70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

In Tokyo Premier Tojo Hideki makes a speech to the Japanese House of Peers outlining war aims. If Burma and the Philippines submit to Japanese hegemony, they'll eventually get independence. But areas like Hong Kong and Malaya which are 'absolutely essential for the defence of Greater East Asia' would be held under Japanese rule.

In Hong Kong today is a day of movement for most of the  civilians.

The Japanese take over the Queen Mary Hospital in Pokfulam, moving the patients to other hospitals at short notice, much to the indignation of Dr K. H. Digby, who refuses to join those doctors staying outside of camp to 'work for the health of the community'. He goes to Stanley, while the doctors who agree to stay out and the volunteer drivers end up at the French Hospital in Causeway Bay. The Japanese wanted a place where all the medical offcers could live under the same roof, so presumably that was why the French Hospital (aka St Pauls) was chosen - there's a huge compound with plenty of accommodation, a high wall, and a gate.

The majority of those interned in the waterfront hotels are sent by boat to an improvised camp on the Stanley Peninsula.

Jean Mather:

Early on the morning of January 21, we were assembled outside our hotel. Our crocodile was formed, and way down the road on either side we could see sections of the civilians marked for Stanley Camp....Clutching the bundles, which had accumulated, the processions under armed guard filed slowly down towards the pier. There was much ribaldry as the lines caught up or passed other groups headed the same way. The usual marching songs were rivalled by lewd rugger ditties....

Gwen Priestwood, having failed to execute a planned escape the day before the Murray Parade Ground registration, was on her way to Stanley too:

A small boy of five or six...walked along in front of me. He wore a blue overcoat, and from its belt hung everything his mother thought he would need: an enamel mug, a spoon, a knife, and fork, a small chamber, scissors, an enamel saucepan and other things. His mother walked beside him, a light curtain pole over her shoulder, with an assortment of bundles hanging on it....

After an unpleasant journey - 'We were almost elbow to elbow. Many unfortunates were being seasick' - Jean Mather and her mother arrive in Stanley Camp. They are amongst the lucky ones: they like the four women they are to share with, they are told that the bathroom has a shower that works until 8 p.m., and their balcony has views over beautiful Tytam Bay.

Future Camp Secretary John Stericker has an easier voyage:

We were packed tightly into boats until they became not only overloaded but top heavy. Fortunately we struck very calm waters and after following the coast for two hours we arrived at the small jetty below the high fortified peninsula at Stanley. This was a name that was to become engraved on the hearts of most of us for the remainder of our days.

He sees that most people are heading for the Warders' Quarters, but decides it's worth walking a bit further to the St. Stephen's College buildings. With a couple of friends he is able to 'grab' a room overlooking Stanley Bay and he eventually comes to realise how lucky they are:

Each little room, about fourteen feet by ten, contained the luxury of two or three iron hospital beds and some articles of furniture. Moreover our troops had left behind masses of plates, cutlery and other useful utensils. 

Back in Hong Kong, Phyllis Harrop hears how bad conditions are:

I met Doctor Rambler ((probably Siegfried Szarfstein-Ramler)) this afternoon. He had just returned from Stanley and reports conditions are terrible. Very little water, and in some places none at all, no sanitary arrangments, no furniture and no cooking utensils. Houses have been thoroughly looted and damaged just as they have been elsewhere on the island.

But the Allied civillians have no choice about going. Wenzell Brown arrives late in the afternoon. He notices Chinese workmen still putting 'barbed-wire entanglements' into place.

Bill Ream also arrives on this day, but as he was at Queen Mary's Hospital, he was taken direct to Stanley by bus. He takes a suitcase full of his luggage and a few blankets, and is later amazed to hear that the Americans seem to have been able to take so much more. He and a friend from the Hospital, Jack Johnston, find a room with camp beds in the Main European Warders' blocks, but have to move out to make room for two families with children. They leave the camp beds, and sleep on a corridor floor for the night.

But before that they eat their first meal in Stanley Camp:

Some food was provided for us in the evening....My diary records 'some rice and a small portion of a fishy mixture and some soya beans for the evening meal.

