G) The Internment

The Internment

After three weeks of this incarceration without any opportunity for exercise, the prisoners (comprising 1,100 men, 1,000 women, 340 children and 80 infants), were conveyed to a remote part of the Island (known as Stanley Peninsula) and housed at the rate of one per 36 square feet in school buildings and premises formerly the quarters of the prison staff. No organized provision was made in advance, but gradually sufficient equipment was provided for a scratch existence to be maintained. Only two small meals of rice daily, with microscopic additions of vegetables and unmarketable fish, were provided. On these rations the people were in a state of semi-starvation; some lost as much as 100lbs in weight in a few months; the average loss of weight was 40lbs. In the first six months over 100 hernia cases developed, ascribed by the doctors (who were interned with the rest of the European population) to wastage and weakening of bodily tissue, due to the almost complete absence of protein from the diet.

With childlike effrontery, the ‘Foreign Affairs Department of Greater Nippon,’ in March, 1942, presented to the camp a bill for $86,000, $9,000 of which represented ‘hotel charges’ for the filthy accommodation in which internees were herded before the opening of Stanley Camp; the remainder was the cost of fish and vegetables, the Japanese blandly explaining that rice and salt only, is a prisoner’s official ration, as recognised by them, and anything else must be paid for by the victim.

After an anxious special meeting, it was decided to tender a cheque for the money, one of the large firms ‘doing the needful’ against a guarantee of future repayment by the Hong Kong Government. At the same time the war was carried into the enemy’s country by saying that if we had to pay for part of our food, we should like to be permitted to select nourishing food (and not the filth so far sent in). This request, and the fact that the Japanese could not cash the cheque (having cancelled the currency and frozen enemy accounts) led them to reconsider their absurd demand and to return the cheque, much as it must have paid them to do so.  At this juncture, several large firms offered to put millions of dollars at the disposal of the Hong Kong Colonial Secretary in order that the people might be properly fed, but the fact that bank accounts were frozen prevented action along those lines.