kwai issue, meanwhile, refused to lie down and die, becoming a television favourite after it was first shown on British television in the summer of 1968. The public fascination with the film continued for decades. Toosey, because he had been the British commanding


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Figure 9.1 The bridge over the river Kwai, 2006. The second bridge that Colonel Toosey’s men built over the River Khwae Mae Khlong, the first wooden one having been swept away. The two central spans are later additions, the originals having been destroyed by Allied bombing during the war. The railway had many bridges, mostly cruder wooden structures. Source: Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn.

officer of the POWs building the bridges at Tamarkan, began to be seen as the real Colonel Nicholson, especially after Ian Watt identified him as such in his 1 October 1968 Observer article. One might even suggest that Watt overidentified Toosey with the fictional Nicholson. The latter was in reality a montage of different people’s experiences and events, blended with Boulle’s concerns. To set the record straight, Toosey now enlisted the assistance of Liverpool University historian Peter Davies. Together they audiotaped Toosey’s memories just before he died in 1975. The 48 hours of audiotapes, lodged with Toosey’s private papers in the Imperial War Museum in London, later formed the basis of Davies’ 1991 biography, The Man Behind the Bridge: Colonel Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai. The tapes were then used by the BBC TimeWatch programme, The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai, which aired in 1997. This examined whether Toosey was like Colonel Nicholson. Davies told TimeWatch how Toosey had wanted an historian to record his testimony to get down what he saw as the truth so his real story would not be forgotten: Everyone thought the film was an excellent film. There was no dispute about that. But so many people in the general public understood that this

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Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn was the truth, or they felt that it was the truth . . . His fellow ex-prisoners of war were concerned that the myth portrayed by the film would become the reality. There was no way the prisoners of war could really dissuade public opinion except by getting one of their leading lights [Toosey] to tell his story. So I said to Colonel Toosey, ‘I’ll tape you, put your records in order, of course, and in the event of you dying everything will be recorded for prosperity.’54

Of course, even then the truth was a difficult one, and a complicated one to communicate. For the truth was that Toosey was not Nicholson, but parts of Toosey were infused into his fictional counterpart. More profoundly, Toosey’s dilemmas as a captive officer – how to preserve life and dignity while balancing cooperation and distance from his captors – were painfully true to life.

Australian ex-POWs and protest over King Rat (1965) In Australia, The Bridge on the River Kwai did not provoke protests, neither in newspapers, nor in ex-POW journals such as Victoria State’s NewsBulletin, or the New South Wales Ex-Prisoners of War Association’s Barbed Wire and Bamboo. The movie only showed British POWs, in particular a British officer, in a bad light. Not a single Australian POW was depicted in the film. Australian ex-POWs, with their tradition of distrusting authority for authority’s sake, also seemed able to appreciate the ‘Great Joke’: the way following codes and rules could lead to absurd results. The editor of the NewsBulletin noted that ‘to those who were not there at the time the film seemed quite horrifying – to those who were there the film was almost amusing’.55 For King Rat, however, the roles were reversed. When King Rat premiered in Britain during the last week of November 1965, British FEPOWs were notable for their silence. The only ex-POW to protest against the film was an expatriate Australian living in London, Russell Braddon. After attending a special preview, he clashed with James Clavell in the London newspaper, The Evening Standard during the last week of November 1965. Braddon noted inaccuracies in the way the POWs dressed, their accommodation, and camp routines. Clavell retorted that he had drawn on his own experiences in Changi, which were different from Braddon’s. This clash was picked up by Australian correspondents in London and published in the Melbourne Herald of 30 November 1965, and later in the Victoria State ex-POWs’ News-Bulletin of February-March 1966.56 Braddon was quoted in The Evening Standard complaining that, ‘What I really object to is the slur on my comrades. It shows almost everyone as corrupt, depressed or insane. Maybe some people were, but it is the film’s disproportion that is the real flaw.’ Clavell countered in The Evening Standard that for his British comrades there was not much that was wrong with the film, ‘Camp mates who have seen “King Rat” judge its scenes . . . to be very faithful to the feelings and memories many of us share’.57


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Braddon’s comments, as an Australian ex-POW, alarmed the management of Columbia Pictures in Australia, where the film was scheduled for release in February 1966. Colin H. C. Jones, the Managing Director, located in Sydney, had already been worried by reviews of King Rat coming out of the United States. The New York correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald filed a major report on the 26 October 1965 premiere of King Rat in New York that made headlines in Sydney on 30 October 1965 with the title, ‘Changi Film “Shocker” ’. The Australian correspondent was shocked that ‘the film presents a stark picture of men disintegrating under the strains of camp life, and emphasises the callous brutality of prisoners towards each other rather than self-sacrifice’ and ‘It tells how Allied prisoners preyed on each other in order to survive and ran blackmarkets in food and life-saving drugs’. Special mention was made of how Australian POWs were depicted: ‘The Australians are represented as being “the only prisoners who are capable of stealing things in bulk.”’ He also described how ‘an Australian accused of stealing hut rations is found dead rammed head first down a camp drain’ In actual fact, it was a hole in the ground that functioned as a latrine.58 Columbia Pictures in Australia knew what to it had to do, based on the protest over The Bridge on the River Kwai. When Jones received the print of King Rat for Australian release he immediately showed it to prominent exPOWs who would be most likely to lead protests. He arranged a private viewing for Brigadier Frederick G. Galleghan, who was in charge of the Australians at Changi, George Gettens, President of 8th Division and Service Associates, Mr F. S. Maher, metropolitan vice-president of the Returned Services League, Colonel D. Duffy and Charles H. P. Williams, vicepresidents of the New South Wales Ex-Prisoners of War Association. After discussing the film with them, Jones recommended to Columbia Pictures’ New York office that the film contain a disclaimer telling the audience that it was fiction. The wording was worked out by Columbia Pictures in New York and in Australia with Brigadier Galleghan. The disclaimer was to precede the title of the film every time it was shown in Australia. A key part of the disclaimer reaffirmed the accepted notion that the POW experience exemplified the national values surrounding mateship, which the movie seriously challenged. The statement was read as a personal message from Brigadier Galleghan, who at the time was perhaps the most respected leader of the ex-POWs held in Changi: Foreword By Brigadier F. G. Galleghan DSO, OBE, ED. I have seen ‘KING RAT’ and enjoyed it. I consider the acting exceptionally good. As Officer in supreme command of Changi Prison Camp I thank the distributors of this picture for pointing out that ‘KING RAT’ is pure fiction and no similarity to anyone living or dead is intended; Changi did exist.

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Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn I particularly want to stress that it was discipline, mateship and splendid morale of the men of all nations and ranks in Changi that alone allowed them to survive three and a half years of deprivation and brutality. 4 February 196659

Not many Australian film critics were convinced by Brigadier Galleghan’s message that the film was good, as it portrayed mateship among the Australians as little more than honour among thieves. The film critic of the Melbourne Sun Herald described it as ‘a negative drama which comes to its own resolution on the one word “hate”’.60 Peter King of The Australian called it ‘rubbish presented as bearing some relation to life’.61 In Britain, by contrast, many reviewers welcomed the anti-heroic approach to the POW experience. The Daily Mail of London wrote: ‘KING RAT is different. You will stagger away from it feeling you have never really seen [a POW drama] before . . . it reaffirms Bryan Forbes as one of the major screen craftsmen of our time.’ The London Evening Standard added: ‘If you want something different and daring, here it is . . . KING RAT is a gruelling honest film . . .’ The Evening News and Star wrote: ‘KING RAT is like no other P.o.W. film ever made . . . A TRIUMPH. . . .’ 62 The film never achieved the critical acclaim of The Bridge on the River Kwai; or its level of box office success. But it later became a cult classic on university campuses after the impact of the Vietnam War made films with what Bryan Forbes calls ‘a cynical view of human behaviour’ in war more acceptable.63 Australian ex-POW reactions to King Rat, like the British counterparts’ responses to The Bridge on the River Kwai, were nuanced rather than uniform. Mufti, the magazine of the Victorian Returned Services League, praised King Rat because of its attention to detail and realism in showing everyday camp items and routines, such as the latrines or ‘thunderboxes’ and catching cockroaches for food. The reviewer affirmed that King Rat is, ‘according to former P. O. W.s, a fairly faithful depiction of the infamous Changi Prison camp’. Regarding the struggle to survive, Mufti continued:, ‘The film achieved the rare distinction of being able to “get across” human relations and reactions under terrible conditions’. There was understanding for the way the film showed mateship in an anti-heroic way among the POWs: ‘Mateship proves a pretty lasting ingredient of the POW, even though it cracks at times under extreme stress.’ The review ended: ‘Here is a realist film which will bring memories flooding back to many’. At the end of his article, the reviewer for the Returned Services League told ex-POWs how they could obtain their free tickets for a preview to be held at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne on 14 February 1966.64 By March 1966, however, as an increasing number of ex-POWs started to see King Rat, unhappiness became more vocal. One of the voices raised, moreover, was that of a member of the Australian Parliament. On 9 March 1966, Winton George Turnbull, member for the Country Party seat of Mallee, asked the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, in Parliament:


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whether the film “King Rat”, currently being screened in Australia is a true record of events in Changi prison camp, Singapore, or a money making project to the detriment of the reputation of many Australians and others who served in Malaya and who were imprisoned in Changi? Turnbull was a farmer, growing wheat, and grazing sheep and cattle. He had been a Staff Sergeant in the Australian Imperial Force and a prisoner in Changi from 1942–45. Turnbull was also member of the Returned Services League in Victoria, whose journal had praised King Rat the month before. He said he addressed the question to the Prime Minister because he regarded it as a matter ‘of great national importance’.65 Conscious that there were members of the Parliament on both sides of the House who had been prisoners at Changi (Turnbull was from Holt’s own coalition parties), Holt promised to ascertain the truth.66 Jones, the Managing Director of Columbia Pictures in Sydney, was jolted into additional action. He now wrote a letter to several major newspapers. Published in various dailies between 12 and 15 March 1966, it argued they had gone to the extent of enlisting the assistance of Australian ex-POWs to draw up the disclaimer, and repeated its exact words.67 Turnbull’s outburst in Parliament heightened media interest. Ex-POWs were now solicited for opinions. On 15 March 1966, in Perth, H. Brown, Secretary of the Western Australia Ex-Prisoners of War Association, with fellow ex-POWs T. Bunning, I. Hangor and B. Saggers, attended a private screening. Later the Secretary and President were interviewed on television station Channel 7. Their views were simple: ‘It is a good film, but is not Changi as we knew it, and we are in full agreement with the Foreword by the Australian G. O. C. [General Officer Commanding, Galleghan]’.68 Others were more scathing. A letter writer to the Canberra Times of 14 March 1966 questioned the sincerity of Columbia Pictures’ use of the foreword, saying that the disclaimer is ‘only for Australian consumption’, and that ‘the great majority of people who view the film in the US and elsewhere will have no reason not to doubt that the film purports to be factual’. He asked, ‘Could it be that Mr Jones’ company agreed to the foreword only in Australia because survivors of Changi and the next of kin of other POWs would boycott the film if this gesture were not made?’69 In Parliament, Turnbull revealed his motives for directing his question on the accuracy of King Rat to the Prime Minister during the grievance debate of 17 March 1966. He said, ‘I asked the Prime Minister so that he would be able in the Commonwealth Parliament to make the announcement that this [film] is fictional’. This was because he felt the foreward insufficient: It is not enough to have something just at the start of the picture. Many people do not see the foreword at all. Many have asked me whether such and such a thing really happened. They have forgotten all about what was written at the start. Why should the name Changi have been used?

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Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn I believe that it was used because this picture is trading on the suffering of the men in that camp. 70

Turnbull asked why a fictional name, such as ‘Camp Bologa’, could have not been used, only to answer his own question: ‘Would people rush along to see a film with that title? Certainly not. The name Changi was used as a money making proposition, and no man can deny this.’ He concluded: ‘I believe that the name “Changi” should never have been used in a film of this nature, and for my part, and on behalf of many men whom I knew in that camp I condemn the use of the name Changi in “King Rat”’. Prime Minister’s Department bureaucrats doubted whether any answer from the Prime Minister could change Turnbull’s unhappiness.71 Nevertheless, on 26 April 1966 Holt did reply. He followed word for word the suggested answer given by his bureaucrats, that the film was preceded by a disclaimer by Brigadier Galleghan, ‘pointing out that the film is based on a work of fiction and this being so portrays a situation incidents and characters created by the author for the purpose of dramatic effect’. He then repeated the part of the foreword which emphasised that ‘it was the discipline, mateship and splendid morale of the men of all nations and ranks in Changi that alone allowed them to survive 3 1/2 years of deprivation and brutality.’72 Thus ex-POWs in Australia had succeeded where their British counterparts had failed. They had been able to get their Prime Minister to disclaim a POW movie that offended their own memory of their experiences. Just as the memory of the controversy over The Bridge on The River Kwai would rumble on long afterwards in Britain, so too, the controversy over King Rat was not forgotten in Australia. It is not often that an Australian Prime Minister makes a statement in Parliament on a film. When James Clavell visited Australia in 1975 the ex-POW reactions to the movie King Rat, less than 10 years previously, were still brought up in press interviews with him. By 1975, public memory had exaggerated the controversy of 1966. One journalist wrote: [the] film version of King Rat was allowed to be shown in Australia only after Brigadier Sir Frederick (Black Jack) Galleghan, who had been in charge of the Australians at Changi, wrote an introduction stating that the film was very much fiction and not fact’73 Even James Clavell’s book was misremembered as provoking strong ex-POW protest, whereas it had not.74

Conclusions The films The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat have fascinating contrasts and similarities. In each case, the novels which provided the script raised barely a murmur of complaint. In each case, the film ran without


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complaint in one country, but with a storm of opposition in the country where it offended the public memory of POWs. In each case, the opposition in the offended country was strong, but not unanimous, with some people recognising the film as containing some level of veracity, of realism. In both cases, the film helped to create or maintain awareness of the POWs sufferings, while raising complex questions about the relationship between fiction and fact. For instance some prisoners, in the pages of FEPOW Forum, claimed to see in The Bridge on the River Kwai a reflection of real events and tensions in their camps, and not only at Tamarkan, while others focused instead on the implausibility of an officer so wholeheartedly cooperating. In the case of King Rat, the film touched on a very real deterioration in the camp over time. Charles Wilkinson wrote on this very theme, before the film’s launch, in the Fepow Forum of June–July 1964. Initially the black market was supposed to be used – in Changi and in other camps – to support the sick, and Allied officers maintained a level of discipline. But so undisciplined did the situation become as scarcity increased towards the end of the war, that officers had to make orders against lending at excessive rates. In July 1944 they forbade POWs leaving Changi wearing anything other than shorts. Even the shorts were sometimes stolen from the washing line and sold on at $200. As Japanese shipping losses reduced food, and prisoners had to be ordered not to consume pig swill, Changi did take on aspects of King Rat in its worst year of 1945.75 Hence a commentator as astute as Braddon, himself a best-selling writer who had noted exceptions to mateship, emphasised not so much that King Rat was wildly inaccurate, but that it was, in his eyes, disproportionate. He could scarcely do otherwise, since both films captured, extrapolated, and dramatised, dilemmas at the core of the captivity experience. For The Bridge on the River Kwai, the dilemma was that, if officers were to do their duty to their men, to maintain their life, dignity and morale in the most pressing circumstances, this must involve a degree of cooperation with the Japanese, and with their railway building. For King Rat, it was that survival in the face of shortages necessitated black marketeering and stealing, and this tended to open the way to profiteering, as well as to boosting supplies for the sick, the weak, and the prisoner community as a whole. Underlying both situations was the necessity to operate on the margins of normal codes of practice, and the moral jeopardy, and danger of deterioration that this opened up. Even the most factual of documentary treatments might have struggled to communicate the ambivalence of these situations, and their psychological peril. With films, the issues were extrapolated, if not over-dramatised and exaggerated, for effect. In terms of the success of protests against these over-dramatisations, and the lack of balance, in the films, there are again interesting similarities and dissimilarities between the two. At root, each protest was against a film countering the public memory of a community of POWs. The Bridge On the River Kwai contradicted the stoicism and stiff upper lip in the face of adversity

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story that audiences were familiar with in British war films of the 1950s. King Rat undermined the idea of mateship and opposition to authority as positive, national, even martial, characteristics of Australians. Hence both British FEPOWs and Australian ex-POWs sought disclaimers to be attached to the films, and to make use of the press to publicise their own public memories. But the results were rather different. The greater success of the Australian ex-prisoners can be put down to two factors. One is that Columbia Pictures in Australia during early 1966 had learnt from its European branch’s experience in 1957. It knew that it needed to ensure there was a disclaimer created by POWs telling the audience that the film was fiction, and that any disclaimer should be on every print of the film exhibited in the country. But perhaps more importantly, the different place of Eastern POW experience under the Japanese in wider British and Australian national memory played a part. Spiegel did not take seriously the disclaimer in Britain for The Bridge on The River Kwai and never really honoured it. The Eastern prisoners had always been a minority of Britain’s prisoners, and their experience was not central to national memory of the war, or to attempts to construct national stereotypes. In contrast, his counterpart in Australia immediately asked the ex-POWs to craft a disclaimer for King Rat. Australian ex-POWs in the East had been the overwhelming majority of Australia’s wartime prisoners, and their experience of survival through authority-tilting ‘mateship’ was seen as a part of the bigger story of Australian ‘digger’ spirit, and of Australia’s evolving national identity and pride. Australian ex-POWs even had the power to get the Prime Minister of Australia to provide his own disclaimer for the film. In short, the films show that real history and reel history are not easily separated and opposed. The latter do not just fabricate, but instead may rely on extrapolating core aspects of reality to dramatise human dilemmas, here prisoner dilemmas. At the same time, the success of veterans and others in publicising their alternative memories, and in demanding proportion be restored to the story, may depend not just on how well they establish their version of events, or even how effective their ‘fictive kinship’ associations are, but on how far their public memory meshes with wider national memories and concerns.76

Notes 1 2 3

Straits Times, 7 September 1945, and 19 August 1957; and the figures in David Nelson, The Story of Changi, Singapore (Perth: Changi Publications, 1974), p. 10 and pp. 210–11. For angst over post-war campaign histories, see Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 1–11 and pp. 142–88. Andrew Sinclair, Spiegel: The Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1987), pp. 74–5; and Kevin Brownlow, David Lean, A Biography (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 340. See also Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Sam Spiegel (New York, Little Brown, 2003), pp. 182–3.


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4 Bryan Forbes, Notes for a Life (London: Collins, 1974), p. 314. 5 Pierre Boulle, The Bridge on the River Kwai, trans. Xan Fielding (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), p. 107. 6 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 October 1965. 7 Julie Summers, The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai (London: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 14. 8 Lucille Frackman Becker, Pierre Boulle (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), p. 24; and pp. 46–54. See also, Georges Joyaux, ‘The Bridge Over [sic] The River Kwai: From Novel to the Movie’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 2 (1974), pp. 174–82. 9 Boulle, The Bridge on the River Kwai, p. 111 and p. 167. 10 Brownlow, David Lean, A Biography, pp. 350–1. 11 Robert C. Doyle, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Who was the Real King Rat?’, in Wolfgang Gortschacher and Holger Klein (eds) Modern War on Stage and Screen/Der Moderne Krieg Auf Der Buhne (Lampter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), pp. 431–40. For an analysis of the novels The Bridge On the River Kwai and King Rat and other works of fiction on the Prisoner of War experience see Roger Bourke, Prisoners of the Japanese: Literary Imagination and the Prisoner-of-War Experience (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2006). 12 Weekend Australian Magazine, 13–14 December 1986. 13 James Clavell, King Rat (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), original published 1962, p. 447. 14 Forbes, Notes for a Life, pp. 346–9; and Bryan Forbes, A Divided Life: Memoirs (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993), pp. 281–5. 15 Clavell, King Rat, p. 105. 16 Clavell, King Rat, p. 366. 17 Hack and Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall?, pp. 152–62. 18 News-Bulletin: Official Organ of the Ex-Prisoners of War and Relatives Association Victoria, November 1962-January 1963, p. 15; and see New York Times, 12 August 1962. 19 Publication ‘King Rat’ in Department of Customs and Excise files, A425/173, National Archives of Australia (NAA), Canberra. 20 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 21 Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 234. 22 TNA (Kew Gardens), WO32/16027, Facilities for Film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ – Horizon Pictures (G. B.) Limited file, letter, 12 Feb. 1958, from Templer to Major-General Perowne, military adviser for The Bridge on The River Kwai. 23 Boulle, The Bridge on the River Kwai, p. 181–6. 24 Kazuo Tamayana, Railwaymen in the War: Tales by Japanese Railway Soldiers in Burma and Thailand 1941–47 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 151. 25 Web page of the London-based FEPOW,www.fepow.org.uk/. 26 A memorial, in the form of some bolts and pieces of sleeper, was set up in St Martins’ crypt by 1963, and a wreath laid their annually after. Fepow Forum, August– September 1963. 27 Ian Watt, ‘Bridges Over The Kwai’, The Listener, 6 August 1959, pp. 216–18, reproduced from Ian Watt, ‘Bridges Over the Kwai’, Partisan Review, 26, 1 (1959), pp. 83–94; and Ian Watt, ‘The Myth of the River Kwai’, The Observer, magazine, 1 October 1968, pp. 18–26, reprinted as a chapter in Ian Watt, Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000), pp. 192–208. 28 Imperial War Museum: Toosey Papers PJDT-3, ‘Carbon Copy of a Report by Toosey on POW Camps’, pp. 5–6.

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29 IWM: Toosey Papers PJDT- 1, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 55–6, he ‘almost decided’ to go with another group. 30 IWM: Toosey Papers, letter from JDL Boyle to Sir John Smyth, 25 May 1972. 31 Fepow Forum, August-September 1958, ‘The National Federation Social Welfare Conference’. 32 Imperial War Museum: Toosey Papers PJDT-3, ‘Carbon Copy of a Report by Toosey on POW Camps’, 14 September 1945, Ubon, pp 4–5, for Toosey briefing the troops to work ‘cheerfully’ (since the work would have to be done anyway) while their officers would seek to get them food and fair treatment. He insists that, from October 1942 to May 1943, these methods got the work done, notwithstanding the speedo period, with nine deaths of 2,500, most of whom would have died in peacetime conditions. For the Japanese perspective, see Tamayana, Railwaymen, pp. 81–108, especially p. 90, and pp. 103–5. 33 Peter N. Davies, The Man Behind the Bridge: Colonel Toosey and the River Kwai (London: Athlone, 1991), pp. 2, 4, and 5; and Ian Watt, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai as Myth’. 34 Imperial War Museum: Toosey Papers PJDT-3, ‘Carbon Copy of a Report by Toosey on POW Camps in Malaya and Thailand’, pp. 26–7. There are several good biographies of Toosey, most recently by his grand-daughter Julie Summers, The Colonel of Tamarkan, but all take Toosey’s ‘Autobiography’ (IWM: Toosey Papers PJDT–1) as a substantive core, in some cases with large chunks of the latter appearing little changed. 35 Imperial War Museum: Toosey Papers PJDT-1, p. 61. 36 TNA: WO32/16027, Facilities for Film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ – Horizon Pictures (G. B.) Limited file. See 1955 correspondence in WO and between the WO and the film production company, including Sam Spiegel and Carl Foreman. 37 TNA: WO32/16027, memo of 26 July 1956; WO summary of events dated 23 May 1957, passim. 38 TNA: WO32/16027, Document 9A, handwritten Office Note from A. D. P. R. (Lieutenant Colonel J. H. S. Martin, Assistant Deputy Director of Public Relations). 39 TNA: WO32/16027, Document 6A, Broughton to Close, 15 September 1955. 40 TNA: WO32/16027, letter from Major-General Perowne, retired and adviser on The Bridge on The River Kwai, to Sam Spiegel of Horizon Pictures (G. B.) Ltd, as forwarded to the WO. Letter from Sam Spiegel to Colonel L. J. Wood of WO, 9 May 1957. 41 TNA: WO32/16027, letter from Percival to Major-General A. C. Shortt at WO of 22 May 1957, and WO summary of events dated 23 May 1957, passim. For Percival’s role see also Clifford Kinvig, River Kwai Railway (London: Brassey’s, 1992), pp.xii-xiii and 46. 42 TNA: WO32/16027, Major-General Shortt, Director of Public Relations, WO to Percival, 11 September 1957; and appended ‘Draft Title for Film’. 43 TNA: WO32/16027, J. P. Howard, Hon. General Secretary and Treasurer of the Federation, 14 September 1957, for Secretaries of local associations and clubs, as copied to WO It suggested that, in the absence of alternative views, local associations use the letter as a basis for replies to queries about their views of the film pending the next Executive and Management committee meetings of 6 October. 44 TNA: WO32/16027, A. C. Shortt to Percival, 1 October 1957. 45 Singapore Standard, 7 May 1958; Singapore Standard, 20 May 1958; and Yorkshire Post and Leeds Reporter, 6 May 1958. 46 Liverpool Daily Post, 4 October 1957. 47 Fepow Forum, June-July 1958, ‘Seventh Annual Conference’. 48 TNA: WO32/16027, Percival to Shortt, 26 May 1958. 49 Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1957. 50 Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 2 June 1958.


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51 Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 10 June 1958. 52 Fepow Forum, February-March 1961, ‘There was a Bridge over the . . . You Know.’ 53 Fepow Forum, August-Sept 1958, ‘The “Kwai” at Cardiff’. The same issue noted that William Holden, who plays American Force 316 agent Shears in the film, had asked for his payments to be restricted to $50,000/annum, to lessen tax difficulties. For FEPOW reaction to Camp on Blood Island see Fepow Forum June–July 1958, pp. 12–13; and Fepow Forum, August-September 1958, pp. 9–10. 54 The True Story of the Bridge on The River Kwai (London: BBC, TimeWatch, 1997). 55 News-Bulletin, August-October 1963, p. 17. 56 News-Bulletin, February-April 1966, p. 10. 57 Melbourne Herald, 30 November 1965. 58 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 October 1965. 59 See Colin H. C. Jones’ letter to the Editor, ‘King Rat film is fiction’, Canberra Times, 12 March 1966. 60 Melbourne Sun-Herald, 20 February 1966. 61 Australian, 26 February 1966. 62 These reviews were selected for promoting the film in newspaper advertisements, such as the one in The Observer Weekend Review, 5 December 1965, p. 25. See other favourable reviews across Britain and United States in Films in Review, December 1965, p. 644; Films and Filming, January 1966, p. 25; Time, 5 November 1965, p. 69; Saturday Review, 6 November 1965, p. 46; Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1966, p. 2; The New Republic, 4 December 1965, p. 35; New Statesman, 10 December 1965, p. 946; The New Yorker, 30 October 1965, p. 203; Sight and Sound (The International Film Quarterly), Winter 1965/66, pp. 42–3; Sunday Telegraph, 5 December 1965; Times, 2 December 1965; and New York Times, 28 October 1965. 63 Forbes, Notes for a Life, pp. 357–8. 64 Mufti, Victorian RSL Official Journal, 5 February 1966, p. 6. 65 Turnbull, Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, Vol. 50, New Series, 9 March 1966, p. 53. 66 See Joan Rydon, A Biographical Register of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1901–1972 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975). 67 See Canberra Times, 12 March 1966; and Australian, 15 March 1966. 68 Barbed Wire and Bamboo, June 1966, p. 14. 69 Canberra Times, 14 March 1966. 70 Turnbull, Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, Vol. 50, New Series, 17 March 1966, pp. 365–6. 71 Letter to the Prime Minister from G. J. Yeend, Assistant Secretary, Prime Minister’s Department, 7 April 1966 in Parliamentary Question Regarding the release of film ‘King Rat’ in Australia file, A463/32, NAA, Canberra. 72 Holt, Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, Vol. 51, New Series, 26 April 1966, p. 1196. 73 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1975. 74 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1975; and see Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 63. 75 Fepow Forum, June–July 1964, ‘The Black Market’, by Charles Wilkinson. See also R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 76 For ex-POW associations as ‘fictive kinship’, able to campaign in association with pre-existing military groups such as battalion organisations, see Jay Winter, ‘Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Commemoration in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 41.

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10 Japanese guards in film and memory White Skin, Yellow Commander Kaori Maekawa

After the war a camp commander appears before a Dutch court-martial and is accused of acts of cruelty . . . Although various women declare during the trial that the commander never lifted a finger against them, he is sentenced to death. (Remco Raben, ‘White Skin, Yellow Commander’, summarising the Japanese film of that name)1 . . . during the war the Japanese told the International Red Cross that there were 98,000 internees [in the Netherlands Indies] and that 16,800 of them had died, that is 17%.2 By contrast, there were 42,233 European POWs, of whom 8,200 or 19.4% died. 3 In the summer of 1960, news about a Japanese film reached the Netherlands. Its title was Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho (White Skin, Yellow Commander). It dramatised Kikuchi Masao’s prize-winning novel of the same name about Kampili internment camp. Kampili itself was far from being fiction. It was a women’s and children’s internment camp in South Sulawesi, which existed in Japanese-occupied Indonesia from May 1943 to September 1945. Over 40 years later, the film was again in the public eye. This time the occasion was the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, in August 2005. For 2 months, a mini-theatre in Tokyo showed war films, under the theme ‘By that date, the 15th August’. Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho was one of the twenty-eight films screened, from 14 to 22 August 2005. The film portrayed the war struggle of 27-year-old Japanese navy corporal Yamaji Tadashi.4 Yamaji was commander of Kampili camp for women and children internees. At the camp’s inception, he is overwhelmed by thousands of poorly fed ‘hostile nationals’ (Tekisei Gaikoku Jin), as the Japanese military called civilian internees. Despite this, he takes pains to protect them within the constraints set by Japanese military organisation. This includes preventing their recruitment as so-called ‘comfort women’, the Japanese term for military prostitution, into which small numbers of Dutch and Eurasians were drafted alongside a majority of Asian recruits.5 As the film progresses, the internees

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and Yamaji come to understand each other, and when conditions do start to deteriorate, this is initially not because of Japanese actions, but rather due to Allied bombing. Not surprisingly, the reception of the film in the Netherlands and in Japan was very different. In Japan, the film was shown as ‘one of the rare beautiful stories of the war’, as a contrast to the uncountable Japanese atrocities in occupied territories. It was not an anti-Dutch movie, but a romance which expressed a longing for peace.6 In the Netherlands, the film received a more hostile reception. Although the film was not screened there – Dutch parliamentarians who viewed it in Tokyo in 1960 were very angry – former internees protested against the saintly portrayal of commander Yamaji, and the descriptions of the interned women in sensuous terms, in shorts, low-cut blouses and with one expressing unrequited love for the camp commander.7 As the previous Chapter 9, on The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat, has shown, tracing the connections between real history, reel history, and the reception of films, is difficult but revealing. Two issues make this worthwhile for White Skin, Yellow Commander. Firstly, Yamaji is controversial. There are discrepancies between the image of Yamaji presented by the film and by Japanese monographs, and the image presented in the published diaries of former Dutch internees. Secondly, Kampili camp remains both unusual

Figure 10.1 Yamaji Tadashi handing out sweets to children at Kampili Camp. Source: NIOD.

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Figure 10.2 Kampili Camp after Allied bombing of 17 July 1945. Source: NIOD 58226.

and controversial. Kampili is widely recognised as one of the better Japanese camps in Indonesia, by Dutch as well as by Japanese. The purpose of this article is to present Yamaji’s different images through two main approaches. Firstly, it attempts to shed light on the Japanese internment policy and its implementation at Kampili camp. This relates to Yamaji’s perspective, both as an individual and as a part of the Japanese military organisation. In the eyes of the Japanese military, his attempts to run Kampili camp were praiseworthy. The second approach is to highlight the internee’s perceptions. For them, Yamaji’s attempts to maintain control were seen as stretching to extremes. Hence history will be recreated here by juxtaposing these two different views of the realities about Yamaji and Camp Kampili. The protests about the film from the former internees related to two points. One concern was that it might give the distorted impression that the inmates of Kampili Camp – mainly civilians from the pre-war colony of the Netherlands East Indies – enjoyed life under the Japanese without hunger or fear. This was irksome for the internees. The sufferings during internment in the East were comparable for them with the fear and starvation in the Netherlands under the German occupation of 1940 to 1945. Indeed, in parallel to other countries’ internees, they already tended to receive less attention and support than POWs, although in reality they suffered greater personal losses than surviving POWs. Unlike POWs, whose loss was mainly of time, Kampili


internees lost their homes, and exchanged all their property for food and medicine, in addition to suffering from disease and being separated from their families.8 Sometimes they had to endure heavy labour in the camps under fear and strict control. Another reason for protest against the film related to a grievance of the people in the other Japanese internment camps, where conditions were typically worse, particularly those from notorious camps such as Tjideng in Java. To put this in perspective, Kampili suffered 30 deaths out of around 1,650 (1.8%), while Tjimahi in Java had a death rate of 738 out of 9,258 (7.9%).9 It was unbearable for them that their Dutch compatriots might think their camps were like Kampili. They were afraid that they might lose sympathy from fellow citizens. This fear was exacerbated by the cold glance people in the Netherlands often gave to pre-war Dutch colonial residents when they returned from Indonesia after the war. Colonial life in the tropics was in the popular imagination seen as a life of ease and luxury. By contrast, Japanese openly praised Yamaji. It was a small relief with which Japanese could compensate guilt about pre-war values, and their impact on Japan’s wartime captives. In the 1960s, war memories were still vivid. The Japanese knew what had happened during the war and felt bitter about the numerous reports accusing Japan of war atrocities. Japan entered this postwar era in a climate of Cold War alignment with the United States. This made it difficult to openly debate the question of war crimes and the fairness of war trials. It was, therefore, unusual to hear about a Japanese camp commander who managed a civilian camp in a relatively benign fashion, against the prevailing ‘common sense’ of the Japanese military system. Yet here was a picture of Yamaji protecting Allied women and children from the inevitable chaos and hunger of war, and being branded a war criminal despite this. In Section 1, we will look at how Yamaji’s story emerged in Japan in 1959 to 1960, and at the social and political atmosphere of the time. This forms the background for the discussion of Yamaji and his role at Kampili. In Section 2 we will look at Yamaji’s personal history and at several examples of how camp life looked to Yamaji. In Section 3, we will see how the civilian internees interpreted Yamaji and Japanese policy, using the diaries they kept as our main sources. In the last section, I will focus on how the Japanese created a useable image of Yamaji and Kampili for post-war Japan. This chapter is based on the following sources: published essays and monographs about Yamaji Tadashi and a television interview with him;10 published diaries written by internees of the Kampili camp:11 newspaper articles on the film; and trial materials. The latter include unpublished archival documents on the Makassar trial court of Yamaji in Japan and in the Netherlands: an unpublished manuscript of Inoue Tadao, who defended Yamaji’s superior Lieutenant Osugi, the commander of the 23rd Naval Base Force in Makassar; and Sugamo Prison Headquarters reports on Yamaji. The film Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho (White Skin, Yellow Commander) is also used as a source in its own right.

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Section 1: The emergence of camp Commander Yamaji Tadashi’s story On 23 May 1947, the Makassar minor war tribunal sentenced Yamaji Tadashi to 7 years of imprisonment against 10 years demanded by the prosecution. He was taken to Mandai camp in Makassar, before being moved to Cipinang prison in Jakarta from May 1948 until December 1949. He was transported to Japan in January 1950 for further imprisonment. He arrived at Yokohama port together with 693 other war criminals and served 8 months at Sugamo prison in Tokyo. After his sentence was reduced five times, Yamaji was finally released on 21 July 1950, after serving just 3 years and 2 months excluding previous detention as a suspect. Yamaji’s story, and that of Kampili camp, first became public in Japan in September 1959, in Kikuchi Masao’s eighteen-page essay in the monthly literature journal Bungeishunju.12 Kikuchi Masao was an amateur writer of no great note until this publication. He was a civilian working for the military. During the war he had been attached to a Minseibu, that is to a Naval Civil Administration Office in the occupied territories. He had spent approximately 4 years in Southeast Asia. Kikuchi says he witnessed a handful of ‘beautiful facts’, and wrote the essay to make them public. Where did his ‘beautiful facts’ come from? Kikuchi visited Kampili Camp during the war. After the war he asked Yamaji to allow him to write about his experiences. This was made easier because Yamaji had used his period in prison to record his experiences on the blank spaces in a Bible, and on letter paper. Kikuchi wrote an essay based on Yamaji’s Kampili notes and photographs13. Soon after the publication, Yamaji was identified as the camp commander in the story. The story of Yamaji as the ‘good’ camp commander quickly generated public attention. Every half year, Bungeishunju selected the best essay in the journal based on reader’s votes. Kikuchi’s essay was one of the nominated works. Normally, the journal’s annual literature competition would feature works by top novelists such as Inoue Yasushi who actually won the largest number of the readers’ votes in the 17th Readers’ Prize. However, Inoue’s work, The Blue Wolf, was incomplete and so ruled not eligible. The results of the Readers’ Prize were announced in the journal during January 1960 (Vol. 38, February 1960). The 17th Readers’ Prize had gone to Kikuchi’s essay White Skin, Yellow Commander. Surprisingly, the author Kikuchi Masao was not selected to receive the prize. Instead, Yamaji Tadashi was chosen to receive the 100,000 yen. All five selection committee members gave full approval that the first prize went to Yamaji, not the author. They maintained that Yamaji should receive the prize as he was the hero who had carried out humane deeds. The journal ran a five-page interview with Yamaji, complete with photographs of him.14 Shortly after the announcement of the prize Kajiyama Toshiyuki, a popular non-fiction writer, wrote the story into a 240-page book based on the original essay, along with interviews with Yamaji and other former veterans,


and some fictional details.15 The book was a success. The original author of the essay, Kikuchi, confessed in the book’s epilogue that: the story of the book version might not be accurate because this happened sixteen to seventeen years ago. I have to give my apology as part of it is the author’s fiction. I used fictitious names to prevent the relevant people from being in trouble . . .16 The book was launched in January 1960, followed soon afterwards by the film of the same name. In the interview with Yamaji in Bungeishunju, Yamaji said ‘it is a high honour, but I’m at a loss with this announcement’. When the story was published: many expressed gratitude and sent messages to me for being great as a Japanese soldier. Among others, my mother at home is most glad at the news. I am sure that any Japanese would do the same if they were in the same situation. I feel sorry for others who did the same if I am the only one who receives the prize.17 He returned home to Kagawa prefecture to see his family and celebrate. The visit was very different from the first homecoming after his release from Sugamo Prison as a war criminal. He believed that his family would have had a difficult time during his internment. However, Yamaji said, ‘my family welcomed me’. Despite this welcome, Yamaji left Kagawa before long. There was no room for him to take over the family business after his 12 years of absence, probably because he felt that he did not fulfill family duties as an eldest son. Yamaji returned to Tokyo, joined a hemp cloth business with a former superior from the Japanese navy, and afterwards started a business of his own, a transportation company. When he was interviewed for the prize, the interview described his post-war life as that of a successful businessman: having an office building in Nihonbashi, the business centre of Tokyo, owning twentyone trucks, and having forty-five employees. The experience at Kampili certainly seems to have given him the knack of organisation. Yamaji Tadashi had been born on 5 May 1916 (Taisho 5) in Kagawa prefecture on Shikoku Island, western Japan, as the eldest son of four brothers. He was born into a farmer’s family, which held 4.5 hectares of cultivated land, 7 kilometres from the prefecture capital. According to his interview, his education ended with 6 years of elementary school. Yamaji stressed he was from a poor farm in the countryside. However, this does not seem entirely correct. Sugamo Prison Headquarters records show his schooling was 11 years.18 Yamaji completed an additional 5 years of junior high school. He could have proceeded to the elite course for university or the preparation school for the officer’s academy if the family could have afforded it. After completion of this schooling, the same as most young men of his time, he

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helped his family with farming until he was 20 years old. He then joined the Navy as a conscript and went to northern China for 2 years, before joining the landing operation in the Celebes during 1942. He worked on guard duty there in a temporary field internment camp in Makassar, and was then transferred to a guard section in Pare-Pare male-internment camp. By April 1942 he was part of the Makassar Minseibu, that is the local Naval Administration Bureau. After that, the internment camp administration moved from the Guarding Section of the Naval Base Force to the Naval Minseibu he belonged to. Yamaji, now 27 years old, was appointed as commander of Kampili Camp by May 1943. Yamaji was given eight subordinates to help oversee the camp: not a great number considering the size of the task. Kampili Camp was located 20 kilometres southeast of Makassar in South Sulawesi. Its buildings had been used as a pre-war tuberculosis sanatorium and mental institution. In total, the number of people in Kampili was about 1,650. There were two more internment camps in South Sulawesi. One was a POW camp, and the other was an internee camp in Pare-Pare for civilian men and boys above 12 years old. Kampili’s 1,650 internees consisted of three groups of Dutch women and children, each originating from a different island. The largest was the Malino group, which arrived in early May 1943. The second largest was the Ambon group which had arrived in March 1943. The smallest group, from Timor, joined the camp in September 1943, bringing its numbers to around 1,600. Thereafter there were only small additions. In November 1943, a small group of Indo-European women joined Kampili, and a further thirteen came from Bali in December 1943. The existing buildings were never going to be adequate for such large numbers. The first Ambon group did stay at seven former sanatorium buildings. But when the larger, Malino group arrived in May 1943, local Indonesian romusha labourers prepared twelve bamboo barracks. From that time the Kampili internees were organised into A, B and C groups; the first two groups lived in six barracks each and C group stayed in the stone building. In Yamiji’s explanation, most women had already spent all their money and sold their valuable belongings at their first camp in Malino. People could walk more or less freely outside of the camp in Malino. They exchanged money, clothes and precious metals for food and medicine. Some people in Malino fell under the ‘patronage’ of the Japanese soldiers for survival, or had a relationship. Since serious trouble would arise from relationships between women and Japanese soldiers, the policy to intern all women and children from ‘hostile nationals’ came into practice for their ‘protection’. The food situation in Kampili was initially relatively good. After the arrival of Yamaji, the internees grew vegetables and kept livestock like chickens, pigs and water buffaloes. Self-sufficiency was the aim. In addition to routine work like cooking and cleaning, Yamaji ordered the internees to sew Japanese uniforms, to knit officers’ stockings and to peel mica from ore. In October


1944 the internees also received 75,000 guilders from the Netherlands government in exile in London by way of the Vatican and the Swedish government. Conditions took a turn for the worse in 1945. The camp was destroyed during the Allied air bombardments on the 17th and 19th July 1945. After the air raid, people moved to ten large and thirty-six small bamboo barracks, called ‘Boskamp’, where Yamaji prepared shelter. All internees stayed there until the war ended, under much deteriorated conditions.