(O)n 21 January 1942, with the majority of internees in the Camp, bedded down with one meal digested, Stanley Civilian Internment Camp had become a reality.

Geoffrey Emerson

Sources:

Tojo: W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1987, 235

Queen Mary: Queen Mary Hospital: Emily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed., 307-309; (Hahn gives the date of the expulsion as January 20/21; Cindy Yik-yi Chu's book on the Maryknoll Sisters, four of whom were helping in the Hospital, confirms January 21 - The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 53).

Mather: Jean Mather, Twisting The Tail Of The Dragon, 1994, 28-29; 31; 33-34

Stericker: John Stericker, A Tear For The Dragon, 1958, 149, 151

Priestwood: Gwen Priestwood, Through Japanese Barbed Wire, 1944, 42

Harrop: Phyllis Harrop: Hong Kong Incident, 1943, 120

Brown: Wenzell Brown, Hong Kong Aftermath, 1943, 96

Ream: Bill Ream, Too Hot For Comfort, 1988, 35-40

 Bird's Eye View: The Civilian Experience So Far

The experience of Hong Kong's 'white' Allied civilians so far can be divided roughly into three stages:

1) the fighting (December 8-25) - civilians have different experiences according to their roles and those of their loved ones; most of them start in their own homes and end either there (perhaps with others who have been forced to join them), in someone else's home, in a 'concentration point' such as their workplace or one of the big hotels;

2) the Japanese takeover (December 26-January 5) - most civilians stay where they ended up during the fighting, move to a safer house or to a hotel, or are told to report to their place of work;

3) internment in one of the waterfront hotels (January 5 -21) - although a fair number of civilians avoid this stage, the majority are kept in crowded and unpleasant hotel-brothels with inadequate food, air and opportunities for exercise. The substantial number who ended stage 2) at the Kowloon Hotel stay there, and there are also about 100 people who were first held at the former refugee Camp at North Point and then moved to St. Paul's ('the French') Hospital. Both these groups - perhaps more than 500 in all - live in similar conditions to those on the waterfront.

On January 21 it becomes clear that these stages are preliminary to what will become the main setting for the wartime experiences of almost all these people: Stanley Civilian Internment Camp. (For some exceptions see January 31, 1942, 'Bird's Eye View'.)

Up until now the future Stanleyites have been in sub-groups: with family and friends, with strangers thrown together by the war, sharing a hotel room with others in their groups, but now most of them are together, and while no two individuals will react to Stanley in the same way, there are to be important common elements in their experience of internment.

A small British party has gone ahead to prepare the Camp for the arrival of the rest of the internees, but they haven't been able to do much more than bury some of the bodies left by the desperate fighting at Stanley (and, according to some sources, look after their own and their friends' interests). So in the first few days the newly-arrived camp-dwellers must create living spaces that will be reasonably safe and clean (and, to a very limited extent, comfortable).

Then a grim battle begins to take shape: it becomes clear that the Japanese will send the internees rations enough to keep them alive but not much more: from the start most of them are losing weight and strength, and the medicines made available are not nearly adequate to treat the problems that soon begin to arise. There are periods when the rations improve, and people even regain some lost weight, but the basic trajectory of their bodies is downwards. And not just of their bodies: most people are sent to Stanley between January 21-23, and they take with them what they think to carry (those who come in later are forewarned and usually bring in a little more): this deteriorating collection of objects, plus the ones they find in the camp, supplemented by whatever the Red Cross, the humanitarian smugglers or the blackmarketeers manage to get in, is what most internees will have to rely on to provide the material basis of their lives over the next next three years and eight months.

In addition to this intense physical deprivation, almost everyone has to face the psychological difficulty of confinement, in in adequate space, sometimes with a random group of strangers. It's a long time before anyone hears from family back home, and trips to see husbands in the POW Camps are never arranged. Some women are mourning husbands killed in the fighting, and almost everyone's lost at least one friend. And in the background the constant fear of what the captors might do.

Can individuals, families and communities withstand these conditions? If they ever walk free, what kind of people will they have become? The battle to survive, physically and spiritually, will test every internee to the limit.

I was transferred to Stanley Camp on the 21st. January.