Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (12 page)

In the first three months of the war the Japanese had, much to their own surprise, captured more than 100,000 Allied prisoners.
They now faced a profound dilemma — just how should they treat their captives?

PRISONERS OF THE JAPANESE

          
A
ppalling as the mistreatment of Westerners in Hong Kong was in the first hours of the war, such cruelty did not represent Japanese policy, but random acts of brutality by individual soldiers and units.
Once Japanese authority had been established over the occupied areas there was a search for a systematic approach to the treatment of POWs and civilian internees.
In those initial months that policy was influenced by two factors; first, Japan had never ratified the Geneva Convention which laid down humane conditions under which prisoners of war should be treated, and second, the Japanese had never expected to take such huge numbers of POWs so quickly and thus had made little provision for them.

The detailed experience of every POW held by the Japanese is, of course, unique, but the story of what happened to Anthony Hewitt in his first days of captivity in Hong Kong is, in many respects, typical.
In common with the vast majority of Allied soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese, he and his men saw nothing dishonourable in having surrendered.
‘I said to them, “You fought wonderfully and you fought with valour, and you have reason to remain proud of that and to retain your pride.”
And I noticed that they had all shaved and a lot of them had had their hair cut.
They’d cleaned their uniforms and they looked incredibly marvellous.
And I thought: “They are still men.”’

This belief that it was possible to surrender and still retain ‘honour’ was anathema to the Japanese.
Their military code of conduct stated explicitly that no Japanese soldier could ever surrender.
Interestingly, the ancient warrior code of Japan had been contradictory on this point — on the one hand the warrior was obliged not to allow himself to be captured but on the other he was supposed to treat those who surrendered to him with kindness.
This contradiction meant that when, in the course of conflict on the Asian mainland during the 1890s, General Aritomo Yamagata announced that soldiers of the Imperial Army should commit suicide sooner than surrender, his instruction still did not prevent Japanese soldiers taking enemy prisoners and treating them with relative humanity.
But this inherent contradiction always existed and when the Japanese were faced with huge numbers of Allied POWs it was easy for them to extrapolate from this one aspect of their military code — that surrender for the Japanese soldier was dishonourable — the belief that for the enemy to give themselves up in such large numbers meant they were not worthy of respect.
This belief that their Western adversaries lacked courage was compounded by the sheer size of the Allied POWs, the vast majority of whom towered over the soldiers of the Imperial Army.
‘I think we were all rather shocked and taken aback to see the size of them,’ confirms Toyoshige Karashima, one of those charged with guarding Allied POWs.
‘We thought: “How on earth are we going to look after people of this size?”’

Moreover, the attitude of these Japanese soldiers to the Westerners they had captured was very different from that of their compatriots who had so generously cared for their prisoners in the First World War.
Few in the Imperial Army now wished to be judged by the values of the liberal democracies of the West — Japanese propaganda had, after all, called throughout the 1930s for such decadent thought to be rejected.
These Japanese soldiers had been taught that Westerners were interlopers in Asia — what right had these hypocrites (who had so objected to Japan’s legitimate territorial expansion in China) to be here at all?

Against this background of Japanese belief, Anthony Hewitt and his fellow soldiers of the Middlesex regiment marched into captivity in Hong Kong and were held at an abandoned barracks at Sham Shui Po.
‘The barracks had been knocked about all over the place,’ he says.
‘The living conditions were quite terrible.
A lot of my soldiers were living in huts with no roofs and with nothing to protect them from the rain.
They had nothing to sleep on — just bare bits of concrete.
There was no medicine and we only got a bowl of rice in the morning and a bowl of rice in the evening.
There were flies and rats and everything you can think of in the camp and the smell was ghastly.
The sanitation in the camp was out of this world — there was nothing.
But the men were still marvellous.
The cockney when he’s down still keeps his spirit.’
From the first it was obvious that the Japanese would treat their captives with great brutality.
‘The Japanese were inclined to beat you, particularly if you failed to salute them.
This didn’t mean facing a Japanese head on and failing to salute him that way, but it might be a Japanese about a hundred yards away that you hadn’t noticed.’
Hewitt’s commanding officer spent ‘hours and hours’ complaining to the Japanese about conditions in the camp and ‘they always said, “Oh yes, that’s all right, we’ll do that tomorrow, we’ll bring in this tomorrow.”
They never damn well did anything at all.
They didn’t mean to, either.’