Section 2: The world as seen by Yamaji Here we focus on how Yamaji saw the Kampili camp and how he interpreted his conduct and that of the internees. After a short survey of the Japanese internment policy towards ‘hostile nationals’ and POWs, we will look at Yamaji’s work outside the camp, which could not be seen by the internees who stayed inside. First, we look at the context of the Japanese treatment of POWs. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 international law on the treatment of POWs was one of the most important sections in the Japanese soldiers’ handbook. To gain full recognition in international society, Japan felt bound to observe international law in times of war. After World War I, people living in large cities in Japan knew that POWs should be treated well. During World War I, German POWs, who were interned in Japan, were treated well and became popular with members of the Japanese public. This relatively benign situation did not last. Following the ‘Manchurian Incident’ of 1931 and the Japan–China War from 1937, the Japanese government stopped observing the 1907 Hague Treaty on POWs. The reason was that Japan’s invasion of China was not a declared war, but was officially regarded as an ‘incident’. Even officers did not have education about POWs and international treaties on war. Japanese soldiers mostly saw civilians as potential enemies. Looting and murder were prevalent by the Japanese military in civilian areas. By the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, practice in China had contributed to a major alteration in the Japanese military’s interpretation of POW treatment and ethics. The Gunjin Chokuyu (the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors), issued by Meiji Emperor in 1882, had been the pre-1931 norm of behaviour for the Japanese soldiers. It emphasised Loyalty, Courtesy, Bravery, Honour and Modesty. They would observe and carry out orders according to this norm. However, a new interpretation appeared in the Oath of Loyalty in the late 1930s, which led the Japanese to demonstrate ultimate loyalty to the military. Since the Emperor was the Supreme Commander of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, military orders should be respected as the words from the Emperor, irrespective of any inappropriate orders by superior soldiers and commanders. This contributed to the trend by which the military organisation was increasingly independent from government and parliament. A further set of military ethics

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was Senjinkun (Combatants’ Code) issued by the then War Minister Tojo Hideki on 8 January 1941. Its aim was to remonstrate against plunder, rape and disobedience of orders prevalent in the China war. Contrary to the intention, however, only the part of the code: ‘never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive’ became popular. Building on pre-existing notions that surrender was shameful, and that the appropriate response of officers at least was suicide, Japanese soldiers were never expected to be a POW from that time on. Partly as a consequence, no training was given on how to behave after capture, other than ways to commit suicide, and also none on how to treat prisoners.19 Japanese soldiers during World War II tended to demonstrate their superiority over POWs more by violence than by humane treatment. Being taken alive by the enemy was most disgraceful. In the lower levels of the military, not surprisingly, the result was that subalterns and other ranks simply obeyed Japanese wartime orders that POWs and internees should be made to work, instead of enjoying an idle life. It was rare to pay respect to the captive enemy in Japanese military culture, and more often than not, they had no idea of the terms of the Geneva Convention. On the diplomatic level, the Japanese government declared that they would apply the Geneva Convention of July 1929 concerning the treatment of POWs.20 This was nullified mainly by the attitudes described above, but also, in part, by the proviso that they would treat them according to Japanese rules, since Japan had not actually ratified the Geneva Convention, due to objections by the military. The Japanese government stated that they only intended to apply the Geneva Convention in full to civilians, in the hope that hostile states would also treat Japanese civilians abroad accordingly, especially the Japanese immigrants in the United States. In a sense, then, internees occupied an ambivalent position. Japanese views about POWs and defeated Westerners might militate against their good treatment, and operating procedures might carry over from POWs to internees. Rules were formulated to deal with this specific, and awkward, category. The Gun Yokuryusha Toriatsukai Kitei (Army Regulations for the Treatment of Internees) (Riku-A-Mitsu 7391) issued by the Rikugunsho, the Ministry of the War, on 7 November 1943, defined internees as ‘hostile nationals and third party nationals’ who were to be ‘interned at one place for the purpose of limiting their activities and offering shelter’. Most regulations governing civilian internees, however, continued to originate from Japanese military POW policy. Civilian internees, especially women and children, were ‘unwelcome guests’, since they were not appropriate for work and costly to support. According to the November 1943 code, ‘They are to be used to contribute to the Japanese military as much as possible’. This showed the basic nature of Japan’s policy towards POWs and internees, although the


Geneva Convention prohibited the use of ‘hostile nationals’ for specifically military purposes.21 Since the Japanese military regarded guarding internment camps as odd work for military forces, they usually sent physically unfit Japanese soldiers for guard duty. These soldiers were no longer useful on the front. Inevitably, some guards felt frustrated, tagged as inferior, and started to see themselves as dropouts. In their work place, many practised racial discrimination in part to hide their own inferiority. In Kampili camp, terms such as ‘one-eyed guy’ and ‘the 9 fingers soldier’ appear frequently in the internees’ diaries. Korean soldiers and Indonesian heiho (Indonesian auxiliary troops) worked at camps as guards within a clear racial hierarchy. The ruling figures consisted of the Japanese camp commander and several other Japanese who sometimes had handicaps, or poor physical health. Alongside them were Koreans. Korean guards sometimes behaved more brutally than Japanese did, in part because they believed that excessive violence was the only way ‘to show that they could become “superior Japanese”’.22 From late 1943 until the end of the war, the Korean guards were sometimes replaced by Indonesian heiho, trained as auxiliary volunteer soldiers under Japanese rule. Not many Korean and Indonesian heiho guards showed sympathy for internees. The Japanese military promoted the idea that young Indonesian heiho could work as prison guards to show that their former colonial masters were now under their control. Violent reprimand or punishment was practised on all these categories as a part of military discipline. Beyond the general context of Japanese views of POWs and internees, it is an important to note how and why Yamaji became the camp commander. In the essay and book about Yamaji, he is represented as trying to reject the appointment. He supposedly said, ‘I don’t have any experience to take care of the internees, even less of allied women and children’. He was young, single, and a corporal, the lowest rank of non-commissioned officer. He did not have even sisters in Japan. His selection was probably due to his career as a guard in Makassar and Pare-Pare since 1942. Another factor may have been his aptitude or willingness in learning at least a little of other languages. Yamaji claims to have studied Malay with a pocket dictionary during the ship journey to Indonesia. Another probable reason was that no one else wanted to accept the post of camp commander, so it devolved to the lowest plausible candidate. In the book, Yamaji’s superior at the Naval Base Force in Makassar told him: ‘You had bad luck, but do your best. Do not worry about your low rank. I will help you as much as possible’.23 There are two significant points to be noted, before we can understand Yamaji’s subsequent role in Kampili, and the rules implemented there. The first point is the relative power of the ruler and education of the ruled. The ruler on the one hand was a man backed up with military power,

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but the ruled were women who had enjoyed high levels of education, and a sophisticated colonial life as part of a ruling class before the war. The second point relates to the great differences in lifestyle and food culture between guards and internees, especially between what Europeans and Asians considered ordinary daily necessities. The internees’ most important interest was the quantity and quality of food. On the one hand, the Japanese rulers of the camp usually ate barley rice with salted fish, sour plums or dried pickles. When rice was not available, they ate taro or sweet potato as staple food. The Japanese guards felt this was good enough and there was no need for high calorie food, such as butter and meat, which Western women considered daily necessities. On the other hand, the internees had been used to eating baked bread, milk, cheese, cooked dishes with meat, eggs and many vegetables, and even to taking dessert with tea or coffee. Yamaji believed he managed to get enough rice, but the internees always felt hungry, to the extent that they were glad to use rice bran and cassava powder to bake bread. The difference in cultural background made it more difficult to understand what the other felt. Yamaji declared three policies to his subordinates: no drink within the camp; no violence towards the internees; no personal affairs with women in the camp. The second policy, on violence, was frequently broken by him. The other two were strictly carried out. There were three Dutch males apart from the boys under 12 years old in the camp: a doctor, a pastor, and a priest. When Yamaji heard of a rumour that the pastor often talked with a certain woman, he called them both for interrogation. The pastor was severely beaten afterwards, and subsequently said that ‘the camp commander doesn’t understand, and thinks it is simply impossible that a man in this camp talks with a certain woman so much’. When Yamaji’s subordinate had an affair with a woman, the subordinate was expelled to conform with his discipline.24 The book portrayed him as peaceful figure and implied he seldom resorted to harsh treatment. He was sometimes nice, showed a smile when playing with children, invited camp leaders for dinner, and overlooked the mischief of boys. If status, culture and discipline all presented the potential for misunderstanding, resource challenges made the task more difficult. The Minseibu in Makassar initially promised a special budget for Kampili for the first 6 months. To supply 300 grammes rice per person, the camp had to prepare 1 ton of rice every 2 days. It was difficult for a young corporal to negotiate sufficient supplies with senior officers and warehouse keepers who had their own needs, and were unlikely to see female internees as important. Yamaji’s seniors in the Japanese military were not cooperative in helping camps to secure food. From their perspective, food would be going to ‘hostile nationals’ instead of the starving Japanese soldiers on the battlefield. Very few Japanese soldiers helped Yamaji. Most liked to tease this young man, expressing envy and contempt that the young single commander worked solely for women and children. In order to get building materials, sanitary equipment and labour to build the barracks, Yamaji made deals with soldiers. He invited


them to the camp, especially pay officers with pay books or warehouse keys, to give them a chance to glimpse glamorous Dutch women. Although Yamaji took great pains to support the internees, such efforts were always invisible to the people inside the camp. To the internees, the Japanese camp commander had an obligation to provide them with food, clothing and shelter, simply because the Japanese were responsible for the start of the war and their suffering. Yamaji managed Kampili with a system of indirect rule. He appointed a camp leader, Mrs A. H. Joustra, a French teacher from the high school in Makassar, and ordered her to organise the camp with a degree of autonomy.25 Yamaji listened to Mrs Joustra saying, ‘we don’t like to be fully dependent on you, we are going to take care of ourselves with what we can do’. 26 He was impressed by her independent spirit and amazed that she didn’t feel ashamed at being captured. He tried to use coercion in a subtle way, since he knew that the use of violence made things more difficult in the end. It worked well to make the internees feel that they had some control over their own affairs, although quite often they were playing their roles according to Yamaji’s purpose. He ordered the women to cultivate a vegetable farm at first. It turned out to be impossible to attain self-sufficiency with women and children. Since they had never engaged in farming before, the women quickly got overworked and ill. He asked Mrs Joustra what kind of work they could do, and she replied, ‘what we can do is only sewing, knitting, mending, etc’. Soon after that, he started arranging a Japanese uniform sewing factory at Kampili.27 While the internees organised themselves to start the factory, Yamaji asked navy pay officers to transport 230 sewing machines from Manila. The internees were skilful and efficient. Kampili production was more than expected. The internees delivered production twice a week, which reached 10,000 yen per month, if Kikuchi’s figures are correct.28 The 6-monthly budget was almost finished when Kampili received the first payment to the uniform factory. One of the reliable facts in the book was that he convinced his superior Lieutenant Osugi, the commander of 23rd Naval Base Garrison Force, to stop the camp moving to Makale region, about 300 kilometres north of Kampili.29 By March 1944, the army reached an unofficial agreement with the Naval Administration Bureau about moving Kampili camp. After Yamaji came to know, he talked to Mrs Joustra to request Lieutenant Osugi for help. Although Osugi was not responsible for Kampili, he officially requested the army to stop its plan, since the food and conditions in Makale were worse and the internees and the sick had to reach there without transportation.30 Another reliable fact was that he tried to place the identification mark of the Allied camp on the roofing, in order to prevent Allied air attack. After the first air raid in July 1945, Yamaji talked to Lieutenant Osugi about it. The official request to the Minseibu Naval Administration bureau was turned down without giving reasons. Only after the second air raid damaged Kampili was

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a flag raised to mark the presence of a civilian camp.31 They evacuated to the bamboo barrack shelters in the woods, which Yamaji had ordered to be built in case of a serious attack. It is also known that some Japanese military ordered Minseibu women internees from Kampili to work at an officers’ prostitute house in Makassar. Yamaji protested many times, because he feared that camp order and discipline would be destroyed if he offered the internees for such a purpose. From the view of Yamaji, no matter how many pains he took to improve living conditions for the internees, they did not give him any gratitude. They looked more and more arrogant, never stopped complaining and were never satisfied with camp conditions. Nobody wanted to thank him, nobody approved of his job. He was not happy with his position. He conducted the task only because it was his responsibility.

Section 3: The world behind barbed wire In this section, we will examine what the internees thought of Yamaji. In addition to internees’ private diaries, we have two official reports about Kampili. One was by the camp leader Mrs Joustra dated 26 September 1945 on request from Yamaji. Since the report was too favourable on Yamaji, Mrs Valderpoort made a second report. Mrs Valderpoort had taken over as camp leader after the move to the ‘Boskamp’, when Mrs Joustra became her advisor.32 These reports became important as Yamaji was accused with ‘mistreatment of detained citizens’ at Pare-Pare male camp and at Kampili women and children camp.33 While serving as the camp commander of the female internment camp in Kampili from May 1943 until August 1945, it was alleged that he committed: 1. Maltreatment of women and children a. Hitting Mrs. Gravelotte with a whip b. Hitting Mrs. Rijsdijk, Sibenius Trip, Vos, sister nuns de Jong and Riemalda (Rumolda) with his fists in their faces, causing bruises, bruised ribcages and eardrum bleedings. 2. Sentencing Mrs. Valderpoort to decapitation, and preparing for the execution by a. b. c. d.

Asking the above to prepare her for her death Having a grave dug in the graveyard by coolies Having a coffin made Finally being persuaded by Mrs. J. W. R. de Hondt not to go ahead with the execution

3. On 18 May 1943, hitting an agent of the Police, Giat (Hardjo Diwerdjo) 70 times on the behind with a baton using both hands (this punishment was in accord with Japanese law and tradition).34


In the verdict, Yamaji admitted that he was not a man of high moral standards, but argued that he used the punishments to keep order and law since he didn’t know any other way. Although in the verdict, the defendant Yamaji was convicted of sadism, unnecessary torture and offences against defenceless women, Yamaji argued, during the trial, that he helped Kampili to organise food, medicine and relaxation. Mrs Joustra’s report described him with high regard, and 123 exinternees signed a report after the capitulation saying he had also behaved positively. The Judge concluded that Yamaji, educated to the level of highschool matriculation in Japan, was a cunning man, and foresaw the end of the war and his possible accountability as camp commander. To sum up internee impressions, Yamaji was short and fat, and known as a ‘yelling commander’. De Bolle (fat man) and Bok (male goat) were nicknames. He was interfering, hot-tempered, and nervous. He not infrequently behaved violently, hitting and beating people as punishment. He was an enemy and a Japanese who spoke an unknown language, and had a different lifestyle. They felt scared and uncertain because they believed Yamaji did not comprehend their feelings. He spoke Malay but his talk sounded like yelling because of his military manner. The camp operated within an administrative structure. Under a woman camp leader, three group leaders, one from each barracks, functioned as sub-leaders. When the commander Yamaji gave an order, a ‘corresponding person’ wrote it down and passed it to the barracks leader. The leader posted the order on a bulletin board for all to read. Food smuggling with local people from outside the camp was strictly prohibited. People performed their duties, sewing, cooking, cleaning, farming the vegetable garden, and butchery of livestock. An internee expressed her feeling when the sewing factory was about to be set up. In three weeks, our money will finish. Everyone is starting to worry about whether our food might be worse because of this. In my view, it won’t change. The Japanese want to control our health at a certain level. I can tell it from the fact that they check the weight of all 1,500 people every month. Our meals should not be less than what is necessary to maintain our proper weight. They are pretending to look for a way in which we can earn money by ourselves. They have arranged a sewing room with 25 machines. Some of us have to hand in our own machines for it. People who are appointed to work there will earn 1 guilder per day, and people doing hand sewing will be paid 40 cents per day. The money goes to all of us. It is not clear why it is necessary, since Japs do not have any difficulty to get money. (J. C. G. M. Chabot-Kortmann, 18 July 1943) Our money seemed to finish finally. After our leader tried to lift our spirits, a lot of hidden money appeared, although we expected this before. We

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A woman wrote about a dispute over the simple rice meals between an internee and Yamaji: Ms. D told Yamaji, ‘I cannot sit for four and half hours at the sewing room with such a bad meal.’ Yamaji became furious, saying ‘you are living during wartime and you still don’t understand that the rice is a meal which we can eat without side dishes’. (C. E. G. Voskuil-Limborgh, 30, October 1944) At camp, Yamaji often used to manoeuvre behind the scenes to try to appear firm but fair: Yamaji screamed . . . ‘no need to slaughter pigs anymore’. It was annoying news because of the trouble (of Ms. D) yesterday. People don’t appreciate the vegetables on which he spent all his efforts, Yamaji said. Women look down on vegetables, speaking about ubi (potato) or terong (eggplant) contemptuously. He threatens people that he will not give vegetables to them anymore as punishment. (C. E. G. Voskuil-Limborgh, 31, October 1944) Our meals became very small and poor as punishment because of words by D. We had rice and fried small fish – mostly bones – as lunch. Dinner was rice with watery onion sauce. Next morning pleasant news spread. Yamaji called the leader at kitchen and said that he will stop the punishment because she had lost a lot of weight. Today we slaughtered two water buffaloes and baked 150 bread loaves. Previously not even when our barracks had its turn of extra rations did we receive a slice of bread! . . . The hungry camp of the last several days is very happy now. We appreciate the ‘fat’ so much after days of poor meals. (C. E. G. Voskuil-Limborgh, 2 November 1944) After having established self-sufficiency, Yamaji noticed that a bad atmosphere prevailed among the women. He thought they felt frustrated with the boring routine work and wanted news about the outside world. Yamaji felt that the women became fed up with numerous optimistic rumors. He arranged for a library with the internees’ books. He also brought a Japanese newspaper to please them. An internee described the story; Guards usually go to great lengths to make sure we do not have contact with the outside world no matter what happens. But the Ambon camp


leader suddenly brought a Japanese newspaper to our ‘home’. This was not just once. She regularly received the newspaper, every issue. Because we are interned, it is especially difficult to read and to interpret the enemy’s newspaper. But even pessimistic people can judge the tide of the war is not favorable to Nippon. This morning, a barracks leader officially announced the news from the Japanese newspaper of last week to all barracks. What is the intention of the commander? Does he want us to prepare for some administrative change? Or does he want to improve our treatment so that he can point it out later? (J. C. G. M. Chabot-Kortmann, 5 September 1943) Yamaji did not approve the request to open a camp school, because the head of the political bureau of Minseibu was opposed to it. However, Yamaji unofficially opened a school on the condition that they didn’t give classes on political matters. He hoped to receive official approval after an inspection by his superior. Contrary to his expectation, his superior became angry and forbade the school.35 Yamaji continued secretly because the children didn’t bother the mothers at the factory and factory production became more efficient. An internee wrote about the relations between Yamaji and his superiors. It seems that our commander seems to have a number of superiors, but it is not clear who is the real boss. Our commander gives permission to the HBS [the school] during a week, but in another week, he forbids it. (J. C. G. M. Chabot-Kortmann, 15 September 1943) Mrs Valderpoort describes Yamaji in her official report about Kampili. Aside from his good things, he showed more things that were terrible with his own behaviour. These were rough and arbitrary decisions. He is a man of capricious, savage and very uneven temper. Therefore, we could never tell what would happen next. Yamaji admitted in the Makassar court that he was neither a saint nor highprincipled man. At the same time, he thought he used punishment only to keep discipline. He was 160cm and 75 kg in 1960. His diminutive height would mean he had to look up to most of the adult Dutch women when he gave orders.36 He recollected his wartime belief that everything would be all right if only he obeyed the Japanese military discipline and spirit. Another belief was his father’s advice ‘don’t forget moral obligation’, in other words, ‘if you are good to others it will return to you in the end, since people will feel indebted to you’. He used to complain that he had to remind everyone in the camp to express gratitude to the ‘generous’ commander.

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Section 4: Interpretation in post-war Japan The reason for the favorable reaction to the story of Kampili relates to the Japanese social and political context in the early 1960s. After 7 years of the American occupation (1945–52), Japan became independent again as a result of the San Francisco Treaty. Under the post-war governments, Japan took a new path as a democratic pacifist country with a strong economy in exchange for abandoning militarism. Thousands of purged pre-war figures returned to public life by 1952. After the Korean War of 1950–53, the United States also pressed for the rearmament of Japan. In this context, there was more scope to question wartime judgements. From 1952, publications appeared which questioned the fairness of the post-war trials. Already, in the late 1940s, minor ‘B’ and ‘C’ Japanese war criminals had been transferred to Sugamo prison from various jails in China, Singapore, and Southeast Asia. Some were thought to have been found guilty because of false information or taking the blame for the misdeeds of others. A campaign for immediate release was raised, and this formed one of the beginnings of the post-war Japanese peace movement. The deadlocked negotiations on war compensation between the Netherlands and Japan in 1956 gave added impetus to the campaign to release prisoners at Sugamo. Behind the steady growth of the economy, the minor war criminals seemed to be alone in continuing to carry the consequences of the war period. Sugamo had discharged all war criminals by 1958.37 However, Japanese society in general received them rather coldly. Some Japanese veterans also felt ambivalent towards the released war criminals. Many veterans did sympathise, but were busy with the struggles of everyday life. They joined reunions once a year. They rarely talked about the people sentenced for war crimes because there was a norm that people should refrain from gossiping about someone who had been isolated from the rest of the group. In his book about Kampili, Kikuchi criticised how the Tokyo Trial War Crimes Trial and minor trials branded the Japanese as savage. The Japanese public was ambivalent about this stereotype in the war tribunals in films, plays, and magazines. Many Japanese writers and artists were among these ‘new democrats’, and professed anti-war sentiments and criticised Japanese militarist culture. However, there were writers who did not embrace the findings of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and the minor war crimes trials. Popular novelists Abe Tomoji and Hino Shohei, who stayed in Java during the war, started writing critiques of the minor ‘B’ and ‘C’ class war tribunals from 1957.38 The message of the essay and the book by Kikuchi and Kajiyama appeared persuasive enough, in this social context, to address sentiment in Japan of 1959 to 1960, which was uneasy about images of Japanese brutality during the war. Soon after its publication, the film director Horiuchi Manao read the original essay, and decided to shoot a movie of what he called ‘a good one’,


since he was fed up with the stereotyped image of ‘the cruel Japanese’.39 The book was very successful, but the film failed to attract audiences. The film critics reluctantly graded it as a B-movie, the showing of sensual ‘white skin’ of the female internees was the focus of the film instead of the conflicting feelings of Yamaji and the internees. Although the core story of the film was faithful to the original, the description was a one-sided image of a perfect hero.

Conclusion Yamaji was an unusual soldier in the Japanese military organisation. He felt isolated being a man, Japanese, and a military soldier behind barbed wire, in a camp for women. He didn’t join the heroic action at the frontline and didn’t have comrades to share the experiences after the war. Yamaji accepted the prestigious Readers’ Prize as a reward for his unknown hardships, perhaps because he needed the restoration of honour after being branded a war criminal. Once he became popular, his amiable and moderate smile appeared in journals and newspapers. He exaggerated or fabricated extra details in interviews, almost as if he was trying to fit himself into the hero’s story. For example, he stated the number of the internees was 1,700 or 1,800 at the beginning and later increased this to 3,000 or 3,300, although the population of the Boskamp peaked at 1,670. Besides this, he gave his imprisonment as longer than it really lasted, and claimed that the prosecutors demanded 20 years. He made no mention about his previous experience as a guard in ParePare. Significantly, the description of Yamaji’s violence against the women was skipped to fit the story of his saintly figure. These careful choreographies suited his state of mind that he protected people at the risk of his life. Central to these claims was that at his trial Yamaji had been able to submit a petition to the Makassar tribunal with the signatures of 123 women from Kampili camp, expressing gratitude for his treatment during their internment. The prosecutor had demanded 10 years imprisonment; but he was sentenced to 7 years.40 The film dramatised the women’s petition into a firm protest against an unfair judge. The overstatement of the women’s good feelings toward Yamaji in the film finally provided him with the ‘recognition’ he felt he had deserved for his efforts. As he appeared as a bold, clever and benevolent figure in the film, the woman internees were also depicted as faithful people. Yamaji died in a traffic accident in 1970. He was 54 years old. Yamaji stated to Kikuchi when Kikuchi offered to write his biography, ‘please let me be as I am’. The figure in the film was retrospectively sentimental for him. However, nobody knows if he had mixed feelings about his fictitious image as a hero.

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Notes 1 See Remco Raben, ‘White Skin, Yellow Commander’, in Remco Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese Occupation in Indonesia (Amsterdam: NIOD, 1999), pp. 159–60. 2 L. De Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society: The Dutch in Indonesia during the Second World War (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 283, 421. This is the standard work, and points out that far more Dutch (the majority of whom were Eurasian and variously estimated between 170,000 and 220,000 as opposed to c 42, 000 POWs and c100,000 internees) remained outside the camps, suffering suspicion and restrictions. See pp. 509–41. 3 For the geographical distribution of POW and internee camps, see J. van Dulm, W. J. Krijgsveld, et al., Geillustreerde atlas van de Japanse kampen in NederlandsIndie, 1942–1945 (Zierikzee: Asia Maior, 2002). 4 Scripts of movie, Inomata Katsuhito (script writer), Shochiku Otani Library, Tokyo. 5 See Dutch ‘comfort woman Jan Ruff O-Herne’s, Fifty Years of Silence (Sydney: Editions Tom Thompson, 1994). 6 The film was screened for the first time in Holland in the Winternachten programme on 11 January 2007, organised by the NIOD research project ‘van Indie tot Indonesie’. 7 Remco Raben,’White Skin, Yellow Commander’, pp. 159–60. 8 Similar points are made for Australian internees in Christina Twomey’s chapter 11, below. 9 Taken from Historical Research Programme Japan and the Netherlands, online at http://niod.nihon.nl/index.php?lang=en. 10 Yamaji Tadashi, ‘Hakujin Fujoshi Yokuryo Shocho datta Watashi’ (I was the commander of white women and children camp), in Tokyo 12 Channel Hodobu (ed), Shogen Watashi no Showa Shi (Interview records of personal history in Showa) (Tokyo: Gakugeishorin, 1969), pp. 268–78. 11 Diary Compilation: Kampili (in Japanese), NIOD, 2004, online at http://niod. nihon.nl/. This extraordinary project makes Dutch diaries and documents available online in Japanese. 12 Bungeishunju is monthly opinion journal, which is one of two major journalism and literature publishers since 1923. Kikuchi Masao, ‘Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho’ (White Skin and Yellow Commander), in Bungeishunju, in Vol. 36, October 1959, pp. 182–99 (hereunder, called as ‘essay’), the 17th Readers’ Prize essay. Kikuchi Masao, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho (White Skin and Yellow Commander), Tokyo: Bungeishunju Shinsha, 1960. 13 Newspaper article, Mainichi Shinbun on 21 July 1960. Press newsclipping in Otani Bunko (Otani Library) 14 No mention was made of the author Kikuchi in the prize-winning news, other than he received an accompanying prize, a clock presented by the journal publisher. 15 Kajiyama Toshiyuki Electoric Archives run by Hashimoto Kengo, http:// www002.upp.so-net.ne.jp/kenha/kaji_a.html. News clipping on White Skin, Yellow Commander, Shochiku Otani Library. 16 Kikuchi Masao, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho (Tokyo: Bungeishunju Shinsha, 1960), afterword, p. 242. 17 The announcement of the 17th Readers Prize, separate print in Bungeishunju (February 1960) 38. 18 List of Sugamo Prison Records, 63–4(SP00478), microfilm collection (copy from NARA, National Archives and Record Administration, United States), Kensei Shiryo Shitsu, National Diet Library, Tokyo. 19 Aiko Utsumi, ‘Prisoners of war in the Pacific War: Japan’s Policy’, in Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), pp. 68–84.


20 Third Geneva Convention, ‘relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War’, 27 July, 1929. The 97 articles regulated the extended principles in Hague Treaty in 1907 which require that the POWs should be treated humanely. 21 Utsumi Aiko, Sugamo Purizun, Senpantachi no Heiwa Undo (Sugamo Prison: War Criminal’s Peace Movement) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2004). Utsumi Aiko, Nihongun no Horyo Seisaku (Japanese Internment Policy of Prisoners of War) (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2005). 22 Utsumi Aiko, Chosenjin BC Kyu Senpan no Kiroku (Records on Korean ‘B’ and ‘C’ class war criminals) (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1982). Utsumi Aiko, Nihongun no Horyo Seisaku. 23 Kikuchi, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho, p. 18. 24 Verdict, Yamaji Case in Makassar Trial. Pro Justitia No.Tkr.13/1947, 18837/R (162), Indonesia Collection. Vol.3, NIOD, Amsterdam 25 Mrs A. H. Joustra later became head of the Indonesian collection at Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, the present NIOD. 26 Kikuchi, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho, p. 28. 27 The Japanese navy had trouble with uniforms because of the tropical climate. Confiscated KNIL cloth of the Dutch colonial forces was abundant. The navy used to send the cloth to factories at Singapore and to Manila, since it took so much time for professional machine sewing training to local women in Indonesia. The Geneva Convention banned the military use of civilian internees, so ostensibly Kampili produced light summer clothes for ‘civilians’. However, these were delivered to the naval depot of accounting section of Naval Civil Administration Bureau in Makassar. 28 Kikuchi, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho, p. 56–60. 29 Record of Proceedings of Lt. Osugi, the commander of 23rd Naval Base Force, Makassar Trial, Inoue Tadao collection. Kaiko Bunko (Yasukuni Kaiko Bunko Library, Tokyo). 30 Record of Proceedings of Lt. Osugi, the commander of 23rd Naval Base Force, Makassar Trial. 31 Record of Proceedings of Lt. Osugi, the commander of 23rd Naval Base Force, Makassar Trial. 32 Mrs Joustra was replaced by Mrs Valderpoort probably because Yamaji considered Mrs Joustra no longer suitable. She was caught between the internees and Yamaji, probably because she had come to understand his effort, and thus was no longer regarded by Yamaji as having the confidence of internees (V-L, dairy March 1945). 33 Accusations about his conduct in Pare-Pare male camps are as follows: (1) When defendant was guard of the internment camp in Pare-Pare, he maltreated some of the internees in the period October 1942 until April 1943. (2) On 10 October 1942, he beat Catholic Father W. A. A. Maas with a split bamboo and the shovel stick until he lost consciousness, and continued the beating even after. He resuscitated him by pouring water over him and again hit him. When Pastor Schneiders and Pastor Thijssen tried to help, they were hit and knocked to the ground. (3) On 13 October 1942, he grasped Pastor Schneider by the throat, tied his wrists and hung him from the wrists and hit him with a stick until Schinerder lost consciousness. (4) Dominee Bikker, van der Pol, Kettenis, Gollete, Geuninck van Capelle, Galstaun, Prins and Samwel were hit with fists and sticks. About beating father Maas, Yamaji said to his advocate that the father didn’t join the work at vegetable garden at all and looked arrogant, since Yamaji didn’t understand the Western custom of how Christian ministers behaved. Beating him until unconscious was not true, as Father Maas also admitted during the court. Yamaji confessed that he hit the Pastor but never tied him against tree. Makassar Case No.10, Heisei 11, Homu, 17–3, 5085, National Archives of Japan.

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34 Verdict Yadashi Yamaji, Pro Justitia No.Tkr.13/1947, 18837/R (162), NIOD Indonesian Collection. Materials for evident for the Yamaji case were: (a) report on Kampili by Mrs Joustra dated 26 Sept 1945; (b) notes on the report of Kampili by Mrs Valderpoort; (c) note of gratitude, signed by 123 signatures (women). Against the statement by Mrs Valderpoort, Yamaji said that she walked out from camp for about 200 metres. He gave a cautionary warning. Yamaji thought Mrs Valderpoort should behave as model to others. However, she didn’t take him seriously and looked arrogant. Yamaji threatened that if she didn’t listen to him, he would kill her. Since she looked unconcerned, Yamaji decided to make her believe by going through the motions. The other women’s statements about bleeding were exaggerated, Yamaji said in the trial. Makassar Case No.10, Heisei 11, Homu, 17–3, 5085, National Archives of Japan. 35 Kikuchi, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho, pp. 73–83. 36 BC class (the Netherlands war tribunal) Makassar Court, No.10 (Case of Yamaji Tadashi), National Archives of Japan, Tokyo. 37 Sugamo Homu Iinkai (Sugamo Legal committee), Senpan Saiba no Jisso (Tokyo: Tokyo: Senpan Saiban no Jisso kanko kai, 1952, reprint, Maki shobo, 1981). 38 Toyota Kumao, Senso Saiban Yoroku (Records on War trial) (Tokyo: Taiseisha,1986), p. 405. 39 Promotion poster on White Skin, Yellow Commander in 1960, Shochiku Eiga Press, No.864, in Shochiku Otani Bunko. Eiga Hyoron (movie Critic), Vol.17, Sept 1960, p. 118–50. 40 Verdict of Yamaji Case in Makassar Trial. Pro Justitia No.Tkr.13/1947, 18837/R (162), Indonesia Collection, Vol.3, NIOD, Amsterdam.

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11 Crime and authority within Dutch communities of internees in Indonesia, 1942–45 Jacco van den Heuvel

Introduction Early in 1942 Japan invaded the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). The Dutch colonisers became the colonised, and the Indisch (Europeans and Eurasians resident in the Indies) became the interned. The result was years of hardships in internment camps spread throughout the archipelago. Most accounts of this internment focus on the problems of dealing with Japanese control. Less commented on – to a large extent ‘forgotten’ – are two problems which together did much to shape the internees’ lives: the high concentration of internees in the camps; and the decrease in food supply as the war progressed. These pressures motivated some internees to use informal and criminal methods to obtain extra goods and food. This in its turn raised the question of how internees might be policed, both by the Japanese to ensure obedience to outside orders, and by themselves to prevent the scramble for resources undermining their own welfare. This chapter examines the world of internal hierarchy and authority. How were systems of authority constructed and maintained within the camp world among Europeans, in order to deal with what they saw as threats to rust en orde (peace and order)? How much autonomy, if any, did such internal systems have? My focus is on the European leadership in the camps. To what degree were these leadership groups able to carve out a sphere of autonomy? How extensive was their ‘space’ of authority? How did the people that were part of these groups manoeuvre in between the Japanese and the internees? This chapter thus deals with issues crucial to the captive dilemma, but often overlooked because of simple ‘good captive’ – ‘bad Japanese’ dichotomies. Instead, this chapter deals with the difficulties European leaderships had in a situation when authority, crime, illegal behaviour, immoral actions and punishment became deeply problematic, ambivalent concepts.

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Jacco van den Heuvel

Background The Japanese invasion, and rapid defeat of the colonial power, shattered Dutch lifestyles as a privileged colonial elite, and perceptions of them as almost invincible rulers. Around 42,000 Europeans were soon in POW camps.1 Just months after the Japanese installed their administration in Indonesia, they also decided to confine the Dutch population to restricted areas, in order to remove all Western influences from local society. On Java, the Dutch were interned, as well as a fraction of the Indo-European or Eurasian population: the rest being left outside as notionally ‘Asian’, although legally they too had been Dutch.2 Including all registered IndoEuropeans would have led to a total population of over 200,000 internees on Java alone, a policy deemed impractical.3 On the other islands, most Indo-Europeans were confined. Ultimately around 100,000 Dutch civilians entered internment camps.4 The Japanese not only removed Dutch control, but also wanted to remove the memory of the Dutch Indies.5 Tokyo planned to send the Westerners back to their own countries after eventual victory.6 In the meanwhile, confining 100,000 people on restricted wartime resources was an enormous task, one that necessitated improvisation. Confinement of Dutch civilians therefore took place in different ways, with differing levels of restriction.7 A wide array of building complexes was used, from regular residential quarters to schools, monasteries, and prisons. These areas were enclosed by bamboo fences and barbed wire.8 In general, the Dutch were first moved to ‘protected neighbourhoods’, which were then slowly turned into civilian internment camps.9 Life as internees not only tore people away from positions of privilege, wealth and power, but also forced them to deal with other Dutch on new terms. The emerging camps can be considered as small societies of their own for two main reasons: firstly, they were separate environments, because the Japanese isolated them from the outside (Indonesian) world;10 secondly, camps of necessity had to become small societies and economies, with their own facilities such as a camp shop, a general kitchen, and sometimes an improvised school.11 As with any society, they also developed layered systems of hierarchy and authority, and an internal judicial system. So the camps were miniature societies, but special societies because of the degree of stress they operated under. This made them special in three ways: firstly, membership was involuntary; secondly, they consisted either of men only, or of women and children only; and thirdly, people of different social backgrounds had to live together in conditions of forced proximity. POW camps present some similarities, but there the assumptions of rank and military hierarchy might be thought to transfer from combatant to POW life, at least to some extent. For internees, the transition from civilian life to camp raised more intense problems of who to turn to for authority, whether that authority should or would be respected, and what type of authority was

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appropriate in civilian, and in some camps female, environments. Besides, we just know much less about internal authority in internee camps than we do in POW camps.

Japanese internment policy and implementation The Japanese had rules from Tokyo on how to deal with internees, although these rules mentioned few details. Until early 1944, each civilian interment camp came under the authority of the military government in its area. After this, they came under direct control of the Army, as Army Internment Camps.12 In both periods, the General Staff was responsible for the civilian camps. For most of the Military Governance period (1942–43), the direct commander of the camp was the head of the Main Office of Police, who was always Japanese. The regular guard was formed by Indonesian police officers.13 Tokyo made regulations covering matters such as accommodation, numbers, and food and health: regulations not always, if even generally, followed. General Tojo, Prime Minister and Minister of War until 1944, declared at the Tokyo Tribunal on war crimes that an army field commander had great responsibility towards the emperor and did not get specific orders.14 The Japanese custom was to give general orders in the expectation these would be filled in by the local commander according to necessity.15 In 1943, for instance, regional regulations for camps were made, all based around the general regulations from Tokyo. An example of how this worked is Article 6 of the Java Area’s Regulations for Internment Camps. These stipulated the formation of a camp committee for civilian internees. Such a committee, not even mentioned in the general regulations from Tokyo, was set out in detail in the Java Regulations. The committee was to be responsible for governance, preserving common decency, prevention of fire and theft and the like.16 All regulations provided for the camp commander to appoint the internee committee members; they were not to be chosen by the internees themselves.17 Doetje van Velden’s dissertation offers some insights in these regulations. In written accounts by internees, however, and written and oral accounts by former internees, these written regulations get little attention. Because of this and a lack of sources providing Japanese perspectives, it is difficult to assess the reality on the ground. Nevertheless, they did imply far-reaching responsibilities for camp committees. Furthermore, the detail of the internal control structure was later reorganised. In the period of direct army rule, from 1944, the Japanese reorganised the camps in divisions or blocks (han) and subdivisions (kumi). The camp commander appointed heads of these divisions: hancho and kumicho. They had to know exactly what went on in their han or kumi, to report in the daily meeting with the camp leader, and to ensure that orders of the Japanese camp commander were carried out. Together with the camp leader and his or her assistant they formed the daily leadership. Sometimes they wore an insignia and they always had to wear proper dress.18

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Styles of leadership The Dutch camp leadership was to function as a liaison between the Japanese and the detainees, and to organise day-to-day camp life, a task for which the Japanese did not wish to provide the manpower. This was the case in all the camps. One thing that differed between camps was the process of creating the Dutch leadership. The committee was supposed to be created by the Japanese commander. In some camps this happened, but in others it had already been formed through detainees’ own initiatives.19 Occasionally, elections were held. Often, representatives of newcomers to the camp were added to the committee.20 It has been suggested that a camp leader who was appointed by the Japanese commander alone, without support from the internees, was in a problematic position from the start.21 This diversity in the process of forming Dutch committees is one of the reasons for differences in characteristics between them, which resulted in different levels of status in the eyes of the internees. In order to effectively control internee behaviour, a relevant factor was whether or not the camp committee had enough support among the general population of internees, and whether it could claim some sort of moral high ground. In Bangkong Boys Camp in Semarang, for instance, the leadership consisted of three people. These three formed the top of a ‘functional hierarchy’ that was a result of the different tasks people within the camp had. In the case of Bangkong, there was competition for higher positions within this hierarchy.22 But most detainees in this camp had little respect for the Dutch leadership, partly because of the latter’s perceived weak attitude towards the Japanese. In this case, the leadership were regarded too much as an extension of the Japanese, and apparently was not able to gain broad support among the boys. 23 This negative opinion is totally contrary to views of the leadership in Camp Gedangan, also in Semarang, but this time a camp for women.24 Leaders there were more likely to influence Japanese commanders. By being able to argue cases with the Japanese in a persistent but polite manner, they cemented a position of authority vis-à-vis the internees. Successful negotiation with Japanese commanders here seems also to have been buttressed by intuitional references by the Dutch leaders to the Tennosei, the Japanese ideology which holds that all authority originates from the emperor. Those who lost legitimacy by abusing their position needed other ways to hang on to power. In some cases there were corrupt Dutch camp leaders and committee members who sought benefits, and even maintained their position by joining forces with a corrupt (Japanese) camp commander, without whose consent a camp leader could not be removed.25 In many camps, the top of the Dutch hierarchy also systematically got more and sometimes better food.26 This uneven distribution sometimes led to protests.27 Yet this was not uniformly the case. In Ambarawa, according to a former detainee, the camp leaders got the same food and housing. They did get more money from the Japanese, but that went into the camp funds.28


In response to the question of what advantages there were to being part of the leadership, Van Iterson, leader of women’s Camp Kareës, at Bandung in Central Java, mentions having useful tasks. But she denies having privileges, and emphasises the need for self-restraint in such a position. Then she adds that during 3 months after the central kitchen was organised, the camp leadership, the streetleaders, doctors and heads of services got the privilege of 1 ounce (100 grams) of fresh meat per person. This, she explains, took place in the period when food was still plentiful, and these people had more work and worries than the rest. When food got scarcer and people started to protest against this privilege, she revoked it.29 Camp leaders approached the internees and the Japanese with a diversity of attitudes. This is not surprising, but what is striking is that in many cases, there was enough space to realise these individual styles of leadership. The biggest problems arose with those camp leaders who were not able, be it because of the character of the Japanese commander or because of their own character, to occasionally stand up against the Japanese. Camp leaders could only maintain a position of authority if they were able to achieve this role of negotiator or intermediary. Apart from this formal leadership by the camp committee, informal leadership also developed. Internees who were not willing to accept the amount of food they got through normal channels, and were not able to directly access sources of extra food themselves, had to build relations with those who did have access to additional food. In many camps a situation developed that was like a system of patronage. If one received food, a favour had to be done in return. This often meant doing laundry, or another small task.30

Social cohesion and violence It is difficult to deal with people here. They are so different from when they are free. [I]t is quite a challenge to try and be in harmony with everybody. However, most of the time, this does not work. (Janssen Diary, 9 January 1944)31 The extreme circumstances led to a dualistic relation with other detainees. In the words of a former detainee, people would help each other, but would also fight over food.32 In a sense, solidarity might be reinforced by Japanese pressure, as the Japanese motto was ‘satoe salah, semoea salah’.33 This motto ‘If one fails, all have failed’ illustrated the system of collective guilt as it was imposed upon the internees by the Japanese. In these circumstances, according to former internee Frans Keuchenius, the quality of both the Dutch and the Japanese leadership dictated whether rivalries and disorder would predominate.34 It seems that this influence was

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twofold. Firstly, if the leadership was able to get better supplies from the Japanese and set up better logistics, the practical motive for conflict, getting extra food, was less strong. Secondly, if the Dutch leadership had moral authority in the eyes of internees, internal friction was more likely to be kept under control. Supplies were not the only cause of tension and disorder. The risk of treachery by other internees added to the sense of insecurity.35 Erving Goffman has pointed out that this is typical of ‘total institutions’, where most aspects of life are controlled. In them, one continuously has to be aware of the risk of criticism and other sanctions.36 By comparing asylums, barracks, religious institutions, prisons, and to some extent also concentration camps, Goffman sees certain general characteristics to these, which she calls ‘total institutions’. Such total institutions are places where people, called inmates by Goffman, live, work, eat, sleep, and carry on all their social activities.37 The dichotomy of solidarity and internal struggle is also discussed by Goffman. According to him, due to circumstances, solidarity can grow, especially within subgroups with limited sizes. In the Japanese camps, this solidarity existed with the ‘kongsi’. Kongsi originally referred to Chinese grouped together for business, but in the camp it referred to a group of men or boys who looked out for their mutual interests. The flipside of this was that those outside might be regarded with more indifference. An internee could not always trust other inmates, who might steal from him, attack him, or betray him, leading to anomie.38 The notion of ‘law’ in these circumstances is problematic. How relevant were pre-war legal and moral concepts? Whose law should be respected? Anomie might mean that internees could begin to lose respect for notions of internal rules. Food was a particularly problematic issue.39 The tension created by combined high population density and food shortages could lead not just to theft, but to violent tendencies. Physical violence was part of the camp world, frequently used by the Japanese on their own men and towards internees. Occasionally the Japanese ordered executions, which in many cases were correct sanctions from Japanese military point of view. Apart from this, killings by individual Japanese soldiers also took place.40 Cases of violence, sometimes severe, did also occur among detainees. This was the case in women’s camps, as a source on Camp Adek confirms. Here people started to develop aggressive tendencies, as they had been confined too long and in areas that were too small. According to Mrs Hooijsma-Boas, ‘They started to pinch each other, to punch, to bite, to tear each other’s hair out. Women became bitches, there’s no other way I can put it’.41 According to Van Velden, real fights were infrequent in women’s camps, compared to the men’s camps.42 My impression is that internal violence in general was limited, and took place outside of the view of the Japanese. The Japanese generally regarded such behaviour as a sign of lack of discipline.