After little more than a month in captivity, Hewitt was told by his commanding officer that he should try to escape from the camp and make his way to China, in order to take letters to the nearest British embassy outlining the terrible conditions under which the soldiers were held.
In preparation for his escape Hewitt tried to deceive the Japanese guards about the number of British officers imprisoned in the camp by omitting one sick officer from the roll call — the plan was that the sick officer would then be included to make up the numbers once Hewitt had made his escape.
Then disaster struck: ‘One unfortunate day he was found and the Japanese came to me and said, “There are more officers than you said.”
So they took me behind what was the old sergeants’ mess and they went on questioning me and then they started beating me.
They beat me with frightful blows to the head — mainly with the blades of swords and also with bayonets in their leather folders.
I remember thinking about my parents as I was bashed.
When I got into trouble like this I always thought of my parents.
I was very fond of my father and mother who were in England, and I thought, “Oh God, my poor parents.”
I would have loved to have seen them again.
Very shortly I was unconscious.
I was trying not to fall down, because I knew I’d be beaten like mad on the ground but I was completely unconscious and so I must have been beaten as I lay there.’
When he came round he was covered in blood and had trouble focusing his eyes — he was to have problems with his eyesight for many years afterwards.
But in an act of considerable courage he still managed to escape from the camp in February 1942 and make his way by boat to the Chinese mainland where he joined the resistance against the Japanese.
His six weeks of imprisonment had allowed him to form a view of his enemy that would no doubt be echoed by the majority of Allied prisoners who fell into Japanese hands: ‘I thought they were terrible people, the Japanese.
There was absolutely no link between normal civilized behaviour and the way these Japanese troops were behaving.
No reason at all why they had to behave in this awful, cruel and sadistic manner.’

Conditions for both the POWs in the camp at Sham Shui Po and the Western civilians interred in Hong Kong at Stanley camp were grim — all suffered from overcrowding and malnutrition.
But even though the Chinese inhabitants of Hong Kong were not automatically interned they too did not escape atrocious mistreatment.
Two whole areas, Happy Valley and Wancahi, were designated by the Japanese as enormous brothels, with the Chinese women who lived there forced into prostitution.
There was scarcely any food for the Chinese of Hong Kong and, by the end of the war, stories of cannibalism abounded.
Some managed to escape to the mainland (where they often fared little better); those who stayed risked death from starvation and disease.
By the summer of 1945 the Chinese population of the colony had been reduced from 1,600,000 to 750,000.

This pattern of the mistreatment of POWs and Western civilians in overcrowded camps, together with the oppression of the indigenous population outside of captivity, was repeated across virtually the whole of the burgeoning Japanese empire.
Within weeks of their conquest of Hong Kong the Japanese crossed the South China Sea and occupied Java; then part of the Dutch East Indies.
‘We thought we were safe, living in the Dutch East Indies,’ says Jan Ruff, a Dutch woman then in her late teens.
‘Then Singapore fell in February 1942 and we knew it would only be a matter of time before the Japanese landed on Java, which they did on 1 March.’
A week later the Dutch surrendered and captured Western civilians were interned in camps.
‘It was really dreadful — the starvation,’ says Jan.
‘You really had hunger pains.
We ate anything.
We ate weeds.
Towards the end we even ate rats and snails.
We even ate a cat — the camp commandant’s cat — because we were so hungry.
And the Japanese were very brutal.
The women were beaten and often punished by being made to stand in the sun for hours and hours.
Sometimes for punishment we had to bury our food.
And all this for small things.
If you didn’t bow deeply enough, you’d get punished for that.’