If tolerated, it could also threaten the Japanese monopoly on hierarchical violence. The cases I researched did not result in deadly violence. Van Velden mentions one case of killing a fellow internee, in Camp Santo Tomas in Manila. She adds that to her knowledge, ‘this has been the only crime of such a serious nature’.43 The most obvious explanation is that deadly violence by internees would not be tolerated by the Japanese. In most it cases, it also would not be tolerated by the Dutch committee, partly because of their responsibility towards the Japanese. Part of the general interned population would also oppose such violence, leading to social exclusion by other internees.

Camp economy [T]his afternoon everybody had to hand in all their money. Of course we held back most of it. Now we will get a toko-card. It is worth 150 guilders per person. A kind of toko [shop] will be opened, required items can be bought on that card. Buying at the kawat [barbed wire] is very strictly prohibited. (A diary from women’s camp Ambarawa 6, 6 April 1943)44 In the early days of internment, most detainees had some money, which could be used to obtain extra nutrition, among other things. Those who came to a camp without any means or whose money ran out shortly after, were either helped out, or could try to make money.45 This helping out was sometimes organised by the Dutch leadership, which created a support fund. In some camps those who received money from this fund remained anonymous.46 An image of solidarity is reinforced by several interviews, yet others mention fighting for food. Much depended on the Dutch camp committee again; if it was capable of creating a support fund, a basis was laid for solidarity. On the other hand, the way in which people cooperated or showed a more egotistic attitude also depended on the specific conditions of the camp. Where people could freely order goods from outside, it was often difficult to get enough money into the support funds.47 These support funds for the have-nots were formed by a number of means, including making a profit on luxury goods in the camp shop and by levying ‘taxes’ on amusement or certain services, for instance from barbers.48 Some camp communities were developed enough to collect internal revenue. The Japanese were also troubled by the differences in wealth between the internees. This may be one of the reasons for the order, given in a number of camps, to bring all money to a central fund.49 The most important reason for this order most likely was the need to eliminate opportunities to bribe guards.50 For the same reason, the regulations for the internees on Java forbade all contacts between internees and Japanese military and persons in service of the Japanese military, like the Korean military servants and the heihos (Indonesian auxiliaries) except for on official matters (Article 15).51

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Smuggling and ambiguous control As mentioned before, camps can be regarded as isolated ‘total’ communities, with their own internal Dutch leadership. Yet when the Japanese started to close the camps off, it seemed impossible to totally isolate them from the outside world as intended in the official policy. Goods and sometimes messages continued to be smuggled in.52 Apart from the normal word smokkelen (to smuggle), several new verbs were introduced to refer to smuggling: gedekken (gedek = woven bamboo wall), bilikken (bilik = woven bamboo), kawatten (kawat = barbed wire) and riolen (riool = sewer). Through the barter economy of the camps, the existence of big differences in access to goods was painfully clear. In his diary from Tjimahi 4, Aart Huizer wrote in April 1944 that: Great unfairness is arising in this camp because some have money and can order for double prices, and some get food right away, while others don’t get any, or depend on charity from the propertied class, which partly got its cash through either dishonest or illegal methods.53 Jack Scholte complains in his diary about the way one could buy jobs that gave access to extra food.54 We should also remember that, while some Indo-Europeans or Eurasians were interned, 200,000 remained outside of the wire. Indo-European family members or acquaintances on the outside might become partners in smuggling.55 Those who did not have outside connections had to work with a third party, sometimes even one of the heiho guards, who might put the possibility of extra income before obedience to the Japanese. Some camps also had, in the words of one internee, a ‘tame Japanese’ willing to function as a smuggling partner.56 Soon after setting up the camps, Indonesian police were used as guards. Some were not unsympathetic, and helped in smuggling. In 1943 the Japanese started to use young Indonesians like heiho and sukarela (volunteers) as guards. Although these young men were generally less sympathetic, some were still willing to participate in smuggling, ‘if they too could benefit from it of course’.57 Smuggling presented the Dutch leadership with a dilemma: to what extent should they act against it? Would doing so mean that they were collaborating with the enemy too much? One Ambarawa internee mentions that the leadership had to choose between punishing the perpetrator themselves, or handing them over to the Japanese.58 Not taking action at all was often not an option. That strategy might eventually lead to a threatening situation for the camp committee itself, once the Japanese got the impression the committee was tolerating smuggling. The camp leadership of Camp Kareës for women continuously tried to keep smuggling under control by giving warnings. The leadership did so because of the risk of discovery, and beatings that would follow, often of innocent


people.59 In spite of these dangers, smuggling continued to bring in more goods, with a fraction of these benefitting the sick and the weak. Although the group of smugglers included ‘hyenas’, Camp leader Van Iterson believes that most smugglers were more generous than the women in charge of the toko (camp shop).60 This camp leader shows that she not only had to deal with a practical dilemma, but that she also felt morally ambivalent about smuggling and smugglers. For internees, smuggling meant running the risk of receiving corporal punishment, but also of getting less food from the Japanese. To deal with the latter risk, in Camp Belawan Estate, the internees created a sort of collective insurance. You could smuggle quite a lot into Belawan Estate. You could leave the camp and trade clothes for food. The deal with the Dutch camp leadership was; one was allowed to smuggle, but first you had to collect a bag of rice through smuggling and put it in a central location. If you got caught, the camp would have to go without food, for one day for instance, or two. At that time, the spare rice would be used.61 According to a former internee from Makassar, the inhabitants of this camp created an ‘official smuggling gang’, presumably a broad, collective effort, linked to the central camp fund or reservoir of stocks.62 Attitudes to smuggling continued to vary widely. In those camps where the Dutch committee tried to keep a firm control on the economy, not everybody was pleased. J. Weyhenke complains in her diary that: The democratic principle in this camp has suffered an astonishing defeat. Because of fraud and smallness and nastiness, free competition and the free market have been banned as dead concepts, and every action is a step further in the direction of dictatorship. Amazing!63 Yet others viewed smuggling as theft, as Engel-Bruins did in her diary entry written in Bangkinang, on 17 March 1944: Although we are supposed to get a Japanese guard, smuggling is again happening all over the place!! Pity the poor!! Chaotic circumstances. Great wrongs prevail. The boys are stealing towels from the lines and selling them over the fence for 6 or 7 guilders. [. . .] It’s outrageous. Everybody is pinching like crazy.64

Theft Since smuggling required something to trade, it raises the question of theft in the camps. Aside from the desire to acquire goods to trade, fierce competition for what few resources there were intensified as shortages grew. Apart from direct theft from other individuals, another possibility was uneven distribution among internees.65 As food was scarce, the kitchen was of pivotal importance. Usually the kitchen was operated by the internees themselves. In every camp

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complaints could be heard against the kitchen staff and the shop.66 In many cases the only ‘proof’ was that those working there were less skinny. Obviously some will have given in to the temptation of extra food, as they had the opportunity everyday. In male camps, people who did harder work also received extra food. This was openly and officially taken from the camp rations. As far as Van Velden could find out, this never happened in women’s camps. In her opinion, ‘men are more practical in matters like that’.67 However, giving those who bore more responsibilities more food did happen in women’s Camp Kareës, ‘when food was still plentiful’.68 Nevertheless, these measures were probably taken less in women’s camps. Whether this was because of the leadership, or because of lack of support from the internees for such measures in most women’s camps, remains unclear. Getting a grip on theft was a continuing problem. Camp committees encountered not only practical problems, but also ran the risk of being seen as an extension of Japanese repression. In Camp Si Rengo Rengo, a control committee of three was formed to inspect the kitchen. But when they entered it, they heard ‘Klapperdoppen’, the warning call used when the Japanese were approaching. Angrily, the control committee went back to the Dutch leadership, saying that if the kitchen perceived their task in such in a manner, they were not willing to do it. ‘But’, asks Bos in his diary, ‘how else could we perceive it?’69 We have already noted that, through smuggling, a small amount of goods continued to enter the camp. Very occasionally, goods also went the other way. In a camp for women in Solo, thieves from outside climbed over the wall at night to enter the camp.70 The Japanese ignored complaints, saying ‘you are stealing from each other’. 71 Whether or not there was any truth in the Japanese claim, the female guards in this camp were able to capture an intruder. They handed him over to the Japanese who seemed amused and impressed. The Japanese beat up the captured thief, tied him, and left him in the burning sun without food. After a few days he was gone, and was said to be dead. Some of the women who had captured him felt regret, but, internee Alt concludes, the example had worked, because the burglaries stopped.72 An almost identical incident took place in Camp Ambarawa 6 (south of Semarang).73 The Japanese ordered the formation of a night watch of internees, the fushimban, in every camp. One of the main reasons was to control theft. In camps located in or near a city, Indonesians sometimes tried to steal clothes, because at the end of the war every piece of cloth was priceless.74 However, in many camps the guard duty by internees was not only to keep Indonesian thieves out. In Tjideng, the older boys and girls patrolled all night, because according to Weyhenke’s diary, the boys from Tjideng stole a lot and secretly sold it over the gedek (wall of bamboo, the camp fence).75 In Bangkong, according to my sources, behaviour that was called by the Indonesian word rampok intensified because groups from different camps were put together, leading to struggles between factions.76 It is not clear


whether rampok here means robbery, or just theft. Taking of possessions by force seems the most likely interpretation. In general although, the level of physical violence was limited. Thieves stole things if the owner was absent, or asleep. The perpetrators in most cases remained anonymous, adding to the sense if insecurity: everybody, even your best friend, could be a thief. In boys’ Camp Bangkong, stealing was frowned upon by other internees, according to Hans Zwitzer. But that mainly concerned stealing from friends in one’s direct environment, especially from within one’s own kongsi. Most were indifferent about the well-being of camp inhabitants outside their own group.77 The lack of solidarity with those who were not part of one’s most immediate social space led not only to theft at the expense of fellow detainees, but also at the expense of the whole community. This mainly meant stealing community food.78 Zwitzer observes that stealing from communal goods was judged to be less despicable than from individuals in one’s direct environment. However, stealing from communal goods at the expense of everybody, in a situation were food was scarce, and where with direct results could follow, might in turn increase general distrust of kitchen staff.

Punishment by the Dutch leadership Diaries and camp reports discuss all kinds of corporal punishment of individual internees by the Japanese. In some cases, the Dutch camp leader was made to observe this.79 Japanese commanders also made frequent threats of collective punishment, and that made it both necessary and easier for the Dutch leadership to deal with individual perpetrators more strictly.80 In Camp Bangkong, the Dutch leadership tried to stop smuggling, because it was only benefiting a limited number, and could lead to sanctions against all. In this camp some persons, among whom were two boys aged ten or eleven, reported smugglers to the Japanese.81 In one case somebody was caught smuggling by the guards, for which he received a beating and 5 days imprisonment. Shortly thereafter he was caught smuggling again, for which he got 14 days imprisonment. In order to carry out this sentence, the guards handed him over to the Dutch leadership, who locked him up in an improvised holding cell.82 In women’s Camp Bangkinang, an internal police service was formed because of a ‘lack of discipline’ and more frequent theft as hunger increased. The head of this ‘police’, Mrs J. M. Bakker led a team of roughly thirty women. They performed guard duty, would fine people, and presented cases, first to the Dutch main leadership, later on to the Dutch judicial group. This police corps, according to the camp report, had a difficult and often unpleasant task, but helped to maintain peace and order (rust en orde).83 Punishment by the Dutch leadership did not take place at the same frequency in all the camps. In one of the camps in Ambarawa, the Dutch leadership apparently never punished.84 Generally, many crimes could be committed without punishment, because the perpetrators could not be found, or it was impossible to punish, for instance in the case of loan sharking, fraud,

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and black marketeering. These profiteers were not even reported.85 Van Velden does not clarify why it was ‘impossible’ to punish for these economic offences. It may simply have been considered undesirable, or too problematic to prove who was responsible. The Dutch leadership in Camp Bangkong did little or nothing against theft, according to Zwitzer. One witness said that when a number of prisoners were to be moved to Ambarawa, and the Dutch leadership had to provide names for this, this opportunity was seized to get rid of people who protested against the weak attitude of the leadership. These complaints were about having a too weak a stance against the Japanese, but also about tolerating the boys who worked in the kitchen acquiring more food.86 Zwitzer’s remark about the leadership not taking action against theft seems to refer to theft from the community as a whole, as he later on explains that punishment did happen after theft from individual internees. The perpetrator could be deprived of his sugar ration for 2 weeks or a month, or confined to a small place, given 2 weeks of duty in the lavatory team, a beating, or be displayed around the camp as an example. The latter happened to a man who had stolen three ketela (sweet potatoes).87 In Si Rengo Rengo, a boy who had stolen tobacco was sentenced by a Dutch punishment committee (strafraad) to a week of light fatigue duty, because of his young age.88 Another man in the same camp got 3 weeks of fatigue duty for stealing rice.89 In Si Rengo Rengo the Dutch leadership decided to no longer have their ‘trials’ in public, as they had become a form of entertainment, relegating them inside a small building.90 In this camp it apparently also became an offence to protest against the Dutch leadership itself. One man said that all camp leaders were corrupt. That it was ‘[even] better to be a Jap than a Dutchman’. He added that Lugt, chair of the judicial court within the camp, and Kuntze, former mayor of Medan, were corrupt, and more. This resulted in 2 weeks of punishment through fatigue duty.91 In Camp Bangkinang, the Dutch camp leadership decided after 1 1/2 years that there was a need for a camp judge and a police. According to Arie Kuyl, all kinds of unimportant things were brought before this judge, like urinating at the wrong spot or doing dishes in the wrong place. Many reacted with laughter to the first court hearings. The judge used a large amount of expensive paper for unimportant cases.92 This author, while having a strong opinion about irrelevant cases, does not speak about more severe misconduct. The reference to the judge using a lot of paper is also interesting. In a small community it seems less necessary to put all details in writing, yet this leadership was inclined to control law and order in the way it always had, not willing to adapt to the circumstances of camp life.

Conclusion The high number of camps, and great diversity of circumstances makes it problematic to speak of the situation. Even when focusing on civilian camps,


this problem remains. Nevertheless, a number of general points can be made. Inhabitants of all camps had to deal with a lack of food and other goods. In all camps, a hierarchy was created. Part of this hierarchy was organised officially, through the creation of a Dutch committee in between the Japanese military and the Dutch internees. This top layer was often formed from those who held high positions before the Japanese invasion. Additionally, a more informal hierarchy developed within the camps. A higher position could be reached within the camp community if one could get access to goods, and sell those goods for money or directly for services. This way, a system of patronage developed. This system could exist because the camps in most cases were not totally isolated from the outside world, and because some internees had better access to goods (kitchen personnel for instance) or had more money. Goods were brought into the camp economy through smuggling. This was often tolerated by Indonesian guards or a number of Japanese, who could also benefit from this trade. However, if the Japanese commander was confronted with smuggling, severe punishment could follow. The Japanese could also enforce internal control over smuggling among internees through the threat of collective punishment. The Dutch leadership was faced with dilemmas when confronted with problematic behaviour by internees. The bottom line was that if individual behaviour of internees was too much of a threat to either the committee or the group of internees as a whole because of the danger of Japanese sanctions, the Dutch camp committee felt obliged to punish these individuals. To understand the committee’s options, we have to realise the relationship between the Dutch committee and the Japanese commander was not the same everywhere. An important issue was whether the camp leader was elected by internees before he or she was appointed by the Japanese commander. Additionally, the communication skills of the camp leader and the characters of the camp leader and the Japanese commander were extremely important. The result was that the level of respect gained from and authority over internees by the Dutch leadership differed too. To get this respect and authority, the camp leader had to show that he or she at least had some bargaining power vis-à-vis the Japanese commander. This authority was, in turn, necessary to organise daily events in the camps in an orderly fashion. Incidental internal violence did exist, although I found no cases of deadly violence among internees in civilian internment camps in Indonesia. Theft was a more frequent problem. When confronted with taking from communal goods, the Dutch leadership often reacted less strongly than in the case of theft from another individual. Perhaps the latter offence was a bigger threat to stability, as it could lead to victims wanting revenge. Smuggling presented another problem. The offence itself was not automatically seen as immoral, as it mainly ran against rules of the enemy: the Japanese. On the one hand, it brought extra goods into the camp. On the other hand, it could further differentiate between the haves and have-nots, a

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phenomenon that led to friction, as well as leading to disapproval by the Japanese. Nevertheless, in a few cases smuggling was facilitated by the Dutch leadership. Sanctions against theft which the Dutch committee could implement included doing extra work and confinement in an improvised holding cell. The perpetrator would accept this punishment by his fellow internees because the only alternative would be to be send them to the Japanese commander, which very likely would mean harder punishment. That would also illustrate that the committee was not in control, leading to disapproval by the Japanese commander. From this point of view, it was also important for the committee to use punishment that would eventually be accepted by the perpetrator. Seen from this perspective, the Dutch camp leader had not only to negotiate with the Japanese commander and the general population of internees, but in a sense also with those who by their actions were challenging the order of their camp societies. Given these delicate balances, it is surprising how much approval from internees many Dutch camp leaders got for their role during internment.

Notes This paper was written as part of the research programme’Indonesia across orders. The reorganisation of Indonesian Society’ of the NIOD in Amsterdam. 1 This number refers to Dutch and Indo-European military, not to Indonesian POWs. Of these European POWs, roughly one-fifth died during the war. De Jong based these numbers on a study by H. L. Zwitzer. L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, XI (Leiden: Nijhoff, 1985), p. 575. 2 It was often problematic for the Japanese to clearly differentiate between the Dutch and Indo-Europeans. 3 Rinzema-Admiraal, W., Java, het laatste front. Sociale gevolgen van de Japanse bezetting op Centraal-Java voor Indonesiërs en Europeanen (Zutpen: Walburg Pers, 2000), p. 94. 4 De Jong, partly basing this on Doetje van Velden’s dissertation De Japanse interneringskampen voor burgers gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Groningen: Wolters, 1963), proposes 100,000 interned civilians, of which roughly one sixth died during internment. This group consisted of Dutch and Indo-Europeans. L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk, pp. 753–4. Zwitzer gives the same estimate. H. L. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder. De jongenskampen Bangkong en Kedoengdjati. 1944–1945 (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 1995), p. 82. 5 H. W. van den Doel, Afscheid van Indië. De val van het Nederlands imperium in Azië (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001), p. 70. 6 Doetje van Velden, ‘De Japanse interneringskampen voor burgers gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog’ (Disseration Groningen, 1963), p. 41; and Utsumi Aiko, ‘Re-enacting memories. Oral testimonies across the barbed wire’, in: Remco Raben (ed), Representing the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. Personal testimonies and public images in Indonesia, Japan, and the Netherlands (Zwolle: Waanders, 1999), pp. 123–36, here p. 127. 7 For details on the different formats of confinement, see L. J. Brugmans, NederlandschIndië onder Japanse bezetting. Gegevens en documenten over de jaren 1942–1945


8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

(Franeker, derde ongewijzigde druk 1982), especially p. 373 and L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk, especially pp. 753–4 and pp. 766–7. Utsumi Aiko, ‘Re-enacting memories’, pp. 123–36, especially p. 127. van den Doel, Afscheid van Indië, p. 70. Yet not fully isolated, as I will demonstrate later. On Java, schools were officially forbidden, but often internees secretly organised a form of education for the children, and in some camps the Japanese tolerated small improvised schools. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp, 23–5. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 94–5 and 99. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 101. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 109, 108–09 and appendix 7. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 115. The Sumatra Regulations were less detailed. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 115. The insignia was formed by one or more coloured stripes, depending on position. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 324. Dutch campleader Van Iterson of camp Karees in Bandung wrote in 1947–48 that the streetleaders (kumityo) were created in an earlier period than the blockleaders (hantyo), on 1 July 1944. NIOD, Indies Collection, inventory number 033490. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Regina van Iterson-De Hartog (Haarlem 1947–1948), p. 22. H. L. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder. De jongenskampen Bangkong en Kedoengdjati. 1944–1945 (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 1995), p. 113 and Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 379–80. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 323. W. Rinzema-Admiraal, Java, het laatste front. Sociale gevolgen van de Japanse bezetting op Centraal-Java voor Indonesiërs en Europeanen (Zutpen: Walburg Pers, 2000), p. 177. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 116. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 117. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 117. Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, 383. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, 163. See also Carla Vermeer-Van Berkum, Kon ik maar weer een gewoon meisje zijn. Dagboek uit Japanse kampen ’44-’45 (Amsterdam and Brussels: Elsevier, 1980), p. 170. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 164. NIOD, Indies Collection, Inventory number 033471. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Adriana Johanna Luyten-Rijsdijk (Breda 1947). NIOD, Indies Collection, inventory number 033490. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Regina van Iterson-De Hartog (Haarlem 1947–1948), 23. Sometimes sexual favours were asked too, demands against which, according to one account, ‘people had almost no defence’. Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 161. Mariska Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Kamp Tjimahi 4 (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2002), p. 213. KITLV, SMGI, 1200.1. H. de Jager, Wij zijn er nog. Uit brieven van overlevenden. Japanse kampen 1945 (Zutphen: Wöhrmann, 2002), 49. This slogan was used more general by the Japanese. KITLV, SMGI, 1137.1. Frans D. Keuchenius, Herwonnen jaren. Terug naar 1942–1946 (Zutphen: Grafitel, 2000).

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35 M. A. Alt, Ons kampleven gedurende de Japansche en Republikeinse bezetting (Soerabaja: Pinksterzending, 1948?), p. 17. 36 Erving Goffman, Totale instituties (Amsterdam: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam, 1975), p. 36. 37 Goffman, Totale instituties. Translation of chapter 1 and 2 of Erving Goffman, The Prison (New York: Doubleday, 1961). 38 Goffman, Totale instituties, p. 52. 39 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, 160. 40 In January 1943 for instance, a Japanese soldier stabbed and shot to death two Dutch POWs in the kitchen of the POW Camp of Battalion X in Batavia. Procesverbaal van getuigenverhoor. Netherlands War Crime Investigation Team. Johannes Theodorus Schonenberg. 41 KITLV, SMGI, 1482.1. Mrs Hooijsma-Boas (1999) (summary and recording of interview) Track 20. 42 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 392. 43 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 392. 44 NIOD, Indies Collection (IC), Collection 401, Netherlands Indies Diaries, diary 35, Ms C. V. van Lissa Nessel (summary by author from 1946), p. 3. 45 L. J. Brugman, Nederlansch-Indië onder Japanse bezetting. Gegevens en documenten over de jaren 1942–1945 (Franeker, Wever, third unrevised print, 1982), p. 415. 46 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 386. 47 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 386. 48 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 273. 49 The demand to hand over all money was based on an order from Tokyo. In many camps, this order was given when the army took over control of the camps, but in some camps it was given much more early, and in other camps it was never given. Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 274 and 478. 50 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 274. 51 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 197. 52 KITLV, SMGI, 1185.1. 53 Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Kamp Tjimahi 4, pp. 206–7. 54 Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Kamp Tjimahi 4, p. 207. 55 Joop Al, Ambarawa, Bandoengan en de Belg Refuge. Mythe en werkelijkheid over twee Japanse kampen (Rotterdam: Donker, 1994), p. 88. 56 Al, Ambarawa, Bandoengan en de Belg Refuge, p. 89. 57 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 250. 58 Al, Ambarawa, Bandoengan en de Belg Refuge, p. 89. 59 NIOD, Indies Collection, inventory number 033490. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Regina van Iterson-De Hartog (Haarlem 1947–1948) 57. 60 NIOD, Indies Collection, inventory number 033490. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Regina van Iterson-De Hartog (Haarlem 1947–1948) p. 58. 61 KITLV, SMGI, 1307.1. Mr H. J. M. Hillerström (1998). (summary and recording of interview) Track 09. In Belawan people also smuggled ‘over the wire’, but it seems that the Japanese in that camp were putting more effort in preventing it. 62 Brugman, Nederlansch-Indië onder Japanse bezetting, p. 416. 63 Jeroen Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Tjideng (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2002). p. 337. 64 Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken, pp. 136. 65 H. de Jager, Wij zijn er nog, pp. 65–6.


66 See for cases: Frans D Keuchenius, Herwonnen jaren. Terug naar 1942–1946 (Zutphen: Grafitel, 2000), Jeroen Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Si Rengo Rengo (Not published, manuscript read in March 2004), p. 309, Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, 131–2, KITLV, SMGI, 1381.1., Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, pp. 131–2. 67 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 384. 68 NIOD, Indies Collection, inventory number 033490. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Regina van Iterson-De Hartog (Haarlem 1947–1948), p. 23. 69 Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Si Rengo Rengo, p. 304. 70 M. A. Alt, Ons kampleven gedurende de Japansche, p. 19. 71 Alt, Ons kampleven, p. 19. 72 Alt, Ons kampleven, p. 20. 73 NIOD, Indies Collection (IC), Collection 401, Netherlands Indies Diaries, diary 117, Mrs W. Wits, p. 132. 74 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 321. 75 Jeroen Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken:Tjideng (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2002), p. 336. 76 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 104. 77 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 161. 78 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 161. 79 Rinzema-Admiraal, Java, het laatste front, p. 106. 80 Al, Ambarawa, Bandoengan en de Belg Refuge, pp. 89–90. 81 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 198. 82 Al, Ambarawa, Bandoengan en de Belg Refuge, pp. 89–90. 83 Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Bangkinang, p. 14. 84 NIOD, Indies Collection, Inventory Number 033471. RIOD, Vragenlijst voor ex-geïnterneerden in Japanse interneringskampen voor vrouwen. Adriana Johanna Luyten-Rijsdijk (Breda 1947). 85 Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 392. 86 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, pp. 164–5. 87 Zwitzer, Mannen van 10 jaar en ouder, p. 165. 88 Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Si Rengo Rengo, p. 304. 89 Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken, p. 307. 90 Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken, p. 324. 91 Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken, p. 324. 92 Arie Kuyl, Opgeborgen bij de evenaar. Het leven in vier Japanse burgerinterneringskampen voor mannen op Sumatra (Gravenpolder: Jumbo, 1984), p. 99.

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12 Remembering war and forgetting civilians The place of civilian internees in Australian commemorations of the Pacific War Christina Twomey For many years after the end of World War II, the internment of Allied civilians by the Japanese in the ‘Far East’ was peripheral to war histories in Britain and Europe. For Europeans, the war to be won was against fascism in Europe: events elsewhere were sideshows. This allowed little space for the stories of people who had experienced an entirely different kind of war, in a very different geographical zone.1 One recent book by an American scholar suggests that in Britain and the United States there has been something akin to a historical ‘amnesia’ about the Pacific War, constituting as it did a humiliating defeat (at least initially), a challenge to white supremacy in the region and for the British, one of the final nails in the coffin of Empire.2 This charge of forgetfulness is less true for Australia. The experiences of the Pacific War would, in fact, come to dominate Australian national memories of World War II. A key figure in Australian memories of that conflict has been the military prisoner of war (POW) captured by the Japanese. Australian civilians – men, women and children – also detained by the Japanese and interned in prison-like camps for the duration of the war have received remarkably little attention, and have had virtually no place in any public commemorations of World War II. The historical reasons for the absence of Australian civilian internees from such public ceremonies lay in the very ambiguous position they occupied in relation to dominant understandings about war, nation and sacrifice. More recently, in an era which has seen increasing attention paid to the civilian victims of warfare, and when state-sponsored commemorative activity around war in Australia has self-consciously attempted to become more inclusive, civilian internees remain a curious omission. This chapter suggests that the absence of civilian internees from official commemorations of the Pacific War in Australia has more to do with the ambivalent legacy of colonialism than it does with the limited languages of war. The Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies were the most numerous of approximately 130,000 Allied civilians interned by the Japanese in hundreds of internment camps they established in the Asia-Pacific region. While camps established throughout the Indonesian archipelago had a decidedly Dutch

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character, the British dominated camps created in Singapore, Hong Kong, Borneo and China, and Americans were preponderant in Philippines.3 There has been significant research by Dutch historians into the experience of internment, but sustained analysis of British and American internees is a more recent phenomenon. With a few exceptions, most of the historians of the internment experience have been women with an interest in questions of gender, leading to the unusual situation in which the experiences of civilian men in captivity have received rather less attention than those of their female counterparts.4 Bernice Archer’s work has made a significant contribution to the field, combining an interest in male and female internees, a cross-national focus and a broad geographic sweep.5 By contrast, research into Australian civilians interned by the Japanese has been piecemeal, and to date has focused on those captured in New Guinea, territory which Australia held under mandate from the League of Nations from 1921.6 New Guinea might have been mandated territory only, but most historians concur it functioned in practice as an Australian colony.7 The civilians from New Guinea constituted only about one-fifth of the total number of 1,500 Australian civilians interned by the Japanese, a figure contained in the archival records of the Department of External Affairs but not one widely disseminated.8 Just over a quarter of the total of 1,500 Australian civilians who were interned were held in Malaya and Singapore, most of them in Changi and Sime Road internment camps. The next most significant concentration occurred in occupied China, where 331 Australians spent the war in camps in Shanghai and in the north of the country. A further 139 were held in Hong Kong. There was also a substantial number, 328 people, in New Guinea, Nauru and Ocean Island. A further 100 or so were scattered throughout camps in the Netherlands East Indies, most of them in Java and Sumatra. Approximately seventy-seven were in the Philippines, just over sixty in Japan and approximately forty in Thailand.9 It is an irony that Australians interned closest to the homeland of the enemy, Japan, fared better, in general, than those in Japanese-occupied territories further south. The most physically harsh conditions were endured in regions geographically closest to Australia: the islands of the mandated territory and those of the Indonesian archipelago. The limited public knowledge about civilian internment in Australia is largely derived from fiction: films such as Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road (1997) and television series like Tenko, an ABC/BBC co-production of the early 1980s. In the Australian state of New South Wales, school-children study internment through the medium of a play, John Misto’s award-winning The Shoe-Horn Sonata, which centres on the difficult moral choices faced by female internees. The subject of internment appeals to film-makers, playwrights and novelists (Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice also comes to mind) because it contains all the elements of a good story: war, the unraveling of privilege, fear, privation, the reversal of colonial order and the continual threat of violence. Most of these cultural productions also share a focus on the

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experiences of women, fulfilling a long-standing cultural fascination with the experiences of white women at the mercy of men from outside their own racial group. They leave the interment of civilian men, who constituted about two-thirds of interned Australians, almost completely unexamined.10 Internees have entered public consciousness, if at all, through fictional recreation rather than national commemoration. The relative invisibility of civilian internees in Australian commemorations of the Pacific War cannot be explained by a lack of interest in or subconscious ‘amnesia’ about the Pacific War. Although World War I, and Gallipoli in particular, remains the defining experience of war in Australia, World War II has the distinction of being the conflict in which Australia was threatened with ‘invasion’. The authenticity of that threat may now be in dispute, but this has done little to undermine public belief in its veracity.11 The ‘Australia remembers’ campaign of 1995, which celebrated the fiftieth Anniversary of the ending of the Pacific war, also concentrated public attention.12 Moreover, the passing of the original Anzacs has led to a search for new and distinctive embodiments of that tradition. Military POWs of the Japanese have increasingly come to fill that void, and have always been iconic figures in Australian collective memories of the Pacific War.13 POWs have dominated the story about imprisonment and internment by the Japanese and have come to elide the histories of their civilian counterparts. War stories are, by and large, stories about military men. Civilians, women and children have long struggled to find a place within them. In recent years, however, there have been significant studies of Australian women’s experience of war, and of the impact of grief, loss and bereavement on Australian families. Civilians who were themselves directly affected by war have continued to remain peripheral to the vision of historians who concentrate on military service and its affects on individuals and their families. An important exception to this focus is studies of the Australian government’s internment during World War II of people considered ‘enemy aliens’ within its borders – Japanese, Germans and Italians – which has prompted extensive reflection, turning as it did on questions of race, citizenship and rights.14 Civilian internees who had survived some of the harshest Japanese internment camps disappeared into obscurity and fell from the view of historians too. Yet immediately after the liberation of Japanese camps, daily newspapers in Australia contained many photographs of the internees and stories about their experiences. Such images were published alongside news items about released POWs as different aspects of the same phenomenon, in ways that are no longer commonplace. This is partly a result of the numerical preponderance of POWs – 22,000 compared to 1,500 Australian civilian internees. Yet it is not a story of numbers alone: POWs were members of the military and consequently their story has been privileged in the annals of Australians at war. In Australia the citizen-soldier is the dominant figure in national commemorations and recognition of sacrifice in wartime. By the mid-twentieth


century there was a well-developed language that linked military service, sacrifice and the nation. The defence forces were expected to protect the nation and embody its values; their personal suffering was a sacrifice made out of duty to the nation. By contrast, in the early post-war years, civilian internees found themselves in a highly ambiguous position. Civilian internees had not played a direct role in battle, but did have direct contact with the enemy. They had personally suffered hardship, privation and loss, but were not military personnel in service of their country. The ambiguous place of internees in relation to ideas about war, sacrifice and nation bedeviled both their own attempts to make sense of their war experiences, and the Australian government’s efforts to compensate and commemorate them. Internees felt these contradictions keenly. One young woman whose parents were prominent Salvation Army officers in Shanghai has written that: I was not fighting for my country (as much as I would like to have been) when taken prisoner by the Japanese, but I am an Australian and I did lose all but what I arrived home in, and that was donated by the Australian Red Cross, and at the age of twenty had to start my life in Australia with no assistance from my parents who had also lost everything they possessed. I have since lost my Dad whom the Japanese took away from me for 3 years, at the age of seventeen, and whom I blame for his death.15 The words of this young woman express a struggle to place her experiences within the available categories for understanding war. A war spent as an internee seemed to fit none of them. Claude Coates, a teacher from Adelaide who had commenced work with the Malayan Education Service in 1938 and was captured by the Japanese in early 1942, conveyed anger rather than confusion in the way he wrote about his time as an internee. ‘There cannot be many Australians living in Australia in my position,’ he wrote in 1956. ‘We suffered more hardship and loss than most members of the AIF, in view of the fact that owing to the war, we lost all our possessions in Malaya’.16 Yet internees like Claude Coates were civilians and had no entitlement to claim that they had suffered as a consequence of service to the nation. In spite of that difference, what one former internee called the ‘accident that they were not in the forces’, national allegiance had determined internees’ war experiences: as enemies of the Japanese they had been detained.17 Perhaps the ambiguity which surrounded their war experiences explains why, after liberation, none of the internees emerged as well-known public spokespersons for the interests of their group. This is despite some sharing family connections with Australia’s elites. One of the men captured in New Guinea was the territory’s Government Secretary, Harold Page. Harold was the brother of Sir Earle Page, founder of the Country Party of Australia and Deputy Prime Minister in the 1920s and 1930s. Another was the missionary Sidney Beazley, the brother of a senior figure in the Australian Labor Party, Kim Beazley Senior. Fred Drakeford, the brother of Australia’s wartime

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Minister for Air, Arthur Drakeford, spent the war interned in China. In Shanghai the cousin of Sir Keith Murdoch, Douglas Murdoch, spent his war in an internment camp. Internees have themselves been reticent, at least in public. Not one of them has penned a memoir that paralleled the commercial success of POW books. In the early post-war years, the only Australian civilian internee who published an account of captivity was New Guinea missionary James Benson. His compelling and thoughtful memoir, Prisoner’s Base and Home Again (1957), did not at that moment capture the public imagination.18 Benson struggled to get it published, despite the General Editor of The Official History of Australia in the War of 1939–45, Gavin Long, considering it ‘one of the two or three outstanding wartime memoirs on that level’.19 It certainly needed a better title and paled in comparison with the more evocatively named POW memoirs Behind Bamboo and White Coolies, which between them have sold more than a million copies.20 Since the 1990s, there have been more memoirs published by small presses, most by children born to Australian parents working in the Asia-Pacific in the early 1940s, and who were interned alongside them.21 The most well known is probably Sheila Allen’s Diary of a Girl in Changi, which has run to several editions.22 More tellingly, former internees have also been far less likely than POWs to form networks of ‘fictive kinship’. Jay Winter defines these as ‘families of remembrance’, usually constituted by survivors who share a common, often traumatic experience.23 Returned POWs moved quickly to establish precisely these sorts of memory communities. Civilian internees dispersed more widely and rapidly after release. They did not generally participate in ‘fictive kinship’ networks. Such bonds are important not just for individual well-being, but for the way in which the group negotiates the public representation of its wartime experiences. Such networks frequently occupy the ‘space between individual memory and the national theatre of collective memory choreographed by social and political leaders’.24 Former POWs and their associations have been singularly successful in negotiating that space, and in opening up new ways of incorporating their war experiences into national commemorations of Australians at war. Former civilian internees have not enjoyed these bonds of kinship. Surviving POWs also had links which pre-existed captivity. Battalion associations and the like provided important communities of remembrance. Civilian internees, in contrast, were a more diverse group who did not share such extensive ties. Many of them could not return to their homes in the postwar period owing to colonial independence movements. The most cohesive communities prior to internment – the religious orders of nuns and priests, the missionary organisations – were not by nature given to ‘big-noting’, or talking up, their suffering for public political purposes. They were more likely to point to internment as a test of faith. The memory of interned priests, nuns and missionaries is strong within their own denominations and missionary organisations, but is not a more wide-scale phenomenon.