Jan Ruff’s initial experience in her internment camp mirrored that of thousands of other Western civilians captured by the Japanese and held in camps from Hong Kong to Borneo and Singapore to Burma.
Terrible as these conditions were, just as in Hong Kong the indigenous population — especially the Chinese — often suffered worse outside the camps.
But Jan Ruff’s case is different, and worthy of particular study, because after being imprisoned for two and a half years her situation suddenly changed.
‘One day an army truck arrived at the camp with these high-ranking Japanese officers and we thought, “Oh, it’s just another inspection again.”
But this time the order came that all girls from seventeen years old up had to go and line up in the compound — which made us very suspicious.
So all the girls lined up and we could see straightaway that something terrible was going to happen.
They sort of paced up and down, up and down, looking at our legs and our faces.
Then some girls were told they could go back to their mothers and the line became smaller and smaller.
They were sort of laughing at each other and lifting our chins and eventually there were ten girls left in the line and I was one of these ten and the fear was absolutely terrible.’
The selected young women were told to pack a small case and were then taken to a truck which waited at the camp gate to drive them away.
‘We thought perhaps we were going to work in a factory or something,’ says Jan.
‘But we were suspicious because they wanted the young girls — the mothers especially were very afraid.’

She and the other young women were driven across Java until they reached a large Dutch-colonial house in Semarang, the capital of Middle Java.
The house was surrounded by a fence and guarded.
Jan Ruff’s terrible ordeal was about to begin: ‘We were told that we were in this house for the sexual pleasure of the Japanese military.
In other words, we found ourselves in a brothel.
So it was just as if my whole world collapsed.
We protested.
But the Japanese said they could do with us what they liked.’

Each of the young Dutch women was given a Japanese name and had her photograph taken and displayed on the veranda of the house.
The torment of the ‘opening night’ of the military brothel is, says Jan, ‘engraved in my body for ever.’
‘We were supposed to go to our rooms, but we didn’t do that.
We all gathered around the dining table and we just sat, clinging to each other.’
One by one, each of the girls was dragged away.
The house was full of Japanese soldiers, laughing and joking.
‘I could hear screaming coming from the bedrooms,’ says Jan, ‘and I hid under the dining room table but of course they soon pulled me out from under there.’
She was dragged into a bedroom by a tall, fat Japanese officer who brandished his sword at her.
‘He threatened to kill me if I didn’t give myself to him.
And I sort of made him understand that I didn’t mind dying.
I said could I say some prayers before he killed me?
But then, of course, he had no intention of killing me.
I would have been no good to him dead.
And he started to undress himself and I realized he would rape me.
He threw me on the bed.
He tore off all my clothes, and as I lay there naked on the bed he ran his sword over my body, still threatening me with his sword.
I could feel the steel.
He was just playing with me like a cat with a mouse.
And he eventually raped me.
The most brutal rape.
And it’s something you never forget.
We were all virgins.
We were such an innocent generation.
We knew nothing about sex.
And it seemed as if it went on for ages.
Eventually he left the room and I was in total shock.
I went to the bathroom.
I just wanted to wash away the dirt and the shame.’

Jan Ruff tried to hide on the veranda after she was raped but she was soon found and dragged back to the bedroom: ‘And there was a whole line-up of Japanese waiting and it started all over again.
And this went on all night.’
At least ten different Japanese soldiers raped her that first night.
‘By raping me the Japanese took away everything from me — my self-respect, my dignity, my possessions, my family.
I really wonder how I coped.
It’s amazing how strong you can be.
My strong belief in God and my faith and prayer helped me through.’

That first night was only the beginning of many weeks of torment during which Jan and the other girls were repeatedly raped.
‘I even cut off my hair,’ she says.
‘I thought, “I’ll make myself look as ugly as possible.”
I looked absolutely terrible.
Didn’t make any difference.
In fact, it even drew more attention, because everyone wanted the girl who had cut off her hair.’
Once a week the Dutch women were subjected to a gynaecological examination by a male Japanese doctor.
‘This was just so ghastly,’ she says.
‘The door and windows were left open and other Japanese military were encouraged to come into the room or to look through the door or window when we were being examined.
The humiliation was absolutely terrible.
I mean that was as bad as being raped.
They humiliated us.
We had no dignity left — they stripped me of everything.’
When the doctor first arrived Jan pleaded with him to help.
‘I thought, “Well, he’s a doctor.
I’ll put in a complaint.”
I said, “We’re here against our will.
Surely as a doctor you have compassion, you’ll understand?”
He just laughed at me.
And he ended up raping me.
And from then onwards every time that the doctor came for a visit he raped me first.’