The road to commemorative visibility even for POWs, however, has not been easy. They have been described as the ‘subjects of delayed commemoration’.25 This is because an ambiguity inheres in their story: how is it possible to celebrate not only defeat, but capture? More than this, prison and internment camps confound one of war talk’s classic dichotomies: that between the battlefield and the home front. The camps were neither one nor the other. The battle was over; the camps’ inmates were defeated or identified as ‘enemies’ of the occupying power. The camps were ‘home’ to their occupants, but without the sense of nurture that such a word usually signifies. Moreover, these two zones of war – the frontline and home front – were usually aligned with particular gender roles. Battle was for men; nurture was the proper role for women.26 The internment camp, an ambiguous zone, also posed dilemmas for masculinity and femininity. What did it mean for a woman to be detained by the enemy so far from her home? Was it emasculating for men to be defeated and controlled by those whom they had previously thought of as their racial inferiors? And who was to protect the women and children? Such tensions have always circled around the internment camps and their occupants, and have driven the creative interest of film-makers, novelists and playwrights. The same questions have also meant that it has been much more difficult to incorporate prison and internment camps into the traditional narratives, and by extension, commemorations of war. There is one prominent war experience to which the Japanese-run internment camps have always stood in uneasy and awkward relation. The Holocaust, and the horror of state-sanctioned murder, stands astride both public and academic discussion of forced detention. There are parallels between types of imprisonment, but the contrasts are starker. Internees of the Japanese found themselves in camps through circumstance rather than design; they numbered in the hundreds of thousands not the millions; their deaths were most often from starvation, disease or neglect rather than as a result of a planned extermination; most of them survived rather than perished in the camps. The difference was put most succinctly by distinguished Dutch jurist, B. V. A. Roling, who sat in judgement at the Tokyo War Crimes trials in the late 1940s: ‘Japan wanted to expel the colonial powers from Asia. But there was no plan to exterminate all Europeans.’27 Consequently, there is no word for the war experiences of civilian internees that comes close to the power of ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’. Those who were executed in European concentration camps had been persecuted on the grounds of religion, race, sexuality or political allegiance. These elements of persecution, of deliberate genocide, have led survivors and their communities to search for meaning in the madness, to seek explanation in the realm of the metaphysical and sacred. Hence those encompassing words Shoah and Holocaust. There exists no single, powerful word to which a survivor of a Japanese internment camp can lay claim. This is worth mentioning because of the difficulties in naming the war experiences of civilian internees. The lack of

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consensus says a great deal about the personal and broader cultural dilemmas faced in bearing witness to this war experience in peace time. If military service has circumscribed national discussions about sacrifice in wartime, and thereby largely overlooked the civilian internees, the Holocaust has become the international benchmark for the trauma of internment in war. Its scale and depth may have beleaguered internees’ attempts to find a place for their histories.28 Comparison, insidious by any measure, was almost inevitable and began early. War correspondents reporting on the liberation of the camps commented on their similarity or difference to Belsen, which had immediately entered the cultural lexicon as a referent for inhumane treatment. The Australian Associated Press’s special representative in Singapore informed his readers that ‘Sime Rd was not another Belsen or Buchenwald, but certain periods of the imprisonment were hard and bitter’.29 In the post-war years, some internees, when corresponding with the Australian government, resolutely referred to their places of detention as ‘concentration camps’, almost as an act of defiance. The one exception to the general neglect of this issue in Australia relates to civilians interned in the Pacific island territories that Australia had administered under League of Nations mandate since the early 1920s. This group of islands is most often referred to as the ‘external territories’, and included the north-east part of the island of New Guinea and the islands of New Britain, New Ireland, Nauru and Ocean Island. A few historians, and surviving families and descendants, have worked hard to make better known the fate of Australian civilians interned there. Most of the white men captured there – almost 200 – perished along with 800 Australian servicemen when the ship on which they were traveling to Japan, the Montevideo Maru, was torpedoed by an American submarine in mid-1942. This incident cut an enormous swathe through the pre-war white community in New Guinea, and left hundreds of women and children, who had been evacuated prior to the invasion, to mourn the loss of their loved ones.30 To my knowledge, the men lost on this ship are the only civilian internees commemorated on a war memorial on the Australian mainland, and that was a privately initiated memorial opened in 2004.31 The civilian men who died on the Montevideo Maru have received attention in part because their families have formed networks of ‘fictive kinship’. These descendants have been active in organising memorials in Rabaul, running websites and in some cases publishing memoirs and other accounts. Nevertheless, despite the sinking of the Montevideo Maru constituting Australia’s greatest maritime disaster, it remains a story peripheral to mainstream commemorative activity.32 The five Australian men who survived internment in New Guinea, and the ten Australian nuns who were also interned there, have received far less attention.33 The case of internment in New Guinea is interesting because, unlike the other locations where Australian civilians were interned which were British, American and Dutch possessions, New Guinea was nominally Australian


territory. The families of Australians interned in New Guinea and the few who survived their internment there, have always used a language of responsibility and belonging. During the war, when the fate of civilians in the territories was still unknown, the New Guinea Women’s Club wrote to the Minister for External Territories, pleading for the release of their men. They described the New Guinea internees as ‘Pioneers of Australia’s Territories’ who had proved ‘so vital in the defence of the Australian main land’. They referred to the New Guinea internees as ‘the only civilian prisoners captured on Australian soil’.34 This is a powerful phrase, but it is one that the Australian government has never appropriated or adopted. After the war, the Australian government tacitly acknowledged responsibility for the fate of civilians captured in Australian territories, by granting extensive benefits to them. From May 1947 the Australian government gave and continues to give full repatriation entitlements to civilians captured within the borders of its external territories, and it was also prepared to pass on these entitlements to the dependents of those who died as the result of internment.35 This has rarely attracted any attention, and nor did the civilian recipients of the $25,000 compensation payment that the Australian government paid in 2001 to Australians detained, imprisoned or interned by the Japanese in World War II. In the twenty-first century, civilian internees received compensation but still no commemoration. These provisions covered approximately one-fifth of those who had been interned, and their dependents. Civilians captured elsewhere were not entitled to any ongoing benefits, and this formed a constant source of grievance. ‘Civilian internees . . . lost their homes, personal belongings and still suffer ill-health no less than POWs’, one former internee complained to the local Member of Parliament in 1953.36 ‘The Japanese treated all their prisoners the same’, another woman who had been interned in the Philippines complained, ‘they starved us and ill treated us all whether we were civilians or military men, and no one who went through that ordeal from 1941 . . . can boast that they are free of any mark’.37 Queenslander Richard Cloake who spent the war interned in Hong Kong objected. ‘The losses of most internees were material rather than physical’, he insisted. ‘I feel that at least some nominal recompense should be made to those who seek it and I am raising my small (probably futile) voice to that end’.38 One Salvation Army missionary interned in China agreed: ‘civilians chief injury was the material losses as well as the physical and mental suffering of the time’. He was also inclined, as Claude Coats had been, to point out that POWs received full pay, full medical treatment upon return and in a material sense had lost only their kit. Civilians, in contrast ‘usually lived in the foreign land’, lost all their assets, received no pay during internment and no rehabilitation.39 Although the New Guinea internees and their descendants can be considered relatively privileged internees, given their entitlement to forms of welfare when those interned elsewhere received nothing, the Australian government has never shown much willingness to draw attention to their

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experiences or to commemorate their sacrifices. Relatives shocked by the virtual decimation of the pre-war male community demanded, but were never granted, a full government inquiry into the failure to evacuate civilians from Rabaul. There may have been military reasons for the Australian government not wanting to revisit the Japanese occupation of New Britain. In the immediate post-war period there were also broader, international tensions around the issues of colonialism that militated against commemoration of the fate of civilians in colonial possessions. The end of World War II saw a new emphasis on self-determination in forums such as the United Nations, and a concomitant disdain for older languages of colonialism. In the context of the Cold War, of course, ‘self-determination’ for many countries was an entirely contingent process, but the dawn of the postcolonial era made pre-war languages of possession and pioneering in relation to external territories somewhat obsolete. Yet the Australian ‘Territorians’ – as those with an interest in New Guinea and its surrounding islands called themselves – were determined to recreate their pre-war life, which was an essentially segregated community in which whites sought to control the activities and labour of indigenous peoples. Committed to the pioneering and colonialist presence in the Territories, the community’s mouthpiece, the Pacific Islands Monthly, considered the loss of senior bureaucrats, businesspeople and farmers as an economic tragedy for the Territory.40 This conservative magazine was expressly critical of the ‘spiritless ranks’ of the Labor Government, and believed that the Minister for the Territories did not support their community. The Minister allegedly ‘hated’ the Territories’ European population, who were ‘sturdy individualists’.41 His government was also accused of possessing a ‘positive passion for sometimes ill-considered “reform”’.42 The Labor government was making an ‘attempt to socialise New Guinea’.43 Although there are clearly many currents of debate here, one prominent theme is the alignment of internees with a colonialist community out of step with contemporary international developments in race-relations and selfdetermination. Already in 1946, the language used by Territorians sounded like a remnant of a bygone era. Yet in the post-war period the Australian territory of Papua and the external territories of New Guinea became Papua New Guinea, and remained under Australian administration until the granting of independence in 1975. It might just be possible that the public commemoration of civilians captured on ‘Australian soil’ could bring unwelcome attention to this continuing colonialist blind spot in Australian foreign policy.

Conclusion The absence of civilian internees from commemorations of the Pacific War in Australia is a multi-faceted phenomenon. The numerical preponderance of POWs might begin to offer an explanation, but it is actually POWs’ status


as citizen-soldiers that ultimately ensures their commemorative visibility. Civilian internees have stood in awkward relation to the links between service, sacrifice and nation, and their confinement to camps which did not readily fit the dichotomy of front and home-front that has dominated war talk compounded this ambiguity. Furthermore, in the post-war era the Holocaust has assumed centrality in American and European narratives of trauma and war, and internees of the Japanese have struggled to confront the dominance of that particular historical experience of detention and suffering. Apart from the staggering scale of the Holocaust, and its programme of planned annihilation, one of its special horrors was that the killers were members of an industrialised European society. They were ‘civilised’, white representatives of a society not dissimilar in many ways from others in Western Europe. In this sense then, it is not just the extreme suffering of the Holocaust’s victims, but the actions of its perpetrators as representatives of a European culture corrupted and perverted by prejudice, which has driven public discussion. The tortures and abuse endured by some internees of the Japanese were, in contrast, assumed to be easy to explain according to popular racism of the day: they were the actions of an ‘uncivilised’ Asian race. The cultural otherness of the Japanese captor has driven voyeuristic speculation and licensed xenophobia, but has stifled more sensitive debate about the meaning of suffering and the legacy of captivity. The final explanation for the commemorative invisibility of civilian internees is more speculative. As reminders of a colonialist and imperialist past, in an era when self-determination was the preferred course for previously colonised nations but one not always followed, former civilian internees held the potential to bring blind-spots to the light. The final word belongs to a former internee and reminds us that however awkwardly internees were placed in relation to prominent languages of war, sacrifice and nation, the personal costs of internment were keenly felt. Ian Begley, the son of Salvation Army missionaries, spent part of his adolescence interned by the Japanese in a mission school compound at Yang Chow, a village on the Grand Canal north of Shanghai. His Australian-born parents had been missionaries in China, India and Hong Kong for almost 20 years and they too spent the war years interned, as did Ian Begley’s brother and sister. Mr Begley and I began corresponding after I spoke on an Australian radio station about my interest in researching the history of civilian internment. I asked him whether he felt the experiences of civilian internees had been adequately compensated and commemorated in Australia. In December 2003, this was his response: I shall always be grateful to the Australian Government for the grant of $25,000 paid to former internees. Sadly we had to wait 55 long years for that compensation. In the mean time, both my parents and my elder sister had died. Only my brother and I remain to reflect on what might have been. For too many years Australia has been oblivious to the fact of

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Christina Twomey civilian internees. This is understandable in the light of the experiences of the Diggers in Changi and the Burma Railway and the heroic work of Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop. Whilst there have been a few small accounts published, the conditions faced by military POWs and civilian internees cannot be compared. . . . It has taken a long, long time for recognition – and, as far as I know – there has never been any commemoration. However, that does not lessen the personal, emotional cost to a teenage lad, who was a prisoner during the years of his important growth and development’.44

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

An earlier version of this chapter appears in Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War II (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Bernice Archer, A Patchwork of Internment: The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–45 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), p. 8. Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 4. For a full listing of civilian internment centres see Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II: Statistical History, Personal Narratives and Memorials Concerning POWs in Camps and on Hellships, Civilian Internees, Asian Slave Labourers and Others Captured in the Pacific Theater (Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 1994). The earliest and most influential Dutch study is D. van Velden, De Japanse Interneringskampen voor burgers gedurende de tweede wereldoorlog (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1963). For a Dutch study see Esther Captain, ‘The Gendered Process of Remembering War Experiences: Memories about the Second World War in the Dutch East Indies’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 4 (1997), pp. 389–95. For civilian internment see A. V. H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (Manila: Bookmark, 1967); Lavinia Warner and John Sandilands, Women Beyond the Wire: A Story of Prisoners of the Japanese, 1942–45 (London: Michael Joseph, 1982); Joseph Kennedy, British Civilians and the Japanese War in Malaya and Singapore, 1941–45 (London: Macmillan, 1987); Margaret Brooks, ‘Passive in War? Women internees in the Far East 1942–45’, in Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener (eds), Images of Women in Peace and War: CrossCultural and Historical Perspectives (London: Macmillan Education, 1987), pp. 166–78; Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘Till Death Do Us Part: Men and Women’s Interpretations of Wartime Internment’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 10, 1 (1987), pp. 75–83; Shirley Fenton Huie, The Forgotten Ones: Women and Children Under Nippon (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992); Bernice Archer, ‘The Women of Stanley: internment in Hong Kong, 1942–45’, Women’s History Review, 5,3 (1996), pp. 373–99; Bernice Archer, ‘ “A Low-Key Affairs”: Memories of Civilian Internment in the Far East 1942–1945’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 45–58; Frances B. Cogan, Captured: The Japanese internment of American civilians in the Philippines, 1941–45 (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Theresa Kaminski, Prisoners in Paradise: American women in the wartime South Pacific (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000). Archer, A Patchwork of Internment. A. J. Sweeting, ‘Civilian Wartime Experience in the Territories of Papua and New Guinea’, in Paul Hasluck (ed), The Government and the People 1942–45, Australia


7 8

9 10

11

12 13 14

in the War of 1939–45, Series IV, Vol. II (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970), pp. 668–708. Hank Nelson, ‘The Troops, the town and the battle: Rabaul 1942’, Journal of Pacific History, 27, 2 (1992), pp. 198–216; Hank Nelson, ‘The Return to Rabaul 1945’, Journal of Pacific History, 30, 2 (1995), pp. 131–53; Margaret Reeson, A Very Long War: The Families who waited (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000). For brief references see Hank Nelson, POW: Prisoners of War: Australians Under Nippon (Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1985), p. 77; Patsy Adam-Smith, Prisoners of War: From Gallipoli to Korea (Melbourne: Viking, 1992). See also Prue Torney-Parlicki, ‘“Unpublishable Scoops”: Australian Journalists as Prisoners of the Japanese 1941–5’, Journal of Australian Studies, 66 (2000), pp. 180–9. Roger C. Thompson, ‘Managing a Mandate: The Formation of Australia’s New Guinea Policies 1919–25’, Journal of Pacific History, 25, 1 (1990), pp. 68–84. A key compilation such as Australians: Historical Statistics lists internees within Australia and Australian POW statistics. It makes no mention of the estimated 1,500 Australian civilians held in Japanese-controlled internment camps. For statistics see ‘Statement “A”: Analaysis of the Total Number of Australian Civilian Internees by Location of Internment’ in Civilian Internees Trust Fund (CITF), Final report: Covering the Operations of the Trust 1952–1962, 29 October 1962, Typescript, NAA, Series B512/1, box 1. This contrasts to an erroneous figure of 5,000 in Michael P. Tracey (ed), Australian Prisoners of War, special issue of Australian Defence Force Journal (Canberra: Department of Defence, 1999), p. 102. ‘Analysis of Numbers Interned by Locations Where Interned’, in ‘Report on the Distribution of the Trust Fund’, 14 May 1954, NAA, B512, CITF Final Report Folder [No Number], Statement A. Christina Twomey, ‘Retaining Integrity? Sex, Race and Gender in Narratives of Western Women detained by the Japanese in World War II’, in Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (eds), Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace: Captivity, Homecoming and Memory in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 175–84. Hank Nelson, ‘A Map to Paradise Road: A guide for historians’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial (April 1999, online) 32. The one exception that does show conditions for civilian men is Empire of the Sun, but the perspective is that of a child. Peter Stanley, ‘He’s (not) coming South: The invasion that wasn’t’, in Steven Bullard and Tamura Keiko (eds), From a Hostile Shore: Australia and Japan at War in New Guinea (Camberra: Australia-Japan Research Project, Australian War Memorial, 2004), pp. 3–57. Liz Reed, Bigger Than Gallipoli: War, History and Memory in Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2004), p. 8. Joan Beaumont, ‘Prisoners of War in Australian National Memory’, in Moore and Hately-Broad (eds), Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 185–94. Margaret Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire: Internment in Australia during World War Two (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993); Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996); Bill Bunbury, Rabbits and Spaghetti: Captives and Comrades, Australians, Italians and the War 1939–1945 (Freemantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995); Cate Elkner et. al., Enemy Aliens: The Internment of Italian Migrants in Australia in World War Two (Bacchus Marsh: Connor Court Publishing, 2005); David Dutton, One of Us? A Century of Australian Citizenship (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002); Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels (eds), Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2000); Christine Winter, ‘The long arm of the Third Reich: internment of New Guinea Germans in Tatura’, Journal of Pacific History, 38,1 (June 2003), pp. 85–108; Anthony Kaukas, ‘Images from Loveday: internment in South Australia, 1939–45’, Journal of

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33

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the Historical Society of South Australia, 29 (2001), pp. 47–57; Kay Saunders and Helen Taylor, ‘The enemy within? The Process of internment of enemy aliens in Queensland 1939–45’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 34, 8 (1988), pp. 16–27. Mrs Joan Dodwell (nee Walker) to CITF, 27 February 1953, NAA, B510, No. 223 Dodwell, Joan. Claude Coats to CITF, 9 December 1956, NAA B510 No. 352 Coats, Claude Hampton. R J Cloake to Secretary CITF, 23 January 1953, in NAA B510 No. 324 Cloake, Richard John James Benson, Prisoner’s Base and Home Again: The Story of a Missionary POW (London: Robert Hale, 1957). Gavin Long to Angus McLachlan, General Manager Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September 1949, in Australian War Memorial, AWM 93 No. 52/2/23/209 Records of the War 1939–45. Rev James Benson. Betty Jeffrey, White Coolies (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1954). Alice Bowman, Not Now Tomorrow: ima nai ashita (Bangalow, NSW: Daisy Press, 1996); Neil Begley, An Australian’s Childhood in China under the Japanese (Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1995). Ian Begley et.al., Separated For Service: A Biography on the Life and Service of Colin Keith Begley and Edith May Begley, Missionaries to China and India (Melbourne: Salvation Army, 1994); Stephanie Sherwood, Growing Up as a Foreigner in Shanghai: Recollections (Sydney: Mini Publishing, 2004). Sheila Allen, Diary of a Girl in Changi 1941–45 (Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1994, reprinted 1999 and 2004). Jay Winter, ‘Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Commemoration in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 41. Winter, ‘Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War’, p. 41. Ken Inglis assisted by Jan Brazier, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 1998), p. 372. Penny Summerfield, ‘Gender and War in the Twentieth Century’, International Historical Review (February 1997) xix, 1, pp. 3–15; Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, ‘Warfare, History and Gender’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–20. Cited in Horne, Race War, p. x. Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy describe the Holocaust as ‘central to American memorial culture’ in ‘Introduction’, Jill Bennett and Roseanne Kennedy (eds), World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 1. Mercury, 14 September 1945, p. 3. Nelson, ‘The Troops, the town and the battle: Rabaul 1942’, pp. 198–216; Nelson, ‘The Return to Rabaul 1945’, pp. 131–53. The Montevideo Maru Memorial is part of the larger Australian Ex Prisoners of War Memorial, located at the Botanical Gardens, Ballarat, Victoria. The memorial was opened 6 February 2004. The story of the families is analysed in Reeson, A Very Long War. The number usually cited is four men: Gordon Thomas, James Ellis, George McKechnie and Alfred Creswick. I have also included James Benson, an Englishborn missionary priest but long-term resident of Australia and New Guinea, who published an account of his experiences Prisoner’s Base and Home Again. The


34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

nuns were from the order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. One of the nuns, Sister Berenice Twohill, recorded her memories of internment for the Australians at War Film Archive. See www.australiansatwarfilmarchive.gov.au/aawfa, Archive No. 0177, Berenice Twohill. I G McDonald, Hon Sec New Guinea Women’s Club to Hon E J Ward, Minister for External Territories, 22 October 1943, in NAA A989, 1943/235/2/5/1. The Veterans’ Entitlement Act 1986, states in section 5c that ‘eligible civilians’ are those who were resident in the Australian External Territories of Papua and New Guinea. It should be noted, however, that all former civilian internees were entitled to receive the $25,000 compensation payment made available to former prisoners of the Japanese in 2001, regardless of their location when captured. Compensation (Japanese Internment) Act 2001. Mrs Eva Russell to Professor F. A. Bland, 21 December 1953, in NAA B510, No. 286 Russell, Eva. Mrs Sybil Fernandez to Secretary, CITF, 21 January 1953, NAA B510, No. 229 Fernandez, Sybil R J Cloake to Secretary, CITF, 23 January 1953, NAA B510 Box 6 no. 324, Cloake, Richard John. Leonard Stranks to CITF, 30 September 1957, NAA B510 Box 6 no. 345 Stranks, Leonard. Pacific Islands Monthly, October 1945, p. 9. Pacific Islands Monthly, October 1945, p. 4. Pacific Islands Monthly, July 1946, p. 28. Pacific Islands Monthly, July 1946, p. 28. Ian Begley, personal communication with author, 17 December 2003.

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13 Internee voices Women and children’s experience of being Japanese captives Bernice Archer

Heroes were always men; all the stories I’d heard said so. It was men who were brave, clever, wise, proud and saved everybody. Women were usually helpless and weak but good at having babies and bandaging wounds. . .Heroes protected women but didn’t take them seriously . . . Women, though, were not heroes.1 (Ernest Hillen, child internee in a Java camp) The Japanese had no policy for dealing with captured Allied civilians. Japanese historian Utsumi Aiko claims that ‘It could be said that this problem was not even one of great concern for the Japanese Government’.2 Nevertheless, research indicates that from their initial victories over the Western Allies in December 1941 to their surrender in 1945 the Japanese interned over 130,000 Western civilians, the vast majority of them in the former Netherlands East Indies (today’s Indonesia). At least 41,000 were women and another 40,000 were children. Approximately, 3,000 women and 1,500 children were interned in camps in China, 1,000 women and 300 children in Hong Kong, 1,000 women and 300 children in Singapore, 2,000 women and 1,300 children in the Philippines, 4,500 women and 4,700 children in Sumatra and 25,000 women and 29,000 children in Java.3 The camps differed enormously. The Japanese utilised schools, prisons, universities, attap (palm thatch) huts, lunatic asylums or cordoned off parts of towns. The camps in China and Hong Kong were mixed family camps dominated by British internees. In Changi Prison, Singapore, again holding mostly British captives, and Santo Tomas University in the Philippines, which held mainly Americans, men, women and children were housed on the same campus but were sexually segregated, with the younger children staying with their mothers. The camps in Java and Sumatra were dominated by Dutch internees, including Dutch Eurasians, and were totally sexually segregated, with men and women in completely different camps, often miles apart. Again the younger children stayed with their mothers, but older boys, those between 11 and 16 (the age differed over time and place) were sent to men’s or boys’ camps.

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Nevertheless, until relatively recently the Far Eastern civilian internees, and especially the women and children, have received little attention. Early post-war internment reports mention their presence, but the women’s and children’s voices themselves are often absent.4 As Elizabeth Ennis shows in the following quotation, some actually disappeared from the historical landscape: I have been told by Australian women that I could not have been in Changi because their husbands were POW’s [sic] there and there were no women in the camp. Worse still, in 1980 I joined a small group who were visiting Changi prison . . . As we sat in a small room the British warder who was taking us round explained the various badges around the walls and gave a brief history of the fall of Singapore. ‘Any questions?’ he said when he had finished his talk. I piped up, ‘You never mentioned the women who were interned here’. He had never heard that there were women.5 The public commemorations of the various fiftieth and, more recently, sixtieth anniversaries of the beginning and end of World War II have, however, prompted a change of attitudes. This has resulted in the publication of autobiographies of ex-internee children. In addition, perhaps due to the continued growth in feminist, social and oral history and the gradual releasing of official documents, the last decade has also seen the publication of several valuable internment studies by Van Waterford, Frances B. Cogan, Theresa Kaminski, and Greg Leck.6 However, most of these studies are either camp, country or gender specific. Comparative studies are rare and, in my view, the women’s and children’s experiences remain under-researched and, perhaps, under-valued. My recent comparative study, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–45 – A Patchwork of Internment, which compares the internment experiences of a number of British, Dutch and American men, women and children from camps in the Far East, aimed to redress this imbalance.7 To access both the women’s and children’s experiences I made extensive use of personal interviews, recent autobiographies and less conventional source material. This chapter stems from that study and, using some of that research, gives a ‘voice’ to a number of women and children interned by the Japanese in the Far East. I argue that these modest narratives, be they oral, written or sewn, reveal and record heroic battles for survival in internment. My interviews with a number of the women were very humbling. ‘We just got on with it’ was the usual, modest comment. During the interviews I was often shown personal internment mementoes which were, in many cases, more revealing than the interviews themselves. These included tiny notebooks and beautiful birthday cards made from scrap paper, slippers and sewing kits made from old army jerkins, old pillow cases and bits of cloth embroidered with fellow internees’ names, and even an old, badly battered spoon. These

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not only put reality into the women’s stories, but they opened up for me alternative ways of accessing the women’s experiences.8 Further research revealed drawings, paintings and larger embroideries, which gave insight into the women’s internment lives and demonstrated that they had indeed recorded internment – but in different ways. Interviews with ex-internee children were often painful and indicated that, however much these vividly remembered internment camp experiences are tempered by time, internment was a major influence on their lives. For many it remains a reference point. At best, it created ambiguity about the role of children; at worst it eroded perceptions of childhood completely. In the words of child internee Ernest Hillen, for many children, ‘The eve of internment was the last time, I think, that I didn’t feel at all grown up’.9

Figure 13.1 Australian women internees and Major-General Wootten. 12 September 1945. Major-General G. F. Wootten, general officer commanding 9th Australian Division, chats to Australian women internees at a camp near Kuching. Source: Australian War Memorial Negative Number AWM118599.


Pre-internment It is impossible to appreciate the impact of internment without first examining pre-internment lives. Prior to World War II, Western women in the colonies were not socially homogeneous. There were class, educational, and economic differences. In British and American colonies the women and children were in the minority, but the Dutch women and their children in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) made up a large proportion of the Dutch colonial population. Nevertheless, at the time of World War II most women living in the Western colonies were either wives or daughters of colonial servants and businessmen. Others, including missionaries, teachers and doctors (often employed by the colonial educational and medical services), and some secretaries, came to the colonies alone.10 Moreover, ‘all but the poorest European settlers in the

Figure 13.2 Australian women and children internees. 12 September 1945. Camp near Kuching, Sarawak. Source: Australian War Memorial Negative Number AWM118310.

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colonies had access to servants and the possibility of obtaining a higher standard of living’.11 However, whether British, American or Dutch, married or single, Western women in the colonies lived in a male-dominated social space and whatever their professional or domestic role, they represented Western imperialism and contributed to its civilising project.12 Their children were moulded according to the middle class, colonial, social mores of that time and place. Those older children who were not sent ‘home’ to England or the United States for their education (few Dutch children were sent to Holland) were educated in private schools or by tutors in the colonies. The younger ones were cared for by locally recruited nannies called ‘amahs’ and in general all were protected and restricted, materially rich, comfortable and to a greater or lesser extent spoiled. Summing up life for many colonial children prior to the war, Robin Prising recalls life in the Philippines as ‘complacent and comfortable, cared for and protected in every way . . . a life of pearl egg-spoons, sterling silver and servants . . .’. 13 The Japanese victories between December 1941 and March 1942 ended this comfortable lifestyle and swept away many of the myths and conventions that fed into and underpinned it. ‘Nothing’, wrote British woman Mary Thomas, who was working in Singapore on the eve of hostilities, ‘had prepared us in the slightest degree for the sort of thing which actually lay ahead’.14And young James Ballard in Shanghai, no doubt speaking for all the internees, simply recalled that ‘Internment was absolutely the reverse of everything that I had ever known.’15

Internment When Isla Corfield, wife of an official in the Chinese Maritime Customs in Shanghai, entered the crowded room in Santo Tomas University in the Philippines where the Americans were interned she was faced by ‘one of the most extraordinary sights. The floor seemed literally awash with women all busily unpacking the few belongings that would stake their claim to territory’. Sharing a single mattress with her teenage daughter, Isla queued with twentytwo other women for the one shower and shared the three basins with all the women in the half-dozen lecture halls on the ground floor.16 When single, forty-year-old Peggy Abkhazi arrived in Kiangsu Middle School, which became Lunghua camp in Shanghai, her first thought was ‘this was barrackroom life with a vengeance’. The fifty-one beds in the long hut were designated for women without husbands. The wash room had cement troughs round three walls with cold running water, two small wash basins and three flush toilets.17 The mainly British women caught in Hong Kong and interned in the prison warders’ quarters of Stanley Prison, spent the first few days ‘trying to find somewhere to settle, as the room where we spent the first night was now full with more relatives of the people who had first bagged it’.18 One woman recalls her first night ‘sleeping’ on a wicker chair and, eventually, climbing into a camp bed with her mother, only to have it collapse.19


Many of the predominantly British women caught in Singapore and eventually interned in Changi, had already spent weeks completely segregated from the men in houses in the eastern suburb of Katong. Here they cooked and cared for themselves and their children ‘hoicking lumber, sawing and hacking’. At 10 a.m on 6 March 1942 they began the 7-mile walk to the island’s eastern extremity, and Changi Prison. Freddy Bloom recalls: We had all dressed with only one idea, comfort. Style had gone west. I looked splendid in my khaki trousers and the looted white evening blouse. On my head was a nurse’s veil tied like a turban with the brim of a looted hat on top to keep out the sun. To finish the ensemble was a big black looted umbrella to be used as a walking stick or sun shade. Can you imagine five hundred women dressed in similar fashion marching forth under a strong, armed guard?20 As they neared the prison Mary Thomas recorded: At last the grey walls and roofs of the prison appeared on a small hill to our right. We were hot and tired and glad to see them. As we drew near some of the women felt a gesture of defiance was needed and they began to sing. We had left Katong singing Tipperary and we walked into Changi singing There’ll always be an England . . .21 In the prison the women were crammed two to a cell, spilling over into workshops and storerooms. When Dutch woman Netty Herman and her two young daughters arrived at Halmaheira camp, on the outskirts of Semerang in Java, she found it consisted of a few streets in a poor area of the town. The house where she was assigned: Consisted of two small rooms, already occupied, a hallway where our three mattresses just fit next to each other on the floor, with a little space left for a suitcase. Everyone entering or leaving the house had to pass by us.22 Initial internment was equally shocking for the children. James Ballard recalls Lunghua camp in Shanghai, where he was interned with his parents, as being: Like the impoverished Chinese families in the Shanghai slums. Rooms and corridors were a jumble of suitcases and trunks, sheets hanging over lines of string soon converted the open dormitories into a maze of tiny cubicles.23 Young Rosemary Murray recalls her ‘home’ with her family in Stanley internment camp, Hong Kong:

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Bernice Archer Our rooms were our bedroom, sitting room, dining-room, everything . . . The room had one double bed and three camp beds which you folded up in the day time. Wendy, Jacqueline and I used to sleep in one bed and we had one pillow between us.24

Eight year old Ernest Hillen interned with his mother and brother in Bloemenkamp, Java, recalled: Darkness came suddenly, there were only candles. The air hung thick, our shadows dragged along the walls, we whispered. For hundreds and hundreds of nights this is how it would be – people, strangers all around us.25 And nine-year-old Robin Prising found on his arrival in Santo Tomas in the Philippines that: The gym, the largest dormitory in Santo Tomas, resembled an emergency hospital thrown together in the midst of a typhoid epidemic. About three hundred men slept here, the stench in the cavernous gym was heavy and sickly sweet – I gagged when I first was ushered there. Even when I was out of the building the odour still clung to my body.26 The following 3 1/2 years of overcrowding, hunger and deprivation with the consequential loss of everything that had defined their lives was disorientating. How the women and children fared depended on the size, location and demographic make-up of their camps. The family camps in China, Hong Kong and the Philippines, were relatively small averaging between 2,500 to 5,000 internees. As in pre-internment life, these camps were dominated by professional men – doctors, businessmen, surveyors, engineers, chemists, biologists, academics and colonial administrators – who quickly developed administrative structures, basic utilities, hospitals and clinics. In addition they did the heavy work chopping wood, stoking fires and most of the cooking. Later, with the help of all the internees, schools, religious services, sports activities and entertainments flourished. In spite of the fact that they had re-entered a male-dominated space, the British Women’s Group meeting in Stanley Camp, Hong Kong, argued that: Marking time was the wrong attitude to take in view of the fact that there was a great deal to be done in the camp. Above all our object as a women’s group is to be ready to undertake any work which is within our scope.27 This attitude prevailed through all the camps, and that scope proved to be very wide. Peggy Abkhazi in Lunghua, recalls that ‘The women garden, cook,


teach, nurse, clean the dining rooms, clean vegetables, do mending and dole out drinking water for hours, daily, in all weathers’.28 The women in Stanley did the lion’s share of teaching, all the secretarial work for the male administrators and nursed in the camp hospital. Those with limited nursing skills acted as hospital orderlies. One Stanley interviewee recalled, ‘We had no soap and had to scrub the hospital floors with wood ash every day’. Another recalled ‘We had very little soap, icy water in the winter and scrubbing brushes worn down to the wood. The sheets at times would be beyond description and the mosquito nets were full of bugs’.29 It was similar in the Americandominated Santo Tomas Internment camp in Manila: Each woman took an hour of room duty but later those that worked in the kitchen, the hospital or cleaning vegetables were relieved of other duties . . . The women’s morale was high. They accepted the situation in Santo Tomas, they washed and cooked, sewed dresses for themselves and their children, knitted, attended classes and did secretarial work for the various committees. (The committees were run by the men).30 The months became years. Clothes rotted and wore out. The making and remaking of clothes became an essential and invaluable skill, one in which many of the women excelled. Trousers were transformed into two pairs of shorts, a man’s shirt became a frock, old rice or flour sacks became knickers, old scout ties became a bra, odd pieces of material patched together became a child’s dress and bits of army jerkin were transformed into children’s shoes. In Santo Tomas it was claimed that: Among the most useful women workers was a busy group who toiled daily at the sewing machines set in the corner of the main building . . . They worked from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon making mosquito nets, mending men’s clothing and sewing on buttons all without charge . . . They made hundreds of aprons for the workers in the kitchens and sheets and pillowcases for the hospital.31 The repatriation of some Canadian internees from Stanley Camp meant an unexpected bonus for one of my interviewees: She recalled: When the Canadian priest Fr. Murphy was repatriated he left us some of his underwear which I altered. However my young daughter always referred to them as Fr Murphy’s pants because of the hole in the front.32 Daisy Sage, a young nurse in Stanley Camp, found a different outlet for her sewing skills. When Hong Kong fell she started sewing internees’ names on an old hospital sheet. It was, she said, ‘simply a hand steadying, mind employing, secret thought recorder of my own’. By the end of internment the 8-foot by 7-foot sheet recorded approximately 1,100 names, signs, figures

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and the signatures of many men, women and children and ‘of heroic people who will not come home’. Round three sides of the sheet is a list of, apparently, random words. These are, in fact, a coded 365 day calendar. The dates of the calendar, however, are not conventionally inscribed. Commencing on 8 March 1942, Daisy chose a word from a page in the tiny English dictionary that she owned. Sometimes randomly and sometimes purposefully she ‘played with the word in her mind and sewed it in the sheet to mark a day’. Modestly, she claims: ‘To say it is a code is making a very simple idea sound far too grand . . . I hoped that what I was doing was not too obvious. To an enemy enquirer I was learning better English!’ The sheet is a detailed 3-year record of people and events in Stanley Camp.33 Meanwhile what was happening to the children in these family camps? They were fortunate to have their health monitored by the camp doctors, and soya milk made from crushed soya beans and calcium from crushed bones was provided for the younger children whenever possible. Their formal and informal education also continued albeit with adaptations. Neil Begley, in Yang Chow Camp, Shanghai, remembers: Geography was taught by an ex-mountaineer, there weren’t many places in the world he hadn’t been. His lessons were embellished with stories of adventure that kept us enthralled. Mr. Willis taught us maths. He was a surveyor and to impress us with the importance of trigonometry, he recounted stories of his surveying days in the wilds of Canada . . . Father Thornton had a passion for English literature and seemed to be able to recite from memory.34 In Santo Tomas, Robin Prising found: Although meals took place round a card table propped up outside our cook shed before seating herself mother primly placed leaves for napkins in front of Father and me . . . Mother gracefully requested the Lord to bless our repast. Although we ate from old tin cans, and without knives, father insisted on decorum. ‘Sit up straight on your box, my boy, I see no reason why your table manners need resemble a baboon’s’ . . . His determination was ‘though we starve on roots and weeds we shall, by God, preserve some link with the civilised past’. But running the camp was labour intensive and exhausting on the near starvation diet, so the children’s help became essential; washing, cleaning, gardening, food collection and fuel gathering became an important part of the children’s everyday lives. Robin Prising summarises his roles: I did all father’s duties for him, swept beneath our beds, cleaned the passage and corridors when our turn comes up and washed our clothes. He was too ill and old to do such things himself . . . Before the war we


had both had pots under our bed which Alfred [the servant] used to empty each morning. Now my turn had come.35 In spite of this, James Ballard recalls of his parents, ‘Of course they were protective, but I think the important experiences took place outside our family room’. The multifunctional room shared with so many others was restricting and consequently, whereas in pre-internment life, ‘outside’ was considered dangerous if ventured into unchaperoned, now it was accepted as a place for un-chaperoned play and socialisation for the children. ‘Outside’ dominates many children’s internment narratives. ‘Outside’, although surrounded by barbed wire, was freedom from adult or parental control, constraints and structured time. It was the social and recreational area, the space where relationships and friendships were made, both with other children and with adults. It was where mud, old ammunition and stones replaced traditional toys, and where imagination could run free as new play materials were discovered and games created. It was outside the school and family room that the children had the greatest opportunity to shape their own internment world; it was also where the internment world shaped them. Dorothy speaks for many when she recalls having: More freedom from my parents than I had before the war, because the children all seemed to get together. It was very much like them and us. We were like a colony on our own . . . The grown ups were quite removed; they were sort of busy trying to survive . . . They had a lot of problems. We didn’t. We used to play up in the hills at the back . . . We had boys and girls in groups. There were separate boys and girls groups . . . There were all sorts of friends, we could chose our own friends rather than sort of have your parents choose your friends for you . . . We had a lot of fun . . . We were not supposed to talk to the guards but we did.36 Internment was, however, a very different story for the women and children in the segregated camps, notably Changi and all the camps in the NEI. The women in Changi Prison were fortunate in some respects. The Western civilian men were interned in the other part of the jail and were responsible for general sanitation, wood cutting and communal cooking in the prison. Also included among these men were a large number of doctors which meant that in emergencies the women and children had access to medical expertise. But the women certainly repaid them. On 17 June 1943, the woman fatigues officer reported to the women’s committee: One of our infirm ladies has made 35 pairs of socks this year – all in use by men on fatigues – they must wear socks with the rough S. African boots. One lady has made no less than 300 new pairs of shorts, another 200 have been made and 2,000 have been patched and repaired. Underpants, pyjamas, coats, shirts, surgical belts, aprons, pillows and

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Bernice Archer pillow cases have been made. A darning squad and an unpicking squad keep busy. These figures should help the camp to realise that sewing really is a good camp chore and must make for the comfort of the men. 37

But, for the mainly Dutch women and children in Java and Sumatra, the totally female internment camp was a desolate landscape. The lack of evacuation prior to the Japanese attacks meant not only were thousands of women captured, but also thousands of young children. The camps typically held 4,000 to 10,000 internees. They had no access to trained engineers, carpenters, chemists, businessmen or colonial administrators and, having only a few female doctors, they had less medical care. In one camp in Sumatra, a male doctor was brought to the women’s camp because so many were ill, but he was not allowed in. He had to sit between the barbed wire and the outer fence and women had to walk or be carried to him for treatment.38 Rarely did these women remain in one camp, and the unexpected moves from camp to camp ‘scared people: the whispers never stopped that the Japanese really just wanted to kill us off’.39 The moves also fragmented families and support groups and often the women’s limited equipment had to be left behind. Internee, Daphne Jackson, recorded that: At about two-thirty we moved out of the prison – a most pitiable collection of humanity, covered with ulcers on arms and legs on which the flies settled, and laden with bits of luggage, tins, buckets, and bags, for by this time we had learned to hang on like grim death to any nail, tin or bit of string. 40 The journeys themselves, either walking or in cramped lorries, trains or boats, aggravated health problems. Sometimes they were fatal. Moreover, in addition to organising the basic utilities, medical care and cleaning and cooking, these women had to care for the thousands of children. Cooking in Halmaheira camp, Netty Herman recalled: The central kitchen consisted of a few stoke-holes for wood in a row. Over the fire were large iron drums in which the rice and soup were cooked. A group of single or older women made up the vegetable shift.41 To add to their problems, the Japanese subjected them to severe discipline (beating and head shaving were common) and some were even used as ‘comfort’ women to Japanese officers.42 Whether sick or not, the Japanese forced them to carry out hard manual labour which was defeminising and dehumanising for them. ‘At last’, claims Betty Jeffrey in her diary: I have decided on my occupation when I get home – I’m going to be a wharfie and move cargo. I now spend the best part of the hottest mornings in the sun working. We unload all the heavy fruit and sacks of hard beans


and other goods while natives sit by and watch . . . The latest idea is for us to carry sacks of rice into the camps. 43 Another young woman wrote that she ‘was a horse’ because her work involved pulling ‘big, flat, iron carts in groups of five or six, harnessed like horses to move all types of furniture’.44 Ernest Hillen, in Bloemenkamp, recalls his mother’s work in camp: My mother was a mover, hauling furniture out of houses and, after sorting – chairs, tables, beds, cupboards, even pianos – loading it onto huge wooden carts that had been pulled by buffalo before the war. These she and other ‘furniture ladies’ then pushed to already empty houses for storage for the Japanese: to be used in their quarters or shipped to Japan. She did this all day long in the sun, growing brown and thin. 45 Jessie Simons recalls: The food situation in Sumatra was becoming acute, we had to cultivate gardens to supply food . . .We were compelled to attack the camp padang [recreational space or playing field], now like concrete from the traffic of hundreds of feet. All the digging was done with eleven pound chunkels [hoes]. The work went on from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. In spite of this dehumanising treatment, the women found subtle ways to defy the Japanese attempts to destroy their humanity, femininity and morale. Jessie remembers: We groaned in private but hid our real feeling from the Japanese under a laughing military precision, marching off in squads and swinging the heavy hoes in rhythmic unanimity, a burlesque which vastly annoyed the guards. 46 Even more humiliating was the experience of women like Jan Ruff O’Herne. Jan was eighteen when she was interned with her mother and two sisters in Ambarawa camp in Java. In 1944 she was forced, along with other young Dutch women, to act as a prostitute for Japanese officers in their Club. Although deeply traumatised, Jan also found a way to defy the Japanese. Using the only materials available to her, she ‘sewed’ a record of that time. She wrote in her memoirs: I took out the white handkerchief that one of the women had pushed into my hand the day we were taken from Ambarawa Camp . . . I got a pencil and asked each girl to write her name, then I wrote in the centre 26–2–44, the date we had been forcibly removed from the camp. Afterwards I embroidered over each name in a different colour. I kept this white

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Bernice Archer handkerchief with the seven names on it hidden for fifty years . . . It has been one of my dearest possessions but also my most hidden, the secret evidence of the brutal crimes that had been done to us.47

Jan survived and eventually gave evidence at the 1992 Tokyo trials along with Asian women who were similarly used. Then, with the help of her daughter, she traced the other women whose names she had recorded. They supported and corroborated her claims against the Japanese. But what of the children in these single-sex camps? In many of these camps, the Japanese banned education, and insisted that all children over the age of 10 years had to work alongside adults. The younger children were often left to their own devices for much of the day. Ernest Hillen recalls: Of course, there was no school of any kind and adults and older children had to work. Jerry [his older brother] was put to work in the kitchens where boys of his age [twelve] lifted drums of boiling water or soup or rice from wood fires and toted them around on bamboo poles. I was left alone.48 Young An Jacobs, in Gloegoer camp, Sumatra, also recalls: The little girls became handy. They cooked and baked and did the wash in the well water. They looked after the small children if the mother was sick and they looked after the sick older people. They knew all about wounds and ulcers and the bearing of pain and they could clear away filth and clean up blocked cesspools.49 Eleven-year-old Connie Suverkropp, caring for her much younger sisters in Tjihapit camp and Struiswijk prison, remembered: Because I was more than ten years old the Japanese insisted I did one-anda-half hours everyday cleaning the streets with other girls of my age . . . Some had to clean the toilets, the drains and the floors. After the morning parade I had to clean and wash the vegetables, clean the big pots they used to cook rice. I would then go to my sisters where my next duty was to catch flies. Everyday we each had to hand in ten dead flies. She added: Education was not allowed. So if there was a bit of education we had to do it in secret. I had the Old Testament with me . . . I feared that I would forget how to read so every day I read for half-an-hour. I taught my sister to reckon [add up] and a bit of reading and writing but we had to do it with some wood in the sand. I taught them to sing several songs. I told them fairy stories. It was difficult. My little sister would ask ‘What is a horse? What is a sofa? What is a Father?


We could draw in the sand. There was a tree and leaves falling down. They would play with the leaves and their hands – we sat down only. We could play leap-frog but we had no energy so it was oral playing. We would say ‘Now I am jumping ‘. . . it was play that you really did with your minds. You could use your minds freely.50 When the young boys were removed from the camps at around 10 years of age, ‘the goodbyes were horrible’, remembers Pans Schomper. ‘Mothers and sisters watching their sons and brothers leave were crying’ others ‘raged with despair’.51 Bert Singelenberg recalls the terrible conditions in Ambarawa 8, where he was moved to: It was lousy – bad. Looking after the old sick men. We had to do the dirty work . . . Emptying pots because they were not able to get to the toilets, cleaning them, taking them to a special place when they were dead and putting them in a coffin – sometimes twenty and thirty a day . . . We were cutting wood, unloading trains . . . At the end they put two camps together. Obviously things got worse. We were eight-hundred boys in one barracks close together, all night some people always going to the toilet . . . It was always dirty, other people didn’t manage to get to the toilet in time . . . It was terrible you were never alone . . . You were always afraid of somebody, or something.52 Listening to, and reading, the powerful images presented by the diverse voices of these children it is clear that their new freedom, visibility, responsibility, independence and the camp brutality changed the lives of all of them. Liberation was the catalyst for that change. As these children

Figure 13.3 Connnie Suverkropp (middle), flanked by sisters Els (left) and Kathy (right). Source: Connie Suverkropp and family.

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emerged from the internment camps, they entered a post-war Western world in which they no longer felt comfortable or at home. James Ballard reflected: I had come to puberty [in camp] and developed the beginnings of an adult mind. I had seen adults under stress, a valuable education I would never have received in peacetime Shanghai.53 Rosemary Murray said: Ironically I felt more of a prisoner there [boarding school] than at any time in Stanley. The rules, the silences, discipline and censorship soon changed my personality. From a spirited youngster I became a withdrawn adolescent, frightened, lonely and always pining to go home. 54 Robin Prising wrote: At the age of twelve I was already in revolt. Of one thing I was certain: I did not wish to go to school or ever be treated as a little boy again. The past three years had provided an education far broader than any that was available to me in this period of my precocious youth. 55 As the following comments from Connie Suverkropp show, it alienated some of them from their peers who had not shared camp life: Because I had had little education for two and three years I was two or three years older than my other school mates. But in thinking and feeling I was an old woman, I was looking like a girl, but I was thinking like a woman.56 Sadly, for many of the boys who had been interned in Java and Sumatra, the effects of internment also alienated them from their parents. Ernest Hillen recalls: My father walked through the camp gate one afternoon [at the end of the war] . . . He was not a big man . . . he hugged me and said, ‘I am your father.’ I answered, ‘yes sir’. ‘Jongetje, let your mother and me talk’, he said in a low tone. But no one called me Jongetje ‘little boy’ any more; old little boy maybe. I said nothing and went out.57 Similarly, Bert Singelenberg observed: I was a small boy in my father’s eyes when he left. When he came back, he started up a cigarette and I said ‘can I have one as well,’ He said ‘You’re smoking. It is not good.’ Well I had been looking after my mother and my younger brothers for all these years, and then there was somebody who was going to tell me what to do. It was difficult for him and me.58


In the post-war world, the children complained ‘we were mature in our minds and we came back home and mothers and fathers treat us like babies. They wanted it normal again, but internment had changed, shaped and moulded all the internees and life would not be ‘normal’ again.

Conclusion The presence of so many professional men in the mixed family camps made life more comfortable in many ways for the women. But despite re-entering a male-dominated space and structure, the inherent pressures of internment meant the loosening of pre-war constraints. This opened up unexpected opportunities for the women: opportunities broader than those in preinternment colonial society. Although the women continued their traditional roles as secretaries, teachers and nurses, their willingness to contribute in whatever way possible, including doing the menial tasks or ‘sweat shop’ labour, meant they were involved in the day-to-day struggle to survive and in providing essential support in all aspects of camp life. Consequently, they and their efforts were highly valued by all the internees as they eased the miseries of internment. While the presence of the men and women in these mixed camps also cushioned internment life for the children, the camp environment meant they too became essential and useful members of the community as work became a new but integral part of their lives. The loosening of colonial social mores also meant a relaxation of discipline, more freedom, outdoor life and a variety of friends for the children, all of which added new and exciting dimensions to their lives. Therefore, despite, or perhaps because of, the loss of luxuries and regardless of the hunger, dirt and overcrowding, the narratives of the women and children interned in these mixed family camps are full of energy, industry, creativity, fun and freedom. In contrast, the challenge to survive for the women and children in the sexually segregated camps, not only without luxuries but also without the support and expertise of colonial men, was unprecedented. The inherent pressures and conditions in these camps meant that pre-war constraints did not just loosen but virtually snapped. Overnight both the women and the children found themselves filling all the traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, becoming administrators, the labour force, the educators and the carers. Women were forced into ‘slave labour’ and young girls and boys were catapulted into adulthood. Leisure and play were replaced by full time heavy work and responsibilities. Despite this, and while also bearing the added indignity of physical and emotional abuse inflicted on them by the Japanese, they clearly rose to the challenge in heroic ways. Not surprisingly, however, in spite of their ironic humour and obvious bravery, energy, industry and creativity, all of which underpin their stories and were so essential for their survival, the narratives of the women and children interned in the sexually segregated camps are full of pain and loss.

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Notes Bernice Archer would like to thank the British Academy for helping to make this chapter possible. 1 Ernest Hillen, The Way of a Boy: A Memoir of Java (London: Viking, 1994), p. 115. 2 Utsumi Aiko, ‘Japanese Internment Policies for enemy Civilians During the AsiaPacific War’, trans. by Meredith Patton in Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack and Tessa Morris-Suzuki (eds), Multicultural Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 179. 3 Statistics from Dr D. Van Velden, De Japanse Interneringskampen Voor Burgers Gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog – Japanese Civilian Internment Camps During the Second World War (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1963), Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War II (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 Van Velden, 1963; A. V. H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (Manila: Bookmark, 1967), Frederic H. Stevens, Santo Tomas Internment Camp ([n.p.] USA: Limited Private Edition, 1946). 5 Interview with ex-Changi internee Elizabeth Ennis. 6 Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1994); Frances B. Cogan, Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941–45 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Theresa Kaminski, Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2000); and Greg Leck, Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941–1945 (Bangor, P. A.: Shandy Press, 2006). 7 Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–45, A Patchwork of Internment (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 8 Shirley Fenton Huie had similar experiences researching, The Forgotten Ones (Pymble: Angus and Robertson, 1992). 9 Hillen, The Way of a Boy, p. 28. 10 Statistics suggest over two-thirds of the women interned in Stanley, Changi and Santo Tomas were married; most were classed as housewives. The majority of single women were teachers or nurses. According to Sir Charles Jeffries, Partners in Progress: The Men and Women of the Colonial Service (London, George Harrap, 1949), pp. 151–2, between 1922 and 1943, the whole of the Colonial Service recruited 83 women for educational posts, 72 for medical and 8 miscellaneous: 2,189 were recruited as nursing sisters. Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 30, claims that women in the Colonial Health Service still faced discrimination. They were forced to retire earlier than men, first to be fired and last hired in tight financial times and were hired primarily as welfare workers because African and Indian women refused to be examined by men. 11 Ann Stoler has written extensively on this subject, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31, 1 (1989), pp. 134–61; ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial South East Asia’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 3 (1992), pp. 515–51 and ‘Mixed Bloods and the cultural politics of European identity in Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bikhu Parekh (eds), The Decolonisation of the Imagination (London: Zed Books, 1995), pp. 128–48. Strobel, European Women, p. 73. 12 Janice Brownfoot argues that, ‘The British Empire was a masculine world of power, authority and control in which women played little or no formal part. Their


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primary roles were wives and mothers in the traditional spheres of home family and social life’. ‘Sisters under the Skin’, in J. A. Mangan (ed), Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 46. This is not to deny the opportunities women had for informal activities in areas involving women and children. Strobel, European Women, claims, ‘European women carved out a space amid the options available to them: options for the most part created by imperialism and limited by male dominance. From the view point of the dominant ideology, they were the inferior sex within the superior race’. Robin Prising, Manila, Goodbye (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 12. Mary Thomas, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun, 2nd. ed. (Singapore: Maruzen Asia, 1983), p. 13. Elizabeth Dunn interview with James Ballard in The Daily Telegraph Magazine (9 November 1991), p. 90. Celia Lucas, Prisoners of Santo Tomas (Devon: David & Charles Publishers, 1988), p. 11–13. Peggy Abkhazi, ‘Enemy subject’:Life in a Japanese Internment Camp 1943–45 (Stroud: Alan Hutton Publishing, 2nd. ed., 1995), pp. 51–2. Interview with ex-Stanley internee Peggy McMahon, who was sixteen when she was interned in Stanley with her family. Private diary of ex-Stanley internee, p. 21. Copy in possession of author. Freddy Bloom, Dear Philip – A Diary of Captivity, Changi, 1942–45 (London: Bodley Head, 1980), pp. 8–10. Mary Thomas, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun, p. 51. Ronny Herman, In the Shadow of the Sun (Manitoba: Vanderheide Publishing, 1992), p. 117. James Ballard, User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 290; and Dunn interview. Interview with ex-Stanley internee Rosemary Murray. Hillen, The Way of a Boy, p. 24. Prising, Manila Goodbye (1975), p. 126. Hong Kong Public Records Office (HKPRO), Phylis Ayrton private papers. H. K. M. S. No.72. Abkhazi, ‘Enemy Subject’, p. 53, 62. Interview with ex-Stanley internee Vivienne Lock and correspondent from Stanley Camp (February 1992). Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, Vol.1. p. 50. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, Vol.1. p. 50, p. 32–3. Correspondence between author and ex-Stanley internee (February, 1992). IWM, p. 324. Mrs Day Joyce, ‘Ordinary People: The sheet’. Neil Begley, An Australian Childhood in China Under the Japanese (CNSW: Kangaroo Press, 1995). Prising Manila Goodbye, p. 151, 146. Interview with Stanley internee Dorothy Hovey who was interned with her parents. IWM. Dr M. E. Hopkins papers. Fatigues Officers Report. (Thursday 17th June 1943). The Changi women also made three patchwork quilts to be sent to the men in the POW camp. For more details see Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians. Fenton Huie, The Forgotten Ones, p. 32. An Jacobs, Ontwortleden (Holland: Uitgeverij W van Hoeve, 1947), p. 32. Hillen, The Way of a Boy, p. 125. Daphne Jackson, Java Nightmare (Padstow: Grafton Books,1989), p. 67. Herman (1992). pp. 119–20. ‘Comfort Woman’ – a euphemism for forced prostitution. For more on this subject see George Hicks, The Comfort Women (London: Souvenir Press Ltd., 1995)

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Betty Jeffrey, White Coolies (Sydney: Angus and Robertson,1995) p. 54. Fenton Huie, The Forgotten Ones, p. 22. Hillen, The Way of a Boy, p. 27–9. Jessie Elizabeth Simons, While History Passed (Melbourne: William Heinemann Ltd., 1954), pp. 73–4. Jan Ruff-O’Herne, 50 Years of Silence (Sydney: Editions Tom Thompson, 1994), pp. 90–1. Hillen, The Way of a Boy, pp. 27, 29. An Jacobs, Ontwortleden, p. 66. Interview with Connie Suverkropp who was 11 years old when she was interned with her two younger sisters. Pans Schomper, Chaos after Paradise: The promise of the Japanese Egg Man (Den Haag: CIP-Gegevens Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1995), p. 99; and An Jacobs, Ontwortleden, p. 43. Interview with Bert Singelenberg interned in Ambarawa 6, 7 & 8 with his mother and young brother. James Ballard, User’s Guide to the Millenium, p. 292. Interviewee, Rosemary Murray interned in Stanley with her parents and siblings. Prising, Manila Goodbye, p. 204. Interviewee, Connie Suverkropp. Hillen, The Way of a Boy, pp. 185–6. Interviewee, Bert Singelenberg.

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14 Unlikely heroines Sybil Kathigasu and Elizabeth Choy P. Lim Pui Huen

Sybil Kathigasu and Elizabeth Choy are Malaya’s two best-known war heroines.1 They were ordinary women, living useful and uneventful lives, until war discovered in them a courage and stubbornness they had not known before. Their narratives are extraordinary: firstly, because at a time when Asian women were practically invisible, they were articulate and decisive; and secondly, because they were tested and remained uncowed. Sybil Kathigasu was a nurse in Ipoh, and Elizabeth Choy was a teacher in Singapore. They shared a similar background in being middle class, English educated, and happily married: nothing that would have prepared them for what was to come. This chapter will discuss similarities and differences in their narratives and show how they rose above the trauma of captivity. The idea of the hero in war conveys not only the quality of personal courage but also the altruism of fighting for one’s country. For Malaya the latter presents a problem, because the conflict there was not, strictly speaking, Malaya’s war. It was a war by Japan against Britain and her Allies. What could Malayans be asked to fight for? Pre-war Malaya was not a political entity. Pre-war ‘British Malaya’ consisted of nine separate Malay states and three Straits Settlements held together by a colonial administration. For the Malays, loyalty was to a particular state and its sultan. Most of the Chinese and Indians were still oriented to their places of origin, although many English educated non-Malays had begun identifying themselves with Malaya. Loyalty to Malaya, however, was loyalty to a colonial entity and by extension loyalty to the colonial power. For example, the Straits Chinese were proud to be called ‘the King’s Chinese’. That was how Sybil Kathigasu and Elizabeth Choy viewed their patriotism. When we think of heroism in war, we usually think of fighting men performing feats of valour in battle. However, the number of Malayans who fought was very small. They included two battalions of the Malay Regiment,2 the Johor Military Force,3 and various volunteer units which were not given a meaningful role.4 This was a small fraction of the total strength of nearly 87,000 troops under Malaya Command.5 But, is heroism in war only to be found among fighting men? If heroism is defined as courage in the face of danger, there is plenty

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of danger under enemy occupation. Since so few Malayans fought, the memories of war in Malaya are mainly those of civilians. They are stories of the victims of war, not its participants. Published memoirs of war in Malaya do not relate stories of heroic battles but rather, the stoic courage of endurance and the struggle for survival.6 The narratives of Sybil Kathigasu and Elizabeth Choy are, however, more than stories of mere survival but of surviving

Figure 14.1 Ms Elizabeth Choy. Source: National Archives of Singapore.

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captivity and torture in the hands of the dreaded Kempeitei (Military Police). Their ordeals have come to personify the agony Malaya went through, and their tribulations have come to represent the collective suffering of all Malayans. They have become symbols of the struggle against the inhumanity of occupation in the same way that Anne Frank symbolises the sufferings of the Holocaust. This brings us to the notion of the victim as hero. Ironically, images of victimhood and suffering – as in the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking – seem to stay longer in the memory than images of heroism.7

Sybil Kathigasu When war broke out, Sybil Kathigasu was living a busy but contented life in Ipoh in the state of Perak, in the centre of Malaya’s tin mining industry.8 She was a nurse who assisted her husband Dr A. C. Kathigasu in his practice, and had a complementary practice of her own as a midwife. She was in her early forties, mother of two daughters and an adopted son. She was Eurasian and her husband an Indian of Sri Lankan descent. That she was a woman used to decision-making and giving orders was clear from the beginning from the way she dealt with the confusion following the Japanese bombing of Ipoh. The family, together with some close friends, found refuge in a small town called Papan about 16 kilometres from Ipoh. Papan then consisted of two rows of shophouses lining the main street, a Chinese school, a temple, a market, a police station. It remained much the same when I visited it about 10 years ago. The one road ended in a treecovered slope that led upwards to the foothills of the Main Range, the mountains that run the length of the Malay Peninsula. These huge tracts of jungle-covered mountains became the sanctuary for guerrilla groups who would harass the Japanese and then disappear back into the jungles again. A number of resistance groups had been formed. The most effective of them was the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), which was controlled by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The MPAJA started with four regiments and eventually grew to eight, each comprising 400 to 500 men.9 The 5th Regiment in Perak was the earliest formed and most formidable. It was led by able commanders including Chin Peng, who later rose to become the Secretary General of the MCP. According to Chin Peng’s recollections, resistance in Perak ran ahead of the Central Committee’s directives. The military units there were formed early in February 1942 under the temporary name of the Perak People’s Anti-Japanese Army (PPAJA), designated the 5th Regiment, PPAJA. The PPAJA was later re-designated 5th Regiment of the MPAJA.10 It consisted of four companies. The unit operating around Papan, the 3rd Company, had its headquarters in the hills above the town.11 In Papan, the Kathigasus opened a clinic stocked with supplies from their Ipoh dispensary. The MPAJA depended on the local population for information and supplies and soon made contact through one of their agents, a neighbour whom Mrs Kathigasu called Moru.12 The guerrillas needed

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medicine for their sick and wounded: would Dr Kathigasu be willing to help? He was hesitant because assisting the guerrillas was punishable by torture and death. They were, however, already guilty of an equally serious political crime: the possession of a clandestine radio. Mrs Kathigasu deeply resented the isolation from the outside world imposed by Japanese occupation and felt ‘the burning need’ to know the real war situation to counterbalance Japanese propaganda.13 She was confident of the Allies’ eventual victory but needed to know the real state of the war to maintain her courage and hold on to her faith in the future. So when Dr Kathigasu turned to his wife for her opinion, her response was immediate: It took me only a moment to make up my mind. I could not approve of some of the guerrillas’ methods, but this was war. They were fighting the common enemy, and any help I could give them was a contribution to final victory.14 This was the beginning of their involvement with the resistance, for which Mrs Kathigasu took considerable risks. Dr Kathigasu returned to Ipoh to resume his practice. His wife remained in Papan and their house and clinic became a point of contact. The guerrillas came at night for supplies when Mrs Kathigasu also passed them news from the BBC. Her attitude to them was: ‘. . . we never thought of them as Communists at all, but as allies of Britain and America in the fight against the Axis’.15 The clinic provided excellent cover and became a clearing house for local news, messages and warnings. Her work as a midwife gave her mobility and enabled her to win the confidence of the people in the surrounding area. The police consisted of local people and if they suspected anything, they studiously looked the other way. The Kathigasus were a resourceful couple. They managed to buy a car that ran on ‘rubber oil’ and they managed to obtain supplies of drugs for their patients with enough to spare for the guerrillas. Although Dr Kathigasu appears in the book as an unfailing source of support, the narrative is essentially the author’s own. To begin with, he was in Ipoh most of the time and her memoirs describe events in Papan. Many of her activities were carried out on her own initiative. In most cases she came to a quick decision, usually in favour of doing something even if danger was involved. As a nurse, she was a true professional braving the Japanese military to attend to her patients. Even when he was present, her husband was a secondary figure. In the key issues of whether to obtain a clandestine radio or whether to give medical aid to the guerrillas, hers was the stronger voice. On other occasions, he had to comply with a decision that she had already made, as for example, in carrying out an operation on a wounded guerrilla in their house. In spite of the care and secrecy with which she cloaked her endeavours, the Japanese became aware of underground activities in Papan. The whole population was rounded up and subjected to repeated screening. Several


young Chinese were taken away after identification parades. The MPAJA suggested that the whole Kathigasu family join them in a safe area in the jungle. She was tempted, but rejected the idea because of the frailty of her aged mother and the fear of Japanese reprisals on the people of Papan. Dr Kathigasu was arrested in July 1943 and in August Mrs Kathigasu was also taken in. Early in her book, she describes the Japanese method of crime investigation as ‘torture first, then investigation, and always more torture than investigation’. This was to be borne out by her experiences. She was questioned repeatedly, beaten, slapped, kicked, verbally abused, kicked in the face and her husband was beaten in front of her eyes. The Japanese used torture, intimidation, humiliation, and starvation and psychological pressures to extract information and confessions. Her memoir details the degrading and unsanitary conditions: men and women in the same cell, the cell door so low that prisoners had to crawl in and out like animals, and food given without receptacles so that they had to eat off the floor. Mrs Kathigasu’s most terrible experience was to be tied to the pillars of a garden pavilion and made to watch while the Japanese strung her 6-year-old daughter Dawn up a tree and lit a fire under the child. Her ordeal only ended when her screams caught the attention of a senior officer who stopped the proceedings. Eventually, both she and her husband signed a statement and were tried and given prison sentences. As she had taken the responsibility for what took place in Papan, she was sentenced to a life imprisonment while her husband, son and others arrested for colluding with her were given lighter sentences. Mrs Kathigasu and her husband were incarcerated until the war ended. Although her narrative is a story of brutality and suffering, it is also an inspiring tale of endurance and the will to survive. Even in her darkest hours, she did not despair, but found ways of coping with pain and imprisonment and of matching her wits with those of her tormentors. When she was arrested, she wrote, ‘The Japs might kill me but I would fight them every step of the way’. In the end, even her chief interrogator, Sergeant Ekio Yoshimura admitted, ‘You are a brave woman’. Those who knew her remember her as a frail woman but a strong person emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.16 Cheah Boon Kheng, in the introduction to her memoir, describes her story as ‘one woman’s brave struggle for humanity, justice and sanity’. She was awarded the George Medal, the highest British civilian award for bravery. Her husband was awarded the MBE.

Elizabeth Choy The autobiography of Elizabeth Choy is actually the story of her life as told to Shirle Gordon through oral history interviews.17 The narrative begins in Sabah where she was born and spent her childhood. Her family, the Yongs, were among the large numbers of Hakka who came to British North

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Borneo (now Sabah), towards the end of the nineteenth century. Her great grandparents came with their employers who were German missionaries. Her family were devout Christians, her grandparents on both sides being church workers. Her father was the eldest and, after finishing English school, joined government service and was posted to remote areas as District Officer. Since there was no school in those places, she was sent to live in Kudat, where her paternal grandfather was the village schoolmaster. Kudat was also very rural and did not have many Chinese, so that young Elizabeth grew up among the Kadazans and recalled with nostalgia the simple joys of plantation life with these people. Her parents believed in education for girls as well as for boys and sent her, at great cost, to board in Saint Monica’s School in Sandakan at the age of ten. The school was run by Anglican missionaries and she converted to the Anglican Church. In 1929, she came to Singapore to finish her schooling at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus and had hopes of going on to higher education. However, the Great Depression prevented her from attending Raffles College, one of the predecessor institutions of the National University of Singapore. Instead, she went to work as a teacher and became engaged. Her marriage was neither arranged nor a love match. Mrs Choy recalled meeting her future mother-in-law: The old lady took a liking to me and looked after me very well, giving me lunch every day, and eventually she told me I would make a very good wife for her second son. When I did not show much enthusiasm, she became very sad, and so – typical of my missionary upbringing – I said all right, I will marry your son and at least make one old lady happy.18 Married life was interrupted by war 4 months after her wedding. Her autobiography briefly describes the bombing and shelling, and the enemy planes that flew low with machine guns firing at soldiers near her house. After the surrender of Singapore, the Japanese carried out an operation called sook ching, to screen out anti-Japanese elements among the Chinese in February to March 1942. This led to the indiscriminate massacre of Chinese males screened. Her teenage brother was among those detained. One of her most tragic memories was the frantic search for her brother together with other women also searching desperately for their lost men folk.19 Her husband had taken over the running of the canteen in Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Her autobiography tells us that, using the ambulance that ran between the hospital and the internment camp, friends of British internees sent them food, medicine and news. The canteen became the conduit through which these supplies were smuggled. The Japanese eventually got wind of this and her husband was arrested in October 1943. She was arrested a month later. She was taken to the YMCA which then housed the Kempeitei, and put into a small room with twenty other people. She was the only woman in the


cell most of the time and all of them were made to kneel from morning to night. She stayed in that damp and filthy cell without a wash or change of clothing for the whole of her imprisonment. When the order was given to sleep, the prisoners just rolled over and laid down where they were for there was only room for them to sleep side by side. As with Mrs Kathigasu, the Japanese used physical and psychological torture. Prisoners were beaten, subjected to the infamous ‘water treatment’ and threatened with being beheaded or buried alive. The Choys were brought together face to face and told to say their goodbyes. Her most severe test occurred when her husband was made to watch while she was stripped halfnaked, made to kneel on a sharp edged plank, and had electric shocks applied until she fell unconscious. The Japanese were particularly harsh at the time because, in October 1943, a number of Japanese ships were blown up in Singapore harbour.20 They did not realise that the damage was inflicted by Australian and British commandos, but believed that it was carried out by British agents aided by information provided by British internees. They concluded that the Choys were engaged in espionage. On 10 October 1943, a day which became known as the ‘Double Tenth’ incident, the Kempeitai raided Changi Gaol and arrested fifty-seven suspects, including John Wilson, the Bishop of Singapore, and Robert Scott, the Information Officer.21 When Mrs Choy saw them in YMCA, she believed that her arrest was connected with sending supplies to the internees. She described the YMCA as ‘a real hell’ where cries of agony could be heard day and night. She found inactivity a great trial. Hunger also took its toll. It was agonising to hear the ‘tick tock tock tock tock’ signal of the noodle hawker passing by on the road outside while craving for food. In spite of not being allowed to speak, the detainees found ways of encouraging each other. She remembered, ‘. . . our comradeship was very strong’. Mrs Choy was released after about 200 days, but her husband was imprisoned until the war ended. After the Japanese surrender, her assistance to British internees was remembered by a grateful British government. As a member of the Medical Auxiliary Services, she was invited by Lady Mountbatten to witness the signing of the Japanese surrender at City Hall. Then the Choys were invited to England to recuperate. Only Mrs Choy took up this offer and what was intended to be a 6-month visit stretched to 4 years. During this time she received many honours, including a private audience with Queen Elizabeth (later, the Queen Mother); an invitation to a party at Buckingham Palace; and another invitation to the palace together with an ex-internee to jointly present a casket to Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II). The Girl Guides movement awarded her its highest honour, the Bronze Cross, and the Rajah of Sarawak presented her with the Order of Sarawak because there were Sarawak people among the internees. When she returned, Singapore was embarking on the road to selfgovernment. When the Singapore Municipal Council elections were held

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in 1950, she was persuaded to stand as an Independent, as there was a need for an educated woman to speak up for the poor and needy. She lost, but the campaign exposed her to political life. A year later, she was nominated by the Governor of Singapore to serve as an unofficial member of the Legislative Council and spoke frequently on family and welfare issues. During this time, she made two trips abroad: the first to represent Singapore at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; and the second, to speak about Malaya on a lecture tour of North America arranged by the British Foreign Office. There she met many people including Vice-President Richard Nixon and his wife. The Western press was captivated by the exotic Mrs Choy. She was tall for a Chinese, her perfect figure was habitually clad in a form fitting cheongsam, and she wore a flower in her hair and numerous bangles on her left arm. In 1955, elections were held to elect a Legislative Council which, for the first time, would have a majority of elected members. These elections gave Singapore its first taste of self-government, with David Marshall as its first Chief Minister. They also brought Lee Kuan Yew into political prominence as one of the three elected representatives of the newly formed People’s Action Party. Again, Mrs Choy was persuaded, this time by the Progressive Party, to stand for election, and again she lost. This made her realise that she was not made for politics ‘and could do more good for the country by doing my job well as a school teacher’. She returned to St. Andrew’s School where she had taught before the war and, with the exception of a period as founder and principal of the School for the Blind, continued there until retirement in 1973. Her long years in education were recognised in the conferring of the Pingkat Bakti Setia (PBS) by the Singapore government and the Centenary Award from St Andrew’s School. Mrs Choy showed a remarkable zest for life. She had been a teacher, nurse, Girl Guide, social worker, politician, lecturer, artist’s model and world traveller. There is an attractive photo of her dressed in uniform as ‘Gunner Choy’, one of the few women who joined the women’s auxiliary of the Singapore Volunteer Corps. At a mature age, she decided to study Chinese and Malay with the Jawi script thrown in for good measure. A play based on her life had been performed and she had been the subject of a biography. In 1997, the National Museum held an exhibition in her honour, ‘Elizabeth Choy – Woman Ahead of her Time’. Elizabeth Choy died on 14 September 2006, aged ninety-six. For the first time in its history, St Andrew’s Cathedral allowed a wake for her to be held in its premises. The service was attended by the Singapore Minister for Defence and the British High Commissioner. Representatives of the Disabled People’s Association and Singapore Association for the Visually Handicapped remembered her compassion, and eulogies recalled not only her war-time heroism but also her many contributions to Singapore. At her funeral, her family toasted her with champagne. Said her daughter Bridget Bay: ‘This is a celebration of Mum’s ninety-six very good years.’


Women’s awareness Mrs Kathigasu’s memoir was published posthumously in 1954. Her memoir is one of the earliest pieces of writing in English by a Malayan woman. A few other women authors subsequently wrote about their wartime experiences, such as Ruth Ho in Rainbow Round my Shoulder (1975); Janet Lim in Sold for Silver (1958) and Aisha Akbar in Aishabee at War (1990), but these authors were fortunate to have escaped the tribulations of captivity. In a study of women’s biographical writing, Koh Tai Ann points out that many narratives are accounts of powerful fathers or grandfathers whose achievements raised these women to positions of privilege.22 Mrs Kathigasu and Mrs Choy however, came from modest backgrounds and had to earn their own living. Their writings display a strong sense of self-identity and they themselves are the chief protagonists in their narratives. As mentioned earlier, the lives of Mrs Kathigasu and Mrs Choy bear certain similarities. They were among the few women who completed English secondary school, which, before the war, was regarded as a considerable accomplishment. At the time, only a small number of women were fortunate enough receive higher education.23 Mrs Choy regretted not attending Raffles College because of financial circumstances, but she did the next best thing which was to become a teacher. Mrs Kathigasu was a nurse. Before the war and even some time after, teaching and nursing were two of the few careers open to girls with ability but limited financial means. They were therefore among the small number of career women of their generation. They were educated, independent women and, as a result, they carried themselves with confidence and were used to dealing with the world outside their homes. They were women with minds of their own; they made decisions affecting themselves and other people. They were in control over their own lives, husbands notwithstanding, a prerogative not enjoyed by many women of their time. Their wartime involvement was part of this proactive attitude. They are heroines because they rose to occasion. In war conditions when most people laid low for the sake of survival, they resisted the Japanese as a conscious commitment and accepted the consequences. Both women had the security of a happy marriage and the support of their husbands, but the two men are somewhat over shadowed by their wives. In part, this is because the narratives are their wives’ narratives, but also because both women seem to be the stronger partner in the marriage. Although Mrs Kathigasu always referred to her husband reverently as ‘the Doctor’ and was solicitous of his opinions, hers seemed the stronger voice and in many cases he appeared to have fallen in with what she proposed. Ho Thean Fook (Moru), her neighbour and chief contact with the guerrillas, described the Kathigasus as a ‘matriarchal family with Sybil in absolute control’. The Japanese recognised her as the greater culprit and gave her a heavier sentence than her husband.

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Choy Khun Heng is an even less visible figure than Dr Kathigasu. He comes across as a patient and forbearing man. According to her biographer Zhou Mei, Mrs Choy accepted her future mother-in-law’s proposal of marriage to her son on condition that he wait until she felt she was ready.24 Since her concern at that time was the education of her younger brothers and sisters, Choy had to wait almost 10 years. After the war, he did not wish to travel to England and had to wait for her for another 4 years. According to British War Crimes trials, he had passed radio parts to John Long, an internee who was tortured and executed, and it was for this reason that Choy was tortured and imprisoned.25 Mrs Choy did not say much about her husband’s sufferings in her autobiography but admitted to Asia Magazine that he had been more harshly treated.26 Both husband and wife were presented with the OBE But for him there was no invitation to view the Japanese surrender, no tête-à-tête with the Mountbattens, and no visit to Buckingham Palace. Both women had a simplistic understanding of politics and were openly pro-British, a natural consequence of their education, religion and social background. When Mrs Kathigasu’s daughter Dawn was released from being tortured by fire, she shouted, ‘Long live Malaya and the British’. Mrs Choy recounted her visits to British royalty with awe and regarded the signed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II as her most prized possession.27 As mentioned earlier, this was a consequence of the pre-war system when there was no sense of a Malayan nation or of Malayan identity. Mrs Choy readily acknowledged her lack of interest in politics. It was British defeat as much as the suffering imposed by Japanese occupation that helped to awaken political awareness. This sentiment is best articulated by Lee Kuan Yew who said: [The Japanese] made me and a whole generation like me determined to fight for freedom – freedom from servitude and foreign domination. I did not enter politics. They brought politics upon me. From that time onwards, I decided that our lives should be ours to decide.28 The two women were devout Christians and found strength in their faith during their incarceration. Mrs Kathigasu was a Catholic and claimed to have had a vision of the Sacred Heart in which she was asked to ‘pay the supreme sacrifice’. Mrs Choy attended mission schools. The motivation for their antiJapanese activities can be attributed at least in part to their sense of Christian charity. They were generous in helping those in need and moved by compassion for the suffering of others. Mrs Kathigasu as a nurse was both true to her calling when she extended medical aid to the guerrillas, as well as genuinely desiring to contribute to the war effort. For Mrs Choy, ‘all we did was help those in distress to live through their internment’. She could never resist an appeal to her sense of Christian duty and this desire to help the needy was what drew her into politics and work for the blind. Precisely because they had no political agenda and espoused no political ideology, we can say that their motivations were truly humane and altruistic.29


When we examine Mrs Kathigasu’s and Mrs Choy’s memoirs, we can say that they are among the earliest articulation of the female awareness. I say this with some caution because both women were rather conventional in their social attitudes, and the movement towards women’s liberation with its feminist ideas had not yet emerged. Theirs is an unconscious kind of articulation because they were not aware of the power of the woman’s voice, nor were they aware of the empowerment within their narratives that we now see. But the very fact of writing and going into print is to enact an identity: in their case, a heroic identity. The two memoirs express the feelings and opinions of women on war, on life, and on the world around them. They reveal the authors’ strong and confident sense of self-worth, and in this expression of the woman as self, we see the articulation of the woman as an individual.

Dissimilarities in narrative Although the two narratives contain parallels, there are also differences. To begin with, Mrs Kathigasu’s memoir is largely the product of her own hand while that of Mrs Choy consists of transcripts of an oral history interview.30 No matter how sympathetic the interviewer might have been, she would have acted as a filter and shaped the direction and contents of the interview. Secondly, Mrs Kathigasu’s memoir deals only with her wartime experiences and was written in England, where she had been sent for treatment for her injuries. The book conveys the immediacy and intensity of pain and suffering, while the memory was fresh and the distress from injuries still present. While in prison she had been given a blow on the spine by a heavy wooden bar that left her partially paralysed. Although she seemed to be on the way to recovery, she finally succumbed on 12 June 1948 to septicaemia from the fractured jaw caused by a kick to her face.31 Her narrative is clear and detailed. This can be explained by the mental exercise she had set herself while in solitary confinement when she decided to go over in her mind all that had happened, racking her brain to remember even the smallest detail. The exercise was not only a survival strategy but also a payback to her tormentors: she would survive and tell the world what they had done. The rawness in her narrative is matched only by the few publications issued in the immediate post-war years. Publications such as: Kempeitei Kindness by Tan Thoon Lip (1946) who was severely tortured by the Japanese; The Double Tenth Trial edited by B. A. Mallal (1947) which comprises the proceedings of the War Crimes trials held in Singapore; and This Singapore by N. I. Low, which was privately printed in 1947 and reprinted with as When Singapore was Syonan-to (1973). Low was one of the survivors of the sook ching massacres. These publications convey a strong sense of ‘moral outrage’.32 So does Chin Kee Onn’s Ma-rai-ee (1952), which, although written as fiction, is also a graphic account of having been tried in ‘the fires of tribulation’.

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Mrs Choy’s interviews on the other hand, were published in 1973, 28 years after the Japanese surrender. Mrs Choy’s wartime recollections comprise only six pages out of sixty-five. In a study of the memoirs of war in Malaya, I observe that most have been written a quarter of a century after the end of war, by which time the memory has dimmed, and the 3 1/2 years of occupation has become merely an interruption in the business of living.33 Narrators admitted that the anger and emotions generated by war could not survive the passage of time, especially as nations then at war now live in peace. Time and Mrs Choy’s sense of Christian charity had blurred the suffering she went through. People who have met her are impressed by her sense of forgiveness. She blamed war rather than the Japanese. It seemed hard to believe they could do such things, but all the time I believed in their hearts they could not be so cruel. I made myself believe that it was because of their military obligations they became so cruel and heartless.34 Lastly, the greatest difference is that Mrs Kathigasu died but Mrs Choy lived to pick up the strands of life again. While the memory of Mrs Kathigasu is frozen in the time of war, Mrs Choy continued to another time during which she lived a full life and participated in the country’s social and political growth. She ended her days as a much respected figure in Singapore.

Dissimilarities in remembrance There are dissimilarities in the way the two women are remembered because World War II has different roles in the history of Malaysia and Singapore and hence gives rise to different historical contexts. The Federation of Malaya achieved independence in 1957 and became the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 with the inclusion of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. In 1965, Singapore separated from Malaysia to form the Republic of Singapore. Malaysia is a Malay dominant nation in which Islam is the official religion, Malay the national language, and where national life is infused with Malay cultural symbols. Malaysia draws its inspiration from the golden age of fifteenth-century Melaka and sees in itself the continuity of Malay history. If we look at Malay history in the long perspective, British colonisation can be seen as an interruption of this continuum and Japanese invasion becomes a factor that hastened the end of colonialism and a return to Malay continuity. War served to heighten Malay political consciousness and Malay nationalism found a focus in the protests against the Malayan Union which led to the founding of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).35 This political party led a multiracial coalition of parties to independence and has been the dominant party in government ever since. War was therefore a transition to independence.


The common suffering of war cannot be denied but has been coloured by the serious ethnic tensions that surfaced at its end. The accepted view is that the MPAJA was responsible for causing these racial clashes because of the reprisals it carried out against perceived Malay collaborators.36 Since resistance against Japan was part of the MCP’s larger objective of establishing a communist state, such resistance could not be accepted as heroic by the state. This was because the same resistance fighters subsequently launched in 1948 a pro-communist, anti-government insurgency, referred to as the Malayan Emergency. Malaysia’s attitude to the war differs from that of many countries. Former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, during his tenure of office, was the only Asian leader who said that Japan need not apologise for the war.37 His ‘Look East Policy’ drew inspiration from Japan’s economic success, underlining his view of Japan as a leader in Asia’s economic advancement. Official memory of war is caught up in the complexities of Malaysia’s ethnic politics on the one hand and the desire to maintain good relations with Japan on the other. Moreover, the theme of unity and inclusiveness is problematic in a culture of Malay political dominance that calls for a Malay narrative of war. This can be seen in the rewriting of school history textbooks.38 It can also be seen in the honouring of a Malay war hero, Lieutenant Adnan Saidi, some 59 years after he died.39 The fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II passed barely noticed in Malaysia. Yoji Akashi regards this as the ‘politics of forgetting’ and points out that there is a discrepancy between popular memory and official memory in Malaysia.40 Mrs Kathigasu’s pro-British attitude, therefore, grates against official sentiments in Malaysia, and her support for the MPAJA puts her on the opposite side to the mainstream view of the history of the war and the Malayan Emergency. The publication of her memoirs was delayed until the worst of the Emergency was over and the MCP a spent force.41 However, her heroism lives on in popular memory. A small road in Ipoh is named after her.42 Her house in Papan has been privately maintained as a museum by Lau Gaik Hong as a personal mission.43 Her memoir has been reprinted in 2006 with the addition of several valuable documents. These comprise Chin Peng’s recollections of the Papan guerrillas, an account of her daughter Dawn’s life in England, an interview with her surviving daughter Olga, and the trial of Sergeant Ekio Yoshimura. Singapore’s modern history dates from 1819 when it was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles. The prosperity of the entrepôt attracted large numbers of immigrants from China and India as well as people from the surrounding islands. In the years since its separation from Malaysia, it has achieved outstanding economic success as a city-state. It sees itself as a global city but one that endeavours to retain the roots of its Asian traditions. Lee Kuan Yew has described Singapore as ‘the confluence of four great civilisations, the British who founded the place, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Malays, who sweated to build it to what it is now . . .’.44

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Singapore recognises its diverse demographic background and claims a wide cultural mix as its heritage while freely acknowledging Britain’s role in its past. Statues of Stamford Raffles still stand at prominent locations and no attempt has been made to rename Raffles Place or roads named after British dignitaries. The conclusion that its leaders draw from the fall of Singapore is that island state should build up its defences. The lesson of Japanese domination is that people should be united into one nation to meet future threats. All male Singaporeans are required to undergo compulsory national service and a considerable portion of the annual budget is spent on defence. National service and defence are important components of Singapore’s nationbuilding agenda. The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war was marked by many ceremonies and eleven war sites were restored and identified as war monuments with the Ministry of Defence taking a lead role in the organisation of these commemorations. The memory of war has been melded into the founding myth of Singapore’s nationhood and integrated into the nationbuilding process: As we trace this dark chapter of our past, we reflect upon the brutalities of war, the courage of the people and the relentless faith of the survivors – and thus understand the motivating forces behind the building of modern Singapore. (World War II Sites of Singapore brochure) Mrs Choy’s pro-British sentiments do not appear out of place. She was much admired for her modest and unassuming style and respected as a war heroine who had, in addition, made other contributions to Singapore.

Conclusion In 1946, Sergeant Yoshimura was brought before the Perak War Crimes Tribunal and charged, firstly with ill-treating Sybil Kathigasu and her 7-year old daughter Dawn and, secondly, with ill-treating the civilian residents of Malaya in his custody.45 Yoshimura had pleaded not guilty, but on the second day of the trial, much to the Court’s surprise, he changed his plea to guilty. What is interesting is what his counsel, Captain Roy-Chowdhury, stated in his defence. The extortion of evidence by torture, he said, was obnoxious, but Japanese ideas of morality and civilisation differed from those of the Allies. Japan had signed the Hague Convention in 1907 but with a reservation regarding Article 44. This forbids forcing the inhabitants of occupied territory to furnish information about the other belligerent forces. Yoshimura had not had the background of Christian civilisation. He should not be judged against an alien moral code.46 Yoshimura was sentenced to death, but his counsel made a plea for clemency on three main grounds. First, he was only a sergeant and junior in


rank to officers in the Ipoh headquarters of the Kempeitei. Three senior officers had consented to his activities. Secondly, two of these named officers had been nearby when Dawn had been strung up and they had approved his line of interrogation. Thirdly, the methods he employed were used generally throughout the Kempeitei. He was hanged on 24 May 1946 at Taiping Gaol. There is enough evidence from survivors, both military and civilian, that testifies to the widespread Japanese ill-treatment of prisoners and civilians. However, if we condemn individuals like Yoshimura, we should also condemn his superiors and the system that condoned such methods. The narratives of their victims are a moral indictment of Japan’s war record that will continue to haunt its role in the history of the war. Therefore, in a time of war when the normal rules of conduct disappear, we can only express our admiration for two strong women of courage who rose above the degradations of war and imprisonment. Sybil Kathigasu’s narrative projects a passionate patriotism and a defiant spirit, while that of Elizabeth Choy conveys a depth of compassion and forgiveness. They also reveal a resilience of mind and a depth of humanity in the human spirit that will continue to inspire generations to come.

Notes This is a substantially revised version of a paper that appeared in Views and Visions. Part 2: Proceedings of the Views and Visions Conference of 18–20 December, 2000 (Yangon: Universities Historical Research Centre, 2001). 1 Malaya was formerly a British protectorate comprising the Malay Peninsula and Singapore and since 1965, the independent states of Malaysia and Singapore. 2 Alan Warren, Singapore 1942: Britain’s Greatest Defeat (Singapore: Talisman, 2002), p. 307; and Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 188–91. 3 Tunku Shahriman bin Tunku Sulaiman, ‘The Johor Military Forces’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch, Royal Asiatic Society (2004) 77, 2, p. 103. 4 Yap Pheng Geck, Scholar, Banker and Gentleman Soldier (Singapore: Times Books International, 1982), p. 47. 5 Peter Elphick, Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), pp. 185–6. 6 P. Pui Huen Lim, ‘Memoirs of War in Malaya’, in Paul H. Kratoska (ed), Malaya and Singapore during the Japanese Occupation (Singapore: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 1995), p. 138. 7 The Japanese too, regard themselves as victims because their leaders have repeatedly declared Japan to be ‘the only nation ever to have been atom-bombed’. See James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Post-war Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), p. 1. 8 See Sybil Kathigasu, No Dram of Mercy (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1983). 9 Cheah Boon Kheng, Red Star over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict during after the Japanese Occupation, 1941–1946, 2nd ed. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1987), p. 60. 10 Chin Peng, ‘The Papan Guerrillas and Mrs K’, in Faces of Courage: A Revealing Historical Appreciation of Colonial Malaya’s Legendary Kathigasu Family (Singapore: Media Masters, 2006), p. 177.

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11 Chin Peng, My Side of History, as told to Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), p. 78. 12 Ho Thean Fook, Tainted Glory (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 2000). 13 Wang Gungwu, who had listened to a secret radio during the war, still remembers that excitement of contact with the outside world. See Wang Gungwu, ‘Memories of War: World War II in Asia’, in P. Lim Pui Huen and Diana Wong (eds), War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), p. 13. 14 Kathigasu, No Dram of Mercy, p. 60. 15 Kathigasu, No Dram of Mercy, p. 99. 16 Communication with Rasmah Bhupalan. 17 ‘The Autobiography of Elizabeth Choy Su-Mei as told to Shirle Gordon’, Intisari 4, 1 (1973). Shirle Gordon subsequently converted to Islam and was known by the name Alijah Gordon. 18 ‘The Autobiography of Elizabeth Choy Su-Mei as told to Shirle Gordon’, p. 32. 19 Large numbers of Chinese were killed in the sook ching operations all over Malaya. Estimates vary from 6,000 (Japanese figures) to 40,000 (Chinese figures). A more recent figure of 100,000 has been claimed by Takashima Nobuyoshi, a Japanese school teacher researching the subject (P. Lim Pui Huen, ‘War and Ambivalence: Monuments and Memorials in Johor’, in War and Memory, p. 153). 20 This was Operation Jaywick carried out by an Australian and British raiding party which came into Singapore harbour by canoe, attached limpet mines to the ships and sank or damaged seven vessels. The Japanese only learned the truth when they captured the men of the second raiding party called Operation Rimau in December 1944. See Ronald McKie, The Heroes (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1960); and Brian Connell, Return of the Tiger (London: Evans Brothers, 1960). 21 Robert Scott was head of the Far East Bureau of the British Ministry of Information when Singapore fell. He testified at the ‘Double Tenth’ Case. See B. A. Mallal (ed), The Double Tenth Trial (Singapore: Malayan Law Journal Office, 1947). Sir Robert Scott was subsequently Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in Southeast Asia. 22 Koh Tai Ann, ‘History/His Story as Her Story: Chinese Women’s Biographical Writing from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore’, Leo Suryadinata (ed), Southeast Asian Chinese: The Socio-Cultural Dimension (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1995), p. 255. 23 On the eve of war, there were only two institutions that offered tertiary education in Malaya; the King Edward VII College of Medicine and the Raffles College. In 1941, only 1,600 students completed the school leaving certificate to qualify for higher education. The College of Medicine had an intake of 60 students while Raffles College had a total of 300. Education for girls lagged far behind that for boys. In 1946, there were two boys for every girl attending English school. In the postprimary classes, the proportion of girls to boys was 1:3 and in the school certificate classes 1:4. See University Education in Malaya: Report of the Commission (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1948), p. 13–19. 24 Zhou Mei, Elizabeth Choy; More than a War Heroine (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1995), p. 47. 25 Mallal, Double Tenth, p. viii. 26 Asia Magazine, 8 Mar 1987. 27 Straits Times, 22 Oct 1986. 28 Lee Kuan Yew, speech to a mass rally at the Padang, 25 Aug 1963, in Prime Minister’s Speeches (Singapore: Government Printer, 1963). 29 See Leong Liew Geok, ‘Altruism in Wartime: Self, and Others’, in Basant K. Kapur and Kim-Chong Chong (eds), Altruistic Reveries: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2002).


30 According to her daughter Olga, Mrs Kathigasu’s book was completed by a British editor. Norma Miraflor and Ian Ward, ‘The Forgotten Kathigasu – Amazing Olga’, in Faces of Courage, p. 233. 31 See the story on her death at St Mary’s Hospital, Larnark, Scotland published in the Straits Times, 14 June 1948. 32 Cheah Boon Kheng, ‘Memory as History and Moral Judgement: Oral and Written Accounts of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya’, in War and Memory, p. 30. 33 Lim, ‘Memoirs of War’, p. 137. 34 ‘The Autobiography of Elizabeth Choy Su-Mei as told to Shirle Gordon’, p. 37. 35 The Malayan Union was a scheme prepared by the British War Cabinet as a means of reorganising all the states of post-war Malaya into a unitary state as a necessary step towards independence. The sultans would retain their positions but sovereignty would be transferred to the British crown. Citizenship would be liberalised and all citizens granted equal rights. Because of strong Malayan protests, the Malayan Union, formed in 1946, was revoked in 1948 and replaced by the Federation of Malaya. 36 Chin Peng has refuted this and blames the Japanese for instigating the unrest. See Chin, My Side of History, p. 127. 37 See P. Lim Pui Huen, ‘More than Apology Needed to Confront the Past?’ in Derek Da Cunha (ed), The Evolving Pacific Power Structure (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1996), p. 178. 38 Cheah, ‘Memory as History’, p. 30. 39 Sunday Star (11 Mar 2001). 40 Yoji Akashi, Review of P. Lim Pui Huen and Diana Wong (eds), War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Malaysian Branch, 73, 2 (2000), p. 110. 41 Miraflor and Ward, ‘The Forgotten Kathigasu’, p. 217. 42 New Straits Times, City Focus, 21 Aug 2000. See Kevin Blackburn, ‘Colonial Armies as Postcolonial History: Commemoration and Memory of the Malay Regiment in Modern Singapore and Malaysia’, in Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (eds), Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 302–26. 43 Miraflor and Ward, ‘The Forgotten Kathigasu’, p. 228. 44 Quoted in Raj K. Vasil, Governing Singapore: A History of National Development and Democracy (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000), p. 94, from his interview with Lee Kuan Yew in December 1968. 45 Norma Miraflor and Ian Ward, ‘The Yoshimura Trial’, in Faces of Courage, p. 189. 46 Miraflor and Ward, ‘The Yoshimura Trial’, p. 199.

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15 ‘Hide and seek’ Children of Japanese–Indisch parents Eveline Buchheim

I feel that a personal part of me has been denied. I am looking for my father and at the same time I have to hide my background. I am not allowed to be proud of my Japanese roots.1 (Life story 1, born 1945, daughter of Indisch mother already married to an Indisch man and a Japanese civil engineer who was responsible for education in the Soerakarta region) I do not look for the enemy, I do not seek the Japanese, I simply try to find the father I missed so much.2 (Life story 2, born 1945, daughter of single Indisch mother and a Japanese father who worked as an official for the army)

Introduction Imagine men going to war while at home their women fall prey to the enemy. Can we picture a more emotionally charged topic? During the Pacific War, most European couples in the NEI were forcedly separated by the Japanese. Men were imprisoned as POWs or in civil internment camps. Women were either interned with their children or had to make a living for their families outside the camps. Despite disapproval in both communities, some intimate relationships developed between Japanese men and Indisch women. Indisch was used to denote both Europeans who had settled in the NEI, and the Eurasians, the latter being regarded as Europeans before the war, but classified as ‘Asians’ by the Japanese. For political and emotional reasons, these relationships were controversial at the time, and remain so until today. Inevitably, this means the story of these women is hidden or almost forgotten. The stories of their mixed-Japanese–Indisch children also continue to be cloaked in obscurity. Indeed, if not for the birth of the latter, these liaisons would not be considered anymore. Even those Japanese–Indisch descendants who do record their memories often prefer to remain anonymous. One historian conservatively estimates that there were around 800 such children,

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while in 1995 a newspaper sensationally suggested 8,000. Given the hidden nature of their histories, we will never know the exact scale of this legacy.3 Here I investigate the personal histories of Japanese–Indisch offspring in order to explore why their stories were concealed for so long, why they remain controversial 60 years later, and what their histories mean to them, as children then and as adults later. Even though they originated from unequal sexual power relations, it is important to note that these case studies are very different from stories told by the 100,000 plus so-called ‘comfort women’. ‘Comfort woman’ was a euphemism for women whom the Japanese military in China and Southeast Asia forced into prostitution.4 Comfort women were mobilised as ‘military supplies’. For each unit of forty soldiers at the frontline, Japanese Army and Navy planners decided to make available one woman.5 I will argue that not all intimate relationships between European women and Japanese men were coercive. Most of the mothers referred to in this article had some kind of exclusive relationship with one single Japanese man during the period 1942 to 1945. From the beginning of the occupation, the Japanese military authorities tried to banish European presence from society. They imprisoned a large part of the European population in camps. In order to determine who had to be interned, on Java an organisation was set up to verify the degree of Asian descent. A certain degree of Indonesian background could keep one out of the internment camps. For this reason, and also because of pragmatic quantitative and organisational motives, large numbers of Indisch residents – women, children and older men in particular – were not interned. Numbers are notoriously difficult to establish, but one estimate is that while around 42,000 Dutch and Dutch Eurasians were taken as POWs, and 100,000 interned, approximately 220,000 Eurasians remained outside of the camps.6 Remaining outside meant hardship for Indisch women. All of a sudden, they had to take care of their own living now that their husbands, who had been the main breadwinners, were gone. In these circumstances of imprisonment, hunger and scarcity, extramarital relationships between European and Indonesian women on one side, and Japanese men on the other, came into existence. Here I will unravel the stories behind Japanese–European relationships. Did they originate out of love, necessity, or lust? Furthermore I will show how mothers handled their situation, and how their mixed-Japanese–Indisch descendants dealt with their ambiguous background.

Tracing hidden stories The main data for this article comes from interviews with fourteen people involved in the history of Japanese–Indisch offspring, all of whom will be referred to anonymously, as Life Story 1 to 14. In four cases, the same story was told from two different angles, by both the age group of the children and of their mothers.7

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Of the fourteen interviewees, nine were children born out of a Japanese father and a European mother between 1944 and 1946. One more was the sister of a half-Japanese sibling. In addition to these ten, who were ‘children of the war’, four adults told their stories: two mothers; and one brother and one sister of women who bore a halfJapanese child. The children’s Japanese fathers worked either in the armed forces or as civil engineers. Their mothers were ‘Europeans’, as defined by the Dutch colonial regime, although they could more precisely be labelled either as Indisch, or as Eurasian.8 This was not surprising; since more Eurasian than European-born white women remained outside the internment camps. Thus, for Eurasians there was both more opportunity and necessity to engage in intimate relationships with Japanese. According to eye-witnesses quite a few Japanese seemed interested in such relationships. Some may have found European women attractive. Some may have wanted to humiliate the enemy by seducing his wife or daughter. Yet others wanted a relationship with just one woman because they were in search of affection, warmth and care while far from home. Tracing their paternal roots seems an important drive for half-Japanese descendants. Now that they are becoming older, some are investing considerable energy in investigating their background, with increasing success. During an earlier stage of this research, when I had interviewed six children, only one had managed to find his Japanese family. In the meantime three others out of this original group of six managed to find more information. Two of the children I interviewed in a later stage had been in the exceptional situation of meeting their Japanese fathers in Japan; one son spent 3 days with his father in Japan in 1996; one daughter stayed in contact with her Japanese father through letters since her youth and visited him in Japan when she was 33 years old.9 Her story was exceptional, since her mother had always been very open about her Japanese father, who had been a civil engineer, not only with her daughter but with everybody else. From her birth, she always carried the Japanese name that her father had given her. From the beginning it was clear that the children could provide only a fragment of the story. Their parents’ perspectives were needed to complete the narrative. Finding a father to interview seemed an illusion, but it also proved difficult to find a mother willing to talk. At first I thought that the age of mothers would be the biggest obstacle in finding informants; instead, I discovered it was their insistence on preserving silence. The two mothers that I eventually found willing to share their stories can be considered exceptions. The sole fact that they were prepared to talk was telling: their attitude towards their wartime love affair seemed much more open-minded than interviews with most mixed-Japanese children would suggest. The first time I came across stories about Japanese–Indisch children was when I researched personal life histories at the SMGI (Stichting Mondelinge Geschiedenis Indonesië, Foundation for Oral History of Indonesia) in


Leiden.10 As expected, I often encountered rhetoric directed against so-called ‘whores of the Japanese’. But also less harsh judgments were pronounced upon women who had intimate relationships with Japanese men. In many interviews, I heard compassion and understanding for these women. Especially if they had children to raise, a liaison with a Japanese man was sometimes accepted as a reasonable survival strategy. The reaction of some husbands who found their wives with a Japanese child at reunion was also restrained. One woman claimed that the husband of a friend was so happy to find his wife and six children safe at his return that he was only too glad to accept his wife’s half-Japanese child. She recalled him saying that it was because of his wife’s Japanese friend that his family had been able to survive.11 On the other hand, other interviewees recalled that such wives, once reunited with their pre-war husbands, had to let go of their half-Japanese child. The fate of these children was varied: some were given to relatives or acquaintances, others were sent to orphanages. For their part, Japanese–Indisch children recall that members of the Indisch community judged them negatively. This was in contrast with the information in interviews in the oral archive, where in a range of interviews, the informants formulated moderate judgments balancing between understanding and disapproval.12 It appears that many mothers of mixed-Japanese–Indisch children conveyed to them a specific perception, often quite negative, of the Indisch community, and that this was not questioned by their children. The strong feeling of humiliation their mothers lived through during and after the Pacific War has burdened their children throughout most of their lives.13 At the same time, a distinct loyalty to their own environment and the inward orientation of the family has been an important aspect of these children’s lives. Only rarely can one find written records that provide insights into mixed children’s lives; as far as I know, no letters or diaries written by mothers of Japanese–Indisch children can be found. The only way of finding first-hand accounts is by locating children and their mothers in order to interview them. In the Netherlands, two organisations of children of Japanese–Indisch descent exist, both with a very limited number of members.14 The oldest of these is Vereniging JIN, Japans Indische Nakomelingen (Association of Japanese– Indisch Descendants), founded in 1991. The second, Stichting Sakura (Sakura Foundation), was established in 1995. Both function as self-help and mutualsupport organisations. Their members are called ‘fellow-sufferers’, and both try to help in locating fathers and families in Japan. Their aim is similar, to establish contacts between Japanese–Indisch children as they struggle for recognition of their specific war-related problems. It was through Stichting Sakura that I got in touch with most of my informants. With a few exceptions, stories of Japanese–Indisch children for many years were only remembered within the privacy of the family’s inner circle. The early 1980s brought the first signs of change. In 1983 two daughters of Japanese fathers placed an advertisement in a daily newspaper asking other

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half-Japanese children to join them because they wanted to establish a contact group called ‘Japanese roots’. Only six people replied. In 1984 the life story of one child was published, under a fictitious name, in a book on women’s internment camps in the Indies.15 After this publication the founders of ‘Japanese Roots’ were asked to tell their stories in a nightly programme on a national radio station. Shortly after this one of the two women found her front door besmirched with the words ‘hara-kiri’. Between 1991 and 1998, articles appeared sporadically in Dutch newspapers. In some of these the children demanded to be recognised as war victims, while others chronicled an unusual reunion of a child with its father.16 In 2003 the Pasar Malam Besar (literally meaning ‘night market’ in Indonesian, an annual Eurasian festival) for the first time featured two presentations to a larger audience.17 These presentations coincided with the publication of a book by the husband of a Japanese–Indisch daughter, who published the life story of his wife. The wife, referred to in the book by the pseudonym ‘Anna’, felt confused about the publication: ‘It was difficult for me to read the story in black and white, there is a huge difference between knowing something and reading it. And besides that I found it very difficult because I did not want to hurt my parents.’18 Although it was very difficult to go public, the couple thought it was necessary to do so because so many half-Japanese children continued to be silent.19

The face of the enemy The Dutch had two different enemies during World War II: the Germans who occupied the Netherlands; and the Japanese who occupied the Netherlands East Indies. Even today, remembrance of both enemies has the power to summon up strong emotions, but because of their different racial backgrounds they are also treated differently. In 1943, a Dutch POW in the Indies summarised the different attitudes as follows: ‘Why are we more or less indifferent towards the Japanese and do we hate the Germans?’ He gave two reasons: Firstly, the Indies are not really our fatherland. We can talk generously about a joint fate with the people of the Indies, but we are and remain for the largest part strangers here. Secondly the difference between Japanese people and us is so huge that we barely can see them as humans: a monkey with a gun is a dangerous thing, but you cannot hate it, it is even difficult to have feelings of disdain.20 This idea of presenting the Japanese as exotic and inferior was widespread. Western wartime cartoons represented the Japanese military as gruesome monkeys or bats.21 After 1945, there was not a day of reckoning for women who had sexual relations with the enemy during the Japanese occupation of the NEI, in


contrast to what occurred in the Netherlands. Dutch women in Holland who had been involved with a German occupier were publicly condemned. In both the title and the front cover of a 2006 study on relationships between German occupiers and Dutch women, the fact that after the war these women had their heads shaven as a punishment is stressed.22 In the Indies too, many people looked down on women who had conducted affairs with the enemy, but critique there was more often expressed indirectly. This difference was due to the different political contexts. In the Netherlands, a clear distinction was made between those who had and those who had not been implicated during the Nazi occupation. In the NEI, the situation was much more difficult to judge. The Japanese surrender in August 1945 did not bring the long awaited peace and reconstruction. It initiated a power vacuum – a Stunde Nul – and a chaotic period in which Indonesian nationalists struggled for an independent Indonesia, while the Dutch government in Indonesia fought a fierce battle to re-establish colonial order. For the European inhabitants it was important to stick together, and this created a sense that internal problems had to be avoided in the interests of group survival. In addition, a range of people did not want to discuss those who had been engaged in affairs with the enemy because they presumed that it was the only way for some mothers to preserve themselves or, more importantly in terms of exculpating their behaviour, their other children.23 In her work on Japanese civil internment camps in the Indies, the Dutch historian D. van Velden dedicated a whole chapter to the Japanese culture and outlook on life.24 Japanese were considered aliens, and in order to understand their behaviour during the war, the myriad differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ had to be explained. As a clarifying framework, van Velden resorted to explanations about Shinto religion, the hierarchical organisation of society with a special place for the emperor, and the lower status of women in Japanese society. An article in a medical journal in 1946 took, as a point of departure, the assumption that Japanese considered women as inferior and dependent. The idea was expressed there that Japanese found European women annoying.25 This was in line with the self-righteous Western analysis that was common right after the war. In a war diary, the same amazement about differences between Japanese and Europeans, especially in the field of intimacy, can be found. Japanese–Indisch sexual relationships during the war have not yet been a serious topic in Dutch historiography. They sometimes figure in memoirs of those interned, although mostly as circumstantial or third-hand accounts.26 Women were believed to engage in liaisons because they were either in need of some luxury or just in need of a man in the harsh conditions in the camps. Obstinate stories of special spaces in the camps where sexual encounters took place, labelled hondehok figure in interviews. Information like this cannot be found in contemporary war diaries though. One has to conclude that these stories may be part of gossip or of constructed myths. In war diaries, people predominantly write about young women who were

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taken away to be forced into prostitution.27 I have not found first-hand evidence of European women having a sexual relationship with Japanese military inside the internment camps, let alone of a half-Japanese child born in these camps. Van Velden mentions the possibility that Eurasian women outside of the camps sought liaisons with Japanese men because they either wanted to remain out of the internment camps, or because they saw no other way to survive. Most relationships between Japanese men and Dutch women were mentioned in relation to prostitution. The idea was that if sexual relations in internment camps were voluntary, many of these women must have been prostitutes before the war.28 The tacit assumption was that all relationships of ‘decent’ European women with Japanese men had been coerced, and in the eyes of contemporary historians forced sexual relationships were the centre of attention. During the 1990s, after a range of ‘comfort women’ had told their poignant stories in public, more was published about coerced (army) prostitution.29 Due to the emphasis placed on the coercive nature of sexual relations between Japanese men and European women, a taboo rested on the topic of sexuality, and love relations were ignored. Only recently have historians begun to devote some attention to European women who became sexually involved with Japanese men, often explaining this phenomenon as above all a survival strategy.30

Hidden in silence During and after the war, Japanese–European relationships were surrounded by hearsay and rumour. The silence and shame that surrounds intimate Japanese–Indisch relations has persisted. It is exactly this suppression and obscurity that makes it so difficult to establish how, where, and why European women embraced intimate relationships with Japanese men during the war, thus yielding insights into the origin of the resulting half-Japanese children. The combination of shame, disappointment, frustration and denial on the part of the mothers was internalised by their children. Unfortunately they knew only little of the story and today they have to guess, speculate, and even invent part of their history. Children born as a result of these unions represented everything that was so despised by European bourgeois respectability in the NEI. One man who knew nothing about his Japanese father besides that he had been an officer, and who had never known how his mother got involved with his father, said: When my mother gave birth to me she was only fifteen years old. When I went on [a] trip to Japan I spoke to some people and I talked about my father. We were talking about how old a Japanese officer in the Indies could have been, for myself I always had made up an age of about twentyfive years. Then I was told that officers mostly were much older, forty to


fifty years. At that moment I suddenly realised that my mother obviously must have been raped by him.31 In reality it is known that many officers were indeed older, but there were also Japanese lieutenants in their twenties. Another reason children gave for concealment was the nature of the Indisch community in the Indies in 1945, and afterwards when colonial residents had returned from Southeast Asia to the Netherlands. The post-war view of colonialism in the Netherlands was of greed, exploitation, and racism. This was not one which would encourage former inhabitants of the Indies to share their experiences with the wider Dutch public. Children highlight the norms and values in the Indisch community in the Netherlands as an important factor in their life. They refer to a strict, even severe upbringing, because as children they were instructed not to ask too much or be too critical. Being silent was one of the tactics to overcome and forget war experiences, which has increasingly been acknowledged as an important reason for war trauma. It is clear, however, that silence is not a unique feature of Indisch war survivors. Besides, silence and speaking are hardly unequivocal notions.32 According to Esther Captain, although wartime experiences were not discussed in public from 1950–68, they remained as very private memories. Consequently, she renames silence ‘whispering’.33 Even this, however, does not apply to most mothers of Japanese–Indisch descendants. They chose to remain silent, not only in public but also in private, thereby making a part of their history inaccessible to future historians. There remains one complicating aspect to this silence. Japanese traits can be hidden by words, but not so easily in looks. Where for Dutch people in the Netherlands it might be difficult to discern Chinese from Japanese features, for Indisch people this is often much easier. Most Japanese–Indisch children carried traces of their Japanese fathers’ ethnicity on their faces. They themselves learned about it at only at a certain point in their lives, but many in the Indisch community were aware long beforehand, even though everyone kept quiet. Everybody could see it, but nobody was supposed to mention it aloud. Mothers of Japanese–Indisch children employed different tactics in responding to improper questions. Either a complex patchwork of ancestry was invented (such as the existence of Menadonese forefathers), or the whole story was simply denied.

The children: belonging and loneliness Despite all the efforts their mothers made to keep their Japanese–Indisch identity secret, at some point in their childhood the children were confronted with it. Generally there were three moments in life when their Japanese descent came to the fore. The first time that many of the children heard about a Japanese father was during their teenage years. The revelation of their biological father meant that they lost the father they had until then imagined.

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In his place they encountered a mystery. The second moment came with their own marriage, because at that time they had to sign official forms and locate their birth certificate, on which only their mother was mentioned. The third moment was when the children themselves started to look for the Japanese father, mostly when their own children had grown up. In exceptional cases, children discovered their Japanese roots very late: ‘I was already 55 years old when I discovered that my father was Japanese, it all came out because I applied for Het Gebaar [‘The Gesture’]. Due to the information needed for the forms I had to fill in, the truth came out.’34 ‘The Gesture’ which she refers to was a 2001 Dutch government provision of 350 million guilders for individual allowances meant for European inhabitants of the Indies who experienced the Japanese occupation, and 35 million guilders for collective (cultural) use on behalf of Indisch survivors. Some mothers had wanted to protect their children: ‘I did not want to expose my child to the same problems I went through. I wanted to tell her as soon as she could handle it,’ one mother stated in interview.35 An intimate relation with the enemy was regarded as betrayal. Children today recall that their mothers seldom mentioned their wartime partners: ‘That period is over, I do not want to talk about it.’36 The ethnic identity of the lovers meant discussing the fathers remained problematic. Already before the war the overall picture of Japanese was largely negative, they were considered intrusive, repulsive and subhuman, as people with an evil nature.37 Strongly influenced by colonial ideas of European superiority, European inhabitants of the Indies tended to see the Japanese as small, bow-legged and incompetent men who would never pose a real danger. This turned out false and after the war the Japanese image became more demonic. This was not the kind of contact one wished to commemorate with one’s children in the cultural context of the Netherlands in the immediate post-war era. Despite this, the very few things that some mothers were inclined to say about a Japanese father were often positive. Frequently the fathers were described as very nice and caring people, not only towards the mothers, but towards their environment at large. Frequently, the first disclosure of their background did not come from their own mothers. Instead, someone close to them told them. One woman recalls: When I was thirteen years old an uncle took me to a chicken restaurant and there he told me that my real father was a Japanese and that my mother still had a picture of him in her purse.38 I think he did this because he was in love with my mother, but she did not return his love. By revealing her secret to me he wanted to take revenge on her. My uncle had mentioned my father’s photo, and every time I was alone at home and managed to browse through my mother’s personal belongings I tried to find his picture, which I never did.39 Discovering their half-Japanese descent led to mixed feelings. The terrible things they heard about Japanese all of a sudden enveloped their own lives.


Even today, many Japanese–Indisch descendants experience a substitute sense of guilt for the atrocities that victims of the Japanese occupation suffered. With the anti-Japanese sentiments after the Pacific War in mind, most children did not dare to ask direct questions. Intuitively it appeared a better strategy to keep quiet and hide their Japanese background. As one child recalls, in the 1950s and 1960s ‘nobody liked to talk publicly about a child born out of wedlock, and especially a child whose father was considered the enemy’. Hearing how people used to talk about half German children made him decide not to mention his Japanese roots at all.40 Japanese–Indisch children found themselves at the crossroads of conflicting political and personal loyalties while struggling with their ethnic identity. The issue of the Japanese fathers might be raised more publicly during family quarrels. Suddenly blame became loud, public accusations were made, and, out of the blue, mothers were labelled ‘Japanese whores’. But even then questions were not allowed, and soon afterwards ranks closed again. Children had to assemble their hybrid identities out of shattered fragments. During a very vulnerable period in their lives, adolescence, they were confronted with confusing questions concerning their own ethnic background. The most disturbing fact of all was that neither within their own families nor outside could they openly own up to their descent. Mothers managed to impose an oath of secrecy and it seemed that nobody dared to lift it. For most children the silence meant a heavy burden throughout their lives. Sometimes the revelation of their background became a possible explanation for the adolescent sense of feeling different and misunderstood, a sensation that affected many children. As one man said: ‘I always felt strange somehow, but I could never find the words to express this strangeness.’41 Often a feeling of disconnectedness with the Indisch community arose. Belonging to this community and loyalty towards it became problematic. Japanese–Indisch children felt that pride and the satisfaction of belonging to a vibrant Indisch community in the Netherlands were denied to them. Children who start searching for their father in Japan embarked on an uncertain journey: one that continues to be a bold project because one ever knows where it will lead. A filmed compilation, brought together for the fifteenth anniversary of the Association of Japanese–Indisch Descendants (JIN), visualises the importance of finding Japanese roots. The encounter with concrete traces of their fathers, like their gravestone, leads to intense emotional scenes.42 Their mother’s silence makes it often difficult to find a starting point, and many insecurities hinder the successful search. What if the father turns out to be a war criminal? What if he or his family denies everything? How will they feel when they discover that they were born as the result of rape? Last but not least, what happens once one finds the father that one has looked for so long? In the end, the time-and-energy consuming project comes to a halt. As one son who managed to find his unknown siblings in Japan stated pragmatically:

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Eveline Buchheim My life is in the Netherlands, and I feel Dutch, even though I have a different colour. That my father happened to be a Japanese national: so be it. Times were different then, there was a war going on, customs and values were so different at that time. For me the story is finished.43

The mothers: pragmatism, lust, love or rape? In hindsight, it is difficult to reconstruct the perspectives of mothers, mainly because most women want to gloss over their recollections of the Pacific War. Both the number and the personal motivation of women who had an intimate relationship with a Japanese man, or with a Korean in Japanese service, remain unclear. Such intimate affiliations were welcome to neither side, Japanese or Dutch. For Dutch outsiders, these liaisons were often judged as being solely born out of survival mechanisms. But a monocausal explanation is too narrow to explain the multi-faceted stories the Japanese offspring tell. The children born out of these unions can be taken as a sign for something more complex. Women were not completely ignorant of birth control and the use of condoms, or the possibility of abortions. Did they consciously choose to give birth to these children, and if so, what were their reasons? The interviews that I had with two mothers differed greatly from the picture that most children expressed about their mothers. In both cases coincidence played an important role. One of the mothers found herself involved in the relationship without really seeking it. In retrospect she described her actions during the war as thoughtless and naïve. Only after her pregnancy and the birth of her child did she start to love her Japanese partner, and not want to lose him.44 The story of the other mother was even more atypical. Unlike many European inhabitants of the Indies, this woman had an unreserved attitude towards Japanese in general. She was as old as her Japanese lover and both were single when they started their love affair. She confessed that social or political consequences of her relationship had never even crossed her mind. They had just acted as two young people in love to whom the rest of the world, and the political situation, had no relevance. She was sure she did not want to follow her lover once he returned to Japan, but she was proud of her daughter whom till today she calls her ‘souvenir’. 45 On occasion, the first initiative to establish contact seems to have been taken not by the Indisch women, but by the Japanese men. One woman recalled that: My mother met him [her future Japanese partner] at his office. The next day he came to her house and asked my grandmother if he could meet her daughter. People were afraid of Japanese entering their house. My mother, who was married already, thought that it might be wise to consent to a visit in order to protect her two [unmarried] younger sisters.46


The initial fear most Indisch women felt of Japanese men was understandable. The Japanese military had a brutal reputation, especially when it came to sexual practices. The Japanese occupation in Manchuria in the early 1930s was a stage for rape and other sexual violence. Inevitably, the central question for many Japanese–Indisch children today is whether they were born out of love or as a result of rape. This in itself provides a compelling reason to investigate their parents’ relationship. The mothers’ wartime relationships, meanwhile, might help themselves, pre-existing children, and their relatives. During the war, the Japanese men involved with Indisch women provided for daily necessities such as food, and were capable of keeping people out of the much dreaded camps. The benefits of these affiliations were, however, confined to the war period. Afterwards, all traces of intimate relationships had to disappear as soon as possible. Many mothers received the advice to dispose of their half-Japanese child because their future would otherwise be burdened. Japanese–Indisch children’s date of birth, their looks, and their whole existence was problematic. Mothers felt that they had to deny and forget everything because otherwise they would be rejected by their family and community. A mother of one of the interviewees who had been married before the war reunited herself with her husband afterwards. According to their daughter, the parents’ marriage had not been a solid one before – they had to marry because of a pregnancy – and their union did not improve after the war. They stayed together till their children grew up and then divorced. According to another woman: It was difficult for me to be in love with a Japanese man. After the war I was excluded by everybody, nobody understood why I had had this relationship. I had been a traitor and everybody wanted to let me feel that. Right after the war I stayed in contact for some time with the Japanese father of my two children, that stopped after a while. I think his family was against it.47

The fathers In the stories of Japanese–Indisch descendants, fathers are the most veiled figures: most remain a mystery until this day. Children who try to find their fathers encounter many difficulties. This starts with their mothers, who frequently do not supply them with enough practical information about their father’s name and function during the war. The difficulties continue in Japan where doors remain closed. Especially in the cases of fathers who had had considerable social standing, it might prove difficult to persuade official institutions to provide help in tracing them. This can be compared to the difficulties researchers encounter in tracking information on sensitive events during the Pacific War. Many documents did not survive or are still not public, and until today the evaluation of Japan’s colonial and war past remains contentious in Japan itself.

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What little we do know of these men therefore consists of fragments: making up a battered and broken mosaic rather than a smooth and coherent picture. The Japanese men who engaged in relationships with European women in the Indies were, it seems, often much older than their European partners. This age difference further exacerbates problems in reconstructing their part of the story, since by the 1980s to early 1990s most of them were dead. Since some of these men also had family and children in Japan before leaving for the Indies, the Japanese–Indisch were more likely to encounter half-brothers and sisters than their father. Such half siblings, naturally enough, are not always happy to meet an unknown child of their father. Both emotional and financial reasons lay behind this. As one woman experienced: when I finally managed to get hold of my father, my four Japanese sisters did not want to have any sort of contact with me. They denied my story and did not allow me to have a DNA test to prove my descent. I think they might have been afraid of financial claims.48 Another complicating factor in this search for Japanese relatives was that wartime Japan had also frowned on Japanese–Indisch relationships. Members of the Japanese military were not encouraged to engage in any form of intimacy with the enemy. One reason for this was the fear of espionage and bribery. Many relations were covert and secretive, and occurred within the private sphere. Japanese men did not want to give publicity to their intimate interactions with European women. In his diary, the Dutch lawyer Leo F. Jansen, who worked for the Japanese, cites a Japanese man who tells him that Japanese officers were displeased once they noticed that European women could not keep their contact secret.49 An eyewitness remembered that the Japanese military could be severely punished for their intimate relationships with European women.50 Towards the end of 1942, the head of the Kempeitai (Japanese military police) in Batavia received orders to observe and investigate allegations of relationships between Japanese men and European women.51 The Japanese military thus discouraged relations of love, encouraging instead organised prostitution. Hence the extension to the Netherlands Indies of the practice already established in China, of a network of military brothels called ‘comfort stations’, where Japanese army personnel were expected to find sexual gratification in a regulated environment. Such controlled brothels, ultimately with different women for officers and men, or at least different times for visiting, had become a part of military planning after 1905, especially after the Japanese-Russian war, when the epidemic proportions of venereal disease in the army were thought to render such measures necessary. But the effort of preventing venereal disease and rape in daily practice proved not at all effective. Because of the dishonour it meant to Japanese women, seen as pure and innocent, foreign and subjected women were seen as preferable recruits for these brothels, with a high proportion of early inmates procured from Japanese-controlled Korea. With some women recruited on false promises of good jobs, and others seized from


occupied territories in China and Southeast Asia, these ‘comfort stations’ – recorded on paper as voluntary brothels with pay and enforced hygiene – in reality functioned as places of organised rape and for the routine violation of the honour and dignity of women who belonged to the defeated enemy.52 In this context, the more informal, even affectionate, liaisons are not just forgotten now, but were largely undercover and kept quiet at the time. Despite this, some Japanese eyewitnesses do confirm the existence of EuropeanIndisch relations. One such witness is Mr Oba, who worked as a military official in Java during the war. He recalls that quite a few European women had relationships with Japanese men. He even heard rumours of Eurasian women who became suicidal because their relatives despised them due to their Japanese fiancés.53 After the war, some of these men managed to take their partners to Japan. But many of these women left after a short time, because they could not get used to the very different life in Japan.54 One woman who was 13 years old in 1946 left for Japan together with her pregnant mother and her three sisters. The idea was to join the father of the unborn child in Japan and establish a new life there. After the birth of her halfJapanese brother, however, it turned out that the wife of her mother’s Japanese lover had not died in the bombardment on Tokyo. This was what her mother and her Japanese lover had expected and maybe hoped. Now the relationship could not continue. In the autumn of 1947, her mother returned to Indonesia with her half-Japanese child.55 The children who try to locate their fathers in Japan are sometimes helped by Japanese veterans, but their search rarely yields a positive experience. In a Dutch newspaper from 1992, Freda Rijnders, a daughter who did find her Japanese father, was interviewed together with her father during his visit to the Netherlands, a most remarkable situation. The father, Kazuoh Satoh, was retired and 72 years old at the time of the interview, and had been an officer in the Japanese army in the Indies. He confirmed that talking about the war was uncommon and frowned upon in Japan, the past has been forgotten by most. He reveals that he had already tried to establish contact with his daughter long before, and did send a letter to her mother, but that she never answered it. The fact that this man did not father children during his marriage in Japan might have made it easier for him to get in touch with his child.56 Another Japanese–Indisch child, Molly, managed to find her father and visit him in Japan, but they had to meet in secret because he insisted that his Japanese family should remain ignorant of this. The father had a 2-year relationship with Molly’s mother, their daughter being born in 1945. The young parents called Molly their sachiko, Japanese for ‘child of fortune’.57

Conclusion Ann Stoler has pointed out that ‘who bedded and wedded whom in the colonies’ was never left to chance.58 The background of half-Japanese children illustrates that fundamental changes occurred in sexual practices during the

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Japanese occupation. Because of their complex and ambivalent background, the intimacies of empire, and especially those of the fall of empire, need more than archival information.59 The history of Japanese–Indisch children illustrates the importance of the use of personal life stories in gender and colonial studies. However different the life stories of children of Japanese–Indisch descent turned out to be, one common point was present in most of their memories: the silences their mothers maintained. In most instances they kept their painful memories to themselves. The exceedingly negative, almost demonising, representation of the wartime Japanese enemy produced a conscious effort to hide as much as possible all signs of Japanese–Indisch descent. The children’s Japanese–Indisch descent appears to have been under a lifelong taboo. Parents are the first who can be held responsible for this. Their fathers disappeared from their lives and hardly anybody ever heard from them again. It might be possible that some of the men did not even know they had fathered a child. And even if they did, in post-war Japan the desire to deny and distort the realities of wartime made it difficult to acknowledge they might be the father of a child born abroad. For the mothers, the story was completely different, as their children were the lifelong evidence of their war experience. Still, even though Japanese traits were visible, they also insisted on covering up the Japanese origin of their children by deliberately silencing and hiding it. This tendency can be seen as yet another survival strategy. Most of them simply could not cope with the social pressure around them, because shame was an important factor as well as the fear of being rejected. Women who engaged in a relationship with the enemy were judged negatively by society at large. The children, meanwhile, are still searching for what their mothers tried to hide since their birth. Many mothers take their secrets and histories with them to their graves. Hiding and, at the same time, seeking their Japanese roots seems to be a lifelong contradiction for many Japanese–Indisch descendants. Originally they were forced into such a shadowy position by their mothers, but later they continued it themselves. For the children I interviewed, denial of their identity and the fact that they had to live with a secret turned out to be the main problem. In the complicated stories, the racial element seems a central factor. The fact that their fathers were part of the Japanese military, which had brutally occupied the Netherlands East Indies, makes the life stories of Japanese–Indisch descendants controversial to this very day.

Notes All information from life stories stem from the anonymous interview collection gathered by the author. 1 Life story 1, Ɋ (female) born 1945, Indisch mother already married and father Japanese civil engineer. 2 Life story 2, Ɋ born 1945 single Indisch mother and father in the Japanese army.


3 De Jong mentioned a few hundred children at most. L. De Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog 11b, tweede helft (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), p. 905. The figure of 800 is mentioned in Sakura (1997) Bulletin 3. In the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad of 30 June 1995, the number of 8,000 was mentioned. 4 Interest in ‘comfort women’ is recent as well. It dates from the early 1990s, when some dared to make their stories public and tried to get recognition, compensation and apologies. See George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Sex Slaves of the Japanese Imperial Forces (London: Souvenir Press, 1995); Brigitte Ars, Troostmeisjes: verkrachting in naam van de Keizer (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2000); Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 31. 5 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941–1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 409. 6 See L. De Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society: The Dutch in Indonesia during the Second World War (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), ch. VI, pp. 509–42, ‘Dutch Eurasians under pressure’. 7 Of the fourteen interviewees, eight were related. I spoke to a mother and her daughter; a mother and her son; an aunt and her nephew; an uncle and his niece. 8 The Japanese did not consider Eurasians as enemies but Eurasians were loyal to and legally belonged to the European group. The Japanese tried hard to win them over. De Jong, The Collapse of a Colonial Society, pp. 509–42. 9 Life story 14, Ɋ born 1945, single Indisch mother and father Japanese civil engineer. 10 The Foundation for the Oral History of Indonesia interviewed 724 individuals who lived in the Netherlands East Indies and Indonesia between the 1930s and 1960s. See Fridus Steijlen, Memories of ‘The East’, Abstracts of the Dutch interviews about the Netherlands East Indies, Indonesia and New Guinea (1930–1962) in the Oral History Project Collection (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002). 11 Life story 13, Ɋ, mother born 1919. This mother was very open about her love affair with a Japanese man of her own age. 12 Although it is unclear why so many moderate opinions appear in the interviews, one reason might be the long period of time that elapsed between the events and the interviews. 13 The so-called ‘trans-generational trauma’ that could result from this is an often described phenomenon. See Jolande Withuis, Erkenning. Van oorlogstrauma naar klaagcultuur (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2002), p. 63, passim. 14 One reason for this limited number is believed to be the feeling of shame that these children still experience. Even today, there are members who want to receive all information in anonymous covers. 15 Theo Willem van Redde and Arjan Onderdenwijngaard, Een draad van angst. Over Japanse vrouwenkampen op Java en het leven daarna (The Hague: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1984). 16 See for example: Algemeen Dagblad, 29 January 1992; Trouw, 4 July 1995; De Volkskrant, 4 May 1996; and Gelderse Courant/Arnhemse Courant, 4 May 1996. 17 The Pasar Malam Besar is the largest Eurasian festival in the world, held in The Hague every summer since 1958. 18 Life story 1, Ɋ born 1945, Indisch mother already married and father a Japanese civil engineer. 19 Pakhan, Ik ben anders. Een kind van de vijand (s.l.: Gigaboek, 2003). Pakhan, Spoorloos . . . of toch niet, (s.l.: Gigaboek, 2006). In this Dutch book the Dutch husband of a Japanese–Indisch woman anonymously describes his wife’s biography. An important reason was making public a personal history of Japanese–Indisch descendants.

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20 De Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog 11b, tweede helft, p. 612, quoting Mr C. Binnerts (my translation). Binnerts was a totok (fullblooded) Dutch. Most Eurasian inhabitants of the Indies considered the Indies their fatherland. 21 See John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 22 M. Diederichs, Wie geschoren wordt moet stil zitten. De omgang van Nederlandse meisjes met Duitse militairen (Amsterdam: Boom, 2006). 23 See for example SMGI interview number 1460.1 (07), (08); 1151.1 (06), (12); 1165.1 (12); 1203.2 (08). 24 D. van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen voor Burgers gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Groningen: Wolters. 1963). Van Velden based her information on Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946). 25 J. H. de Haas & J. Hermana-Posthuma, ‘Nederlandsche kinderen in Japansche interneeringskampen op Java’, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, Jaargang 90. No. 42. Zaterdag 26 October 1946, 1530–41. 26 See for example: Jeroen Kemperman, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Buiten de kampen (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002), pp. 231–49. This mentions the birth of many half-Japanese children in Semarang. 27 See chapter 14 in Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken. Vrouwenkamp Ambarawa 6 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2001). 28 See Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, pp. 440, 277–9; De Jong, Het koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog 11b, eerste helft, pp. 321–2; and pp. 796–800. 29 See: Barnouw N. D. J. et al., Vijfde jaarboek van het Rijksinstituut voor oorlogsdocumentatie (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994); Poelgeest, B. van. ‘Gedwongen prostitutie tijdens de Japanse bezetting’ in: W. Willems en J. de Moor, Het einde van Indië. Indische Nederlanders tijdens de Japanse bezetting en de dekolonisatie (Den Haag: SDU, 1995). 30 See for example: Hans Meijer, In Indië geworteld. De Twintigste Eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2004), p. 229. 31 Life story 5, ɉ born 1945, single Indisch mother and father Japanese military. 32 Withuis, Erkenning, pp. 99–123. 33 Esther Captain, Achter het kawat was Nederland. Indische oorlogservaringen en – herinneringen 1942–1995 (Kampen: Kok, 2002), pp. 166–211, 338, 343. 34 Life story 3, Ɋ born 1946, married Indisch mother. She has no information on her Japanese father. 35 Interview with Joan van der Vet, daughter of an Indisch mother and a Japanese civil engineer, in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad 28 August 1995. 36 Life story 2, Ɋ born 1945, single Indisch mother and father Japanese military. 37 For an excellent analysis on racism and the Pacific War see Dower, War Without Mercy. 38 It is unclear what the precise family relations with this man were since it was common practice to call relatives as well as parent’s friends ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’. 39 Life story 1, Ɋ born 1945, Indisch mother already married and father a Japanese civil engineer. 40 Life story 4,ɉ born 1946, single Indisch mother and father a Japanese civil engineer. 41 Life story 4, ɉ born 1946, single Indisch mother and father a Japanese civil engineer. 42 The DVD made by Marcel Reijnst for JIN consists of a compilation of interviews with nine JIN members broadcasted on Dutch and Japanese TV. 43 Life story 4, ɉ born 1946, single Indisch mother and father a Japanese civil engineer. 44 Life story 7, mother born 1928.


45 Life story 13, mother born 1919. 46 Life story 1, Ɋ born 1945, Indisch mother already married and father a Japanese civil engineer. 47 Mother in an interview with the Dutch magazine Hervormd Nederland, 25 January 1992. 48 Life story 1, Ɋ born 1945, Indisch mother already married and father Japanese civil engineer. 49 Mr Dr L. F. Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis. Dagboek van Mr Dr L. F. Jansen, Batavia/Djakarta 1942–1945. Bewerkt en geannoteerd door Dr G. J. Knaap (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 1988), p. 21. 50 See for example SMGI interview 1551.1 (03) where the interviewee recalls that a Japanese soldier who had been caught with a European women was hanged as punishment. Of course it is not clear whether the relationship was the only reason for this punishment. See also Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, p. 28. 51 Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, p. 28. Also inside internment camps regulations stated that contact between Japanese military and internees was not allowed. See Van Velden De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 125. 52 For almost unbearable accounts of such military sexual captivity, see George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Sex Slaves of the Japanese Imperial Forces (London: Souvenir Press, 1995), especially p. xii, describing the brutal abduction of Malayan Chinese ‘Madam X’; and the oral history accounts of Koreans in Keith Howard (ed), True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (London: Cassell, 1995). 53 Personal conversation with Mr Oba, May 2005. 54 Interview with Mrs R., The Hague, 2003. 55 Life story 11, sister born in 1933 of mixed-Japanese–Indisch child. 56 Interview in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, 29 January 1992. 57 Interview in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, 4 July 1995. 58 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 47. 59 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 8.

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16 The Dutch community in Thailand, 1945–46 Arno Ooms

A people forgotten Within the body of English literature on the Pacific War and the Thailand– Burma Railway, the Dutch are largely absent. As a result of the way the POW camps were organised, with national groups under their own commanders in their own barracks, there was never much contact between the 686 Americans, 13,304 Australians, 30,131 British and 17,990 Dutch in Thailand.1 Even when Australian and British POWs met the Dutch a large portion of them were not recognised as such. Simply put there were two main groups of Dutch POWs: those born and raised in the Netherlands; and those born and raised in the NEI. The majority of the Dutch POWs in Thailand fell into the latter group, and many had one or more Asian ancestors. Due to different colonial practices many English-speaking POWs did not consider these men to be Dutch but described them as Javanese, Indonesian, Black Dutch or Eurasian. In addition there are only four English-language accounts, to the best of my knowledge, by Dutch ex-POWs.2 This lack of Englishlanguage material by or about Dutch POWs results in the experiences of the British, Australian and American POWs seeming to represent the experiences of all POWs. There is of course a large overlap between British and Australian experiences on the one hand, and the Dutch experiences on the other, but there are also areas of difference. For example, after the Thailand–Burma Railway was finished in late 1943, POWs were transported to base camps in Thailand where the Japanese selected large groups for work in Japan. Based on AngloAustralian memoirs, these selections were solely based on health.3 But when Dutch experiences are included, it becomes clear that another criterion was skin colour.4 Similarly, it has for a long time been common knowledge that there were no successful escapes from the POW camps in Thailand and Burma (Britons Jim Bradley and R. A. S. Pagani both escaped but were recaptured5), because white Europeans stand out too much in Thailand. Incorporating Dutch sources results in a very different picture, with escaped Dutch hiding as monks, farmers, and gold sellers at the marketplace. One even ended up as a gardener at the Kempeitei Headquarters in Bangkok. The fact they could pass for Thai even fooled the fellow Dutch they had known in the POW camps:

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Phra Kanong, Bangkok. 28 March 1945. Yesterday we experienced something amazing. A couple of Thai were looking at us while we were unloading in the harbour. One of them shuffled closer and closer. Then, when the Japs weren’t around he suddenly said in fluent Dutch ‘Boys, I’m so glad to see you here’ Unbelievable! It is Blans!6 He ran away in 1943. . . . And he did it! It is of course lucky for him that he is a relatively dark ‘Indo boy’7 so he doesn’t stick out here. He has been married to a Thai for a year and wants to stay here after the war. His father-in-law has a textile shop in Bangkok.8 The ways in which the Dutch POW experience regarding appearance, escapes, being used to a rice diet, or the ability to find food or medicine they recognised from home in the Thai and Burmese jungles differed from that of the British and Australians will not be examined further. But, taking the experiences of Australian and British POWs as the norm for all POWs also has consequences for the way the immediate post-war period is viewed. Because British and Australian ex-POWs were repatriated from Thailand and other countries in September and October 1945 – the few Americans had already left in August – the conclusion is that all POWs were home by November.9 Instead, as will be explained below, while their fellow ex-POWs went home, more than 10,000 Dutch survivors were kept waiting in Thailand for the remainder of 1945. They were even joined by 4,000 women and children evacuated from Java. The first large group of Dutch ex-POWs to leave Thailand did so only in February 1946.10 Instead of going home, these Gadjah Merah11 battalions joined the fighting in the NEI, landing in Bali in early March 1946. Repatriation only started in April 1946 and it wasn’t until late November that the Dutch presence in Thailand became so small that the Dutch Headquarters in Bangkok was closed. This article will focus on the Dutch community that existed in Thailand until November 1946.

The politics of surrender On 15 August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army surrendered to an absent victor. Permission to land and accept local surrenders was denied by General Douglas MacArthur, the American Supreme Allied Commander for the Pacific, until the official surrender had been signed. It would take until 3 September 1945 before the invisible victor made its first appearance.12 Since 1943, the Pacific War theatre had been divided into two parts: the British South East Asia Command (SEAC), under Lord Louis Mountbatten, and the American South West Pacific Area (SWPA) under MacArthur. At the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, it was decided to redraw these boundaries, mainly because America saw the liberation of European colonies by American troops as politically inconvenient.13 Originally SEAC comprised Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore and Sumatra, but the area almost doubled in

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size with the inclusion of French Indochina below the 16º North parallel and the remaining islands of the NEI.14 The objectives remained the same: locating, liberating and repatriating POWs and internees; locating, disarming and repatriating the Japanese; and lastly, to ‘establish and maintain peaceful conditions preparatory to handing over the territories to their respective civil governments.’15 The number of British troops available to perform these tasks in an area doubled in size had actually dwindled under the influence of public opinion in England. SEAC was left heavily reliant on troops from India, which was itself rapidly moving towards independence. Combined with British political priorities, this resulted in a strategy that identified key regional areas to be occupied, secured and then used as staging areas for the incoming army and the outgoing ex-POWs. In order of priority, Singapore and Malaya (British colonies) were the most important areas, followed by French Indochina (the location of the Japanese Army Headquarters), then Thailand (a former Japanese ally). The NEI came last, even after Hong Kong where ‘it was felt essential to have the Japanese surrender accepted by British rather than Chinese or American forces if the British claim to sovereignty was to be reestablished’.16 The Dutch felt the same regarding the NEI, but their efforts to at least arrange a simultaneous arrival of Dutch and British troops were unsuccessful. Fit, trained Dutch troops were hardly available in either Asia or Europe, and what was available, in the Netherlands and Thailand, could not be transported due to ‘the Allied unwillingness to release Dutch shipping from the pool in which it had been placed for the duration of the war’.17 While Dutch ex-POWs waited in Thailand because there were no ships for them, many British ex-POWs came home on Dutch ships.18

A new war in the Netherlands East Indies The Japanese surrender combined with the absence of a victorious army caused a power vacuum that the Indonesian nationalists seized upon. By declaring independence on 17 August 1945. In the days following, large caches of Japanese weaponry were seized and the nationalists took control over the larger part of Java. The movement was seen at that time as ineffective by the British and Dutch authorities and no plans were made to push the arrival of the Allied Army forward. On 8 September a small advance party of seven officers landed in Batavia followed a week later by the 5th Cruiser Squadron, which had aboard a RAPWI team but no troops to secure the island.19 When Dutch first left their old camps on Java, meanwhile, ‘there wasn’t any sign of aversion against the Dutch’, as a Dutch ex-POW observed in late August: On the road we saw no sign of a hostile attitude among the population. A week later . . . I first noticed the signs of a people’s movement. There


were red and white flags on every house and almost all Indonesians on the street wore red and white pins. Still, nobody bothered the Europeans who became more and more visible on the street and the Javanese were just as friendly as before the war.20 For most Dutch the Japanese surrender had meant the end of a nightmare, a return to peace and order. Most Indonesians on the other hand had gotten used to the Dutch being absent in daily life, and some saw the actions of the returning Dutch as a prelude to the return of Dutch colonial rule. In the absence of Allied troops, it didn’t take long before extremists took over and the streets to become unsafe. Kidnapping, rape, torture and murder became rampant. Just 2 days after the arrival of the taskforce in Batavia, ‘two Japanese guards were killed defending European women and children housed at the nearby Tjideng internment camp’.21 The people who have been outside meet Indonesians with bamboo-spears and knives, little eleven-year-old boys carry guns; people are murdered in their own houses, on the streets betja’s [bicycle cabs] transporting Europeans are stopped and the European is dragged out. Most of the time he does not survive.22 For their safety, more and more people returned to the camps they had just left, where they were joined by those Dutch Eurasians who had been lucky enough not to have been interned during the war, but who, by now, were seen as pro-Dutch by extremist nationalists.23 The first large contingent of British troops arrived on 29 September and immediately started securing Batavia.24 Almost a month later, they came to Surabaya, a nationalist stronghold with many ex-internees and ex-POWs. When they tried to concentrate Dutch women and children into neighbourhoods or camps that could more easily be protected, all hell broke loose. A convoy of lorries containing [400]25 Dutch women and children was attacked by terrorist gangs: most of them were killed and the remainder abducted. Fighting then broke out. Mobs, armed with swords and spears, attacked Allied defence positions; and where they drew our fire, better-armed and trained elements (who had been sniping from the surrounding buildings) would emerge and attack. Outlying units of our forces were isolated; some were over-run, but others managed to make their way back to the dockyard area.26 In the days following, heavy fighting broke out involving thousands of combatants. British ships started shelling Surabaya and tens of thousands of Indonesians fled the city. Repercussions were imminent and inside the camps became just as unsafe as outside.

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Arno Ooms [Ambarawa] 22 November was terrible. Gurkha troops were coming from Magelang. Before they arrived sixty armed Javanese forced themselves into the camp. They chased all women out of the barracks . . . into the courtyard. If they raised their hands nothing would happen. But then they threw hand grenades into the group and shot with pistols and revolvers. There were little katjongs [boys], a gun in each hand. . . . Around seven o’clock the Gurkhas arrived and the Javanese fled. All the dead and wounded were immediately brought here. Horrible! There were eighteen dead and many wounded. This morning more died. This morning, the 23rd around half seven there was a direct hit on barrack nine. Six people wounded, a little girl of eight years old died later on the day. At this moment, while I’m writing, they are shooting again. Bombs are flying over the roof. Gurkhas are trying to destroy the kampong [village] behind us that is used to shoot at us. Electricity and water have been cut off for the last four days. Hopefully we get wells for drinking and bathing water. This afternoon we buried six dead outside the camp under heavy fire: a little four year old girl from camp eight; a girl of nine years old from our camp; an eighteen year old girl who was a good friend of mine; a girl of twenty-two from camp eight; a thirty-three years old lady whose face I’ve forgotten, and a twenty year old boy.27

Large areas in west Java had by now become so dangerous that the decision was made to evacuate people to safer zones outside Java. Between 1 November 1945 and 1 February 1946 large groups left for the Netherlands, while more than 15,000 were evacuated to Celebes, Borneo, Ceylon and Singapore.28 Thailand, where 10,000 Dutch ex-POWs were threatening revolt if they weren’t allowed to go home soon, was not on the list of destinations at first. At that time Dutch authorities still assumed that the Dutch ex-POWs would be leaving Thailand within weeks. But in the first week of December the Dutch in Thailand suddenly received orders to start preparations for the imminent arrival of 4,000 evacuees from the NEI.29

Waiting in Thailand Immediately after the Japanese surrender, Thailand had disassociated itself from the alliance with Japan into which it had entered in December 1941, and had announced the declarations of war against Britain and America of January 1942 to be unconstitutional. A day later, it let the American and British governments know it would: direct the Thai police and military forces to assist the Allies to disarm the Japanese in Thailand, to provide special care for the Allied prisoners of war until their repatriation, and to accept responsibility for damage done to Allied property in Thailand during the war.30


Thus, when a 1,250-man strong advance party of the British 7th Indian Division arrived on 3 September 1945,31 they found 113,000 Japanese troops mostly confined to their barracks (although still under arms).32 The few American ex-POWs had already been repatriated and the other survivors were mostly celebrating their new-found freedom with each other and the Thai. A small number were already in hospital with alcohol poisoning or syphilis. British troop dispositions thus speak volumes about their priorities. Contrast the rushng of 1,250 troops to Singapore and Malaya, both relatively peaceful lands, by 3 September, with the late arrival of troops in the Netherlands Indies on 29 September. Yet in the latter nationalists had declared a Republic on 17 August, and were on the brink of armed revolution. To be fair, it also says a lot about the Dutch failure to understand the realities of the new situation in the NEI: a combination of ‘ignorance and self-delusion’.33 The weak position of the Dutch, illustrated by the British and American refusal to release Dutch ships, had enormous consequences for the Dutch ex-POWS in Thailand. In August, the Americans repatriated their POWs by plane, and then the British got their own out in September before they started to repatriate the Australians in October. By this time, the first stories of ‘Dutch women being cut to pieces by Java Nationalists’34 started to become known and the Dutch realised they were left behind. 26 September. There is an uprising on Java but we are kept here doing nothing. We can’t leave; there are no ships, only the English and the Aussies are leaving by ship or plane. And again we are the little Dutch who have to swallow it all.35 When the Dutch finally got their ships back they still couldn’t be used to repatriate Dutch ex-POWs to Java. SEAC would not allow the Dutch to land troops on Java fearing that this would be seen as a provocation by the nationalists; which might not only endanger the lives of British, troops but also those of the thousands of internees still in nationalist controlled areas. Despite the impotence of the Dutch Government in these matters, or the justified concerns of SEAC, the Dutch ex-POWs in Thailand only knew they were still living in old POW barracks while their families were under threat. A revolt was only averted when news about the imminent arrival of the Java evacuees became known. 11 October. The situation on Java is getting worse and worse, women and children are in danger. We are cursing the government. 20 November. A delegation went to see the camp commander and said that if we haven’t gone home by Christmastime there would be no need for decorations, the barracks would burn instead. A company here [Tha Muang] laid down its arms; a Marine company in Petchaburi did the same. . . . English troops have been sent to Java to protect the women and children but the news we get is that they spent more time flirting with our women and destroy many marriages. 10 December. There’s news: four thousand women and children are coming, finally. Everyone hopes his family will be among them.36

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From Java to Bangkok Although some communication had been possible during the war it was only after the Japanese surrender that people heard if their family members were still alive and where they were located. Shortly after we’d heard we were free we received two telegrams from father so we knew he was still alive and healthy. We heard he was in Thailand. Annie’s father was there as well, Nel’s father had died and Tot’s father was in Bandung.37 For most of us the most exciting time of the war had arrived, waiting for news about the men. Messages concerning someone’s death kept arriving [. . .] My husband had sent his first letter to our old address and it only reached me after many wanderings around half October. Luckily the Thailand lists arrived on 28 September and he was listed. I now knew he was still alive but had no further knowledge concerning his state of health.38 Numerous mistakes were made regarding these ‘Thailand lists’ but it should be kept in mind that almost the complete Dutch administration in Southeast Asia was made up of released POWs and internees. Lists with names of the deceased were published in Batavia around the end of September. Carefully they told [my wife] when and where I had died. Registration number, date of birth, profession, everything was correct! Three days later [she] received my first letter which I had posted more than a month before.39 Still, most evacuees knew where their loved ones were and were transported accordingly, although again mistakes were made as one family whose father was working in Bangkok ended up in, for example, Ceylon.40 On the eve of 20 December, two ships arrived in Bangkok: the Lake Charles Victory, which left from Semarang on 16 December with 1,507 people, and the Staffordshire from Batavia which had left on 13 December with 1,263 people. The people aboard the Staffordshire disembarked the next day but those on the Lake Charles Victory had to wait for two more days. Lastly on 1 January 1946 the Amhurst Victory, also from Semarang, arrived with 1,227 people – not seen as Dutch by the British but labelled ‘Inhabitants Friendly To Us’ instead.41 But no matter their origin, there was one thing the evacuees had in common: they finally felt safe again, although in some cases this was coupled with anxiety. It was such a relief. To be relieved from all of this misery, of the terrorists. And to be able to build a new future. But most importantly: I would finally see my father again. Reunion awaiting with loved ones – our ‘men’.


Fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers. How would we find them, though, and how would they find us, after four years of separation?42 Not only was it not known in what shape their loved ones were – news about the horrors of the camps in Burma and Thailand had spread by now – it was also unknown how the children, especially the younger ones, would react to their fathers as ‘there are many women here with small children that were born after the Dutch surrender of 1942, they’re now around three years old, but have never seen their father’.43 Another common theme is the quality and quantity of the food aboard. ‘White bread, butter, fruit, desserts, and milk’, Catherine van Rinsum, 14 years old at that time, fondly remembers. Good food however was not only a treat but a necessity in many cases. ‘Many women and girls still had nasty wounds on their legs and feet and there were many with swollen legs and bellies suffering from hunger oedema.’44 Still, despite feeling safe, well-fed and about to be reunited with loved ones after almost 4 years of separation, the 4-day journey to Thailand must have been a trying one. To say that the ships were not very suitable for transportation of hundreds of civilians would be an understatement. From my ‘luxury’ seat, five hammocks high, where I sit sweating like an otter, I have a good view over a sea of beds containing small and larger

Figure 16.1 Sleeping arrangements on an evacuation ship. Source: NIOD 48940.

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Arno Ooms children, playing, sleeping or fighting; ladies in brassieres and knickers; ladies in nightgowns or men’s pyjama’s. Everywhere lights are burning, the white ones very brightly, the red ones a bit dimmed. People shuffle through the small corridors between the bunks, flattening themselves to enable others to pass. A mother reprimands her daughter, another combs her hair – although the wind on deck will mess it up again. Everywhere there are packets of biscuits, mugs, or shoes lying around. Laundry is trying to dry between and above the beds and over the collar beams – if you can call the air vents which are stuck to the ceiling ‘collar beams’.45 Behind the sleeping and dining rooms there is the ‘troop-washroom’ a.k.a. toilet. The stench is overwhelming and I try to avoid going there during the day. Some stairs up there is a similar row with showers. There are two corridors with small cubicles on both sides without doors. In each salt water is running and you can barely stand up. I hang a blue overcoat in front as a door so I feel a bit safer. There are women here who aren’t bothered by anything but I don’t like it if older boys walk past and try to sneak a peek.46

Experiences differed though: In the camps we have already learned a lot in this aspect and now we set aside all ideas of primness. A bath is a bath, whether in a luxurious bathroom or in a ten people row under a shower with no doors.47 Living in internment camps for 3 1/2 years had fostered a survival mentality and many of the evacuees helped themselves to articles from the ships inventory. The purser of the Staffordshire drew up the following list: ‘Government and Owners Stores not returned . . .: ten seamen’s beds, twelve hammocks, 124 blankets, eighty-six soup plates, 101 dinner plates, 213 drinking mugs, four hundred dessert spoons, fifteen soup ladles, four meat dishes, and twenty-four tea cloths.’48 Although, as said, the majority of the evacuees hadn’t eaten this well for a long time, now felt safe, and had started to collect various necessities, the first view of the Thai coast came as a release, almost immediately followed by feelings of insecurity. Many women did not know where their husbands were, where they themselves were to go to, or even when they were going. I still haven’t been able to find out if the passenger lists are known in Bangkok. It seems as if they are sending the lists to shore with the first party, so there is a large chance my husband won’t be there to pick me up.49 This chaos was not confined to the arriving evacuees though. Ten of our men are coming aboard with the lists of the men in Thailand. Of course they first look for their own wives. Not all are lucky. One


hears that his wife is living together with an Englishman; another has to hear that his wife was one of the last victims in Ambarawa.50 Although not frequent, these stories are not exceptional either. Apart from joyous reunions, there were also instances of marriages breaking up. Sometimes adultery was cited as the reason, at other times they had simply grown apart, irrevocably changed by POW and internment camps. A dangerous game had been played by the men in the camps with many losers. They told each other stories about ‘home’. And ‘home’ became a paradise compared with the hell in which we lived. A paradise complete with angels. . . . And what you tell are not the stories about the fights, the problems or the disagreements. . . . Only about beautiful people, beautiful things and beautiful memories. But not about the bag of bones, the pale, malnourished, sexless creature that steps of the boat with the fear still in her eyes. The women also did not find the same men from which they were parted many years ago. It is said years in the tropics count double, but tropical prisoner-of-war-years can’t be counted. . . . The women in the camps had had their children to fight for. The men had only been thinking about themselves. . . . We at the Military Mission were surprised by this. Embittered and disappointed women. . . . Men who disappeared after their first reunion; men who disappeared even before the first meeting. Who saw their wives disembark and fled back to their Siamese sweethearts in panic.51 Still, many married couples were reunited and, later on, some of the men and women thus divorced married each other. In my school class at Nakhon Pathom I knew children who had come to Thailand with an aunt, to go to their father who was somewhere in Bangkok. . . . Women who watched over children who were without mothers, sometimes they were widows themselves, and who later married the man whose children she had watched over.52 Until 10 September 1946, seventy marriages between Dutch had been performed in Thailand, together with 418 marriages between Dutchmen and Thai women.53

Accommodation After entering Bangkok in December 1941, the Japanese took over the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, Lumpini Park, Don Muang airfield, the National Stadium and the Chulalongkorn University campus and turned these into military camps.54 While adequate for soldiers, other accommodation was

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Map 16.1 Bangkok in 1945. Map handed out to ex-POWs and internees in 1945. Source: Collection of Arno Ooms.


sought for staff officers in hotels like the Trocadero, the Europe, the Thailand and the Oriental, and various villas on Silom, Sathorn, Phyathai or Suriwong. What the Japanese had taken over from the Europeans in December 1941, the Allies took back again in September 1945.55 The Allied Headquarters, for example, was located on the grounds of the Vajiravudh Collage. By the time the Dutch started to arrange accommodation for the evacuees, more than half of them were still living in slightly upgraded POW barracks in Tha Muang, Nakhon Pathom, Ubon Ratchathani, Nakhon Nayok or Prachinburi. Some 1,200 underwent training in Tha Muang and Chonburi as part of the newly formed Gadjah Merah battalions that were supposed to land on Java in November, but were refused permission by SEAC. Three thousand were housed in Bangkok, where pre-war differences between officers and men resurfaced almost immediately. I was in a jungle camp near Kanchanaburi at the end of August but was moved to Kanchanaburi in September. Because I was a Marine I knew about protocol and the Oriental Hotel needed somebody to hoist and lower the flag. They were actually looking for fit men to function as guards but they choose me because of my knowledge. After a while the officers wanted to move me to the Sports Club because I didn’t belong in the Oriental, but the commander resisted because I was the only one who could properly raise and lower the flag.56 The news regarding the impending arrival of the evacuees arrived late and there were only 2 weeks to prepare for their arrival. At first it was thought to house all evacuees in Bangkok57 and officers vacated the Trocadero and the Oriental and moved to Tha Muang. But the Oriental could only house fortytwo families, and even this could only be achieved by adding beds to every room, while the Trocadero wasn’t much bigger with six people to a room.58 Other locations were needed. During 1944, Bangkok had suffered so many bombing raids that an estimated 60 per cent of the population had fled the city.59 In December 1944, the city decided that ‘[i]n view of the intensified air attacks on Bangkok and Thonburi all schools, including the universities, which are now closed for the mid-year vacation, will remain closed indefinitely’.60 It was these empty schools, a number of which where already used by the Allied Land Force, that the Dutch turned to. For example, the Ban Somdet College on the Thonburi side of the Cha Phraya was first used to imprison Japanese officers. On 24 October 1945 the Dutch requested: that the beds stored at the college may be used for ex-POWs. We understand that the above mentioned college will be the place where the Japanese field-officers will be concentrated so that the beds will not be needed for that purpose.

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Permission was received, ex-POWs in the National Stadium started sleeping on beds while the Japanese in Ban Somdet got used to the floor, and then the evacuees arrived. We brought fifty-five beds to our supply depot and ninety-two beds (of which three incomplete) to the National Stadium. Now that the School partly has been occupied by refugees from Java, we have brought these beds back to this school.61 Ban Somdet College, known to the Dutch as Irene camp,62 housed 248 people in February 1946, with an elementary school for approximately 100 children.63 The nearby Sueksanari School housed ninety-seven people in February and was known as Margriet Camp. Another school used by the Dutch was the old Japanese school on Soi Sap – between Siphraya and Silom – where in February the Oranje Instituut [Orange Institute] was opened – an elementary and a high school with almost 300 students attending that also functioned as a boarding school for approximately 50 children. These were mainly children whose fathers were employed in places without schools. For example Margaret Warmenhoven, the daughter of Karel Warmenhoven, the officer in charge of the Thailand part of the Railway who lived in Kanchanaburi.64 A last school used in Bangkok was the Uthen Thawai Building and Technical School on Phyathai near Chulalongkorn University, but this was solely in use as a transit camp where people arriving from other cities were collected before boarding ships in the harbour. It closed on 20 November, 1946. Also used to accommodate the evacuees were locations such as the Mater Dei Catholic School or the St Joseph Convent. Those that could afford to sometimes rented private houses.65 Because these hotels and schools did not offer enough room, additional space had to be sought outside Bangkok. As one aspect of the evacuations was family reunion, it was decided to try and accommodate in Bangkok only those women and children whose relatives were stationed in Bangkok as well. The rest were to be housed in the large ex-POW camps in Tha Muang and Nakhon Pathom.66 The situation there was markedly different from Bangkok, no luxury hotels and no large schools available, although in Tha Muang an empty school in the nearby village of Ban Wansala was used as Dutch school. Instead, extra accommodation deemed suitable for women and children was created by further upgrading the old barracks to create small private rooms. We were housed in an old men’s camp, the barracks were from gedek [woven bamboo strips] and about two metres above these walls there was an attap [woven banana leaf] roof, the whole of it was very, very noisy. In the middle was a corridor with stamped earth on the floor, left and right of this there were small rooms with a rough wooden floor. The window was a piece of gedek which only remained open if you inserted a piece of


wood. Two bunks of rough wood and some sort of bench-like thing completed the furniture arrangement. Father slept in the neighbouring [Bernard] camp.67 Tha Muang in particular was seen as barely adequate for the accommodation of women and children. Barracks were far apart, sanitation was minimal, the water supply unreliable and ‘during the rainy season [the camp] will undoubtedly be inhabitable due to the mud and the large waterholes in which children can easily drown.’68 Still the camp, which housed approximately 1,000 women and children and had an elementary school with 305 pupils, a high school with 51 students and a kindergarten with 30 toddlers, remained in use until June 1946.69 Accommodation in Nakhon Pathom rated barely higher. Again there was too much distance between barracks and there were problems with water and electricity. Still, it had a better reputation than Tha Muang, mainly because the canteen was a bit better, there was a bit more to do and see in the small city and, very important, it was much closer to Bangkok. Tha Muang remained in use until 7 August 1946. It had an elementary school with 622 children attending in April, with 122 students attending the high school.

Reunion The ships arriving from the NEI anchored at Ko Sichang, opposite Chonburi. There the evacuees were divided into groups, depending on their ultimate destination in Thailand, and transferred to smaller boats which would bring them to the Bangkok harbour. We were transported in flat-bottomed vessels on which about six hundred of us could take place, together with some small luggage. These boats were originally meant to put landing-troops ashore. The trip to the harbour of Bangkok took about four hours. The sea is very shallow there and because of that our ship has to remain far out in sea.70 After about three hours we reach the mouth of the river on whose banks Bangkok lies. We sail upriver and moor at the quay. To our disappointment there are very few men to pick us up because nobody knew we were arriving.71 Some women and children were able to meet their husbands and fathers in the Bangkok harbour. Corry Lieneman was one of those lucky ones. Her father was a civil engineer and worked at the Dutch headquarters in Bangkok. Later he taught mathematics at the Oranje Instituut. Mies Barbilon-Rijke and her husband had to search for each other. She heard he was under observation in the hospital with kidney problems, but when she went there, her husband was on his way to the harbour where he supposed her to be. Around midnight, they found each other in the Irene Camp where she was first quartered. Because she was an accomplished classical

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pianist, she was subsequently assigned to the entertainment unit and housed in the Trocadero Hotel with her husband. Apart from giving recitals in the hotels and camps, she also performed with the Siamese Symphony Orchestra in the Theatre of Silpakorn University. The last concert she gave, a Beethoven recital, took place on 1 June and was attended by His Majesty the King Ananda Mahidol in what may possibly be his last public appearance before his tragic death on 9 June 1946. J. J. Huussen was a high-school English teacher before the war. At first she set up the elementary school in Irene Camp. In late January, she was transferred to the Oranje Instituut where she taught English and ran the girl’s section of the boarding school (for girls between 13 and 21 years of age). Corrie Lieneman’s complete family stayed here as well. Catherine van Rinsum, with her mother, sister and brothers, met her father in Nakhon Pathom although she was the only one he recognised. ‘My brothers were very skinny and he didn’t recognise them, he only saw me and he even pushed them out of the way. “Go away kids, I finally see my daughter.” ’72 Rita Schilling’s father was the commander of Juliana Camp in Nakhon Pathom but only heard about the imminent arrival of his family a few days before. M. J. Dekkers, the postmaster of the Nakhon Pathom camps, only noticed by accident that the letter on top of the pile was from his own wife, telling him that she would arrive the very same day.73

Figure 16.2 The arrival of Dutch evacuees from Java in Bangkok, 20 December 1945. Source: NIOD 49205.


A Dutch community Most of the evacuees had been reunited with their relatives and had somewhat settled down by mid-January 1946. An almost normal lifestyle was resumed. Schools were started. Boy Scout clubs were formed, of which eight groups rallied for demonstrations in Nakhon Pathom on 22 February, followed by a large meeting in Hua Hin in April.74 Designated barracks in Nakhon Pathom and Tha Muang served as canteen, lecture room, cinema or concert hall, and numerous adolescents received their first dance lessons in a barrack on the Thai central plains. The ‘hokey-pokey’ was the popular dance of the Oranje Instituut. A Dutch language newspaper, De Uitkijk, was printed in Bangkok and provided news from home. Performers like Wim Kan and Corry Vonk toured the camps and cities, just as the Atomic Boys, the A-Z Cabaret or the Samethini Band – musical groups using instruments borrowed from the Chinese Chamber of Commerce – sometimes earned extra income by playing the jazz clubs of Bangkok. College professors gave lectures. In Bangkok, lectures and dance parties were first held at the Oriental Hotel, but very soon the Oranje Instituut took over these functions. Bangkok was in this, and most other aspects, a ‘better’ place to be as the city of 1 million offered far more opportunities for sightseeing and leisure than any other city in Thailand. While the children of the Oranje Instituut had weekly excursions to different temples and monuments, the only option available for the youngsters at Nakhon Pathom was the highest temple in Thailand: the Wat Phra Chedi. After they had written their essays on its history, its steps became a favourite, unsupervised, meeting place for young people discovering the opposite sex for the first time after 4 years of sexual segregation in the NEI camps. Some of them, Rita Schilling’s older sister among them, even became engaged. For many of the evacuees the most important aspect of their stay in Thailand was the ability to resume an almost normal life for the first time since March 1942. Most of the men were still a part of the KNIL and were in uniform. Many of the women invested their weekly allowance in clothing or shoes that actually fitted, and many reconnected with fashion by getting their first permanent wave.75 A swimming pool was opened at the Oranje Instituut, people played tennis on the lawns of the YMCA, and a football team composed of ex-POWs reached the finals of the Thailand Soccer League, although the game against the Thai Niyom team was never played ‘owing to the departure of several of the Dutch players for Java’.76 Life in Thailand was, nevertheless, not without risks. January 1946 saw an outbreak of smallpox. Margriet Camp was quarantined for several weeks and a baby in Irene Camp died. Cholera broke out in March: 14 March. We are not allowed to eat ice cream anymore. Cholera has broken out and now the vendor isn’t allowed at the Oranje Instituut.

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Arno Ooms A shame, we were faithful customers. It looked ridiculous when we were all surrounding him sucking on ice cubes on 2 sticks.77

Disease was not the only hazard. High inflation and a scarcity of imported goods caused a crime wave and, in February, Thai newspapers reported that there were ‘about one hundred cases of crimes daily in addition to an unknown number of petty thefts and other minor crimes’, against a ‘normal’ figure of 2,000 to 3,000 a year.78 J. J. Huussen had her camera stolen in the temple compound of Wat Po, and thieves trying to enter the Oranje Instituut in late March were chased away by guards. Crime rates soared, tensions became high, probably too high. Three months later, a Thai was killed trying to steal a towel that was hung out to dry over the fence of the Dutch Mission at Ratchadamri Road.79 Despite the thefts, the prevalence of disease, many people still suffering from deficiency diseases, and accommodation so crowded some people tried to rent privately, life in Thailand was seen as lacking only in one really important aspect: it wasn’t home.

Repatriation The first large Dutch group to leave Thailand was formed by the 1,200 Gadjah Merah members who were shipped to Bali via Singapore on 14 February 1946.80 As a testament to Thai–Dutch relations, four of the men were not about to be separated from their Thai girlfriends and smuggled them aboard in duffle bags: Thai girls aren’t that big so they were put into duffle-bags and carried onto the LST. But then you had to get on board via a rope ladder which meant the duffle-bags were lifted on board with ropes. When a duffle bag with a girl was next we shouted to the boys above ‘barang aloe’ [breakable goods] so they knew next one up was a girl and acted accordingly. They lifted them up very carefully without banging into the wall and then quickly hid them below deck.81 Three women were discovered and forced to disembark in Singapore. The fourth was only discovered when the Gadjah Merah was about to land on a beach in Bali. She and her sweetheart were immediately married by the commander on the same beach.82 British–Dutch relations were less friendly with British Indian cooks refusing to cook for the Dutch ‘colonials’.83 The first priority had been given to the transport of troops to the NEI, and then people from various camps in Southeast Asia started to be repatriated to the Netherlands or back to safe places in the NEI. Those staying in Thailand had by far the lowest priority as, especially when compared to Singapore which had seen heavy fighting and now suffered from rice shortages, it was deemed the best place to be. It was also the least expensive place. To be sure,


Figure 16.3 Members of the Gadjah Merah in Chonburi, 1946. Source: NIOD 53755.

the repatriation of very small groups had already started in March, but it was not until 21 April that the Nieuw-Holland left for the Netherlands with 501 people (6 men, 246 women, 299 children), followed by the Johan de Wit on 2 May with 974 people (90 men, 379 children, 505 children). After this, large transports left for either the Netherlands or the NEI on a monthly basis until the end of August 1946. Small transports were still leaving Bangkok until the end of November. Administratively, these departures were almost as chaotic as the arrival of the evacuees. People could register themselves for ships destined for the Netherlands or the NEI, after which they would have to wait until their names appeared on the shipping lists. But inclusion on these lists did not immediately mean that repatriation was certain, as they were subject to change, either because groups of sick people had to be included or because priorities suddenly changed. Departure dates kept changing as well. The departure of the Nieuw-Holland – first announced for 12 April – was delayed for such a long time that Rita Schilling’s older sister decided to return from Bangkok to Nakhon Pathom to spend some time with her fiancée. The long wait also resulted in many people changing their minds or their destinations, which only added to the chaos. On 13 July 1946, six hundred people (three hundred civilians and three hundred soldiers) destined for Java will depart from Nakhon Pathom to

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Arno Ooms Bangkok. The first two hundred and fifty civilian evacuees will go to the Princess Irene camp, the other fifty to the Transit camp [the Uthen Thawai Technical School on Phyathai]. The soldiers that belong to the same household as these civilians are going to the same camps. The rest of the soldiers will be transferred to the [Royal Bangkok] Sports Club camp.84

Camps started to empty and were closed. Slowly the composition of the remaining camps changed. At first the different groups of women, children and soldiers were big enough to accommodate in separate camps (if they didn’t belong to the same family), but slowly they were housed in the same camp. On 10 June 1946, Thailand housed ‘approximately 3,000 and 400 Dutch destined for the Motherland and about 3,000 destined for the Netherlands East Indies. This last group consists of approximately 2,000 men, mainly soldiers declared unfit, and 1,000 women and children.’85 By August 1946, most Dutch had left, although the Uthen Thawai transit camp remained in use until 20 November, 3 weeks after the last Japanese had been repatriated.86 The Dutch Post-Office, which had a staff of thirty-five and a separate counter at the General Post Office, was closed on 22 November 1946.87 This did not signal the end of the Dutch community in Thailand. Lt Karel Warmenhoven had been rapidly promoted Captain and then Lt Col. at the war’s end, before taking over the Thailand–Burma Railway, in order to give him status with the British. He remained in charge of the railway, and was in Thailand until at least 17 July 1947, when he submitted his last Railway report regarding the valuation of its assets.88 Dozens of Dutch ex-POWs married to Thai women stayed even longer or returned after their demobilisation. At first, many of them worked for Dutch companies such as KLM airline or Shell, where they formed the connecting layer between the Dutch board and the Thai employees. Advancing age, burgeoning families and lack of promotional opportunities – many of them had been unable to finish their education due to the war, while others couldn’t get the hang of the Thai language – saw the majority leave for the Netherlands in the early to mid-1960s. There their wives formed the first large group of immigrants not directly linked to a colonial past. Many eventually returned as pensioners.

Completing the narrative An almost exclusive focus on English-language sources has caused a severe distortion of the narrative of the POW and internee experiences, in which the Dutch seem to have little or no place. The result is the creation of a pervasive mythology: all POWs were white Europeans; no POW was used to a rice diet; and no POW could escape. Within this mythology, there is no place for the vast majority of the Dutch POWs born and raised in the NEI just as there seems to be no place for the members of the Malayan and Singapore Volunteer Forces.


Another consequence of the focus on Anglo-Saxon sources and experiences is that the Pacific War ended for all POWs and internees on 15 August 1945. While this may have been the case for the Americans, Australians and British, the Dutch experience differs markedly. For the Dutch in the Pacific, the Japanese surrender did not signal the expected return to normality. Instead it was but the start of years of evacuations, repatriations and starting anew over and over and over again. While this article has shown the necessity of moving outside national narratives in order to create a more complete picture, it offers no easy solutions. At the present time, Dutch experiences are available but mostly seen through Anglo-Saxon eyes. For the Dutch experience to be finally incorporated in the overall narrative, more material needs to become available for an English speaking public. Either Dutch eye-witnesses and researchers will have to publish their accounts in English, or significant numbers of British and Australian researchers will have to learn another language. The latter, in particular, seems unlikely.

Notes Translations from Dutch and Thai to English by the author. Translations from Japanese to English by Drs Kuniko Forrer of the NIOD. 1 Rod Beattie, The Death Railway. A Brief History (Bangkok: Image Makers & Co, 2005), p. 52. 2 Cornelis B. Evers, Death Railway. The Stirring Account of the Building of the Infamous Burma-Siam Railway and the Lives of the Men Who Died Constructing It. By One Who Survived. Cornelis B. Evers’ Own Story. (Bangkok: self-published, 1993); Cornel Lumière, Kura! (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press Pty. Ltd., 1966); Fred Seiker, Lest We Forget. Life as a Japanese P. O. W. Sketches and Comments (Worcester: Bevere Vivis Gallery Books Limited, 2002 [Second Edition]); Loet Velmans, Long Way Back to the River Kwai. Memories of World War II (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003). 3 Geoffrey Pharaoh Adams, No Time For Geishas (London: Corgi Books, 1974), p. 128. 4 Felix C. Bakker, interview, 29 April 2004. Different explanations are offered regarding the colour selections. One is that having Asian-looking POWs working in Japan would contradict the Japanese war slogan of ‘Asia for the Asians’, although this did not apply to Koreans. Another suggestion is that according to the Japanese people from the NEI weren’t able to stand the cold Japanese winters, and would therefore be ineffective workers. 5 Regarding Roy Anthony Stephen Pagani, Robert Hamond wrote that ‘He has a justified pride in his escapes, especially from the Burma-Siam railway, from which he made the only successful escape’. (Robert Hamond, The Flame of Freedom. Corporal RAS Pagani’s Escape from the Railway of Death (London: Leo Cooper Ltd, 1988), p. 171). Pagani was recaptured in Burma but posed as the pilot of a downed American plane to avoid execution as an escaped POW. For this reason, the name Pagani still appears on the Japanese of escaped POWs (List of POWs escaped and still at large up to 31 July 1945, Siam POW Internment Centre). (NIOD 041.371. Translated by Kuniko Forrer). James Bradley, also recaptured, wrote about himself, ‘There were . . . no survivors of other escapes in South East Asia, and

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therefore this account is of a unique experience’. (James Bradley, Towards the Setting Sun. An Escape from the Thailand-Burma Railway, 1943 (Wellington: J. M. L. Fuller, 1984 second edition), p. xviii). Later he amended this to include Pagani whom he describes as Eurasian, ‘His skin-colour no doubt helped him to elude capture.’ (James Bradley, Towards the Setting Sun, p. xix). Actually Pagani was not Eurasian but half-British and half-French, with an Italian grandfather. Johannes Blans escaped on 7 July 1943. List of POWs escaped and still at large up to 31 July 1945, Siam POW Internment Centre. (NIOD IC 041.371). ‘Indo’ is an abbreviation for Indonesian–European. Mariska Heijmans-van Bruggen, De Japanse Bezetting in Dagboeken. De BirmaSiam Spoorlijn. (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2001), p. 407. See for example Clifford Kinvig, River Kwai Railway. The Story of the BurmaSiam Railroad. (London: Brassey’s Classics, 1992), p. 195. A group of Dutch sailors left Bangkok on HMS Tromp on 30 January 1946. Adriaan Kannegieter Sr, Adriaan Kannegieter maakte in Wereldoorlog II een wereldreis met de kruiser Hr. MS “Sumatra” en werkte als Japans Krijgsgevangene aan de aanleg van de Burma Spoorlijn. (Spijkenisse: Self-Published, 2004, fifth edition), p. 116. Gadjah Merah is Javanese for Red Elephant. Out of gratitude for all the Thais had done for the ex-POWs it was first thought to name the battalion after the Thai national symbol: the White Elephant. Pemission was refused by the Thai authorities, probably because of the royal connotations of white elephants. There was already a White Elephant Group consisting of Thai Force 136 agents. (Andrew Gilchrist, Bangkok Top Secret. Being the Experiences of a British officer in the Siam Country Section of Force 136 (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1970), p. 30). The ex-POWs still opted to link their battalion to Thailand by using the elephant. The elephant (Gadjah) being ‘Red’ (Merah) refers to the blood that was shed, although some say blood shed in Thailand, others in the NEI. The official ceremony was planned for 28 August, but delayed until 2 September due to bad weather in Tokyo Bay. Willy Meelhuijssen, Revolutie in Soerabaja (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), p. 81. Wartime American intelligence officers of OSS described SEAC as ‘Saving England’s Asian Colonies’, Songsri Foran, Thai-British-American Relations during World War II and the Immediate Post-war Period, 1940–1946 (Bangkok: Thai Kadi Research Institute, Thammasat University, 1981), pp. 135, 142. Peter Dennis, Troubled Days of Peace. Mountbatten and South East Asia Command, 1945–46 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 5. Dennis, Troubled Days, p. 80. Dennis, Troubled Days, p. 67. Dennis, Troubled Days, p. 69. Eric Lomax for example returned home via Rangoon on the ‘Johan van Oldebarnevelt, a requisitioned Dutch ship heading for Southampton’, Eric Lomax, The Railway Man (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 203. Dennis, Troubled Days, p. 81. Mary C. van Delden, Bersiap in Bandoeng. Een Onderzoek naar Geweld in de Periode van 17 Augustus 1945 tot 24 Maart 1946. (Kockengen: Van Delden, 1989), p. 92. Andrew Roadnight, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy: Britain, Japanese Troops and the Netherlands East Indies, 1945–1946’, p. 251, History 87:286 (2002), pp. 245–68. David Tett writes that, ‘[The Japanese] lost more men protecting their former prisoners than they had lost in the campaign to capture the [NEI]’. David Tett, A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia During the Second World War. Volume Two: Paradise Lost. Dutch East Indies, 1942–1946 (Herts: BFA Publishing), 2003, p. 353. In total, 562 Japanese-surrendered personnel


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32

33 34 35 36 37 38

died on Java and 244 on Sumatra while performing peace-keeping duties. Kazuo Tamayama, Building the Burma–Thailand Railway. An epic of World War II 1942–43. Tales by Japanese Army Engineers (Tokyo: The World War II Remembrance Group (Sensou Taikenn wo Kiku Kai), 2004), p. 100. Margaretha Ferguson, ‘Op Java’, In: De Bevrijding in de Oost, pp. 63–88. Originally published as ‘Mammie, Ik Ga Dood. Aantekeningen uit de Japanse Tijd op Java 1942–1945. (Den Haag: Uitgeverij Leopold, 1976) Although they held Dutch nationality and legal status the British described them as ‘Inhabitants Friendly To Us’. Roadnight, Sleeping with the Enemy, p. 250. Meelhuijsen, Revolutie, p. 161. Mountbatten of Burma, Post Surrender Tasks. Section E of the Report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. By the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia 1943–1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969), p. 292. Rita Schilling, Verloren Jeugdjaren. 1942–1945 (self-published, 1995), p. 61–63. 2100 evacuees went to Celebes and Borneo, 3800 went to Ceylon, and 10,400 to Singapore (Report KPD and RAPWI, September 1945–March 1, 1946. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Inventaris van het archief van het Commissariaat voor Indische Zaken 2.10.49, folder 103). On 12 November 1945 there were 5312 evacuees and 5277 ex-POWs in Singapore, 2 months later, 16 Januari 1946, there were 9260 evacuees and 6260 ex-POWs. (H. Th. Bussemaker, Bersiap! Opstand in het Paradijs. De Bersiap-periode op Java en Sumatra 1945–1946. (Zutphen: Uitgeverij Walburg Press, 2005), p. 69). Report KPD and RAPWI, September 1945-March 1, 1946. (Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Inventaris van het Archief van het Commissariaat voor Indische Zaken, 2.10.49, folder 103). Foran, Thai-British-American Relations, p. 202. Sonsak Shusawat, Ending the State of War between Thailand and the United Kingdom: International Negotiations and Thai Domestic Politics, 1945–47 (London: SOAS, 1999), p. 243. The 7th Division consisted of three brigades: 33 Indian Infantry Brigade (1 Queens; 4/15 Punjab; 4/1 Gurkha Rifles), 89 Indian Infantry Brigade (1 Sikh; 3/6 Gurkha Rifles; 4/8 Gurkha Rifles), 114 Indian Infantry Brigade (1 Royal Jat; 4/14 Punjab; 4/5 Royal Gurkha Rifles). Rajendra Singh, Postwar Occupation Forces: Japan & South-East Asia (Kanpur: Combined InterServices Historical Section India & Pakistan, 1958), pp. 216–17. According to Cornel Lumière, there were a number of Nisei (American-born Japanese) volunteers from California and Hawaii attached to the Gurkha Battalion that was quartered at Chulalongkorn University opposite the Royal Bangkok Sportsclub. (Cornel Lumière, Kura!, p. 223). Although the Thai had also promised to disarm the Japanese troops ‘the Japanese explained [to Thai Regent Pridi Phanomyong] they could not honour a request that Thai forces be allowed to disarm the Japanese, because this matter had to be negotiated with the Allies’. E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance 1940–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1994), p. 227. The real reason for not disarming was safety concerns. The situation on 14 January 1946 was ‘112,630 Japanese disarmed, leaving approximately 600 to be disarmed on arrival in Nakhon Nayok’. TNA, Kew, FO 371/5462. Dennis, Troubled Days, p. 78. Joseph Albert Eldrige and Padre H. C. Babb, First Reconnaissance of the BurmaSiam Railway (Lytham: James C. Hilton, 1995), p. 121. M. J. Dekkers, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 139. M. J. Dekkers, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 139. E. O. Muller, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 169. Mies Barbilon-Rijke, letters, NIOD IC Dagboeken 126.

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39 Wim Kan and Corry Vonk, Honderd Dagen Uit en Thuis (Utrecht: A. W. Bruna & Zoon, 1963), p. 146. 40 ‘Friday 8 March 1946. Jan Schneider [administrative head of the Oranje Instituut] is incredibly upset because his wife is still in Ceylon, Candy, in a real camp where she finds it hard to endure with three boys. The Dutch government talks a lot about family reunions but over here there are still many families that are separated.’ (J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 89a). 41 J. van Dulm, W. J. Krijgsveld, H. J. Legemaate, H. A. M. Liesker and G. Weijers, Geïllustreerde Atlas van de Japanse Kampen in Nederlands-Indië 1942–1945 Deel II (Supplement) (Zierikzee: Asia Maior, 2002), p. 33. The Staffordshire carried 1263 people – 526 women, 547 children 12 years or younger, and 190 men (boys between 12 and 18 and men older than 55). (De Uitkijk 20 December 1945. NIOD IC T205). 42 Corrie van Werkum-Lieneman, interview, 28 February 2004. 43 M. Barbilon-Rijke, letters, NIOD IC Dagboeken 126. 44 J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 89a. 45 Rita Schilling, diary. 46 J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken89a. 47 Rita Schilling, diary. 48 Nationaal Archief, Ministerie van Defensie, Troepencommando Siam/Nederlandse Militaire Missie Bangkok (1942) 1945–1953, folder 48. 49 Mies Barbilon-Rijke, letter, NIOD IC Dagboeken 126. 50 J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 89a. 51 Henk Gideonse, Het vergeten leger in de jungle. Nederlandse krijgsgevangenen in Birma/Siam. (Amsterdam: De Bataafse Leeuw, 1989), p. 112–13. 52 Catherine van Rinsum, interview, 22 July 2004. 53 On 10 September 1946 there had been 488 Dutch marriages; in 418 cases the bride was Thai. 347 Thai women had been repatriated with their husbands to the Netherlands Indies, 19 to the Netherlands, 29 had refused to leave Thailand and 23 women were awaiting repatriation together with their husbands. (Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Inventaris van het Archief van het Commissariaat voor Indische Zaken, 2.10.49, folder 103). 54 Songsri Foran, Thai-British-American Relations during World War II and the Immediate Post-war Period, 1940–1946 (Bangkok: Thai Kadi Research Insititute, Thammasat University, 1981), p. 83. 55 See for example Gerald Sparrow, Land of the Moonflower (London: Elek Books, 1955), pp. 103–9. 56 Willy Thamm, Interview, 4 March 2004. 57 Help to remaining POWs. (National Archives of Thailand, Inventory of Documents of the High Command Military HQ, folder 3.7/2). 58 Mies Barbilon-Rijke, letters, NIOD IC Dagboeken 126. 59 1907 bombers, 1306 deaths, 752 heavily wounded. Total damages amounted to 28,376,157 baht. Thamsook Numnonda, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 1941–1945 (Singapore: ISEAS, 1977), p. 51. 60 Bangkok Chronicle, 7 December 1944. (National Library of Thailand, Micro-film Department, 30/489). 61 Help to remaining POWs (National Archives of Thailand, Inventory of Documents of the High Command Military HQ, folder 3.7/2) and Reports regarding the use of Ban Somdet and Suksanari (National Archives of Thailand, Inventory of Documents of the High Command Military HQ, folder 3.7/13). 62 Many of the camps used to accommodate Dutch evacuees in Thailand or Singapore were named after members of the Dutch Royal family. Thus camps for women – the euphemism dorp (‘village’) was often used – were named after the Queens Emma and Wilhelmina, or the Princesses Juliana, Beatrix, Irene or Margriet. A men’s camp at Nakhon Pathom was named after Juliana’s husband Bernard.


63 The Irene-camp at the Ban Somdet College was closed on 10 May 1946, but a new camp with a similar name, the Prinsessekamp [Princess’ Camp] was opened in a Thai military compound near Bang Sue Road. ‘It is located at the outskirts, surrounded by fields, which is ideal for the children.’ (J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 89a). 64 Even though suffering from malaria and had a 39 degree fever, Margaret Warmenhoven was one of six students who passed high school exams in June 1946 – 3 at Nakhon Pathom and 3 at the Oranje Instituut. (J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 89a; De Uitkijk, 25 June 1946 (NIOD IC T205), De Uitkijk 27 June 1946) (NIOD IC T205). 65 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Inventaris van het Archief van het Commissariaat voor Indische Zaken, 2.10.49, folder 103. Sjoerd Wiersma and his Thai wife rented a house in the neighborhood above Victory monument. (Sjoerd Wiersma, interview, 23 December 2004). 66 About 80% of evacuees were reunited husbands and/or fathers. The Netherlands Community in Siam. (Nationaal Archief, Ministerie van Defensie, Troepencommando Siam/Nederlandse Militaire Missie Bangkok (1942) 1945–1953, folder 59). 67 E. O. Muller, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 169. 68 Rapport Nederlandsche Roode Kruis Missie, Februari 1946. (Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Inventaris van het Archief van het Commissariaat voor Indische Zaken, 2.10.49, folder 103). 69 Nationaal Archief, Ministerie van Defensie, Troepencommando Siam/Nederlandse Militaire Missie Bangkok (1942) 1945–1953, folder 34. 70 Bangkok harbour, heavily mined, was partially cleared in September 1945 (Mountbatten, Post Surrender Tasks, p. 282). 71 M. Barbilon-Rijke, letters, NIOD IC Dagboeken 126. 72 Catherine van Rinsum, interview, 22 July 2004. 73 Several hundred evacuees slept outside on the decks of the evacuation ships because the cargo holds were too stuffy. Many of them were still malnourished and became sick when a tropical rainstorm hit them. 74 De Nederlandsche Padvinders, Achter Kawat en Gedek (Publisher Unknown, 1947), p. 110. 75 60 baht a week per adult (90 after 1 March 1946), 45 a week per child with a 60baht bonus for people that worked. An average family of two non-working adults and two children thus had a monthly income of 1080 baht, plus free accommodation, free food, free use of the electric tram and (for the people in uniform) free entrance to the Odeon Cinema. In contrast, the Thai head of the National Stadium earned 600 baht a month, without the extra perks. 76 Democracy, Thursday, 21 March 1946. (National Library of Thailand, Micro-film Department, 36/004). 77 J. J. Huussen, diary, NIOD IC Dagboeken 89a. 78 Democracy, Friday 8 February 1946 and Monday 18 March 1946. (National Library of Thailand, Micro-film Department, 36/004). 79 ‘Various legal charges concerning soldiers from Holland’. (National Archives of Thailand, Inventory of Documents of the High Command Military HQ, folder 3.7/51). 80 Felix C. Bakker, ‘Het Marine Vendel. Oktober 1945-Juni 1946,’ Mars et Historia, 2003, pp. 44–53; Ruud O. Spangenberg, Gadjah Merah Document (Utrecht: Stichting Dienstverlening Veteranen, 2004), p. 23. A document in the National Archives of Thailand states that ‘Until 15 February 1946, supplies issued to Dutch Forces will be treated as mutual aid. [. . .] After 15 February 1946, all issues of supplies will be in charge against the Dutch government’. (National Archives of Thailand, Inventory of Documents of the High Command Military HQ, folder

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81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88

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3.7/31). It seems likely the Gadjah Merah departed on 16 February because the cash-strapped Dutch now had to pay their own bills. Felix C. Bakker, interview, 29 April 2004. Felix C. Bakker, interview, 29 April 2004; Anonymous, De Gadjah Merah op Bali en Lombok, 1947, p. 5. H. Th. Bussemaker, Bersiap!, p. 68. Nationaal Archief, Ministerie van Defensie, Troepencommando Siam/Nederlandse Militaire Missie Bangkok (1942) 1945–1953, folder 63. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Inventaris van het archief van het Commissariaat voor Indische Zaken, 2.10.49, folder 103. Nationaal Archief, Ministerie van Defensie, Troepencommando Siam/Nederlandse Militaire Missie Bangkok (1942) 1945–1953, folder 34. Democracy, Thursday 31 October 1946. National Library of Thailand, Micro-film Department, 36/005. David Tett, A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia during the Second World War, Volume 3. Burma, Thailand and Indo-China 1942–1946: The Railway, the River and the Bridge (Herts: B. F. A. Publishing, 2005), p. 301–2. Warmenhoven was not a ‘Senior Dutch Officer’, contra. Rod Beattie, The Death Railway, 2005, p. 59. He was promoted Captain and then Lt Colonel for fear the British would not take a First Lieutenant seriously. Captain Theelen of the Post Office was originally a First Lieutenant. Tett, Postal History Volume 3, p. 301. K. A. Warmenhoven, Valuation of Identified Assets. TNA, Kew, FO 371/63886. Also published in Paul Kratoska, The Thailand-Burma Railway, 1942–1946. Documents and Selected Writings. Volume Two. Intelligence Reports Concerning the Railway, Disposal of the Railway (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 161–9.

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Index

Where index page numbers are in bold they refer to individual chapters and in italic to figures, tables or maps. abuse 11–15, 28, 113–14, 137, 179–80, 184–5 Australian abuse of Italians 28 German 23–4 Japanese 11–15, 80, 182, 184–5, 202 New Guinea and New Britain 81–3 see also executions, Burma–Thailand Railway, Japanese, massacres, sook ching and torture Air raids 12, 83–4, 174 Akihito, Emperor: Netherlands visit (2000) 107 UK visit (1998) 66 Ambon 56 n46 American see civilian internees, and POWs Anglo-Indians 58 Anzac Day 33, 43–4, 52 Anzac forces 41, 54 n4 Anzac legend 41, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54 Asahi, Count Isohi 15 Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region (ABCIFER) 66, 67 Australia: Army units: 2/1st Battalion 34 2/3rd Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment 23, 34 2/6th Battalion 34 2/7th Battalion 34 2/8th Field Ambulance 29 2/18th Battalion 35 6th Division 35 Ballarat 25–6, 35, 36, 41–56, 42, 45, 51, 215

Ballarat Courier 52, 53 civilian internees 5 mateship see mateship memories 8, 17, 23–40, 41–56, 162–8, 210–23 see also POWs, Australian Australian Ex-POW Memorial see Australia, Ballarat Australian treatment of Indian ex-POWs 86 Australian War Memorial Canberra 33 Baird, M.M. 64 Ballarat see Australia, Ballarat Ballard, James 226, 229, 232 Bangkok 288–90, 293–4 Barbed Wire and Bamboo 162 Barrett, K.T. 30–1 Barnett, Gunner Alex 23, 26, 27–8, 34–5 Bataan death march 10, 11, 114, 118, 119 Beattie, Rod 71 Beazley, Sidney 213 Begley, Ian 219–20 Beijing 116 beriberi 25, 82 black market 7, 203–4 Blizzard, Peter 26, 44–6, 51, 53 Boer War 26 Bomber Command 33 Bombing see air raids Boon Pong 43 Borneo 3 Bose, Subhas Chandra 79 Boulle, Pierre 58, 148, 149, 153

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Index

boys 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 224–42 impact 238–9 separation from mothers 237 Braddon, Russell 67, 150, 162–3, 167 Bridge on the River Kwai: historical detail on two bridges over the river 161 see also Burma–Thailand Railway, film and Toosey British: Army units: 18th Division 58, 62, 64, 70 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 64 The Manchester Regiment, 1st Bn 58–9 The Northumberland Fusiliers, 9 Bn 58–9, 64 officers 64 Royal Artillery 60 The Sherwood Foresters, 1/5 Bn 58 see also civilian internees and POWs buitenkampers 106, 107 Burma: civilian internees, numbers of 5 population 3 visits suspended 56 n46 Burma–Thailand Railway 2, 14, 15, 16, 17, 43, 45, 59, 60, 147–62, 161, 278–9 death rates 147, 155 Dutch memories of 100–1 escapes 278–9 film and memory 147–62 labour conditions 155 memorials to 70, 71 camps 6, 7–8, 11, 15 Ambarawa 235, 282 authorities, western and allied 7, 183, 193–209 Bangkinang 203 Bangkong Boys Camp, Semarang 196, 204 Batavia 81 Belawan Estate 201 Bilibid Prison 118 Cabanatuan 114,118 Colditz 58 Commandants 15–16, 24–5, 81–3 Crete 28 Duderstadt, Germany 26 Fukuoka POW Camp No. 17, Kyushu Island 117

Gedangan, Java 196 guards and Japanese authorities 7–8, 11, 15, 16, 23–5, 29, 199, 200 Hansa Bay, New Guinea 81 Japan 29–30, 114–15, 117, 134–5 Kampili 101, 102, 172–92 Kareës 200 Kawasaki Camp 3D 135 Klagenfurt, Austria 34 Kuala Belait 81–2 Liguria, Italy 27 Los Banos 118 Lunghua, Shanghai 228, 230–1 Meiningen 36 Murchison, Australia 27 Netherlands East Indies camps 6 Niigata Camp 5B 134–5 numbers 11 O’Donnell 114 Pare-Pare 178, 184, 191 n32 roll calls 27 Rowville, Australia 28 Santo Tomas 16, 118, 224, 228, 230, 231, 232 Semarang 229 Shamshuipo, Kowloon, Hong Kong 136 Si Rengo Rengo 202, 203 Sime Road 16 Stalag Luft IIIA 27 Stalag Luft VII 36, 57 Stalag VIIIB Lamsdorf 27 Stanley 228–30, 231–2 Struiswijk Prison 236–7 Tjideng 175, 202, 281 Tjihapit 236–7 Tjimahi 175 Turkish 28 Weltende, Germany 26 Wewak, New Guinea 82 Yang Chow, Shanghai 228, 232 Yokohama 25 Zentsuji 25, 30 see also Changi, civilian internees and POWs Canada 2, 125–43 Army units: Royal Rifles of Canada 126 Winnipeg Grenadiers 126 Japanese Canadians 125, 131–3 see also POWs, Canadian cannibalism 83 captive’s dilemma 7–8

Index 305 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

cemeteries: Thailand, Kanchanaburi 3, 31, 43, 50, 56 n46, 68, 70, 71, 100 Singapore, Kranji 50 Chalo Delhi 2, 79 Changi 15–17, 30–1, 35–6, 49, 58, 60, 147, 224 chapel 35–6 civilian internee camp 15–16, 224, 229, 233–4 death rates 16, 17 deterioration in 1945 167 Double 10th incident 16, 249 food 30 King Rat see film murals 49 POW camp 16, 17, 58 children 6, 16, 174–92, 197, 198, 219–20, 224–42 child sex with Japanese soldier 266 impact 226, 233, 238–9 Japanese-European children 260–77 post-war attacks on by Indonesians 281, 282 post-war Thailand 281–302 schools 187 Children and Families of Far East Prisoners of War see COFEPOW Chin Peng 245 China: civilian internees, numbers of 5, 17, 116 guerrilla resistance 10 Japanese-occupied 3, 9–10, 13–14 see also POWs, China Chinese 10 cholera 293 Civilian War Memorial see Singapore Choy, Elizabeth 11, 243–59, 244 Church of Our Lady and St Thomas at Wymondham 70 civilian internees 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11–12, 15–17, 174–92, 193–209, 210–23, 224–42 Americans 16, 114, 116–17 Australian 5, 8, 210–23 authority, internee appointments 183, 184, 185, 193–209 British 5, 15–16, 221, 224–42 Burma 5 camps 6, 11, 15 Canadian 231 Changi 16 see also Changi

children see children China 5, 16, 211 clothes 231, 233–4 commemoration see civilian internees, memory deaths and death rates 5, 15 Dutch 5–7, 95–110, 172–92, 193–209, 210, 234, 261 exchanges 117 food see food good treatment 185, 189 Hong Kong 5, 16 indirect rule and internees as camp authorities 183, 184, 185, 193–209 Indochina 5 Japan 5 Japanese civilian internees 16, 131–3 Japanese policy and regulations towards 13, 111–13, 116–17, 179–83, 195, 198–9, 224 kitchens 201–2, 204 labour 178, 183, 185, 191 n27, 234–5, 236 see also labour Malaya 5 memory 214–17 money, shortages and profiteering 183–5, 199 Netherlands East Indies 5, 15, 16 news 187 Philippines 5, 16 property 213 sense of loss 213 smuggling 200–1 stealing see stealing Sulawesi, North 15 Thailand 5 violence among internees 198 women 16 see also women see also camps Clavell, James 148, 149–51, 162, 166 Coast, John 67 Coates, Lt Col. 32 COFEPOW (Children and Families of Far East Prisoners of War) 70–1 collaboration 8, 178, 183, 184, 185, 193–209, 261–77 Columbia Pictures 148, 162, 163–4, 165 comfort women 172, 184, 234, 235–6, 261, 265, 272–3 commandants see camps Commonwealth war graves and Commission 53, 56 n46, 68, 70 compensation see payments

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Index

Cooper, Carol 70 Cosgrove, General Peter 44, 48, 52 Cowen, Rev. Fr Malcolm 70 Crasta, John 76, 77, 80–1, 86 crime 193–209 Crete 33 Dalforce 9 Davies, Peter 161 Death Railway see Burma–Thailand Railway Dunlop, Weary 43 Dutch: arrivals from Indonesia 96 Dutch Eurasians (Indo-Europeans or Oosterse Nederlanders) 94, 96, 106, 107, 172, 193–209, 261–77 Indisch Monument 104 memories 6–7, 94–110, 173–92, 193–209, 264–5 Netherlands East Indies see Netherlands East Indies payments 104 population 94, 95 Remembrance days 102, 105, 107 see also civilian internees, Dutch, and POWs, Dutch Dutch East Indies see Indonesia dysentery 10 education 32 Eurasians 94, 96, 106, 107 Sybil Kathigasu 243–59 Japanese-European 260–77 see also Dutch Eurasians executions 9, 13 threat of 155 Farrer Park, Singapore 75 FEPOW (Far East Prisoners of War): associations, various 70 Blackpool Association 159 Bridge on the River Kwai 156–60 views of 149, 152–61 Cardiff 160 East Wales and Monmouthshire 160 Fepow Forum 154, 158–60, 167 Leeds Association 63 London Association 62–3, 70, 154 Memorial Building, Alrewas 70 shrine 70

fictive kinship 214 film 7–8, 33, 100–1, 105–7, 147–92 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 7–8, 147–62, 166–8 Dutch attitudes towards 100–1, 106 Camp on Blood Island (1958) 160 The Colditz Story (1955) 148 Gordel van smaragd (Emerald Belt, 1997) 105–6, 107 The Great Escape (1963) 150, 151 The Great Raid (2005) 118 King Rat (UK 1965, Australia 1966) 7, 147–8, 149, 162–8 Paradise Road (1997) 211 Private’s Progress (1956) 157 Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho (White Skin, Yellow Commander, 1960) 101, 107, 172—92 A Town Like Alice (1956) 211 In Which We Serve (1942) 148 Flower, Colonel H.S. 63 food 7, 15–16, 25, 30, 32, 36, 81, 83, 117, 135–6, 155, 178, 182, 183, 185, 186, 193, 196–7, 199–202, 204, 232, 235 Forbes, Bryan 148, 150, 164 Foreman, Carl 153 Formosa see Taiwan Frankovich, Mike 148 French Indochina see Indochina Fujiwara, Major 75, 76 Galleghan, Brigadier Frederick G. 163–4, 165, 166 Geneva Convention (1929): Japanese attitudes to 12, 16, 74, 112, 180 United States breaches of 16 genchi-shobun (on the spot punishment) 13, 113 genju-shobun (severe punishment) 13, 113 Gettens, George 163 Gimson, Sir Franklin 158 girls 236, 238 guards see camps, guards guerrilla resistance: China 9–10 Philippines 10 Singapore 10 Gurkhas 9, 86, 89 Hague Convention (1907) 12, 14, 15, 111, 154, 179

Index 307 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Hellfire Pass see Thailand, Hellfire Pass hellships 53 heiho 11, 181, 199, 200 Hillen, Ernest 226, 230, 238 Hirohito, Emperor 65–6 son’s UK visit (1998) 66 UK visit (1971) 65–6 Hogan’s Heroes see film Holt, Harold (Prime Minister of Australia) 164–5, 166 Hong Kong 5, 58, 60–1, 74, 126–31, 134–7, 211 Australian civilian internees 211 British civilian internees 228 Canadian experience 126–31, 133, 134–7 civilian internees, numbers of 5 Howard, John (Prime Minister of Australia) 31–2, 43–4 Huie, Shirley Fenton 6, 220 n4, 240 n8 India: Army units: 4/9th Jats 80 5/11th Sikh Regiment 83 9th Division 74 11th Division 74 14th Punjab Regiment 90 n33 17th Division 76 44th Brigade 75 76 45th Brigade 75 see also POWs, Indian Indian Independence League 75 Indian National Army 9, 74–9, 84–7, 88 memorial 89 numbers 74, 79 managing publicity about 84–7 post-war issues 84–7 recruitment of Indian POWs for 75–9 Indische 98 Indisch Instituut 98 Indisch–Japanese see Japanese–Indisch Indisch Monument 104–5, 107 Indochina: civilian internees: numbers 5 population 3 Indonesia 107 see also Netherlands East Indies (for pre-1949) Inglis, Ken 50–1 internees see civilian internees internment camps see civilian internees izzat 9, 88

Jackson, Frank 30 Jackson, Rollo 53 Japan: auxiliaries 11 civilian internees, numbers of 5 labourers 11 occupied Asia 6 populations 3 population 3 post-war attitudes to POW and internee treatment 188–9 War Ministry 13 Japanese: Army Field Service Code (Senjinkun) 14, 15, 112, 180 Army regulations for handling POWs 12, 14–15, 80, 111–14, 179–82 civilian internee regulations 180, 195, 199 Gun Yokuryusha Toriatsukai Kitei (Army Regulations for the Treatment of Internees) 180 Gunjin Chokuyu (Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors) 179 camp commanders 7, 8 Japanese–European children 261–77 memories 172–92 militarism 14 sex and relationships with Europeans and Eurasians 261–77 see also POWs Japanese Empire see Japan Japanese–Indisch 261–77 Japanese Labour Camp Survivors’ Association (JLCSA) 66, 67 Jeffery, Michael (Governor-General of Australia) 44 Joustra, A.H. 183, 184 Kampili camp see camps Kan, Wim 101, 103, 107 Kanchanaburi see Thailand Karafuto 3 Kathigasu, Dr A.C. 245–6 Kathigasu, Sybil 11, 243–59 Keating, Paul (Australian Prime Minister) 43 Kennedy, Lee 49 Khwae Mae Khlong (Kwai) 154, 161 Kikuchi Masao 172, 173–4, 188 King, Corporal 150 King Rat see film KNIL (Royal Netherlands Indies Army) 11

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Index

Kongsi 198 Korea: population 3 Korean guards 181, 199 Kranji Cemetery 50 Kwai, River (Khwae Mae Khlong) 154, 161 Kwantung 3 labour 11–12, 15, 16, 17, 30, 114–15, 136, 178 Asian 11 children 236 civilian internee labour 178, 183, 185, 191 n27, 234–5 international treaties relating to 11–12, 191 n27 New Guinea 81, 82 numbers 11 Tamarkan 155 see also Burma–Thailand Railway language 29, 81, 185 German guards and 29 Urdu 81 League of Nations 12 Lean, David 148, 152, 153 legal action: American 120–1 logistics 15, 198 Lomax, Eric 67 Makassar see film, Shiroi Hada to Kiiroi Taicho malaria 10, 16, 31, 80, 136, 301, Malay Regiment 9 Malays 9, 243 Malaya 3, 5, 11, 15, 243–59 Australian civilian internees 211 British civilian internees: numbers of 5 population 3 POW treatment in 30 women 11 Malayan Communist Party (MCP) 245, 255 Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army 245–6, 255 Manchukuo 113 population 3 massacres 13, 53, 60, 61, 248 Hong Kong 61 New Guinea and New Britain 82 Singapore 10, 248, 253, 258 n19

mateship 27–8, 31–2, 43–4, 48, 51, 147, 149, 150–1, 162–4, 167–8 criticism of mateship 147, 148–9, 150–1, 162–4, 167–8 McCreath, Captain Henry 64 medical 16, 31, 80, 233, 234 disease 16, 136 supplies 16 treatment 31 memoirs: Australian 214, 221–2 n14 Behind Bamboo (Rohan D. Rivett) 67, 149, 214 British 57,67 Diary of a Girl in Changi (Sheila Allen) 214, 222 note 22 Dutch 98, 103–4 I am well, who are you? (David Piper) 68–9, 72 n28 Malayan and Singaporean women 251, 253–4 The Naked Island (Russell Braddon) 67 Prisoner’s Base and Home Again (James Benson, 1957) 214 Railroad of Death (John Coast) 67, 149 White Coolies (Betty Jeffrey) 214 memorials: Ballarat see Australia, Ballarat British 62, 70, 154 Burma–Thailand Railway 71 Dutch monuments to eastern captives 98, 104–5, 107 Indians 88–9 Singapore Civilian War Memorial 53 Vietnam War 45–6, 70 Minseibu 177, 178, 183 Mitsubishi 115 Mitsui 121 Montevideo Maru see ships modernist 46–7, 50, 51, 54 moral dilemmas 8, 167, 193, 205–6, 215 Mufti 164 Murdoch, Douglas 214 Nanyö 3 National Federation of Far Eastern Prisoners of War Clubs and Associations (NFFCA) 70 annual reunion 63 founding 62, 154

Index 309 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

protests about The Bridge on the River Kwai 156–60 protests about Japanese visits 66, 67 winding up and recognition of COFEPOW as successor 71 see also FEPOW National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas, Staffordshire 70 Navy 52, 58 Australian 52 Royal Navy 58 NIBEG (Nederlands-Indischev Bond van Ex-Krijgsgevangenen enGëinterneerden – Nederlands Indies’ Association of ExPrisoners of War and Internees) 98, 102 Netherlands see Dutch, POWs, and civilian internees Netherlands East Indies 58 Australian civilian internees 211 Dutch civilian internees: numbers of 5–7 Dutch Eurasians 94 Japanese–European children 260–77 population 94, 95 post-war transport and repatriation problems 280–2 see also Indonesia for post-1949 New Guinea 19 n9, 24–5, 33, 80–4, 211, 216–19 Australian civilian internees 211, 216–19 Nicholson, Colonel 8, 149, 152, 153, 157, 160, 162 similarity to Toosey 154–5 Novels A Dance to the Music of Time (Anthony Powell) 57 King Rat (James Clavell) 58 The Bridge on the River Kwai (Pierre Boulle) 58 White Skin, Yellow Commander (Kikuchi Masao) 176–7 see also film O’Hearne, Jan Ruff 235–6 oral history 16, 52, 262–4 Osugi, Lt 175, 183 Page, Harold 213 Papan 245

payments: American 119–20 Australian payments to civilians 217, 219–20 Australian payments to POWs 34 British 67 Canadian 137–8 Dutch 104, 268 Japanese 188 see also POWs, payments Payne, Harold 65 Percival, A. E. 62, 63, 154, 156–7, 159 Philippines 3, 5, 10, 114, 224 civilian internees 224, 226 camps 16 , 224 guerrilla resistance 10 numbers of 5 population 3 Piper, David 68 populations 3 post-war rescue and repatriation 84, 118 see also recovery Powell, Anthony 57 POWs: American 2, 4, 10, 114–24 Asian 4 Australia 27 Australian 2, 4, 17, 23–40, 41–56, British 2, 4, 57–72 British official history 64–5 Canadian 4, 133–6, 136 China 9–10 comparative 1–20, 17, 26–7, 29, 57–8 compensation see payments deaths and death rates 3, 15, 17, 33–4, 36–7, 59, 74, 80–1, 114, 115–16, 136, 147 disease 16, 24, 73, 80, 82, 136, 175, 215, 272, 293–4 Dutch 95–110, 278–302 Filipino 8, 10, 11, 114 German 12, 23–4, 26, 27, 179 German camps 28, 29, 33, 36, 57–8, 150–2 (films about) good treatment 15–16, 25, 27, 29–30, 36, 81 Hong Kong 58 information bureau 13 Indian 2, 4, 9, 11, 58, 73–93 Italy 27 Italian 28

310 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Index

Japanese policy and regulations towards 9–10, 12–15, 17, 80, 111–14, 179–81 Japanese POWs 14, 180 Korean War 34 labour 12, 13 Malays 9 Malaya 30 mateship see mateship New Guinea 19 note 9, 33, 35 New Zealand 4 numbers 3, 8, 57, 74, 114 Pacific Islands 19 note 9 payments 34, 67, 89, 1119 Philippines 8 policy, general 14 post-war networks 214 see also FEPOW punishment 13, 27 Rabaul 35 Red Cross see Red Cross Russian 12, 37 Tenko (roll call) 27, 62 Turkish camps 28 see also camps prisoners 8 see also POWs Rabaul 24–5, 80–1 radios 16, 246 railways see Burma–Thailand Railway and Sumatra Railway Rakuyo Maru (Rokyu Maru) 32, 33, 61 rampok 202–3 Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI) 84, 279–82, 294 Red Cross 12, 25, 36, 81, 85, 117 International Red Cross Convention of Tokyo of 1934 13 New Guinea 81 survival of POWs, role in 36 Red Fort Trials 79, 86, 87 religion: Islam 81 repatriation of POWs and internees 84, 279–82, 294 Returned Services League of Victoria 164, 165 Rivett, Rohan 32, 67 Robinson, Viv 49 romusha 11, 17, 178 Rossiter, Rev Ray 70 Royal Air Force (RAF) 58, 156

Royal Albert Hall 154 Royal Festival Hall Reunion 63, 154 Royal Navy 58 see also ships Royal Netherlands Indies Army see KNIL Russia 12 Russell, Lord, of Liverpool 69 Russell-Roberts, Colonel 73, 74, 87 Russo-Japanese War 12, 14, 112–13, 179, 271–2 Saghal, Captain P.K. 77–8 St Martins-in-the-Fields: memorial 70 memorial and remembrance services 62, 154 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan (1951) 120, 137, 154, 188 schools 32 senjinkun see Japanese, Army Field Service Code Seunke, Orlow 105–6 Seymour, Alan 32–3 sexual relations 265–6 sexual segregation of civilian internees 16, 224 Shandong (Shantung) 12 Shanghai civilian internees 228, 229 ships: hellships 53, 80–1, 119 Hibu Maru 81 HMS Dragonfly 59 HMS Electra 58 HMS Encounter 58 HMS Exeter 58 HMS Jupiter 58 Kachidoki Maru 61 Montevideo Maru 216 HMS Prince of Wales 58 HMS Repulse 58 Rakuyo Maru (Rokyu Maru) 32, 33, 61 Simmons, Jack 49 Singapore 3, 8–10, 15, 16, 53, 255–6 Australian civilian internees 211 British civilian internees 229 Civilian War Memorial 53 fall 8–10, 58, 59, 95 Farrer Park 75 INA Memorial 89 Singh, Captain Mohan 75, 76, 79 Sino-Japanese conflict 9–10, 13, 14, 112, 113, 179 smuggling 200–1, 202, 203, 204

Index 311 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Smyth, Sir John 159 songs and singing 30, 100, 236 Colonel Bogey 153 sook ching 10, 53, 248, 253, 258 n19 Spiegel, Sam 148, 157, 158 Starkey, Ed 61 stealing 7, 32, 150, 163, 167, 200–4 see also camps, stealing Straits Chinese 243 Straits Settlements 3 see also Singapore subversion 75–6 Sumatra Railway 15 Susuki, Sakae 16 Suverkropp, Connie 236–7 Taiwan population 3 POWs 68–9 Takano, Colonel 82 tapioca 15 television: De Bezetting (The Occupation, 1964) 103 Bridge on the River Kwai (first shown 1968) 160 Changi by script writer John Doyle and as a book from the series (2001) 31, 39 n40 Hogan’s Heroes (1965–71) 33 Tenko (1981–84) 27, 211 The True Story of the Bridge over the River Kwai (1997), 161–2 The Valour and the Horror (1992) 129 Tenney, Lester 121 Territorials 58–9, 64 Tamarkan see Thailand Thailand 3, 5, 7, 43, 278–302 Americans 278 Australians 278 Boon Pong see Boon Pong British 278 Chungkai camp 68, 100 civilian internees, numbers of 5 Dutch 278–302 Hellfire Pass 43 Kanchanaburi 31, 43, 50, 71, 100, 154 population 3 post-war fate of captives 7 Tamarkan 154, 159, 161 Thailand–Burma Railway Centre 71 theft see smuggling and stealing

Timor: population 3 Tojo, Hideki, General 13, 59–60, 113, 195 Tominaga, Jikko 16 Tokugawa, Prince Iyesato 12 Tokyo War Crimes Trials 4, 8, 195 Toosey, Sir Philip 65, 154–5, 160–2 biographies 161 care for men 155 Japanese, relationships with 155 Nicholson, link to 154–5, 162 President of Merseyside FEPOW Association 154 President of NFFCA (1966–75) 65, 154 Tamarkan camp 155 True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai 161 torture 11, 13, 14, 59, 185, 249 Choy, Elizabeth 247, 248–9 Kathigasu, Sybil 247 Turnbull, Winton George 164 Tyrell, Ray 23–4, 29–30, 31 Uemura, Mikio, General 13–14, 113–14 Uren, Tom 43 United States see also American, POWs, American, and civilian internees, American Valderpoort, Mrs 184, 187 Van Iterson 197 Van Velden 198, 202 Van Waterford 4, 5, 6, 8, 20 note 43, 225 veterans associations and groups: Australia: Eighth Division and Service Associates 163 Ex-Prisoners of War Association (New South Wales and Western Australia) 26, 35, 37 n12, 49, 162, 163, 165 Ex-Prisoners of War and Relatives Association of Victoria 54 n8, 151 Returned Services League 55 n13, 163, 164, 165 Canada: Hong Kong Veterans Association 129, 137 lack of similar associations among former civilian internees 214–16

312 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Index

Netherlands: NIBEG (Nederlands-Indischev Bond van Ex-Krijgsgevangenen en-Gëinterneerden – Nederlands Indies’ Association of ExPrisoners of War and Internees) 98, 102 United Kingdom: Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region (ABCIFER) 66, 67 COFEPOW (Children and Families of Far East Prisoners of War) 70–1 FEPOW (Far East Prisoners of War) 62–3, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71, 149, 152, 154–61, 167 Japanese Labour Camp Survivors’ Association (JLCSA) 66, 67 United States of America 119–22 Vietnam 46–7, 50 memorials 46–7, 50 violence among internees 198 war crimes trials 119, 175–6, 188–9, 191 n33, 195, 215, 252, 253, 256 British records 69 Japanese attitudes towards 188–9 New Guinea 83

Warren, Stanley 49 Watt, Ian 154, 155, 161 White Skin, Yellow Commander 176–7 see also film widows 34, 137 Winter, Jay 214 Williams, Eric 57 women 6, 11, 16, 34, 178–92, 193–209, 211–13, 216, 224–42, 243–59, 281–302 Dutch internees 101–2 film and television portrayal 101–2, 106, 211–12 Malayan women who resisted 243–59 post-war attacks on by Indonesians 281 post-war Thailand 281–302 pre-war backgrounds 227–8, 240 n10–n12 sewing as a form of everyday resistance 225, 231–2, 235–6 sex and sexual abuse 232, 235–6, 265–6 violence and conflict 198–9 Yamaji Tadashi 101–2, 172–92, 173 Yoshimura, Sergeant 256

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